Adobe Social
Operational Readiness Playbook
Created by: Scott Rigby and David Contreras
Date: July 2015
Playbook Objective
The objective of this documents is to get your businesses operationally ready for the
implementation and deployment of Adobe Social. This will help you and your organisation – as
new Adobe Social user - to drive maximum value from your investments in Adobe technology.
Although we have seen many projects succeed, others have faltered due to a lack of internal
investment in the businesses to ensure they are operationally ready to adopt this new
technology. This playbook will help guide you to avoid some of the common areas we have
identified as missing in less successful deliveries.
The recommendations and best practices in these playbooks are ideally intended to be applied
to your business in parallel to your technology solution deployment, to ensure that by the time
you go-live with your solution your business is best positioned to drive value realisation from
your investment.
The playbooks use a common digital governance structure focusing on the key areas of
leadership, strategy, people, product and process to deliver a robust approach to readying your
business whether you are deploying one Adobe solution or multiple.
This playbook should be read by:
Chief Marketing Officer Head of Digital, Head of Strategy, Head of Marketing, Head of Customer Insights Head of Social, Publishing Leads, Social Analysts, Moderation Leads, Monitoring Leads Solution Architect, Head of Implementation, Digital Implementation Leads Program Manager, Project Manager, Business Analyst
Table of Contents
1 INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................... 6
1.1 About Adobe Social ......................................................................................................6
1.1.1 Adobe Social Capabilities ......................................................................................7
1.2 About this Playbook ......................................................................................................8
2 LEADERSHIP........................................................................................................... 9
2.1 Sponsorship ..................................................................................................................9
2.2 Buy-In .........................................................................................................................10
2.3 Communication ...........................................................................................................11
2.3.1 Communication management ..............................................................................11
2.3.2 Recommended communications process and principles ......................................11
2.3.3 Setting communication goals ...............................................................................12
2.3.4 Recommendations on a communication approach ...............................................13
2.4 Accountability ..............................................................................................................15
2.4.1 Steering committee ..............................................................................................15
2.4.2 Common roles and responsibilities within a steering committee ...........................15
2.4.3 Setting up a working group ..................................................................................18
3 STRATEGY ............................................................................................................ 19
3.1 Adobe Social Maturity Model.......................................................................................19
3.1.1 Key dimensions of Social Media Marketing ..........................................................20
3.2 Focus ..........................................................................................................................25
3.2.1 Digital Strategy ....................................................................................................25
3.2.2 Key Performance Indicator: ..................................................................................28
3.3 Alignment ....................................................................................................................30
3.3.1 Refining Social KPIs: Integrate with Business Objectives.....................................31
3.3.2 Standardising Social Media Processes ................................................................33
3.3.3 Integrating marketing channels ............................................................................34
3.3.4 The Four Pillars of Social Media Strategy ............................................................36
3.4 Innovation ...................................................................................................................37
4 PEOPLE ................................................................................................................. 38
4.1 Expertise .....................................................................................................................38
4.2 Structure .....................................................................................................................38
4.2.1 Structures Types ..................................................................................................39
4.2.2 Business Recommended Organisational Structure ..............................................40
4.2.3 Roles & Responsibilities ......................................................................................42
4.3 Resources...................................................................................................................44
4.3.1 Resource Model ...................................................................................................45
4.4 Community..................................................................................................................46
4.5 Culture ........................................................................................................................47
5 PROCESS .............................................................................................................. 48
5.1 Deployment.................................................................................................................48
5.1.1 Implementation Methodology ...............................................................................49
5.2 Publishing Workflows ..................................................................................................49
5.3 Moderation Workflows.................................................................................................50
5.4 Usage .........................................................................................................................52
5.4.1 Administration ......................................................................................................53
5.4.2 Access Levels ......................................................................................................55
5.5 Sustainability ...............................................................................................................56
5.5.1 Maintaining a Single View of the Customers ........................................................56
5.5.2 Process to Adopt Traditional or Emerging Channels ............................................57
5.5.3 Track and Upgrade ..............................................................................................57
5.5.4 Optimise and Report for Success .........................................................................57
5.6 Using the Real-Time Twitter Preview Feature to Fine-Tune Rules ..............................57
6 TECHNOLOGY / PRODUCT .................................................................................. 59
6.1 Solution fit ...................................................................................................................60
6.1.1 Solution Architecture ............................................................................................60
6.2 Integrations .................................................................................................................60
6.2.1 Marketing Cloud Integrations ...............................................................................60
6.2.2 Common Third-Party Integrations ........................................................................61
6.3 Democratization ..........................................................................................................62
6.3.1 Automation ..........................................................................................................63
6.4 Leveraging your investment (The Big Picture) .............................................................64
7 CHECKLIST ........................................................................................................... 65
8 ADOBE SOCIAL PRODUCT MATURITY ACTIVITIES ......................................... 66
9 ADOBE CONSULTING OPERATIONAL MATURITY REVIEW............................. 66
10 ADOBE SOCIAL GLOSSARY OF TERMS ........................................................ 67
11 ADOBE SOCIAL TEMPLATES .......................................................................... 69
11.1 Social Media Marketing Framework ............................................................................69
11.2 How to Create a Content Schedule Template .............................................................70
11.3 Key metrics on Social Media .......................................................................................71
11.4 Common KPIs and Calculated Metrics ........................................................................72
11.5 Deep dive insights request template: ..........................................................................73
1 Introduction
1.1 About Adobe Social
For generations consumers have trusted people for reliable information about products, services
and purchase decisions. Social interactions in the digital world strongly influence our daily
consumption habits. In fact, 92 per cent of consumers state that they rely on information from
people they know, or interact with, online1. This is why it makes sense for organisations to work
hard to build trustworthy relationships with their audiences and influence positive behaviours
towards brands, communications and promotions.
Adobe Social leverages Adobe’s core strengths in content and data to deliver a comprehensive
social marketing solution that combines strategic services with enterprise-class software. Fully
integrated with Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Social is the only platform that enables
marketers to track the performance of social content across the customer lifecycle and identify
not only the messages and behaviours that drive engagement, but also measurable brand
impact. By delivering smarter data, Adobe Social helps marketers optimise content strategies to
improve social relationships in the form of reach, engagement and influence. And better
relationships lead to better business results.
Adobe Social enables your organisation to:
Manage all social activity with a single solution by monitoring and moderating social
conversations and analysing social engagement and conversion.
Streamline content development and delivery by accessing robust “listening” data to
identify content and topics that matter to your audience.
Understand the impact of your social efforts across social media channels and your
Web siteWeb site.
Build relationships with key influencers by helping you identify individuals and
audience segments most likely to drive conversion and learn which types of posts and
messages effectively engage influencers.
Integrate social with your other digital marketing efforts and take advantage of
integration with Adobe Marketing Cloud to put social media into context. Track social
1
media conversions, improve targeting and optimise onsite experiences by leveraging
social data and customer activity.
1.1.1 Adobe Social Capabilities
Scale efforts across any number of stakeholders.
Assign and control access to multiple users.
Consolidate workflows for a holistic view of your social landscape.
SOCIAL ACCOUNT
MANAGEMENT
Monitor trends, opportunities and potential
business.
Track customer sentiment and measure your share of
voice.
Access real-time moderation queues.
LISTENING AND
MODERATION
Publish to multiple social channels at once.
Target custom audiences by demographic, geographic and social profile parameters.
Amplify the reach of important posts with
advertising.
INTEGRATED
PUBLISHING
Monitor more than 100 engagement metrics across your entire social
presence.
Identify content types, social networks and key influences to drive engagement.
Predict post performance based on historical data.
SOCIAL ANALYTICS &
PREDICTIVE INSIGHTS
Monitor performance and report on which channel influenced the most
conversions.
Optimise content strategy and amplify campaigns.
SOCIAL ROI
1.2 About this Playbook
This document follows a structure that will help you understand the key focus areas to nurture
the implementation of Adobe Social. This structure is based the digital governance framework,
which creates the appropriate business environment for digital to succeed. It includes:
Leadership—Executive buy-in and support for the implementation and adoption.
Strategy—Clarity and alignment around key business goals for evaluating digital
performance.
People—Resources, expertise and the appropriate team structure to run Adobe Social
effectively.
Process—Procedures, project management and workflows for deploying and using
Adobe Social effectively.
Product—Solution fit, common integration and automation.
What’s different about digital? Everything.
Adobe Digital Governance Framework.
People
Culture shift, new skills, strategic in-sourcing, diverse talent and skillset.
Strategy - Aligned to business goals, common goals and KPIs, communicated to business.
Process
‘Always-on marketing’, testing and next-best offer. A single source of truth. Digital and traditional merge.
Product (Technology)
Deploy the right technology to deliver the best customer
experience.
Leadership
Stakeholder buy-in, single executive sponsor, defined program of work and Budget, insight-driven culture.
2 Leadership
Leadership is critical — it provides the foundation for successful digital transformation.
C-suite involvement is needed to drive a digital transformation program, budget and outcome.
Your role as the project sponsor is to contribute with a strong understanding of how Adobe
Social, and digital in general, will transform the business. Position yourself as the subject matter
expert and functional leader in a hands-on mode.
A common trait you will find in successful digital teams is that they are owned and managed by
people who are prepared to make the necessary investments in talent, equipment and training.
Leaders are skilled at extracting optimal performance from team members and developing
strategies that take full advantage of their unique talents.
Leadership consists of four subcomponents: sponsorship, buy-in, communication and
accountability.
2.1 Sponsorship
Having an effective executive sponsor will help the project achieve maximum success. To be
truly effective, this internal executive sponsor should have enough seniority and influence within
the business to get buy-in from other stakeholders across the organisation. Having a high level
of self-interest in the project success and a passion for digital transformation and truly believing
in how Adobe Social is going to transform the business are also critical.
An effective executive sponsor should guarantee the implementation of Adobe Social stays in
line with the corporate strategy, protecting it from conflicting initiatives or internal politics and
helping address any limiting factors, such as resource or budget constraints.
The Four P's of Execute Sponsorship
Source: Dykes, Brent. 2011. Web Analytics Action Hero. Adobe Press.
2.2 Buy-In
Achieving management buy-in across your leadership team is also key. Having multiple change
agents to drive adoption will help you drive adoption easier and faster. The responsibility for the
implementation and deployment of Adobe Social needs to be shared by the entire leadership
team.
It is then the executive sponsor’s responsibility to win over the executive team by sharing
examples that prove the value of Adobe Social and digital, typically this focuses on delivering a
better customer experience and subsequent benefits to the business.
When implementing digital projects such as Adobe Social, leaders will be responsible for
monitoring different departments and teams owning different parts of digital marketing initiatives,
it is critical then to make sure that all groups share a common strategy to achieve common
goals. Having an internal roadshow to win support from executives will help raise awareness
towards aligning all teams and obtaining the necessary resources for an optimal
implementation.
Prioritisation
Adobe Social needs to be aligned with key business goals. The executive sponsor should provide crucial direction to the team, ensuring the implementation of Adobe Social is always in line with the corporate strategy and top priorities.
Protection
The executive sponsor will play an important role in
protecting you, the digital and the implementation
from other conflicting initiatives or corporate
politics.
Problem solving
Using their influence within the organisation, the
executive sponsor should step in to remove any
problems that may impede the success of the
implementation, such as resource or budget
constraints.
