The document discusses Adobe's approach to overcoming disillusionment with corporate social media. It outlines Adobe's vision of being the most social brand to better serve customers. Adobe aims to integrate social media across its business functions like marketing, PR, support, and product development. It achieves this through meaningful content, compelling activations, and activating employees as advocates. Adobe measures the impact of its social media efforts on metrics like traffic, subscriptions, leads, and workforce engagement. Its approach focuses on content, activations, distribution, and internal support through enablement and governance.
The disruption of our computing and business landscape has led to one of today’s top buzzwords: “digital transformation.” Digital transformation is a massive dynamic that affects virtually every part of your business: processes, infrastructure, systems, business models, go-to-market strategies and customer touchpoints. Everything is digital, and digital has changed everything.
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All of these dynamics are important, but we at Adobe believe that standout customer experiences are the linchpin for driving meaningful, measurable impact and transforming how you do business.
Standout and effective experiences have become more critical than ever in today’s market landscape.
Powerful experiences change the way we interact, entertain, work, and relate to the world around us. It can be one to one – friends, family, co-workers –collaborating together or engaging on social media Or one to many – business to consumer, business to business, teacher to students, government to citizen, artist to audience.
Experiences are how you can break through the noise and make an impact.
What makes a great customer experience?
A great experience shares four critical qualities:
It is compelling to capture customers’ interest and draw them in. It needs to look beautiful, be dynamic and display perfectly across devices. For example – a Starwood-Marriott Hotels campaign has a few seconds to grab the consumer’s attention and get them thinking about a tropical vacation before they click away.
It is personal so it understands who the customer is, where they are and what they like. For example – Coca-Cola remembers a consumer’s favorite mix and serves it up on their custom soda machine with one click.
It is useful so people can get things done faster, wherever they are, so they can move to the next thing. For example – we allow someone to sign a contract on a mobile device, from a train, without paper copies and courier services.
And it is everywhere so customers can be reached at the moment where they are working, reading, watching, purchasing or doing whatever else it is that you as a business want to touch. Whether they are in a store, on their mobile device, or using a dashboard in their car – you need to be there.
If we take this idea of a trough seriously from the Hype Cycle – then I believe that the slop in the trough that is so enticing as practitioners is still the shiny objects and cool new trends we want to pursue. Even though analysts have warned us against this mentality, we continue to make our way back to the trough that’s full of cool new trends --- when we should be focused on using social to support the jobs that need to be done.
But how are brands getting into the trough to start with?
- There is this magnetism of sorts that attacks us like pigs to slop in the trough…and it’s often the trends.
Our social media vision is to be the most social brand in order to better serve our customers.
Let’s read a quick quote from Shantanu, “whether it’s Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, you have to go to your customers or they won’t come to you.”
Adobe’s social media vision allows us to 1.) support our corporate strategy (across business units and functions) and 2.) grow to be a socially enable business. In order to achieve this we need to activate a social employee culture where we are listening to our customers, adding value to our customers and prospects by sharing relevant content insights and responding to customer inquiries, needs and requests.
And just as social media has gone beyond marketing in the industry so too has Adobe’s program become a Social Business. Social media is now woven into the fabric of our organization. It may have started for us in PR and Marketing but it has become integrated across customer support, HR, Sales and product development.
There are a few things that I think are helping us to avoid the trough of disillusionment. It helps to have a CEO who is asking us to become one of the most social brands in the world and a CMO who demands greatness in our efforts. But apart from that, there are four key points I’ll focus on for the rest of my presentation that fit organizationally in two buckets. BU social focused on content & activations. But how we complement that approach through our center of excellence that is actively trying out new things that could help the business & doing it with an eye toward business metrics.
Set up
From the trough of dillusionment to the slope of enlightenment.
Perhaps like you, Adobe has a variety of platforms where our content lives. A key part of our social media program going forward is to find the right synergies between the social team, our PR team and our marketing teams as we create content that is both of the evergreen variety that relates to key business topics, but also to create real-time content based on what is happening in the world which is relevant for Adobe to talk about. We’re in the process of trying to create greater editorial rigor around our various content sites to support the already ambitious processes we have for producing, distributing and amplifying content.
-- Let me share one specific example with you…this SME Activation Program.
Relate to them
Finding synergies between teams & editorial process
Evergreen & real-time content
SME Activation
As part of our social media program, we’ve created an internal operation that activates subject matter experts across the company as bloggers. What’s unique about this program is that we’re using processes that scale to allow for hundreds of SMEs to participate. We give these SMEs writing resources to speed the process of writing new blog posts. Our efforts to create content through this program has resulted in 800 pieces of original content in the past year which has been placed on our internal blogs, but also picked up by the likes of HBR or The Economist. But we’re also tracking just how successful these blog posts are in not only raising awareness or building the brands of our thought leaders, but in driving traffic back to our solution pages and ultimately driving leads. A glance at the whole of our MQLs unveils that nearly 1/3 of our leads of our Marketing Cloud solutions have now read our SME produced posts.
