Facebook just announced its new Preferred Marketing Developer program. We are very excited to share that Adobe is the only PMD to be awarded all four API badges – pages, apps, ads and insights.

Check out the post by my colleague, Lawrence Mak, on the Adobe Digital Marketing blog to see how you as a dig­i­tal mar­keter can take advan­tage of some of our core social mar­ket­ing capa­bil­i­ties and key dif­fer­en­tia­tors that we deliver via the Adobe Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Suite.  The suite includ­es Adobe Social (comprised of Context Optional’s Social Marketing Suite) a new prod­uct that inte­grates page management & engagement, lis­ten­ing, social ad buy­ing and social ana­lyt­ics so that marketers can more easily plan, manage, measure, and optimize their strategies and investments in social media.

-Christine Beury, Marketing Principal – Campaigns
Ad and Social Marketing Solutions, Adobe

Today, Adobe announced Adobe Social, a new product within the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite.  Adobe Social combines social publishing and engagement with monitoring, social ad buying and analytics that can attribute social activity to business results.  Adobe is giving those with social marketing responsibilities – digital marketers, community managers, customer service, public relations, ad buyers, analysts, and others – a single platform to align and collaborate around the management, measurement and optimization of their social media strategies, and does so in the context of all other digital marketing efforts.

Adobe Social builds on the social media management and technology Adobe acquired earlier this year as part of the Context Optional/Efficient Frontier acquisition, as well as the social media monitoring and analytics of Adobe SocialAnalytics.  The capabilities of Adobe Social are complemented by Multi-Channel Advertising technology acquired from Efficient Frontier, which brings social ad buying and social campaign optimization to the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite.

Adobe Social will be available in the 2^nd half of 2012 and will expand with additional social marketing features as well as integrations with other products within the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite.

Read the press release: http://adobe.ly/GE8aY5

• Timeline is like a scrapbook — it gives brands an opportunity to tell more engaging stories on Facebook than they can now. Fans can go back in time and see the whole picture, not just the post in front of them. The further back in Timeline you go, the more Facebook will compress the information so that you’re only seeing the most interesting parts of your history. You can customize this by clicking on a star next to a status, say, or enlarging a picture.
• Brands are in more control of their content. They can go back and choose the posts that stay on the page. They can revise the story they’re telling, from beginning to end.
• The ability for Fans to go back and read a whole picture, we have to be more engaging. I think posts will receive more impressions as users explore the pages.
• Reach and opportunity for engagement is growing. “We’ll see the chasm grown between the highly engaging and less engaging brands”
• Less shouting and more engaging. How do we best connect with our customers? No talking AT fans, talking WITH them. We can tell our story, and our fans can tell their little stories on top of ours.
• Have to de-silo — we’re talking about a whole story here, not one campaign, not one initiative, everything has to feed into the larger picture of what this brand represents. Take a holistic approach.
• The ability to message fans directly from the brand will help dramatically with customer service issues and taking certain conversations “offline”
• Pinning and Highlighting posts will allow brands to control the content users see when they first arrive to the page. In my opinion, this is better than default landing tabs.

I’m super excited about these changes and the opportunities it presents for brands. With these changes, there’s a huge need to provide stimulating, engaging content — that’s the fun stuff!

Tuesday, Jeff Feldman, VP of Strategy at Context Optional, an Adobe company, and Ellen Hahn, VP of Communications at Hyatt, spoke to the NYC and global audience at Social Media Week about the complexities of social global brand management. While challenges prevail, it’s not all doom and gloom. Ellen and Jeff settled into a candid and scholastic exchange that covered these essential questions:

-How many pages should a global company have, and what are the criteria?

-How do we manage the content on each page?

-How do we ensure a consistent brand but also enable the right local content and contributions?

-How do we collaborate socially with each branch and centralize the company message? 

Key Takeaways:

Many things were clear for global brands and the consumers that engage with them: authentic, centrally governed, locally relevant and engaging social media channels and sites are crucial, mandatory really.

Hyatt’s case:

Hyatt’s social media infrastructure was launched in June 2011 with Context Optional and Efficient Frontier leading the charge and started with 290,000 fans. To date, Hyatt has 900,000 fans – a great, not remotely miniscule, feat in the hospitality industry. This was accomplished organically and through social media campaigns, PR, paid media and as importantly, CMO-level support within the company to experiment in the social space. Hyatt wanted to “inspire travelers to get the best of their experience” but decidedly gleaned product development insights from fans, for instance, through social media channels they learned that consumers wanted their hotels to carry socks for those that forgot them.

