If you're like me, you've known Adobe for its leadership in digital publishing tools, from Photoshop to Acrobat, but now it will be known also for its involvement in the social side of electronic communications.
Today Adobe announced that its new tool, called Adobe Social, has been rolled out for - as the title says - measuring the impact of social media on your business.
You try to keep up with the latest best practices in social marketing, customer relations, crowdsourcing and influence, but you struggle to understand how your efforts are paying off. It's confusing to see your Facebook follower numbers growing with no measurable means of detecting corresponding jumps in leads or sales. Adobe has now addressed that gap and tried to fill it in ways that other social metrics companies such as Radian 6 (of Salesforce) and other mostly smaller companies do not.
As described in their press release,
Adobe Social is the combination of Context Optional's social media engagement tools with Adobe SocialAnalytics' social listening and analysis tools. It represents not only a single solution for a business's core social marketing activities, but a product that has the advantage of integration with the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite to bring multi-channel measurement and optimization to the mix. Marketers can now create and demonstrate tangible business impact from social media, all within one powerful solution.
What's attractive about Adobe Social (we have not used it yet, but were given a demo) is the way it links social media actions to business KPIs, identifies influencers whose presence actually affects the bottom line and how customers behave across their entire customer journey. Behavior is given way too little attention in social media analytics, so this seems to be a very positive step.
Of course Adobe Social can be made more powerful by integrating it with the rest of Adobe's Marketing Suite. We'll have to wait and see how it measures up against more seasoned social measurement platforms and tools.