Promotion
The executive sponsor will play a key role in
championing the benefits of Adobe Social, holding
people accountable, and promoting digital wins
within the organisation, especially among other
executives.
2.3 Communication
To get the organisation on board, it is always a good idea to share the vision and repeatedly
reinforce the reason why your company is investing in Adobe Social technology by articulating
both the customer benefits and business benefits. Sharing documentation such as success
case studies of digital implementations will help you validate why and how this investment will
take the organisation to a new level. If you want the organisation to embrace digital
transformation, it is important to let employees know it is a priority.
2.3.1 Communication Management
A communication strategy can lay out the foundation and framework for communicating
initiatives and objectives across business and technology teams. It can also help by:
• Providing guidance and a framework for effective communications within and outside of
the project.
• Ensuring that proper protocols are always followed when preparing and delivering
communication.
• Providing precise and concise project communications at the right time.
• Involving all necessary stakeholders and maintain regular contact to keep transparency
in all transactions.
• Having clear communication channels with well-defined roles and responsibilities.
• Clarifying doubts, overcoming challenges and averting risks that affect the project.
• Building trust and develop open relationships between the parties
• Promoting openness and transparency.
2.3.2 Recommended Communications Process And Principles
You can build your communication strategy around the following key principles:
• Communication is critical to effect change: Ongoing and timely communication is a
fundamental requirement to inform and respond to stakeholders about the change, its
impact on them and its outcomes: to enable feedback; to manage expectations; to
ensure a smooth change transition; and to support uptake and continual improvement.
• Communication delivery is local: Communication from the local area will mean that
messages are relayed in a language that is relevant to the audience. Engagement with
local communicators across the business and technology will increase the effectiveness
of the communication.
• Communication is consistent and repetitive: With a common approach across the
program, stakeholders will come to expect communication through specific methods
(channels), with given formats (look) and timing. Repeating key messages through
multiple channels will increase the amount of information that is absorbed.
• Communication is linked to the project objectives: By linking the communication to
the objectives it provides a context and reasoning behind change. Repeatedly providing
these links will serve as reminders as to the wider benefits of the project.
2.3.3 Setting Communication Goals
All communication developed and distributed throughout the project is intended to achieve the
following goals:
• Stakeholders and project team members are aware and informed:
o Stakeholders and project team members should receive timely information about
what is happening (e.g. why, when and how and what it means to them). This
information starts at a generic level (which is repeated throughout the program or
project lifecycle), and becomes more detailed, specific and targeted to the
audience and as the project progresses. This information enables stakeholders
to think about, understand and be prepared for change and plan for future project
streams of work.
• Stakeholders and project team members are engaged:
o Opportunities are created and communicated to key stakeholders to support
them in exploring and becoming involved in and committing to a new way of
doing things, for example:
Different stakeholders and project team members will move through and
transition at different rates and times.
Communication will aim to gain key stakeholders and project team
members’ commitment through implementation.
Strategies and implementation roadmaps can be developed to manage
stakeholders and project team members who are resistant to the change
throughout the transition.
o Communication is two-way, with stakeholder input and feedback sought and
valued at all stages.
o Stakeholders and project team members expectations are managed:
The aim of communication is to provide set expectations of strategic
initiatives, project scope, associated constraints, risks and dependencies,
explain why this may differ from expectations (in targeted messages) and
to provide ongoing updates on expected and actual outcomes.
o Support the acquisition of skills and knowledge: training is backed up by
supporting communication to reinforce the training and provide opportunities to
share knowledge.
2.3.4 Recommendations On A Communication Approach
An approach to communication management for the project may include:
• Communications analysis:
o Conduct an effective stakeholder analysis:
Stakeholder analysis is developed at the project board, user group,
project team and stakeholder levels.
The stakeholder analysis will focus on all parties (e.g. users,
management, executives or third parties) required to achieve the desired
outcomes and any parties impacted by the change to ensure full
coverage.
o Categorise stakeholders into specific audiences (communication channels).
o Identify information requirements of all parties, ensure communication channels
are in place, track required message delivery and establish distribution lists by
subject area:
Have regular meetings. There should be regular meetings organised with
various levels within the project to ensure that there is regular
communication.
Where project team meetings do not meet communication requirements
(for example, where cross-area representation is required for specific
project deliverables) use these sparingly:
One-on-one meetings may be required to obtain specific input or
deliver important messages (as required) both formal and
informal.
A shared drive to maintain a reference point for overview of the
project with links to documentation for wide dissemination and
feedback.
A common wiki or alternate online knowledge management solution to
provide access to all parties and used by some to provide a workspace.
An electronic newsletter or company-wide communications, providing
regular project news (updates, upcoming events, outcomes) delivered by
email.
Email, may be used for targeted, individual or group communication –
with a specific purpose.
Information distribution and reporting, standard templates for
communicating regular standard information such as project status
reports, meeting minutes and reports will be used to ensure
communication is consistent and repeatable.
2.4 Accountability
Your organisation is investing in Adobe Social and top executives are expecting results. For this
to happen, it is the leaders’ and senior stakeholders’ jobs to hold themselves and their people
accountable—employees, teams, partners, and most importantly him or herself. Start with
changing the perception that accountability is about punishment and hard discipline. It should
really be about learning and improvement.
To define accountability, you can create a project charter. This a document states that a project
exists, why it is important, who is involved, its timeframes, the expected outcomes and the
resources needed for it to be successful. It also gives you written authority to begin work.
2.4.1 Steering Committee
Setting up a group of high-level stakeholders and experts will help you achieving the four
subcomponents of leadership and at the same time set direction to the project. This steering
committee can also help by:
• Prioritising initiatives.
• Reviewing business cases for new initiatives.
• Lobbying for the necessary time, personnel and budget.
• Ensuring quality in decision-making.
• Encouraging a collaborative work environment.
• Monitoring progress towards goals.
• Controlling scope and resolving conflicts.
2.4.2 Common Roles And Responsibilities Within A Steering Committee
The following high-level roles and responsibilities are based on industry standard practices for a
steering committee.
Role(s) Responsibility
Business or
Technology
Sponsor
The sponsor is ultimately accountable for the outcome of the program / project and is
responsible for securing spending authority and resources for the program / project.
Responsibilities
• Vocal and visible champion
• Legitimises and lends credibility to the strategic goals and objectives
• Is the escalation point for changes and issues outside the agreed tolerances
• Assists with stakeholder engagement where required
Business
Executives
The Executive’s role is to ensure that the program/project is focused on achieving its objectives
and delivering a product(s) that will achieve the forecast benefits, gives value for money,
ensuring a cost-conscious approach, balancing the demands of the business.
Responsibilities
• Design and appoint the program / project management teams
• Oversee the development of the Business Case, ensuring corporate strategic
alignment
• Monitor and control the progress at a strategic level, in particular reviewing the
Business Case regularly
• Escalate issues and risks
• Escalation point for issues & risks, and ensure that any risks associated with the
Business Case are identified, assessed and controlled
• Make decisions on escalated issues, with particular focus on continued business
justification
• Ensure overall business assurance of and ensure that it remains on target to deliver
products that will achieve the expected business benefits.
Business Owner
This role represents the interests of all those who will use the product(s) (including operations
and maintenance), those for whom the products will achieve an objective or those who will use
the product(s) to deliver the benefits and value drivers.
Responsibilities
• Provide the quality expectations and define acceptance criteria
• Ensure that the desired outcome is specified
• Ensure that end products will deliver the desired outcomes, and meet user
requirements
• Ensure that the expected benefits are realised
• Provide a statement of actual versus forecast benefits at the benefits reviews
• Resolve user requirements and conflicts
Technical Owner
This role represents the interests of those designing, developing, facilitating, procuring and
implementing the product(s). This role is accountable for the quality of product(s) delivered by
suppliers and is responsible for the technical integrity of the program / project.
Responsibilities
• Assess and confirm the viability of the approach
• Ensure that proposals for designing and developing the products are realistic
• Advise on the selection of design, development and acceptance methods
• Ensure quality procedures are used correctly, so that products adhere to requirements
Assurance
Owner
Assurance covers the primary stakeholder interests of the business, technical, end users and
suppliers.
Responsibilities
• The right people are planned to be involved in quality inspection at the correct points
in the products’ development
• Staff are properly trained in the quality methods
• The quality methods are being correctly followed
• Quality control follow-up actions are dealt with correctly
• An acceptable solution is being developed
• The scope of the program / project is not changing unnoticed
• Internal and external communications are working
• Applicable standards are being used
• The needs of specialist interests (for example, security) are being observed.
Business assurance responsibilities
• Assist to develop the Business Case and Benefits Review Plan
• Review the Business Case for compliance with corporate standards
• Verify the Business Case against external events
• Check that the Business Case is being adhered to throughout the program / project
• Check that the program / project remains aligned to the corporate strategy and
continues to provide value for money
User assurance responsibilities
• Ensure that the specification of the user’s needs is accurate, complete and
unambiguous
• Assess whether the solution will meet the user’s needs and is progressing towards
that target
• Advise on the impact of potential changes from the user’s point of view
• Ensure that the quality activities relating to products at all stages has appropriate user
representation
• Ensure that quality control procedures are used correctly to ensure that products meet
user requirements
Supplier assurance responsibilities
• Review the Product Descriptions (features & capabilities) and align to delivery(s)
• Advise on the selection of the development strategy, design and methods
• Ensure that any supplier and operating standards defined for the program / project are
met and used to good effect
• Advise on potential changes and their impact on the correctness, completeness and
integrity of products against their Product Description from a supplier perspective
• Assess whether quality control procedures are used correctly, so that products adhere
to requirements.
Program / Project
Manager
The Program / project Manager has the authority to run the day-to-day operations with the
prime responsibility of ensuring that end result produces the required products within the
specified tolerances of time, cost, quality, scope, risk and benefits.
Responsibilities
• Effective project management requires that the project management team, as a
whole, possesses and applies the knowledge in several areas:
• Project Management itself
• Business and industry domain knowledge specific to the project
• Technology knowledge required by the project
• Interpersonal and communication skills
• The Project Management Framework consists of 5 key activity groups: Initiation,
Planning, Execution, Monitoring & Control, and Closing.
• These are the processes or activities for managing the project and they are
different from the Project Life Cycle.
• The Project Life Cycle activities are generally sequential while project
management activities are performed as below) because project
management activities may overlap and repeat along the timeline depending
on risks (for example, the controlling activities may lead back to planning to
revise the project plan as a result of changes).
2.4.3 Setting Up A Working Group
Having a working group with subject matter experts working below a steering committee will
help achieve specified goals. In your Adobe Social implementation, this working group is made
up of the practitioner leads executing the project. They would meet more regularly and report
upwards to the steering group.
The working group should have a weekly discussion where issues and risks are addressed and
the status, progress and approach of the project are discussed.
3 Strategy
Gaining a clear vision of what it takes to be able to assess and measure your social media
marketing efforts is critical to becoming a high-performing business. Strategy is divided into
three main areas: Focus, alignment and innovation.
“74% of business executives say their company has a business strategy.
Only 15% believe that their company has the skills and capabilities to
execute on that strategy.”
