Adobe Adds Social Analytics Tools to Online Marketing Suite

HooteSuite wasn’t the only company to announce a social analytics suite yesterday: Adobe announced the addition of a new product called SocialAnalytics to its Online Marketing Suite. SocialAnalytics will ship in Q3 and monitor Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many other sources.

Online Marketing Suite already features various tools for social media monitoring, but this new package extends the suite’s capabilities by adding features for determining a business’ top influencers, tracking sentiment over time and calculating how much revenue is generated by social media campaigns.

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Online Marketing Suite is powered by Omniture, which Adobe acquired in 2009. It’s a part of Adobe’s ongoing “customer experience management” (CEM) strategy. Last year, following Adobe’s acquisition of Day Software we talked to Erik Larson, senior director of product management at Adobe, about CEM:

Larson’s vision for the enterprise revolves around “customer experience management,” which combines the discipline of user experience design, interaction design, process management, content strategy and customer service into a unified field for Web-based customer experience. Larson predicts in the near future, if this isn’t the case already, customers will expect to have most of their interactions with companies online – and citizens will have most of their interactions with governments online as well. To this end, Adobe hopes to position LiveCycle, Omniture, and Day’s offerings as a customer experience suite to compliment its existing web development technologies.

Adobe is going up against Cisco (which announced its SocialMiner product recently) and several established social analytics players such Radian6, but social analytics is a now a must-have feature for any sort of online marketing package.

As we pointed out earlier today, these sorts of social tools are great but the majority of customer interactions are still taking place on the phone. Despite a few well-known examples, such as the United breaks guitars incident, social analytics providers are providing solutions to problems that don’t really exist yet. There’s a crowded field of contenders, but we’re actually at a very early stage in the development and need for this technology.

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