AEM Implementation

Google provides an easy to use REST API for label identification (detecting individual objects on an image), landmarks detection, sentiment analysis, logo detection and amazing optical character recognition (OCR).  These services can be used within any application with access to images.

Into the details …

Google requires registration with the Vision Services and establishing an authentication scheme for authentication and/or authorization.  The simplest authentication scheme is an “API Key”.   This scheme provides a JSON file which can be referenced in the code for authentication.

We have created an AEM service to invoke Google’s API.  This service can be referenced by any component, service, or workflow process.  We extended the OOTB workflow “Update DAM Asset” to include the additional process of calling this service for every asset added to the DAM.

Our process determines the type of annotation coming back from Google (label, landmark, sentiment, or logo) and creates a tag in the corresponding taxonomy (see screenshots above).  The process also includes an OCR Vision call, which when made extracts the text identified on the image and populates the metafield “dc:description” on the DAM asset.

AEM “Smart Tags”

Adobe has also announced a native auto asset tagging feature called “Smart Tags” in its AEM 6.2 beta version which was received very well at the Adobe Summit—The Digital Marketing Conference 2016.  Though it is not available for public yet, it would be very interesting to compare it with Google Cloud Vision API’s once available. The Google Vision / AEM integration will work in any version of AEM, not just 6.2.

Conclusion

We are very excited to see what machine learning and AI are contributing to asset repositories in terms of classification. As we keep testing, we are amazed at the great results and disappointed with few misses (It seems to always fail to recognize the Nike logo). As Chad pointed out, the results are not always accurate and for a beta release of Cloud API, we are very impressed. We would now like to see how they compare with Adobe “Smart Tagging” native feature.

Theme: Search and Social platforms are converging – which  means successful marketers musth have one unified team with one set of data.

Key takeaways from this session

1. Connect: facebook to offline experience. feed the metadata
2. Bring: search and social teogher. People, process, and technology
3. Expect: social SEM data unification and all our war among Google, facebook, and twitter for ad dollars

2013

Paid, owned, and earned are converging.  Look at facebook where you can have your owned pages, people who like you and you also buy ads. They might even be on the same page.  Google search results even shows paid and owned assets together, especially with Google + and it’s continuing growth.

2014

Quote: “There’s no free lunch”

Quote: It could be argued from a consumer point of view that the better the search engine is the fewer advertisement  you will need. (Google)

Note that they followed that with a picture of a Google results page with TONS of ads.

• Social will become more like search and search will become more social.  As social becomes more like search, you will pay for it in some form or fashion.
• Search is improving within facebook and users are starting to use the natural search.  The results are like a combination of Yelp and Bing
• Point, you should search for your company or product to see if the results look good or if you need some work.
• Google Hummingbird search uses natural language processing.  They actually followed facebook on this
  • Google is trying to tie in Google+ as much as they can.  There’s a lot of
• Twitter has marketing events but it will depend on real time interactions and key words. You social guys should be talking to your search team.
• Look at all the reviews on facebook.  Although there seems to be some major rate inflation.  It could become the best way to find a restaurant.
  • Note that Google moved their reviews to Google plus so you’ve got something similar going on.
• The clunky: three results for Thornbury Castle on the facebook search right now.  It needs some cleanup.
  • natural language search on facebook is still a bit clunky
• Stalker: Can now search for divorced women over 30 years old. (Creepy)
  • Or divorced women who like a specific tv shows
  • key learning, watch out what you like. It will come back to you.
• Political implications: Femen is illegal in Tunisia but it’s a piece of cake to find people who like Femen in Tunisia.

How to improve your search and your social?

• Update your metadata
• use checkin to your locations
• encourage offline customers to go mobile with likes, checkins, and recommendations
• Great idea: everyone checks in when they upload a picture.   So put something photo worthy in it.
• Don’t forget stickers like rate us on trip advisor, etc.
• It will be easy to get yourself to the top of a list by checking in a fair amount.
• Be careful and remember that Facebook is still working on this. Graph search isn’t even available on mobile.
  • It’s early in the game. They’ve got a lot to do. they just had to index 1 trillion pieces of content.  So something has to slide
• Publish at least one per day on Google+
  • Find something to push out once a day to get decent looking results.
• use Google + social to put content in display advertising in Google ad network
• Twitter strategy
  • Conversation analytics
  • keyword strategy
  • creative development
  • bid optimization
  • Looks a lot like search ad strategy doesn’t it……….

Integrate Search and Social

You need to evolve your approach.

• Disparate teams with social, search etc need to come together.  Adobe uses a hub and spoke framework
  • Other options for approach include centralized, distributed, and holistic
  • Don’t just use a PR agency for your social. Become social yourselves
• Inconsistent KPI’s need a common framework across teams
  • and if you aren’t doing a good job tracking then start.  You need analytics and key measurements
• Siloed tracking and report becomes common tracking and reports
  • Common tracking will push you to channel optimization
  • Which will push your towards attributions.
  • Which will lead you to media mix modeling
  • It must become unified between social and search.  Of course, that’s the whole point of campaign management services.
• Volume, sentiment need to become something that proves value to the business
• In evolving, define what you want to do. Recognize the role of social in YOUR organization
  • PR and communications?
  • Marketing and ecommerce?
    • Search probably belongs mostly in this bucket.
  • Customer service and support?
  • Product innovation?