Forrester: Accelerating your digital business, 2013
3.1 Adobe Social Maturity Model
Nowadays, a great number of businesses are expanding their
marketing portfolio and investing more into social media
publishing, advertising, monitoring, moderation and customer
response and listening activities. These organisations might be
achieving acceptable results, but they might be navigating in
the dark by not having clear roadmap on how their ‘state of the
art’ is and how to evolve into better competency levels.
Take a first step and assess the social media marketing maturity state of your organisation by
applying the maturity model developed by Adobe. This model outlines key social media
marketing components and includes best practices across dimensions based on the experience
of Adobe Social experts, consultants and conversations with Adobe customers. This model also
includes insights from industry analyst research and cross-channel marketing specialists.
Tip
Check the self-assessment tool to
assess your organisation’s social
media campaign management
maturity.
3.1.1 Key Dimensions Of Social Media Marketing
The social media marketing maturity model comprises best practices within eight dimensions:
• Strategy: Relates to the level of talent, executive sponsorship, technology resources
and the overall investments applied to social marketing at your organisation.
• Governance: The way in which social stakeholders are organised within the company,
stakeholder access to information and tools and the processes for integrating social into
the broader marketing organisation.
• Presence: Refers to the positioning of your social media landscape and what elements
are playing actively to engage with your audiences.
• Community engagement: The way in which your organisation is able to filter, process
and respond to customer conversations across the social Web.
• Content: Refers to the quality and cadence of social posts in addition to the data and
tools used to optimise and distribute brand messages across social networks.
• Data collection: Relates to the social metrics the organisation is able to capture in
addition to your organisation's capacity to turn those metrics intro actionable insights.
• Data analysis: Refers to the utilisation of social data to obtain marketing insights which
inform marketing practices to power business decisions.
• Relationship management: Refers to your organisation's ability to access and apply
information about your social audience to engage customers and improve relationships.
Click on this link to assess your organisation’s social media optimisation maturity model.
DIMENSIONS MATURITY LEVEL
STRATEGY Social media
marketing is used
only as a reactive
and opportunistic
way of
communication.
There is no clear
strategic plan on
how social media
can be used to
achieve
organisational
goals.
Few social media
technologies are
used to publish
content.
Social media is
seen as a
marketing channel
used to engage
with customers.
Social media is
mostly used for
publishing.
There is an
operational
structure to
publish content to
the market.
Social media is
not yet seen as a
tool to achieve
organisational
goals.
There is a
strategic roadmap
on how to utilise
resources. This
has not been
implemented yet
Social media
technologies are
currently used to
conduct
publishing and
monitoring
activities. There is
an orientation to
increase the
scope of
possibilities
towards listening
and moderating.
Social media
technologies are
not articulated.
Resources are
available but not
always easy to
get access to.
Technology is
used to publish.
listen, monitor and
moderate
conversations.
Social media is
somewhat a key
contributor to the
achievements of
the organisational
KPIs.
Social media
technologies are
not articulated or
highly
decentralised,
even though
processes are
clear.
Sufficient
resources
dedicated to run a
social marketing
practice.
Social team highly
qualified.
Technology is
used to publish.
listen, monitor and
moderate
conversations.
Social media seen
as key contributor
to the
organisation’s
success.
Social media tools
are integrated
with most
marketing
software.
AD-HOC OPERATIONAL
STRATEGIC ADVANCED
BEST IN CLASS
GOVERNANCE social media team
is limited.
There are no
workflows in place
to edit, publish,
monitor or
moderate content.
social media is
used only to fulfil
eventual
opportunities.
Key team players
manage the social
media operations
and work in
isolation.
Low involvement
from members of
other business
units.
There are no
processes
established as to
what are the best
practices to
escalate
involvement
across the
business.
There is
documentation on
best practices for
stakeholders to
manage social
media operations
at all levels.
Limited adoption
due to low
involvement of
stakeholders.
Stakeholders
have clear,
manageable, and
specific tasks
aligned to their
role as editor,
moderator,
approver, etc.
Social teams are
structured and
although data and
content flows
throughout the
organisation there
are processes
that may improve.
Technology
centralisation is a
challenge.
Stakeholders
have clear,
manageable, and
specific tasks
aligned to their
role as editor,
moderator,
approver, etc.
Social teams are
organised and
structured across
regions and
departments in a
systematic and
scalable structure.
Content and data
is shared
efficiently across
key teams in the
organisation.
Update and
training programs
are in place.
PRESENCE social media
channels are used
consistently.
There is not a
voice or branding
communicated.
social media is
used as a one
way of
communication.
Few social media
channels are
being used.
Branding and
message is
repetitive and
does not relate
with key
audiences that
use each social
media network.
Customers may
comment but
responses arrive
with delays.
Social media
voice is
unarticulated but
consistent.
Digital content
can be shared
from key channels
such as the Web
siteWeb site.
There are efforts
in place to
encourage
conversations
with customers.
Own active and
branded presence
on several public
social networks.
Promote social
presence across
several digital
channels.
Content is easy to
share and
customers can
reach out at any
given time.
Most campaigns
contain social
elements.
Own active and
branded presence
on several public
social networks.
Promote social
presence across
several digital
channels.
Content is easy to
share and
customers can
reach out at any
given time.
All marketing
campaigns
contain social
elements.
COMMUNITY
ENGAGEMENT
There are no
practices in place
to engage with the
community.
Few stakeholders
dedicate time to
respond to user
conversation.
There is no
documentation or
protocols in place
to keep track of
conversation or
generate best
practices for
future reference.
Key leaders in the
organisation are
responsible for
monitoring and
moderating
conversations in
social media.
There are no
activities to
assess customer
sentiment.
Social
conversations are
monitored and
escalated
promptly.
There are no
formal activities in
place to assess
customer
sentiment or
interactions
across social
Conversations are
being constantly
monitored.
Historical data is
archived for future
learning and
reference.
There are
processes in
place to route
content internally
There is no
moderation,
listening and
monitoring taking
place.
media channels.
There are learning
processes to
share experiences
for future
reference.
and address
urgent customer
comments.
There is the ability
to monitor and
assess external
social content,
sentiment and
keyword
performance.
Automation to
respond to
interactions is
existent, fully
deployed and
integrated with
CRM.
CONTENT There are no
methodologies to
produce and
publish content.
Content is not
tracked for
performance
assessment.
There are
methodologies in
place to produce
and execute
across a
promotional
calendar.
Content
opportunities are
mostly seasonal
or opportunistic.
Content is not
tracked for
performance
assessment.
There are
practices in place
to identify content
opportunities.
There is a content
calendar across
different time
periods.
There is
organisation and
consistency on
the key moments
of the day or
weeks to publish
content on social
media to increase
reach and
success.
Consistently
publish social,
informative,
entertaining and
valuable content.
Use performance
data to identify
common
characteristics of
the most
engaging or
effective social
messages
Leverage known
audience data to
target content to
distinct social
platforms.
There are
methodologies to
identify and curate
content that can
be used.
Defined
parameters –
such as target
audience, current
trends, and peak
engagement
hours – to
automate content
development and
publishing.
Consistently
publish social,
informative,
entertaining and
valuable content.
Use performance
data to identify
common
characteristics of
the most
engaging or
effective social
messages.
Leverage known
audience data to
target content to
distinct social
platforms.
There are
methodologies to
identify and curate
content that can
be used.
Defined
parameters –
such as target
audience, current
trends, and peak
engagement
hours – to
automate content
development and
publishing.
DATA
COLLECTION
There are no data
collection
activities in place.
There are some
data collection
activities and
reporting
Data is collected
when required for
specific content or
campaigns.
Social analytics
systems
incorporate mostly
engagement and
Social analytics
systems
incorporate
engagement,
procedures in
place.
cross channel
marketing
campaign data.
listening, cross-
channel marketing
campaign and key
customer data.
DATA
ANALYSIS
Data is limited
and analysed
natively in each
social media
network used and
is rarely used for
feedback and
reporting.
Data is rarely
analysed natively
in each social
media platform.
There is ability to
identify the types
of content
relevant for each
social platform
that possibly can
drive positive
results.
There is an
understanding of
the impact of each
action taken in
social media
across different
digital channels.
There are formal
reporting and
feedback
procedures to
ensure
performance
optimisation and
improvement.
Able to identify
the types of
content and social
platforms that
drive the most
positive
interaction with
your brand.
There is an
understanding
how social media
interaction directly
impacts Web site
activity.
There is a basic
understand of the
roles that each
social platform
plays in the
customer decision
journey.
There are
methodologies in
place to allocate
budgets to
content
production and
performance
improvement.
Able to identify
the types of
content and social
platforms that
drive the most
positive
interaction with
your brand.
Understand how
social media
efforts influence
brand metrics,
including
awareness,
sentiment and
preference.
Understand how
social media
interactions
directly impact
Web site activity
and other digital
channels.
Understands the
specific role that
each social
platform plays in
the customer
decision journey.
Apply media mix
modelling
strategies that
include social to
most effectively
allocate budget
and resources
against desired
KPIs.
RELATIONSHIP
MANAGEMENT
There are no
practices in place
to identify
influencers.
There are limited
resources to gain
knowledge of
customer profiles
and enable
opportunities to
influence
behaviours across
the decision
There is an
opportunistic
approach to
finding relevant
audiences or
brand advocated.
Some of the
profile data is
linked with CRM
systems.
There are limited
resources to gain
Social profile data
is linked and
integrated
between
platforms,
allowing visibility
of social activity
and brand
interactions.
Opportunities to
engage with
influencers are
identified
Social profile data
is linked and
integrated
between
platforms,
allowing visibility
of social activity
and brand
interaction.
There is the
means to identify
audience
segments.
Social profile data
is linked between
platforms,
creating a holistic
view of the social
activity and brand
interaction
associated with
specific
individuals.
There are
influencer
audience
journey knowledge of
customer profiles
and enable
opportunities to
influence
behaviour across
the decision
journey
empirically.
Customer profile
data is linked with
social profile data,
enabling
identification of
trends in the
purchase
behaviour and
preference of
social audiences.
segments
comprised of
brand advocates
with high levels of
social influence as
determined by
their follower
count, expertise,
and ability to drive
conversions.
Ability to
automatically
generate content
or offers for
individuals or
groups of
individuals based
on their current
stage within the
decision journey.
3.2 Focus
Focus means understanding and focusing on the organisation’s key business goals and
strategic initiatives to achieve objectives. It is also important to prioritise these goals and their
scope and timing for completion. As business competitive environments change it’s also
important to review your business strategy and goals on a quarterly or bi-annual basis to ensure
they remain relevant to the current environment.
3.2.1 Digital Strategy
One of the biggest digital challenges organisations face is being able to define what they are
trying to achieve across your social and associated digital channels. Just as with corporate
websites, a Social marketing program has multiple owners and stakeholders, sometimes with
competing interests, that can produce counterproductive results. What also makes Social
special is that key stakeholders may not just be in digital marketing, but may include Customer
Service, Public Relations, Brand Management and Market Research. Defining and finding the
balance between these stakeholders will allow an organisation to define a full Social strategy
and its KPIs.
A clear social strategy enables your team to align its activities to the priorities of your business
and succeed as an integral part of your organisation. A key point to consider is that your social
strategy should always be aligned to the overall business goals of the organisation.