While it’s still a journey, Hyatt’s social media focus has paid off in spades and will continue to do so.

Now that Facebook has filed its IPO there is much speculation regarding its value and how being a public company will impact the social network for consumers and brands. While it is up to Wall Street to value the company’s true worth, we, as marketers, should look at some key Facebook trends to evaluate future Facebook monetization opportunities and what it means for brands.

A look at some of the key trends:

Facebook is finally on every major brands marketing plan: While Facebook rapidly expanded its user base from the very beginning, it was relatively slow in gaining traction with advertisers. In 2011, that has changed. It was, from our perspective, a watershed year for Facebook – a time when the site went from being an experimental medium to a medium that appeared on every major marketer’s media plan.

Facebook ad spend continues to accelerate as marketers begin to understand social ROI: Our recent research shows that Facebook ad spend is nearly 3% of biddable online ad spend. However, we expect this number to increase to 5% of all online ad spend within a year, specifically in verticals such as retail where Facebook currently has a relatively small footprint.

The main reason for Facebook’s slow adoption in the retail category has been its perceived inability to show a direct response to marketers’ call for ROI. However, this will soon change.  Why?

1 – Based on our client data, between 40-60% of all transactions that start on a Facebook ad end in a different channel. So, in a last-click world (which about 70% of retailers currently use), the ROI on Facebook campaigns looks poorer than it really is.

2 – We have seen glimpses of evidence that show that when brands interact with their fans, the offline store traffic increases. In other words, online interaction on Facebook seems to lead to more monetization offline.

3 – We have seen that consumers interacting with Facebook apps tend to buy products more frequently and of a higher value.

4 –Facebook has a massive data asset that only continues to grow. This is perhaps the most important component driving this change.

The bottom line is that the effect of Facebook on purchase behavior and revenue is often indirect and long-term. Today’s direct response metrics don’t capture these effects correctly and thus do not show proper revenue impact. The ability to measure the value of Facebook on direct response will change as more marketers implement marketing solutions that offer cross-channel measurement, analytics and optimization.

New ad formats that leverage the social element of Facebook will accelerate social ad spend: There are two features of social marketing that give it a significant advantage over any other channel:

1 – The social element. When a friend endorses a brand, product or a service there is a much higher propensity for others to buy or endorse it, as well. However, we believe that the social element is still underleveraged for marketers on Facebook. Apart from Sponsored Stories (which do remarkably well on Facebook), and reaching friends of fans, we have not seen new innovation in this area. We believe there is huge potential in making ads and apps even more inherently social so as to gain more free “earned media”.

2 – Facebook’s massive data asset is relatively untapped. The company has one of the richest sources of consumer data on the planet, but for understandable privacy reasons, it has not enabled marketers to leverage it. Yet, we believe that in due course innovation will emerge that balances privacy expectations and regulations with ways to provide marketers with rich data beneficial to industry and consumers. The innovation will come in the form of new ad formats, segmenting capabilities and advanced reporting.

Facebook will be the catalyst for a major media mix shift: Many analysts ask if Facebook budgets are eating into search and display budgets.  So far, it is not, and we believe that will continue to be the case. Facebook’s budgets have and will continue to come from TV and print. There are two reasons for this:

1 – Consumer’s behavior when they see ads on Facebook is a lot like when they see ads on TV. They initially respond well and strongly but when they see the same ads again the response rates drop significantly. The same applies to apps. Thus, the best-executed marketing strategies on both TV and Facebook have the following common elements – a short but intense campaign to maximize reach, frequency and word of mouth; a pulsed media buying strategy so consumers are not saturated with the same ads; and very strong, creative ads that encourage people to look, engage and interact with the brand.

2 – The other reason is the way in which people engage with different media. Many TV viewers are on Facebook simultaneously. We have seen this with some of the fan pages of TV shows that we manage – peak hours of engagement coincide with the times that the show is broadcast. So, if a brand wants to reach out to an audience of a particular show they should advertise on Facebook, too. This is unlike search where the core purpose is to find a product in the most efficient way possible and then get off the search engine’s ecosystem.

What does this means for marketers? Facebook’s IPO will increase pressure on the company to monetize its traffic much more efficiently. One should expect to see new ad formats and targeting capabilities being released. Additionally, one can also expect to see increased ad buying on the channels as more marketers look at social ROI through a broader and, in our opinion, more correct lens. Finally, expect to see more coordinated TV and Facebook campaigns as well as a shift of media dollars away from TV and print to Facebook.