- SMEs
Scale
Writing Resources
But meaningful content is more than regular evergreeen blog posts on key topics to the business an industry…it’s also participating in real-time conversations in the world as they happen in a manner that is relevant. Consider as an example our experience with the dress? How many of you saw Blue/Black…. or saw (or still see) while and gold? For us, a simple way to join was to share how one of our customers had used our Adobe Color app to identify the true color. This fairly simple effort to join the conversation just as it was becoming a hot thing to talk about couldn’t have gone better for us…
Evergreen v. real-time content
Highlighting our customer
One of the things this taught us was the value of being nimble when looking for real-time marketing.
The impact that some of these real-time marketing campaigns can have
Compared to Oreo
Next up: Compelling activations. Avoiding the trough of disillusionment for Adobe has meant an almost incessant desire from the business to use social to do stunts and activations (both in person and online). We did a great deal of research to understand what the key factors were behind the industry’s most compelling activations. We found that while there is no silver bullet the most effective stunts have some common elements.
They are very simple to grasp
They evoke emotion – enough to cause a passive recipient to take action as in sharing
They might be participating – engaging viewers to take part before passing it on.
They’re the inspired by the now – real time or first of its kind
The ability to spread – a combination of the elements above or a very integrated approach across paid and earned marketing
What are the kinds of activations we’re doing? They’re simple things….like paper cuts. In connection with our recent document cloud launch we have created some online and offline plays on how Adobe Document Cloud is helping to eradicate the miserable paper cut.
- 1000s of tweets each day about paper cuts.
We’ve found that many of our most successful social stunts combine the online social world with some off-line in person component at various industry events. Our Field Marketing team has become some of our greatest admirers as we’ve given them massive uplift in their efforts to drive interest.
This is the # of badge scans we had during several events during the past 6 months…
First – social media is a hungry beast and we need to feed it daily – not just occasionally. Here’s a snapshot of our social media channels – for every major product and brand we have a presence on each of the top networks. This requires tailored content for each channel and monitoring everyday. So imagine for Photoshop, Creative Cloud etc – we have 7 channels that we need to feed and engage with daily. Social is a hungry beast and we’re always looking for inspirational, educational engaging content that delights our audiences and is visually up to standard of our brand.
In all we have a total of 345 accounts as of December
Platform
No of Accounts
Twitter 153
Facebook 87
YouTube 33
LinkedIn 25
Google+ 24
Pinterest 7
Instagram 6
Vine 5
Weibo 3
Kaixin 1
RenRen 1
There are a few things that I think are helping us to avoid the trough of disillusionment. It helps to have a CEO who is asking us to become one of the most social brands in the world and a CMO who demands greatness in our efforts. But apart from that, there are four key points I’ll focus on for the rest of my presentation that fit organizationally in two buckets. BU social focused on content & activations. But how we complement that approach through our center of excellence that is actively trying out new things that could help the business & doing it with an eye toward business metrics.
Set up
From the trough of dillusionment to the slope of enlightenment.
You’re looking at data from the Edelman’s trust barometer – survey that goes out to determine who consumers trust from big companies – it’s overwhelming that employees are trusted more than any other position for almost every topic.
Moving from Social Shift defining only Social Media training and rather truly infusing social media into the fabric of the way we do business. Shifting the way Adobe does business.
Educate, activate, advance
Look at other brand channels (other than just the Adobe channels) for the 4x engagement metric
The Vision
For FY15, the sales people who participated in social selling achieved 112.57% attainment as a group. Those who didn’t achieved 61.31% attainment.
For FY15, 43.55% of the sales people achieved greater than 100% of their attainment. Only 12.73% of those who didn’t achieved greater than 100% of their attainment.
Metrics that matter don’t simply matter to the social team, they matter to broader marketing efforts and ultimately the business objectives. Adobe is spoiled in some respects by the fact that we have a social media analytics team that is able to help us really understand the value that social media plays to driving business level KPIs such as web traffic to solution pages, product trials or downloads, and leads via online inquiries.
Metrics that matter to me & the business
But metrics that matter should be used more broadly as social permeates the business. Businesses who avoid the trough of disillusionment with social media are uncovering the value that social brings to its HR or recruiting efforts, employee branding, support, sales, and even product development.
Often social sits in the trough because of too great a focus on social marketing. We’re trying to expand into the other business functions and maintain a metrics that matter mindset.