A suggested digital strategy framework
These are steps you can follow to craft your digital strategy:
• Identify all of the key stakeholder groups that have input into your company’s Social and
digital approach.
• Gather key business objectives from each group separately.
• Merge the goals into a set of four to five key objectives.
• Based on your understanding of the corporate strategy, prioritise and rank the list of
goals.
• In a group meeting review and refine the goals with key stakeholders. If needed, involve
a neutral third party to mediate potential disagreements.
• Based on stakeholder feedback, finalise the business objectives and define KPIs to
measure these by.
• Share an overview of the agreed upon digital strategy with key stakeholders.
Key terminology
3.2.1.1 Enterprise Key Business Goals
• Strategic business goals and objectives.
• Aligned across the business at an enterprise level.
• Tied to increased revenue (or decreased costs).
• Can include a medium to long term vision of the company.
Examples: Increase brand awareness, drive consideration and conversion and improve
customer satisfaction.
3.2.1.2 Social Goals
• Strategic business goals and objectives for your digital channel.
• Identifies how the digital channel will contribute to achieving enterprise goals.
• There can be more than one digital goal for each enterprise goal.
Examples: Increase online sales (by 5%), increase online audience and brand awareness (by
10%) and increase online and social media customer satisfaction (by 5%).
3.2.1.3 Initiatives:
• Strategic digital goals.
• Actionable projects.
• Relates to the digital channel as a whole.
Examples: Create and diversify content for a social media presence, drive traffic to the Web site
from social media sources, create engaging content and create content partnerships with
specialised bloggers.
3.2.1.4 Tactics
• Specific actionable online business requirements.
• Gaps in achieving online initiative and goals.
• Achievable end goal.
Examples: Measure social channel conversion rates, measure customer service time to
respond, email delivery and engagement, measure application form abandonment and report
mobile usage.
3.2.2 Key Performance Indicators
Focus also includes defining the key performance indicators (KPIs). In social media marketing
these indicators can be metrics such as number of social media followers, percentage of traffic
generated in addition to online revenue or applications associated to social media customers
along with associated targets for those metrics (for example, increase application rate by 30%).
A common mistake when setting KPIs is selecting random metrics from an industry-related list
and expecting they will fit and perform towards achieving your unique business goals. Make
sure you always start with understanding your business goals before selecting appropriate KPIs.
As you deploy your digital properties using Adobe Social you will be able to use these KPIs to
understand the impact changes in content, design and architecture have had on your business.
What are key performance indicators?
When implementing Adobe Social, ensure that your KPIs are
measured. However, Social KPIs are difficult, and many
experts still disagree on what Social ROI looks like. Social
KPIs may be direct site conversion for some industries like
Publishing, Media & Entertainment, but may relate more to
customer service, brand awareness and brand loyalty for
others. Understand where you fit, and focus your KPIs on
these strategic measures.
Ask yourself this: If your CEO was stuck on an island and
you could tell him only three things about your business so
he would know the business was healthy, what would you tell
him about social? If you said you have 1 million Facebook
followers, that tells him nothing.
If you tell him your awareness campaign increased your
overall follower base by 10 per cent during the past quarter
— in contrast to 2 per cent in the previous period — and in
addition reflected on a 6 per cent peak in customer ‘loyalty
and retention’ through Web revisits that is something he will
understand as a true measure of business success. There is so much opportunity to measure
What they are:
• Quantifiable, measurable and
actionable
• Measure factors that are critical to
the success of the organisation.
• Tied to business goals and targets.
• Limited to 5 to 8 key metrics.
• Applied consistently throughout the
company.
What they are not:
• Metrics that are vague or unclear.
• “Nice-to-knows” or metrics that are
not actionable.
• Reports (e.g., top search engines,
top keywords).
• Exhaustive set of metrics.
• Refutable.
Tip
When creating your KPIs
remember the acronym
S.M.A.R.T. Performance
indicators must be:
Specific: to precisely define
the goal and it’s expected
outcome.
Measurable: to be able to
understand what success
means.
Assignable: to individuals
or teams.
Realistic: and yet
challenging to drive great
results.
Time-based: built to drive
results fast yet realistic.
initiatives and improve on them based on four or five metrics that you can keep yourself busy for
months and even years. Don’t fret about measuring every little last detail, you’ll drive yourself
crazy and you won’t be supporting your business goals.
“Companies with greater digital capabilities were able to convert sales at a
rate 2.5 times greater than companies at the lower level did.”
McKinsey & Co. March 2015
Example (business objectives and metrics)
Business objective Social KPI Key metrics
Build awareness and foster discovery.
% increase in the follower base over the next six months.
Number of total fans and followers.
Drive consideration and conversion.
% increase in traffic from social channels.
Conversion rate from social consumers. Number of purchases from social channels.
Engage and improve consumer experience
Maintenance % of engagement rates.
Number of comments, shares, tweets, likes, etc… Number of page views and application downloads.
3.3 Alignment
Organisations are dynamic. Business strategy changes, leadership changes, Web sites and
communications in general are redesigned, the market landscape changes, new services and
products are introduced, marketing campaigns are launched, new channels appear, new
competitors are born and so on. All these changes make it difficult for leaders to ensure
alignment between the company’s current strategy and the implementation of digital solutions.
To make sure there is a proper alignment between your Adobe Social implementation and your
digital strategy your measurement strategy needs to be dynamic and adjust as changes occur
within your business. Having a member from the digital team sitting in the steering committee
can ensure that the team knows what is happening within the business and any possible
changes in priorities. The following are key factors that need to be considered:
3.3.1 Refining Social KPIs: Integrate With Business Objectives
Once your organisation has set the overall business objectives it is necessary to translate them
to the context of your social media landscape and create the set of tactics to be able to deliver
them.
Social media goals: the most common types of social
media goals you can set for your organisation are as
follows:
Awareness: To build awareness and foster
discovery.
Engagement: To improve consumer experiences
and drive engagement.
Conversion: To drive specific actions and behaviour.
Awareness
Engagement
Conversion
Current and past tactics
Competitors
Other industries BR
AIN
ST
OR
M I
DE
AS
CU
RA
TE
TA
CT
ICS
– K
PIs
CHANNEL 1
CHANNEL 2
CHANNEL 3
CHANNEL 4
CHANNEL 6
ME
AS
UR
E
SOCIAL GOALS
BENCHMARK IDEATION CHANNEL
SELECTION GOALS
Retention
CHANNEL 7
CHANNEL 8
Tip & Trick
In the templates section there
is a set of metrics you can
use to build your social media
KPI structure.
Retention: To establish a long-lasting relationship.
Common examples of social media objectives are as follows:
Benchmark: Gain knowledge of the possibilities with social media. In this phase you should be
able to acquire knowledge on all your previous and existing social media campaigns and
explore what your main competitors are doing to engage with their communities. In addition to
this, although is not a common practice, we encourage you to explore social strategies from
other industries. You will be inspired to employ creative tactics that you haven’t considered.
Ideation: Once you have observed what is possible it is time to gather your team and create the
support mechanisms to achieve your business goals. We encourage you to be as wild and
creative as possible because in this phase you are not required to think about, or feel
constrained by, budgets, processes or business politics — you will narrow these ideas in the
next phase known as “curate tactics” where you will scope, prioritise and create a plan of
execution based on your resources and selected channels.
Channel execution: In this phase your social media strategy is in action. Make sure the
appropriate tracking and monitoring methods are in place so you can evaluate the ongoing
progress of your campaigns in terms of your business objectives.
3.3.2 Standardising Social Media Processes
Marketers often struggle to integrate the data available to assess business performance for
specific campaigns. The more channels appear, the more challenging it is compile, analyse and
process data to extract useful insights that can lead to business growth. Social media is no
stranger to this matter — business leaders have a tendency to believe that social media metrics
and practices often lack founded consistency and reflection of the key business orientation.
However, the following steps are proposed as a guide to help organisations gain a stronger
visibility of their social marketing initiatives and develop strong programs for their customers.
Step 1 – Challenge your traditions: Organisations that are flexible and open to embracing fast
changing environments will be — at their foundation — skilled enough to champion any
challenges in the competitive and fast changing arena of social media. Make an organisational
effort to transform your traditional business rules, structures and measurements and apply them
to these new channels.
Step 2 – Create to learn: Most organisations currently participating in social media marketing
are still finding their place in this new environment. Don’t be afraid to distance yourself and test
creative approaches to set your processes right and get your audiences engaged. The key point
here is to gain visibility on how your audience behaves, interacts and reacts to your efforts and
how these processes work best for your organisation. This will bring you valuable learning you
can use in your future marketing landscape.
Step 3 – Always find alignment: Organisations often get carried away when trying to develop
content publishing plans, establish listening best practices and conduct monitoring and
moderation activities all at the same time. In the long run this will generate operational
inconsistencies and less involvement over time. Get started by creating a framework to help
stakeholders understand what the purpose of the existence of your social media landscape is,
what their roles and responsibilities are, how the workflows for content publishing and
commentary escalation will operate and, most importantly, how everything will be measured.
Step 4 – Make the loop and find efficiencies: It is recommended that you make an
operational investment and filter the key measurements that are reflecting real opportunities for
your business. Take a step further and find the way to automate processes that are relevant and
are consuming time. Leverage the capabilities of your Adobe Social instance in conjunction with
Adobe’s marketing technology to do the heavy lifting of your automation requirements.
3.3.3 Integrating Marketing Channels
It is likely that your organisation has ongoing investments in marketing tactics at the moment of
the adoption of Adobe Social technology. This is why it is important to ensure your digital
landscape is truly aligned by assessing your organisation’s channel efficiency and ROI and that
you are using all the artillery available to serve your clients competitively.
Digital marketing channels do not work optimally in isolation. Non-consumers use a single
channel to educate and consume the products and services they want. It is recommended you
broaden the reach of your social media efforts by leveraging existing, or new, channels to
increase positive behaviour and generate engagement with your audience.
The diagram below depicts four basic steps your organisation should follow to enable channel
integration and efficiency:
Integrating marketing channels
Step 1: Design
Gain a deep understanding of how your existing marketing channels are structured. Assess if
the tactics are adequate for each channel and be open to embracing unutilised channels. Also
examine the competitive landscape and analyse what other organisations in your industries —
and other industries — are doing and how they are doing it.
Step 2: Assign
Once you have a robust overview of the marketing possibilities, distribute and allocate your
tactics and ideas to serve the most relevant phases of the consumer lifecycle — check the
digital advertising framework to enable the most commonly used digital advertising channels. At
this stage you are not required to narrow down the list of possibilities. We encourage you to
write down as many ideas as possible including what the creative, channel, content and support
resources which might be needed to achieve them.
Step 3: Plan
The planning phase is the appropriate moment to scope and prioritise tasks in the short,
medium and long term. Create an action plan to allocate resources strategically and start
achieving results.
Step 4: Feedback
Assess and measure performance in accordance with your KPI strategy and start the process
again.
3.3.4 The Four Pillars Of Social Media Strategy
When thinking about developing your social media strategy consider that it is supported by four
pillars, or levels, of audience engagement that your organisation needs to embrace to master
the social landscape. The four pillars are: Communication, collaboration, education and
entertainment.
The four pillars of social media strategy.
Communication: Every organisation has ongoing communication mechanisms in place to start
and follow-up conversations with prospects, employees, clients and other stakeholders.
