In this session Craig Stoe and Andrew Bolander spoke about this topic. You can use Adobe Social to gain customer insight. These insights should lead to developing stronger relationships with customers and delivering more consistent experiences.

What is social data?
– engagement data is what is going on with the customer
– listening data are brand relevant keywords, sentiment, influencers
– attribution data is what we can learn about the customer personal attributes

Start with discovery. This is where you mine data about customers. Next is explore. Here you start to look for more engagement data. At the buy stage, customers express buying signals and you need to pick up on these to make offers. All this data can lead to better engagement.

A social profile helps you collect all this data so you have a better view of the customer. Adobe has developed a scoring algorithm that can be assigned. This consists of measuring User Class, Supporter index, Buzz and User Distribution. These measures lead to a composite score that can be used to target customers.

Andrew presented 5 steps to implement and use the social profile.
1. Listen
2. Prioritize
3. Engage properly
4. Gather insights
5. Share insights

He presented a live demo of Adobe Social and how to build and use the social profile through tweets from the audience.

For listening, you create listening rules that help you filter across the social platforms, hashtags, and attributes.

In prioritization, you can set up automation rules to route content around the organization. You can also apply segments and tags to results of the rules.

When it comes time to engage, you use Unified Moderation, which places multiple platforms under one screen so you can moderate multiple systems at the same time. Moderators can claim content, retweet, respond, and close out the item as handled. By claiming content, you prevent others from working on ending up with duplicate responses.

The social profile is connected to the moderation screen and you can review a users profile attributes. The system can also pull together different accounts into one profile. So one profile could link you twitter data with your Facebook data.

The social profile provides the customer insights, including emotion scores, sentiment scores, tracking of previous interactions and more.

As a final piece, Andrew showed how Adobe Social integrates and shares with the Adobe Marketing Cloud. For example, if a user logs into your AEM site using a Facebook login, their actions on the site can contribute to their social profile.

550 million tweets were sent in one day. Yet, there is almost no organization to those tweets. You can’t easily go find tweets about your brand, posted by your employees etc. Add in Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and others you can see that mining social data is not easy. But you must mine this data if you want to understand what people are saying about you.

To make sense of all this data, you want to “cast the right size net for your social campaign”. In other words you want to filter all the data using various techniques. The most basic technique is to use boolean And, Or, and Negation. Gnip uses this kind of filtering as the starting point to filter the huge amount of data coming from the social platforms. Adobe Social then takes that filtered data to further refine the data.

In addition to Boolean, you can also filter on geo-tagging. However only 1-2% of users actually make it easy by supplying or using geo-encoding when tweeting. So Gnip uses other techniques to grab geo-information.

Using public APIs you can also filter on language, hashtags and many other attributes of social data.

Next, you have to figure out what to do with the filtered data. Look at the goals of what you are trying to accomplish. This will affect the workflows you set up for monitoring and responding.

In the session the presenters talked about monitoring the Olympics Twitter feed. So they’ve already performed one level of filtering. Then they looked at specific hashtags, event names, event types and more.

A Social Buzz report showed distinct spikes during the Olympics – one at the opening and one at the closing. When looking at post by platform, Twitter represented 100 times the volume of any other platform. We then drilled down into specific tweets to see the actual contents.

In Adobe Social, you can go back into the history of Tweets. As an example, nobody expected Bob Costas to get pink eye, so no rules were available to monitor that when it happened. Using the historical data, they were able to set up a monitor for that and bring in the historical tweets.

Greg talked about the importance of Disqus. Disqus is a commenting engine that is easy to integrate into web sites. They have 9 billion comments and millions of commenter profiles. Often the comments made through Disqus are more meaningful than what you would see in Twitter. Of course, Adobe Social includes the ability to track Disqus as easily as Twitter and other data.

Tumblr is another platform that is important. They have 165m blogs and 72b posts. Tumblr content is repurposed and reused which accounts for 95% of all posts. These re-blogs can be important to monitor as they can show when something explodes in popularity. Tumblr has become the second most volume that Adobe sees.

Other platforms mentioned included Foursquare and VK. VK is the largest social platform in Eastern Europe.

I think the main point of this session is that Adobe Social gives you access to all the most important social content. Setting up a social program involves monitoring the right content at the right time. When you look to set up your own program, don’t just look at Twitter and Facebook. Many of the other social platforms are also tremendously important both for monitorIng and in which to participate.

• Adobe CQ5.5 Sneak Peek
• Adobe CQ5.5 Now Available

At the time of the announcement, Adobe also announced CQ 5.5 Social Communities, but had not yet shipped that feature.  Well, I missed the original shipping announcement, so I’m catching up to it now.

On May 15, 2012, Adobe announced that CQ 5.5 Social Communities was available.  Social Communities builds on to some existing features already available in Adobe CQ 5.5, such as “developing and managing blogs, forums, comments, and ratings, as well as connecting to social networks, across all aspects of an organization’s digital presence”.

You can now include login to CQ 5 using Twitter or Facebook and then personalize their experience using information from their profile or data from other systems.  Adobe has included several social plugins in CQ 5.5 that include:Activity feeds

• “Like” buttons
• Comments
• Twitter Share
• Twitter Follow
• Twitter Search

These new features will make it even easier for site managers to add social capabilities to their websites.

You can see a video of some of the social plugins on YouTube or inline below.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DVlaN_zcs0[/youtube]

Gartner sees many vendors, such as IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle expanding more and more into the Suite side of the market.  There are also emerging vendors in Suite side, including Adobe and Cisco.  On the lean side, we see vendors such as Liferay, Backbase, Drupal and DotNetNuke.

One of the key points I got out of Gene’s talk is to understand the ethos, or character, of the various vendor products.  Gene offers the following ethos for each vendor.

• Vendor -> Ethos
• Adobe -> Customer
• Cisco -> Collaboration
• IBM -> Customer; Employee
• Oracle -> Business Apps/Process
• MS -> Collaboration
• SAP -> Business Apps/Process

The ethos doesn’t mean that a vendor can’t play in another space, but it may be more challenging.

Gene offers the follow strategies to address UXP in the future:

• Take inventory of portal and portal-like technologies and efforts in your enterprise
• Establish governance early, including processes, teams and executive sponsorship
• Improve design processes as precursor to UXP adoption
• Gather Feedback from stakeholders
• Capitalize on widget and gadget integration via RESTful approaches
• Plan for an onslaught of mobile requirements
• Verify Alignment with Portal Vendor strategies
• Devise a framework and establish standards to address ongoing portal and UXP initiatives.
• Look at new sourcing strategies: buy  vs build vs hosting vs cloud

I asked about how Web Content Management vendors play in the UXP arena.  Gene responded that Personalization is really at the heart of a UXP.  Personalization is something portals do very well.  If you have a content management system that also does a good job of personalization, then that could be the basis of an excellent UXP platform.  See Adobe for an excellent example.  He thinks, and I agree, that we will see Web Content Management vendors becoming players in the UXP market.