The ultimate aim is to get to the right mix of search, ads, email, and social media.  Doing that depends on how well you converge it all.

• Organizations are demanding better user experiences in their portals.
• They see consumerization driving other products and want it for their portals.
• Mobile devices and the need for context-awareness are being demanded by users

What about cloud-based portals – is that in our future?  It certainly is!   Many vendors are starting to offer cloud-based portal systems. But beware!  The very nature of the portal is that it typically connects to a whole bunch of other systems in your organization behind your firewall.  So for a cloud-based portal to be effective, you will need to open up your internal systems to the cloud vendor and have some serious networking pipes. On the other hand, a cloud-based portal would be ideal to integrate your other cloud-based applications.

2015 is still a long way away, so what is happening between now and that future?  Here are the seven things that Gartner sees trending in the portal market over the next few years.

• Analytics need to be implemented to help gauge the effectiveness of the portal.  There has been a recent flurry of acquisitions in the Web Analytics market by traditional and newer portal vendors
• Portal-less Portals – there are several vendors beginning to offer portal type systems without claiming to be true portals.  Backbase is considered one of those vendors.  Adobe’s CQ5 could also qualify.
• Portal ubiquity – portals will become more ubiquitous as unbind their services
• Exploit context across more user attributes (aka enhanced personalization)
• Widgets are becoming more important and portlets less-so
• Mobile is becoming a key first consideration
• The User Experience Platform begins to emerge as a set of cohesive, pre-integrated, highly user interactive services rather than a bunch of products loosely coupled together.

Finally, in terms of vendors, we have basically three major portal vendors today:  IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.  Close behind are our open source friends Liferay and JBoss. As the market begins to move toward this UXP concept, we are going to see lots of other vendors emerge with UXP offerings.  Firms from the content management space are beginning to move toward UXP, as are firms in the Social Software, Mashups, Portal-less Portals and other Markets.

Here are some vendors to keep your eye on over the next few years:

IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Liferay, Redhat JBoss, Backbase, Adobe, Cisco, Google, Apple, United Planet, JackBe, NetVibes, Pageflakes, Fatwire, Extron, Automony, Drupal, DotNetNuke, Plone, Jive, Atlassian, Telligent, SocialText.

What is driving the cloud?  It’s all coming out of web 2.0.  Web 2.o continues to improve and mature.  Technology like REST and Ajax help it.  The user or community based paradigms get better.

Portal and the Cloud

• The portal is aggregation friendly. Good for the cloud.
• It includes cloud capabilities.  Consuming web services is easy for them for example.
• It embraces WOA/REST.  You see this in RESTful services, widget support, mashups, etc.
• It supports MyPortal
• Social Software functions are critical and integrating these things.

Vendor Cloud Offerings

There are a number of major offerings by key vendors in the marketplace.

Microsoft

• Office Live
• Windows Live
• XBOX Live
• Exchange Online
• Sharepoint Online
• Office Communications Online
• Office Live Meeting
• Windows Azure – just launched 5 weeks ago.
• BPOS

There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of pieces. It’s hard to put it all together.  With MSFT, you have low level services like Azure up to middle and top tiers like Sharepoint Online.  This is a very broad strategy.   You can deploy most of this on premises, have MSFT deploy them for you in a hosted model, and then have the actual shared model like BPOS.

IBM

IBM has a number of offerings.

• Web Conferencing in Lotus Live
• Collaboration with Engage and connections
• Amazon EC2 to spin up portal, content, etc.
• He went through this really fast.  IBM offers a little more than he mentioned.

Google

Google calls it GAPE or Google Apps Premier Edition.  They want to make money with this offering. It comes from the consumer side. They want to make people use the web more and thus use MSFT less and less. Google makes more money when people are online.

• Gmail and Google Calendar
• Google Docs and Google Sites
• Google Video
• 25 GB account for mail. 10 gb + 500 mb for storage
• 99.9% uptime guarantee

Is it ready for prime time?  Gartner asks if the enterprise is ready for Google with it’s quick and nimble approach.  However, Google continues to enhance it’s product offerings:

• Postini acquisition for mail security and archive capability
• Migration support
• however, they had multiple outages last year.
• Not a huge amount are taking the plunge.
• iGoogle and Sites are out there. (Sites is the old Jotspot)
• Google Wave is interesting.   It’s not integrated with existing products though.  Gartner considers it a good proof of concept

Covisint

They are really one of the only ones who are pure play cloud.  They focus on a couple key industries.  They have horizontal offerings as well.

Adobe

Their key asset is their client site internet technologies like Flash, Flex, and PDF.  They are starting to offer cloud based services like acrobat and photoshop.com.  Jim Murphy sees them fleshing out collaboration and leveraging the analytics firm Omniture  to help the whole user experience.  (Note: Omniture isin my hometown of Orem Utah)

Models in the cloud

1. Cloud Friendly: I consume cloud services
2. Cloud based portal as a service: Portal in the cloud either hosted or like BPOS from MSFT or LotusLive from IBM
3. Public Cloud Deployable: this is spin up portal on Amazon EC2
4. Private Cloud for internal use: Create your own private cloud and spin it up.
5. Private Cloud for external use: Same thing but different constituents.

Life Beyond the Titans

It’s not just IBM and Microsoft

• Cisco is entering
• Jive has been here a while
• Oracle has some offerings
• Force.com
• Amazon
• AT&T
• Yahoo!
• Facebook
• and a bunch more