However, only few manage to successfully understand and scale the impact of their
communication efforts. Identify what the real purpose of the communication will be throughout
Communication
CollaborationEducation
Entertainment
your online and offline channels and assess how audiences are perceiving them, how effective
they are and which actions trigger the most beneficial responses.
Collaboration: If you are already using social media channels to communicate with your
stakeholders it is possible that you have noticed that the level of contribution required to deliver
on the daily activities is very demanding. Information needs to flow in order to post a message,
the creative and publishing teams must work efficiently to mobilise across the permission levels
and the monitoring team needs to be constantly paying attention to respond to client requests
and coordinate with the appropriate stakeholder on how to respond them. The way your
organisation establishes these processes is critical for the success of your social media
strategy. Make sure you make time with the people that will be involved with the management of
the solution to plan and execute for success.
Education: Your target audience uses social media channels for many purposes other than to
receive promotional communications. They want to relax, learn what is new in the world and
learn new things about the people (or organisations) they like and follow. Only if they are truly
engaged they will naturally find the means to explore further, learn and possibly purchase a
service or product. Use an educational approach to show your audience what your organisation
does, how it can benefit your audience and how they can establish a long term relationship with
your organisation.
Entertainment: One of the keys to engaging with your audience is to serve entertaining
content. This does not mean that you have to consider a comic approach to your
communications, but to embrace a culture of creativity and experimentation to deliver your
message in different ways which your audience might find appealing. This will move your
organisation to an uncontested space generating engagement with your audience while
differentiating from your competitors.
3.4 Innovation
Once your organisation is consistently delivering relevant marketing messages across multiple
channels, you will be ready to continue gaining competitive advantage by finding the means to
expand the possibilities and generate greater value to your stakeholders. Gather a team of
visionary innovators and use the data collected from your ongoing campaigns and digital tactics
and empower them to generate new creative ways to improve your customer’s lifecycle.
4 People
4.1 Expertise
Expertise refers to the different skills required by your organisation’s digital and technical staff,
business users and senior executives. Not every group will need the same skills, but an overall
understanding of how a digital strategy and Adobe Social will help the organisation is
fundamental.
Investing in training is a key activity when implementing new technologies. Make sure you have
training programs not only for on boarding new staff, but also for current employees so they can
continue growing their expertise over time. In particular, Social managers or strategists often
lack understanding of digital analytics fundamentals, and digital analysts often need to learn
about social metrics and tools.
Adobe offers a wide range of courses that can help you with your Adobe Social implementation,
as well as Adobe Analytics if you use the two integrated solutions. These courses are available
in multiple formats to suit your needs — at one of our regional training centres, online as virtual
learning or onsite at your company. Additionally, Adobe has a team of social media specialists
and consultants that will develop a customised training program to meet your organisation ’s
requirements. Ask your account manager for further information.
To see all Adobe Social courses go to the Adobe Social Course Catalog.
4.2 Structure
A well designed organisational structure will give you and your staff clear guidelines about how
the organisation is put together, who they have to report and delegate to and how information
flows across different levels. Defining an organisational structure, including roles and
responsibilities, before starting with your Adobe Social implementation will also ensure the
project runs efficiently.
4.2.1 Structure Types
Below is a common list of organisational structures we see in digital organisations.
Dispersed: This structure is typically an early
stage, organic and reactive response to initial
staffing and resourcing requirements arising in
local or specific departments. While this works
well initially, it has limited strategic scalability and
can prove problematic in coordinating a top-down
strategic vision for the long term structure and
direction of digital capability, particularly within a
large and diverse organisation.
Centralised: Digital marketing roles and
capability are centralised into a single area or
team. This is typically characterised by a reporting
structure through to one head of digital, e-
business or e-commerce.
Hub and Spoke: A combination of both, typically
whereby digital marketing expertise is split - some
positioned at the centre looking across the whole
organisation and some sat within divisions or
departments often acting as a connection point
between the Centre of Excellence and local non-
digital teams.
‘Dandelion’ structure: Organisations which have
a hub and spoke approach, but across multiple
units or divisions. This is usually found in larger
corporations that are operationally divided around
key audiences (B2B and B2C, for example) that
might centralise some key digital capability across
the entire corporation, but also could have some
hub and spoke arrangements in each of the key
divisions.
‘Honeycomb’ structure: One additional structure
is the holistic, or ‘honeycomb’, structure, where
each employee is empowered with capability. This
structure might be interpreted as the equivalent of
a fully integrated digital capability where digital
expertise and skills are the domain of a broad
range of people and roles throughout the
organisation. In this scenario no specialist digital
roles exist and no single role has digital capability
as its sole remit.
4.2.2 Business Recommended Organisational Structure
Organisations commonly use a centralised model for digital implementations. In this structure,
all of the digital resources are centralised into a single area or team often with a reporting
structure through to one head of digital, e-business or e-commerce. This is a generic example of
an organisational structure:
The main advantages of having a centralised model are:
• Consistency and control: Consistent methods, procedures, and terminology.
• Governance and focus: A unified commercial entity, strategy and budgets, ease of
securing senior management buy-in for digital marketing strategy and projects,
consistent standards, greater efficiency in the allocation of resources and ease of project
prioritisation across the organisation.
• Scalability and support: The application of digital expertise to support the wider
business and clarity on where to go for support and advice.
• Social command structure: Consistent operational structures to complete daily social
processes across publishing, monitoring and listening teams.
Marketing Director
Head of Strategy
Business Requirements Specialist
Technical Requirements Specialist
Head of Analytics Channel Analyst
Head of Content Content Producer
Head of Social
Publishing Lead
Monitoring Lead
Listening and Analytics Lead
4.2.3 Roles And Responsibilities
4.2.3.1 In A Centralised Model
Here are the suggested responsibilities for each of the roles described above.
Role Responsibilities
Mark
eting d
irecto
r
• Position of authority to influence others.
• Key point of contact for executives, business owners and analysts.
• Focuses on corporate-level issues, but maintains visibility into regional or business
unit issues.
• Works closely with the executive sponsor to drive value from analytics across
organisation.
• Drives cultural change and product adoption within the organisation via user
education and other means.
• Manages the core team and commercial relationships with analytics vendors.
Head o
f str
ate
gy
• Drives and owns the digital strategy roadmap.
• Coordinates the ongoing strategy workshops with stakeholders.
• Ensures the business is continually focused and aligned with business objectives.
• Determines the priority of new implementation projects.
• Drives the digital steering committee, not just a “Web analytics” steering committee.
• Manages the business analysts and project management resources.
Head o
f analy
tics
• Focused on overall digital performance with Web analytics being the barometer of
that performance.
• Runs regular, recurring meetings (weekly or monthly) with stakeholders on digital
channel performance.
• Establishes enterprise-wide standards.
• Manages ongoing relationships with analytics vendors.
Head o
f conte
nt
• Drives the content strategy.
• Owns the content delivery roadmap.
• Manages the content delivery team.
Head o
f socia
l
Solution expert.
Maintain communication among cross-functional teams to execute on social media
campaigns.
Drives the implementation of social media projects.
Identifies opportunities for expansion.
Responsible for reporting on the performance of social media channels.
Busin
ess r
equirem
ents
specia
list
• Defines prioritised projects.
• Runs workshops to gather business analytics implementation reporting
requirements.
• Develops the business requirements document for each project.
• Gathers business sign-off.
• Works collaboratively with the core team on requirements gathering enhancements
and documenting the process.
• Acts as project manager.
Technic
al re
quirem
ents
specia
list
• Defines prioritised projects.
• Runs workshops to gather technical requirements and identify risks.
• Develops the technical documents and deployment plan for each project.
• Gathers sign-off.
• Works collaboratively with the core team on requirements gathering enhancements
and documenting the process.
Dig
ital analy
st
lead
• Focused on measuring business unit key performance indicators (KPIs) and
optimising business units online.
• Owns the analytical reporting requests log.
• Single point of contact for end users within the business unit and understands end
users’ changing needs.
• Validates data collection for business units.
• Meets with business unit reporting owners and the core team on a regular basis
(monthly).
• Informs the core team of business unit activity and champions its needs to the core
team.
• Coordinates QA efforts and manages ongoing data accuracy.
Conte
nt
pro
ducer
• Maintain communication among cross-functional teams.
• Own the process for creating, enforcing and managing the content production plan.
• Collaborate with all departments to define and manage goals, scope, specific
deliverables and scheduling needs.
• Aggregate and distil input from all areas of the organisation and develop the best
approach for incorporating feedback into project executions.
• Contribute to strategic thinking around content models that adapt, scale and expand
over time and distribution platforms.
Publis
hin
g lea
d
Responsible for the execution of content across social media channels.
Ensures the internal workflows deliver the content and social media strategy.
Ensures the tracking mechanisms have been implemented appropriately.
Monitoring a
nd
modera
ting lead
Represents the organisation across multiple channels.
Maintains the wellbeing of communities.
Provide support to the communities when required.
Lis
tenin
g a
nd a
naly
tics
lead
Responsible for the monitoring of several social media channels to analyse
sentiment.
Measures channel performance in terms of key business goals.
Measures channel sentiment and provides immediate feedback when required.
4.3 Resources
You will need to decide the right balance and allocation of internal staff and external
consultants. This will be determined by your organisation’s previous experience with digital
implementations – less experienced organisations may require more help from consultants.
Internally speaking, your organisation will need to implement a talent strategy to determine how
to best hire and retain digital and analytics talent.
“Having the right talent and sufficient resources on your digital team is
crucial to your long-term, data-driven success.” Brent Dykes - Adobe
4.3.1 Resource Model
To get the most out of Adobe Social, and to deliver a better digital experience to your
customers, you need to get the most out of your implementation. Investing in external resources
will help you optimise your investment, mitigate project risk and identify new opportunities.
4.3.1.1 Adobe Consulting And Partners
Adobe solution partners play a critical role in your Adobe Social implementation. Based on your
resources and the project scope, working with solution partners can help you in many different
ways - from developing your customer journey, creative and user experience to building your
page template and components, making necessary customisations to the implementation,
integrating with other technology platforms and providing general guidance on how to use the
solution.
4.4 Community
It is key to encourage the creation of a digital community within your organisation. Invest in
creating an environment where all members can learn from each other and share experiences,
ideas, best practices and campaign wins. When you have distributed analysts and business
users across different business units and countries, the digital marketing community provides
valuable support to new users in addition to opportunities for more advanced users to share
their collective knowledge. This is especially important in traditional businesses where upskilling
traditional skillsets with digital ones is vital as it can be a useful forum in which to educate the
traditionally minded people within your business. Community can be fostered in a number of
different ways, such as a simple email distribution list, internal wiki, corporate chat groups and
workshops.
4.5 Culture
Adopting marketing technologies influence a great number business processes and practices
changing the nature of how teams work to achieve common goals. Despite the fact that your
organisation has invested in Adobe Social, some leaders and employees may still have doubts
about the benefits of the solution. They probably do not fully understand what social media
marketing, display advertising, analytics, automation, content management, user experience
and other components of digital bring to the table. This is common in a business world that is
still adapting and changing to digital.