Dr. Siddharth Shah
Director, Business Analytics
Adobe

Dr. Sid Shah will be speaking on ‘Social Media Metrics: Measuring the Value to your Business’ at SES Accelerator, San Diego, this Thursday Feb 9^th.  While many discussions on social metrics cover concepts and strategies few of them provide insights with hard evidence to corroborate their hypotheses. Sid will aim to cover this gap by not only outlining a more developed concept of social ROI and related metrics, but also providing real numbers and metrics from actual campaigns to illustrate the benefit that social marketing provides to businesses in terms of awareness and revenue.  Reach out to Sid before and after his talk by commenting on this blog post to ask him more on this interesting topic.

Our webinar series has covered interesting topics and received great participation, but this week’s webinar, “Google+: The Convergence of Search and Social” had such great attendance, interaction and follow up requests that we had to share.  The topic is obviously very timely given Google+’s recent entry into the social mix for brands and their recent announcements around Google account management. As a leader in search and a partner of Google’s for Google+ brand page publishing and moderation, we have incredible insight into how to leverage it as search and social converge.

Some of the attendees shared this feedback with us:

“You guys did a great job covering the super important things and cutting out the fat. Thank you for that!”
-   SEO Specialist, Digital media company

“Really outstanding job on this!  It was both informative and engaging.  It kept my interest throughout while likely appealing to a large audience with vastly different amounts of knowledge regarding Google +.  Probably the best webinar I’ve attended over the past year.”
-   SEM Manager, Automotive marketing company

It’s a must listen-to for anyone in search or social marketing who wants to better understand Google+ and its impact on search.  Listen to replay and get the presentation here.

Today, Adobe solutions are central to how digital marketing and advertising are created, managed, executed, measured and optimized. Our focus on market leadership in the digital marketing space has driven some dramatic changes at Adobe including the recent acquisition of Efficient Frontier, a leader in multi-channel and auction-based digital advertising optimization across search, display and social media.

With Efficient Frontier, Adobe delivers an industry-leading independent platform for digital ad buying to our customers. With this addition to our Digital Marketing Suite, we offer a more powerful solution for managing search, display and social media to better answer the needs of our customers.

The several key areas of technology and expertise Efficient Frontier brings to Adobe’s Digital Marketing Suite include; 1) leading portfolio optimization algorithms and platform for paid search, 2) real-time bidding technology for display advertising that is placing millions of dollars of bids today, 3) Context Optional, a social engagement platform that Efficient Frontier recently purchased that is managing content for major brands on both Facebook and Google+, and 4) the ability to forecast future returns and model media mix options to drive business results from multi-channel campaigns. These additions to our already strong offerings significantly advance our capabilities in the market and, in many cases, accelerate our existing roadmap to give our enterprise and agency customers new ways to manage digital marketing.

What this means for both Adobe and Efficient Frontier customers – the marketers behind some of the world’s largest brands – is new and better ways to understand, and make impactful business decisions around digital ad buying. Both Efficient Frontier and Adobe customers are making tremendous investments in advertising  and must make complicated and real-time decisions about where, when and through which channels they will place ads. They have to take into account fundamental changes as ad budgets continue to shift rapidly to digital channels, which are projected to be 35% of ad spend in 2016 according to Forrester Research.

We understand that the marketer is on the hook to report back to the CEO on return-on-investment and lessons learned from their choices and allocation of resources whether it’s in advertising, or any other marketing campaign. This is no small task. Our customers trust and expect Adobe to be the strategic partner to help them exceed their business goals. With Efficient Frontier, we continue to make customer-driven business decisions as we build a powerful and comprehensive digital marketing platform to drive business impact through the marketing department.

Through our acquisition of Efficient Frontier and our recently announced acquisition of Auditude, a video ad management leader, Adobe continues to build a formidable technology stack for streamlining processes and uncovering actionable insights to drive real business results. As a result, Adobe customers have more power to optimize multi-channel advertising spend, giving them the means to place the right ads and offers at the right time and place, and then identify high performing campaigns to replicate for best business results. Adobe’s Digital Media and Digital Marketing platforms continue to intersect with these recent acquisitions, providing increased value for our customers.

The completion of Adobe’s acquisition of Efficient Frontier is great news for both businesses, for our customers and for a fast-growing industry in need of breakaway leadership. With it, Adobe is poised to win.

- Brad Rencher, SVP & GM, Digital Marketing

- David Karnstedt, GM, Advertising for Digital Marketing