The first step is to have a clear vision for your culture and the right mindset to shift activities and
thinking within your digital organisation. Second, involve key stakeholders and share that vision
of that future across the organisation. One of the main reasons why organisations fear change
is because they have little or no information about where the change is taking them. Third,
invest in individuals who can embrace opportunities and who are the right cultural fit. These
people will find it easily to work in teams and emerge in more complex problem solving
situations.
Additionally, c-level executives can leverage two basic steps to embed a new way of thinking
into business operations regardless of the scale of the organisation. These steps fall into two
categories:
The formal levers: These are the adoption and adaptation of processes and structures
such as leadership policies, role definitions and people processes to support
digitalisation. These stakeholders will be responsible for the introduction of new digital
channels into traditional operations.
The informal levers: These relate to the key behaviour, role models and networks that
help employees set a mindset aligned to the cultural structure of your organisation.
The following are the common traits in a digital organisation2:
5 Process
In this section of the document, you will find information to effectively deploy and use Adobe
Social. There are four main types of implementation processes: Deployment, usage,
sustainability, and change management.
5.1 Deployment
Adobe’s expert teams work hand-in-hand with you
throughout the Adobe Social implementation process.
Implementation is a multi-phased process which includes a
number of steps such as tracking and conversion code
implementation and data validation and user group creation
to ensure accuracy. The following is an outline of the
2 Adapted from: Strategy&, 2013, ‘Building a Digital Culture: How to meet the challenge of multichannel digitalization’, p. 10.
Customers and demand
• Pull ideas from the market.
• Driven by demand.
Organisation
• Flat hierarchy.
• Rapid decision making.
• Result and product orientation.
• Empowering employees to find ways to achieve goals.
Work environment
• Understand needs of digital customers.
• Driven by innovation, improvement and overcoming constraints.
• Cross-functional teams.
• Rapid, unpredictable career progression.
• Focus on rapid learn and launch.
Tip
Depending on the service
associated to your account,
the Adobe Social team will
conduct periodical account
monitoring to help you
leverage the usage of your
solution. Ask your account
manager for more information.
implementation process, which will vary depending on your organisational needs and additional
scoping.
5.1.1 Implementation Methodology
Before the implementation project kicks-off, it is key to have well-defined success criteria for the
program (refer to the S.M.A.R.T KPIs outlined in the strategy section), a comprehensive change
management and communication plan and be committed to the ongoing training Adobe will
provide during the implementation. Adobe provides optional post-deployment resources for
further upskilling in the Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions.
There are several phases in the implementation process.
The following steps are meant to provide a guide and are
indicative of what to expect in a standard Adobe Social
implementation project.
Standard Implementation Process
5.1.2 Publishing Workflows
Adobe Social allows you to create and manage multi-level publishing workflows - a process you
set up to specify how posts must be approved before they can be posted on their assigned
social platforms. It is recommended to first determine publishing access at an individual property
level — being as granular as possible — and then define the approval processes that will
1. Project Kick-Off meeting with key stakeholders
2. Document customer’s Social Profiles and owned site link destinations
3. Review existing Analytics setup to accurately integrate Adobe Social
Discovery
1. Enable report suite(s)
2. Assign Social Campaign tracking code
3. Deploy or deliver optional site code for added functionality
4. Provide Tech Spec Reference Guide
Configuration
1. Add up to twenty (20) Adobe Social users
2. Assign social user groups with specific roles and permissions
3. Create four (4) social campaigns
4. Build five (5) listening rules to begin collecting Social Buzz
Activation
1. Deliver Account Settings Reference Guide
2. Review how to access and navigate Adobe Social
3. Share Customer training enrollment information
4. Transition to Adobe Account Management
Launch
Week 1 Week 2 Week 3
Tip
The following steps are
indicative and should not be applied for every implementation.
govern the subsequent publishing workflows. You can create different approval levels and then
assign individual user groups to each level. You can edit, delete and duplicate posts by
assigning and completing multi-level approval processes.
It is recommended that you assign a user group to a publishing workflow rather than to an
individual user, who can slow your approval process. If you assign a user group to a workflow,
one member of that user group must approve the post in order for that approval requirement to
be met. You can also specify a user group or individual user to override the publishing workflow
settings.
You can assign publishing workflows at the individual property level (individual Facebook page
or Twitter account) or at the account level where all new social properties added to the account
use a default approval workflow. You can create the following types of workflows:
Horizontal publishing workflow: User group or user A and user group or user B and user
group or user C must approve the post in any order.
Vertical publishing workflow: User group or user A then user group or user B and then user
group or user C must approve the post in that specific order.
Combination publishing workflow: Combines elements of a horizontal and vertical publishing
workflow by creating multiple approval levels. For example, level one might contain a horizontal
hierarchy in which an individual member in each of three user groups must approve the post in
any order. The second level might contain a single user who then must approve the post after
the first level is completed.
5.2 Moderation Workflows
Your business will often need to escalate a post or a comment to someone within the
organisation to take specific action. The challenge is to set to right processes and structures to
be able to solve those enquiries in a timely manner while providing the best customer
experience (this is more difficult across social media as consumers are expecting immediate
responses to their enquiries).
In response to this challenge, organisations must leverage marketing automation technologies,
such as Adobe Social, to create and automate escalation or moderation workflows to respond
efficiently to specific requests from your audience.
Building an escalation and moderation workflow
Start by asking your social media team to compile the most common requests, questions,
complaints and comments your organisation deals with every day. Categorise these by
business unit which would be the most adequate to respond to them. For example, if a great
number of comments are related to product promotions you might want to categorise these as
‘product and sales operations’ and if the next bulk of comments are about career opportunities
categorise them as ‘human resources’.
The next step is to gather the key business units that will be involved. Share with them the
previously developed benchmark and build a ‘knowledge base’ that includes all the possib le
responses, key stakeholders and expected outcomes (encourge them to include scenarios you
had not considered). This knowledge base will work as a resource for your social media team to
respond faster to the most common enquiries.
Design a hierarchy map selecting the key individuals from each business unit to be responsible
for communicating directly with the social media team leader in case there is the need to
respond to any other enquiry or situtation that might occur. Ensure these protocols are
communicated and instituitionalised in your organisation.
Lastly, build the escalation and moderation worklows in Adobe Social and consider what the key
reporting suites are to be able to collect process feedback, performance metrics and valuable
insights to improve further. The next section (usage) will cover the best practices to create the
appropriate reports to assess platform usage.
The following diagram illustrates the process discussed in this section:
Building an escalation and moderation process
5.3 Usage
Usage is all about establishing and applying best practices that will help you with your overall
reporting, analysis and decision making. Understanding how your organisation uses the tool
becomes important because it will help you maximise your investment. Here are a few
questions you will need to consider:
How will you manage time and resources spent on reporting and deep-dive analysis?
If your analysts are going to be overloaded with reporting and analysis requests each week,
what tools and workflows you need to implement to help them prioritise those requests?
Adobe Social allows you to send standard email notifications on key system messages that are
useful to keep track of any moderation activities, publishing workflows, errors and other
activities from within the platform. It also allows you to have a deep understanding of author
ADOBE SOCIAL & REPORT SUITE
Human resources
Public relations
Marketing
Sales
BUSINESS UNITS KNOWLEDGE
BASE BUSINESS UNIT
REPRESENTATIVE SOCIAL MEDIA
TEAM
activity. The following are some email notifications you can set up for your organisation. Make
sure you build mechanisms to keep track of these and be able to assess the further
performance of your team. For routine reports and business questions, it may be helpful to
agree on the best approach to ensure numbers match up properly regardless of who is building
the report or performing the analysis.
MODERATION A post or comment was assigned to you for moderation.
A reminder that a post or comment was assigned to you.
A spam filter was activated on a page.
PUBLISHING A new template is available for publication.
Your post has been approved and scheduled for posting.
Your post has been rejected and will not be posted.
A post needs to be approved before it can be posted.
A post has been scheduled for posting.
One of your Facebook pages needs to be authorised.
SUPPORT The system was unable to post a scheduled message.
The system was unable to remove a post from Facebook.
SYSTEM Upcoming authorisation expiration.
5.3.1 Administration
As a solution in the Adobe Marketing Cloud, Adobe Social
permissions are granted at two levels: At the Adobe
Marketing Cloud level and at the Adobe Social level. Cloud
permissions govern access to Adobe Social overall and can
be used to restrict visibility to individual report suites and
their connected data, such as listening rules and campaign
reports. Social permissions define permission levels for your
owned social properties, such as Facebook pages and
Twitter accounts.
Report suite setup and Adobe Marketing Cloud user groups should be configured during your
implementation of Adobe Social.
Tip
Adobe Social is initially
configured with pre-set
permissions groups. Adobe
Social administrators can
adjust and create new
permissions and ownership
groups to match the needs
and structure of your
company.
There are two levels of access given to users: Adobe Marketing Cloud “administrator”, giving
the user full access to all reports and report suites and allowing them to add, edit and delete
groups and users. And as a “user”, providing access based on group memberships. The user
groups are very important in Adobe Social. Managing Adobe Marketing Cloud user groups can
only be done by Adobe Marketing Cloud administrators.
The following matrix illustrates the different access permissions that Adobe Social
administrators can edit and modify:
5.3.2 Access Levels
Tasks Adobe Social administrator
Limited administrator
Administrative tasks
Add a new user to the system X X
Can apply (OWNED/ALL) tag groups and tags ALL OWNED
Can manage (OWNED/ALL) tag groups and tags ALL OWNED
Can add competitor pages and associate it to (OWNED/ALL) pages
ALL OWNED
Change the owner of a page X X
Manage multi-level approval workflows X X
Manage (OWNED/ALL) social properties ALL OWNED
Can add and remove tracked terms X X
Create, edit and delete (OWNED/ALL) user groups ALL OWNED
Analyst tasks
View and export analytics for (OWNED/ALL) promotions and pages
ALL
Can view competitor pages associated to (OWNED/ALL) pages ALL
Publisher tasks
Create and edit publishing audiences X
Create, edit, post, schedule and cancel posts to (OWNED/ALL) targets
ALL
Create and edit Adobe Social campaigns X
Suspend posts X
Create and edit templates X
Moderation tasks
Can access and export unified moderation stats X
Can edit unified moderation settings X
Moderate (reply to, remove, like and escalate posts and comments) (OWNED/ALL) pages
ALL
5.4 Sustainability
Social media marketers often struggle to create a roadmap of campaign development, system
upgrades and maintenance and resource management to achieve the envisioned marketing
strategy and respective corporate goals over time. In fact, it is key to start planning as soon as
the deployment project kicks off to fully evaluate and understand how Adobe Social will align
with the overall business strategy, how it will serve your customer’s journey, how cross-
functional channels and resources will be involved to ensure the solution is maintained, used
and, most importantly, scaled.
Constant contact with your account manager.
Explore the market for new opportunities.
Monitor performance and new platform requirements like social media changing ad
specs.
5.4.1 Maintaining A Single View Of The Customer
Ensure your data architecture, including integrated solutions and platforms, consistently collects
and consolidates all customer-related data into a single marketing view. The more
demographical, transactional, behavioural and aggregated data is gathered in centralised
systems the more challenging it is to maintain its consistency. This factor is critical as the
solution evolves along with your business.
5.4.2 Process To Adopt Traditional Or Emerging Channels
Channels evolve and serve different objectives over time. In this sense, it is considerably
important to create a mechanism of channels evaluation to seamlessly report and assess
existing ones and integrate new ones with your marketing mix.
5.4.3 Track And Upgrade
There are two views of this topic. The first is related to how you document the past (campaigns,
processes and deployments) and the second relates to how you will ensure the people and
physical resources will be kept up to date with new technology frameworks, new trends in the
market and usage best practices.
5.4.4 Optimise And Report For Success
Maintain constant relevancy and workflow success by investing time measuring channel
success, deliverability and return on investment. Encourage the key stakeholders to have
frequent meetings on which they report on testing procedures, success metrics, challenges and
ideas.
5.5 Using The Real-Time Twitter Preview Feature To Fine-Tune Rules
A good tool to gauge the number of potential mentions is the real-time Twitter preview pane.
This feature gives you a better understanding about what Twitter users are currently saying
about the specified term. You can use this information to further refine the term.
For example, suppose your product is a resort and a well-known celebrity tweets about visiting
your resort, but that mention does not help promote your brand. You can create a term using the
"Not" operator and the celebrity's name to prevent paying for mentions that are useless for your
marketing purposes.
The real-time Twitter data preview can also help you see that certain terms have
different meanings, depending on context. For example, suppose you want to use the
word "newt" as a term to gather data about mentions of Newt Gingrich, the U.S.
politician. When you type "newt" into the terms field you might see many posts in the
preview pane mentioning lizards, amphibians or salamanders. Because Newt Gingrich
has an unusual name that means something else in different contexts you should specify
terms carefully to avoid collecting unnecessary data or incurring unnecessary costs. In
this example, you could specify "Newt Gingrich" as a term. You could also specify
"Newt" as the term and then use the "Not" operator with the words "lizard", "amphibian",
and "salamander”.
5.6 Using Social Tags to Optimize Content Strategy
Driving success in Social publishing strategies – with or without paid promotion – is the quality
of your content. Yet, most times, understanding what content “works” is difficult, and marketers
defer to agency expertise or the latest trends. Adobe Social provides tools to take the instant
social feedback system to provide you with actionable insights to iteratively optimise as you
develop and deploy your social content calendar.
Two keys to optimization are
1. Develop your social content strategy
2. Understand your KPIs to define successful content, as outlined above
Once this is done, examine your content strategy, and organise you social content in categories
that align with elements that you would change to optimise performance along your KPIs. These
will become your tag groups, from which you will assign a tag from each group. These
categories often include:
1. Content Pillars: the makeup of the content areas you will publish. Examples: Product
Features, Flash Sales, Feature Articles, Holiday Topics, Question of the Day etc.
2. Content Type: similar to the pillars, these can subdivide what is offered in your post.
Examples: Sale with Price/Without Price, Recipe with/without image, Article preview
3. Media Type: While social channels do report performance by post types (text, video,
image etc.), content of that media can affect its impact. These tags can group and inform
performance based on what is in your multimedia. Examples: Product Image,
Infographic, People Image, Short-form Video, Demo video
4. Language: If you do publish in multiple languages, this is an easy way to group and
compare posts between the two.
5. Target Audience: Even if posts are not targeted to geographies or age groups, content
can be developed to resonate with certain target markets in your fan base. Using these
tags will help you understand what types of target content resonates most with your
social community. Examples: Teens, Boomers, Military, College.
Once you have your Tag system in place, all outgoing posts should be assigned Tags. Weekly,
monthly and quarterly performance reviews should include Tag analysis to tweak your weekly
content mix, or alter your content strategy.
Social Tags also work with Adobe Social Campaigns; while all Campaigns also function as
Content Tags, the reverse isn’t true. A good rule of thumb is that if any tagging category should
be associated with conversion to your website, then you should use a Campaign. Otherwise,
Tags are a good way to examine you post performance in a nimble way.
6 Technology And Product
Adobe technology should act as an enabler — empowering your organisation to manage social
media interactions, create positive experiences, obtain data and act on it. This section will take
you through how Adobe Social was built to fit your business requirements, how it integrates with
other platforms to leverage its power, what best practices ensure the platform is deployed
efficiently and has sufficient levels of support and professional services and how you can
leverage its automation capabilities to manage cross-channel campaigns and democratise data
to empower disparate business users to answer routine business questions.
6.1 Solution fit
6.1.1 Solution Architecture
6.2 Integration
6.2.1 Marketing Cloud Integration
Today many marketers are working with various tools and systems that do not usually work
seamlessly together. With Adobe Marketing Cloud you can improve your organisation’s
marketing effectiveness using Adobe Analytics for performance management, Adobe
Experience Manager for content creation and Adobe Campaign for cross-channel campaign
management.
The following solutions integrate with Adobe Social:
Adobe Social and Adobe Analytics: This integration gives you access to a complete
set of marketing data to attain better insight to the value of your audience. With Adobe
Analytics you can unify reporting and automate your dashboards. This also allows you to
map social data to real and meaningful business KPIs to help measure impact and to
understand your target audience and substantiate what value truly means for it.
Adobe Social and Adobe Experience Manager: With this integration your organisation
will gain the ability to leverage every social input to create consistency across multiple
digital channels providing meaningful, personalised and powerful experiences that your
customers will love.
Asset Sharing Core Service: Marketers can access creative assets (including from
Adobe Creative Cloud) they have uploaded to the Adobe Marketing Cloud directly from
the user interface of solutions like Adobe Campaign and Adobe Media Optimizer.
Adobe Social and Adobe Campaign: Your organisation can also leverage the data
listening capabilities of Adobe Social to trigger campaign events and deliver relevant,
personalised and contextual marketing experiences to your audiences.
6.2.2 Common Third-Party Integration
Third-party integration support in Adobe Social allows
organisations to enrich their social listening capability across
multiple social channels making it simple to centralise and
understand customer sentiment and respond faster to market
opportunities. There are also integration options available to
help you schedule, publish and manage comments across all
pages, all in one place.
Tip
Adobe is always releasing
new integrated applications.
See what is new at Adobe
Social Exchange.
.
Listed below are the most common third-party solutions integrated with Adobe Social:
Vkontakte Tumblr Foursquare
LinkedIn Klout Youtube
Disqus Facebook for Adobe Social Twitter
Impact 360 (Advertising and
Display)
Bitly Google+
Sina Weibo for Adobe Social
6.3 Democratisation
Democratisation refers to how Adobe technology can be more accessible to more people within
your organisation. Since the use of Adobe Social requires the involvement of various individuals
- often are part of different business units - it is recommended you launch your initial social
marketing campaigns with a pilot team. In this sense, your organisation will be able to gain the
knowledge necessary to understand how the solution operates at its best, how to find
efficiencies and how to further optimise the business processes to democratise key learnings
across the organisation.
Leverage Adobe Social’s reporting capabilities to monitor key business processes such
as publishing workflows, the permission sets and business rules to send a post live or
the monitoring workflows to escalate requests, questions, comments or any actions that
might be raised by your social media channels across the pertinent business unit.
Further information on these topics is in chapter 5.
As discussed in the usage section, it is recommended to create a report mechanism by
which your organisation understands how quickly Adobe Social’s operators respond to
moderation queues, launch posts throughout channels and solve possible system errors.
Reflect results on your KPIs for campaign contribution and encourage your team to take
compulsory, periodic training programs.
Reward proactivity and encourage your team to always work towards success. A
possible incentive is to promote people thorough authorisation tiers to encourage better
usage. In the long term this may become a badge of honour.
6.3.1 Automation
Adobe Social is designed at its core to provide businesses with all the benefits a social media
marketing tool can provide allowing your organisation to reallocate resources to more strategic
areas.
Financial: Creating social media campaigns requires a high degree of team cohesion to
perform at its best. Once the processes go live with Adobe Social, most of your digital
channels will be centralised and its subsequent data, assets, media, and content will
flow dynamically generating operational efficiencies. Your organisation will be allowed to
build upon what exists and find new creative opportunities. On the other hand, Adobe
Social has integrated a wealth of analytics capabilities useful to understanding and
optimising your marketing ROI.
Processes: Adobe Social’s interface allows you to easily plan and build social marketing
campaigns in an efficient manner. Its notification workflow creation capability enables
your organisation to optimise processes and act quickly on performance data.
Stakeholders: Adobe Social was built to guarantee a secure flow of information among
team members restricting how sensitive data is shown or handled.
Marketing Automation
Financial
Cost efficiency ROI efficiency
ROI visibility
Processes
Campaign workflows
Plannig
Stakeholders
User administration
Consumer profiling
Reporting
Real timeSolution
integration
Reporting: Adobe Social allows you to monitor and report on key performance
indicators. You can also build customised reports and schedule periodic deliveries so
stakeholders can take action.
6.4 Leveraging Your Investment (The Big Picture)
The Adobe Marketing Cloud includes powerful Web analytics and Web site optimisation products that
deliver actionable, real-time data and insights to drive successful online initiatives. It offers an
integrated and open platform for online business optimisation. Adobe Marketing Cloud consists of
integrated applications to collect and unleash the power of customer insight to optimise customer
acquisition, conversion and retention efforts in addition to the creation and distribution of content.
Once you are up and running with Adobe Social and want to grow your digital capabilities to the
next level, you might want to go back to what your business needs are. We see a common trend
Adobe Marketing
Cloud Solutions Adobe Creative
Cloud
Manage Digital Experiences
Adobe Experience Manager
Personalise Content
Adobe Target
Build and Deliver Video
Adobe Primetime
Build Audience Profiles
Adobe Audience Manager
Manage Social
Adobe Social
Manage Campaigns
Adobe Campaign
Management Digital Ad
Adobe Media Optimiser
Collect and Analyse Data
Adobe Analytics
ACQUISITION ENGAGEMENT
Digital Asset
Management
of Adobe Social users purchasing Adobe Analytics as a next step in order to improve their Web
and mobile site experiences. Clients who feel they have a gap in acquisition, or want to improve
their customer reach, opt to follow their Adobe Social purchase with Adobe Campaign, Adobe
Experience Manager or Adobe Media Optimiser depending on their specific needs.
If your objective is to increase personalisation and engagement we suggest you purchase
Adobe Target together with Adobe Audience Manager. This will help you test and personalise
content across channels and extend audiences across solutions. In the specific case that you
manage high volumes of video content and want to improve your video delivery across channels
and devices, Adobe Primetime will do the work.
Continue growing your digital marketing strength and add a new Adobe Marketing Cloud
solution based on what your business demands. A good level of integration across solutions will
help you make, manage, measure and monetise your content across every channel and screen.
7 Checklist
Item Completed
Executive sponsor named and communicated
Stakeholder buy-in across the business
Communication plan created and announced
Steering committee setup
Working groups setup
Social Marketing Maturity assessed
Digital KPIs defined and agreed across business units
Business structure identified, agreed and communicated
Community and culture practices documented and communicated
Social KPIs refined & marketing integration protocols created
Scope of deployment and Implementation defined
Publishing Workflows structured and implemented
Moderation Workflows structured and implemented
Usage procedures and reporting mechanisms created
Administration, User Access established
Marketing Cloud and Third Party Integrations defined and integrated
Forecasting Questions
Post Production Support
8 Adobe Social Product Maturity Activities
Are you using Adobe Social at its full potential?
Have a look at the entire list of features and assess the degree on which your organisation is
using the solution.
9 Adobe Consulting Operational Maturity Review
Operational Readiness Assessment & Recommendations
- $6000 (per brand/business unit)
Adobe Consulting provides a package to review your
operational business readiness and provide a recommended
roadmap of initiatives to accelerate your maturity. This service
Solution Features
Publishing
Monitoring
Analytics
Moderation
Admin and Governance
Social Marketing Opportunities
Brand presence and management
Fan and follower acquisition
Multi-channel campaign
attribution and measurement
Community development and
engagement
Social campaign measurements
and ad optimisation
Social ROI
Adobe Marketing
Cloud Integration
Adobe Analytics
Adobe Experience Manager
Tip
Also use the self-
assessment tool designed to
help you identify your
organisation’s strengths and
prioritise focus areas in
Adobe Social and integrated
Adobe Marketing Cloud
Solutions
is highly recommended if you are new to the solution and need assistance in evaluating your
capabilities.
Activities include:
Conference call/meeting to interview executive sponsor
Consulting guidance on completing the solution maturity assessment
Consulting walk through of maturity operational readiness checklist
Qualification of current documents, templates, processes
Draft of initial findings, highlight focus themes reviewed with executive sponsor
Executive sponsor sign-off
High-level roadmap of recommendations presented to stakeholder group
10 Adobe Social Glossary Of Terms
Earned media: Earned media refers to publicity, advocacy or promotion gained through efforts
other than paid advertising. Other ways to refer to earned media include buzz, word-of-mouth,
and “viral”. The distinctive characteristic of earned media is that it is outside the direct control of
the business. Businesses attempt to simulate earned media through participation in social
media, media relations, events, etc. Earned media is one of three categories of media options
that marketers have (the others being paid and owned media).
Paid media: Paid media refers to publicity or promotion gained by paying to leverage a channel
– most typically paid advertising. Examples include digital display ads, television and radio ads,
paid search ads and sponsorships. Paid media is typically leveraged to feed owned media and
create earned media.
Owned Media Owned media refers to publicity or promotion through channels controlled by the
business. Examples include the corporate Web site, mobile Web sites, mobile apps (developed
and controlled by the business) and corporate blogs. While social networks like Facebook and
Twitter are consumer controlled, businesses can still control specific elements such as Twitter
profiles and Facebook pages, so while customers discussing a business on Facebook is
considered earned media, the business’ Facebook page is still an example of owned media,
because the business controls the content on the page.
Sentiment: Specific to social media monitoring and listening, sentiment refers to the scoring -
typically on a numerical scale - of a particular mention (see “mentions”) as to the nature of the
full text of the mention, whether it is positive or negative. Sentiment is typically scored using
natural language processing algorithms that observe the full text of mentions and attempt to
determine the positive or negative nature of it based on ways individuals use words together.
Social media monitoring or listening: Social media monitoring, or listening as it is often
referred to, is the practice of observing and analysing conversations and commentary on social
networks, blogs, message boards and discussion forums – anywhere consumer-generated
discussion happens online. Monitoring and listening is typically facilitated through software that
aggregates all the conversation and commentary through APIs and data feeds from providers
and filters based upon the desired topics. Typically, this filtering is based on keywords. For
example, monitoring and listening for the keyword “Adobe” would capture all instances where
the word “Adobe” is mentioned online. Most software vendors who provide this type of software
include the number of mentions (see “mentions”) along with information such as when the
mention occurred, the source (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), the name or handle of who created the
mention, the full text associated with the mention, and other details (where available) such as
geo-location. The most typical use cases for social media monitoring are for brand management
such as responding to commentary (especially negative commentary), supporting market
research such as understanding consumer trends and measuring the performance of marketing
or communications efforts.
Mentions: Specific to social media monitoring or listening, a mention refers to an instance of
word that appears in conversation or commentary online. A mention typically implies the
inclusion of information associated with the mention itself such as when the mention occurred,
the source (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), the name or handle of who created the mention, the full
text associated with the mention and other details (where available) such as geo-location.
Publishing: Specific to social media, publishing refers to the process of creating and
distributing content (both text and rich media such as images, videos, etc.) to social networks.
11 Adobe Social Templates
11.1 Social Media Marketing Framework
SCENARIO TO IMPROVE
DESCRIPTION TACTICS ADOBE SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES
Brand presence and management
Facebook pages that vary widely in number of likes and activity on page. Branding is inconsistent between social profiles (logo treatments, use of images, frequency of posting, etc.) across regions or products.
Define governing methodology and strategy. Deliver competitive insights and content guidelines.
Governance and admin capabilities
Community development and engagement
Unattended social profiles. Look for questions that go unanswered or spam that is not removed from Facebook walls. Limited engagement (few likes, comments or shares on Facebook posts and tweets)
Develop compelling content, engage with users and moderate social conversations. Develop brand communications guideline.
Publishing Moderation Monitoring Analytics
Fan and follower acquisition
Relatively low fans or followers compared to competitive brands An upcoming campaign that requires exposure and increased awareness.
Deploy effective campaigns through enhanced advertising strategies, application design and deployment, and community management support.
Publishing
Social campaign measurement and ad optimisation
Organisation traditionally “tacks on” social to other big campaigns rather than having a distinct social strategy. Organisation does not leverage paid posts or sponsored stories and has not engaged in social advertising because it doesn’t perform as well as search.
Cultivate real-time insights to optimise social advertising campaigns. Develop target audience segmentation and define KPIs strategy.
Analytics Publishing
Multi-channel campaign attribution, measurement and social ROI
Organisation struggling to understand how social influences business.
Measure social media impact on business results in the context of other digital marketing channels in real time, allowing you to optimise existing campaigns or develop new ones.
Analytics
11.2 How To Create A Content Schedule Template
11.3 Key Metrics On Social Media
The following table indicates the key metrics your organisation can monitor across your social
media channels. Note, the metrics below are indicative only and may not be found within the
Adobe Social interface.
EXPOSURE ENGAGEMENT INFLUENCE IMPACT
PAID Impressions
Reach
Frequency
Video views
Likes
Comments
Shares
Replies
Retweets
Etc.
Click throughs
Landing page views
Interactions
Awareness
Purchase
consideration
Likelihood to
recommend
Brand attributes or
equities
Visits to Web site
Attend event
Sales conversion
Download coupon
Leads captured
Promo redemptions
OWNED Unique visitors
Visits
Return visits
Page views
Interactions
Subscriptions
Links
Consideration
Purchase intent
Tell a friend
Likelihood to
recommend
Brand attributes or
equities
Sales
Leads
Info requests
Download paper
Download app
Cost savings
EARNED
(PAID + OWNED)
Number of posts
Impressions
Message delivery
Hashtag usage
Mentions
Contest entries and
participants
Awareness
Consideration
Purchase intent
Associations with
issues and topis
Visit Web site
Attend event
Download coupon
Leads captured
Promo redemptions
SHARED
(PAID + OWNED+
EARNED
Organic impressions
Organic reach
Number of followers
Video views
Likes
Comments
Shares
Replies
Retweets
Etc.
Consideration
Purchase intent
Tell a friend
Likelihood to
recommend
Brand attributes or
equities
Visit store
Attend the event
Sales
Vote for issue
Satisfaction
Loyalty
11.4 Common KPIs And Calculated Metrics
Key Performance Indicator Calculated Metric
Share of voice
𝐵𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑀𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑀𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 (𝐵𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑑 + 𝐶𝑜𝑚𝑝𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑡𝑜𝑟 𝐴, 𝐵, 𝐶 … 𝑛)= 𝑆ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑉𝑜𝑖𝑐𝑒
Audience engagement
𝐶𝑜𝑚𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠 + 𝑆ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑠 + 𝑇𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑘𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘𝑠
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑉𝑖𝑒𝑤𝑠= 𝐴𝑢𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝐸𝑛𝑔𝑎𝑔𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡
Conversation reach
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑃𝑒𝑜𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑃𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑝𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝐴𝑢𝑑𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝐸𝑥𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑢𝑟𝑒= 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑅𝑒𝑎𝑐ℎ
Active advocates
# 𝑜𝑓 𝐴𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝐴𝑑𝑣𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑠 (𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛 𝑝𝑎𝑠𝑡 30 𝑑𝑎𝑦𝑠)
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝐴𝑑𝑣𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑠= 𝐴𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝐴𝑑𝑣𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑠
Advocate influence
𝑈𝑛𝑖𝑞𝑢𝑒 𝐴𝑑𝑜𝑣𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑒′𝑠 𝐼𝑛𝑓𝑙𝑢𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝐴𝑑𝑣𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝐼𝑛𝑓𝑙𝑢𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒= 𝐴𝑑𝑣𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑡𝑒 𝐼𝑛𝑓𝑙𝑢𝑒𝑛𝑐𝑒
Advocacy impact
𝑁𝑢𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝐴𝑑𝑣𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑐𝑦 𝐷𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑛 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝑉𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑚𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝐴𝑑𝑣𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑐𝑦 𝑇𝑟𝑎𝑓𝑓𝑖𝑐= 𝐴𝑑𝑣𝑜𝑐𝑎𝑐𝑦 𝐼𝑚𝑝𝑎𝑐𝑡
Issue resolution rate
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 % 𝐼𝑠𝑠𝑢𝑒𝑠 𝑅𝑒𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑣𝑒𝑑 𝑆𝑡𝑖𝑠𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑖𝑙𝑦
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 # 𝑆𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑖𝑐𝑒 𝐼𝑠𝑠𝑢𝑒𝑠= 𝐼𝑠𝑠𝑢𝑒 𝑅𝑒𝑠𝑢𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑅𝑎𝑡𝑒
Resolution time
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝐼𝑛𝑞𝑢𝑖𝑟𝑦 𝑅𝑒𝑠𝑝𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑒 𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 # 𝑆𝑒𝑟𝑣𝑖𝑐𝑒 𝐼𝑛𝑞𝑢𝑖𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑠= 𝑅𝑒𝑠𝑜𝑙𝑢𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑇𝑖𝑚𝑒
Satisfaction score
𝐶𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑟 𝐹𝑒𝑒𝑑𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘 (𝑖𝑛𝑝𝑢𝑡 𝐴, 𝐵, 𝐶 … 𝑛 )
𝐴𝑙𝑙 𝐶𝑢𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑟 𝐹𝑒𝑒𝑑𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘= 𝑆𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑠𝑓𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑆𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑒
Topic trends
# 𝑜𝑓 𝑆𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑖𝑓𝑖𝑐 𝑇𝑜𝑝𝑖𝑐 𝑀𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠
𝐴𝑙𝑙 𝑇𝑜𝑝𝑖𝑐 𝑀𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠= 𝑇𝑜𝑝𝑖𝑐 𝑇𝑟𝑒𝑛𝑑𝑠
Sentiment ratio
𝑃𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 ∶ 𝑁𝑒𝑢𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑙 ∶ 𝑁𝑒𝑔𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝐵𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑀𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠
𝐴𝑙𝑙 𝐵𝑟𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑀𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠= 𝑆𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡 𝑅𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜
Idea impact
# 𝑜𝑓 𝑃𝑜𝑠𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠, 𝑆ℎ𝑎𝑟𝑒𝑠, 𝑀𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙 𝐼𝑑𝑒𝑎 𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑠𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠, 𝑆ℎ𝑟𝑒𝑠, 𝑀𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠= 𝐼𝑑𝑒𝑎 𝐼𝑚𝑝𝑎𝑐𝑡
11.5 Deep Dive Insights Request Template