At Adobe, we now have aligned our engineering, marketing and partner resources to fully exploit our leadership position in addressing the challenges facing the digital marketer.  Our legacy in the Creative field has placed us in a pole position to lock arms with our partners and the heads of digital marketing to tackle a world that is increasingly more mobile, increasingly more social and increasingly more technical.  Essentially, we have enhanced our market position and partner strategy to align with a CMO who is being forced to transform and reinvent themselves into the Chief Marketing Technologist?

The natural marriage of customer experience management (CEM) and on-line marketing presents a great starting point.  And now with our new alignment, we are organized to win….and win big!

From purely a partner perspective, I believe that we have listened and responded to your input by creating a unified partner organization.  As the leader of this new team, you have my commitment that we will continually strive to earn your business and tune our programs to optimize the impact that we can achieve together in the market.  Partners continue to be key and fundamental to our success.  Over the next several months, we will reveal our plans to combine and align the partner ecosystems around CEM and the Omniture on-line marketing suite for maximum leverage.  These are truly exciting times.  And we are thrilled with and confident that the restructuring of Adobe will yield breathtaking results.

Guess What? Marketing Doesn’t Care How Much Money WCM Saves IT.

When I started in the WCM business in 2003, the value proposition focused on the technology’s ability to shift work from highly skilled IT resources to non-technical business users. It was a straight up “lets reduce your IT spend” play with the CIO in mind.

Fast-forward to 2011. The Second Great Awakening of WCM is in full swing. This time fueled not by cost conscious IT organizations but a generation of tech savvy marketing pros. They see technology as a critical tool that allows them to connect with customers in a deeper and more meaningful way.
In chatting with our clients, it has become clear there are 3 major drivers that are influencing them to make CQ5 a core part of their marketing strategy.

1. The demographic of one…
Our clients love the idea of personalization coupled with analytics. CQ5 allows our clients to measure the effectiveness of campaigns. This gives them the flexibility to make meaningful changes ensuring they hit the mark with customers.

2. MacBooks, iPads, and Droids…Oh My…
Check this out. According to Pew Research Center 85% of Americans own cell phones while only 76% own computers. When you look at the highly prized 18-29 year old demographic, cell phone owners increase to 96%.

Our clients see massive value and higher conversion rates when they can deliver a channel specific experience for consumption across multiple devices. Device emulation features in CQ5 ensure marketers can easily connect effectively with customers no matter what device they are using.

3. It’s all about the Cloud…the Clickstream Cloud!
A niche is a nugget of gold to our clients…and just as hard to find. Successfully identifying and targeting an underserved market creates massive opportunity. CQ Targeting is a great tool that provides information about our client’s customers including behavior, history, and profile information. This allows them to more effective segment their messaging.
There is no doubt feature-rich CQ5 is well positioned to capitalize on this growing WCM market.
Do you agree? Drop me a line or comment below!

The theme of the day at this year’s Adobe Partner Community Day (March 22 and 23, 2011 in New Orleans) was (in my humble opinion) summarized best by a statement made by Rob Tarkoff (@rtarkoff). He mentioned at one point that there is the “science of new marketing”. This idea, that marketing is undergoing a change and its foundation is more “science”-based than “fluff”, was carried through a number of presentations. As a marketer in a techie organization, it pleases me to see the shift in emphasis. Truly marketing is a play-ah now. Or it should be.

Sessions by Bruce Temkin (@btemkin) and Scott Stratten (@unmarketing) followed on this theme. Bruce spoke with great energy on how companies need to do a better job of communicating with customers and dealing with customer feedback. Had a “yeah” moment when he pointed out that companies should not rush into social media, but instead should look at how they are currently interacting with customers. Final word: Fix existing issues before rushing into a new medium for exchange.

@unmarketing was even better. I’d finished his book on the plane, so was prepared for his take, and was pleased to see that despite having read the book, I wasn’t bored to tears when he spoke (YEAH moment there for you). Agree wholeheartedly with his approach to marketing and the need for a change. Like how he gets that “awesome” wins every time. Who doesn’t love awesome? Companies need to find it, foster it, and support it for their customers and their employees.

Each corroborated and clarified an ongoing message. That marketing is everything you do, and it’s certainly not just your collateral. They push the idea that marketing departments shouldn’t be marcom departments (managing brand stamping on collateral, events, etc.), but should be transforming the entire organization to think, live, breathe, and communicate what the organization is. This stems from and also trickles down into customer engagement, in that your brand is about how you respond to your customers (old, new, and those that are in between).

This entire message supported Adobe’s customer experience management platform. Adobe has the tools companies need to make it easier to deliver awesome. And now, after NOLA, it’s nice to see that Adobe is taking their platform’s power seriously and supporting it with real ideas on how to bring the platform to life in your organization.

Nice one Adobe!

Attending the Barcelona Adobe partner meeting around the theme of how customer experience management was very engaging. The theme of the day was all around the emerging trend that what the customer experienced was not only a rising concept across business and IT, but it was actually a key factor in launching a successful solution based on how users chose to interact through technology and social networks with their favorite brands.

My part of the discussion was to stress the point that due to the nature seen in future business models where users will navigate complex systems of decentralized technologies through engaging interfaces, current standards and practices used to define and design user experiences were no longer adequate for the task at hand. I shared examples on how using visualization in conjunction new UX toolkits based on Collaborative Decision Making, Behavior Science, Game Mechanics, and Business Analytics were vital to meet this rising challenge. This discussion was well received and drove interesting conversations on the rapidly changing future of role of user experience defining success business models and those who will need to define and deliver these solutions.

Customer Experience Management (CEM) was the hot topic of the Adobe Partner Community Day last week in Barcelona. It was great to learn more about Adobe’s CEM strategy, and how the additions of Omniture and Day to their existing product portfolio play into that. Adobe is on the way of creating an integrated platform which helps enterprises realize great Customer Experiences across digital channels.

While this is definitely exciting, will the implementation of such a platform also be sufficient to build lasting consumer-brand relationships, which is the ultimate goal of CEM? We at SapientNitro are convinced that besides solving the technology challenge there are three other dimensions that need to be addressed. In the first place this is the organizational challenge. Most enterprises are still organized like in the 50’s. They have siloed departments taking care of different phases of the customer lifecycle, like marketing, commerce and customer service. In order to create a harmonized experience across all touchpoints, including the digital and the real world like traditional ads, stores and call centers, it is most crucial for enterprises to first transform their organization.

The other two dimensions that enterprises need to evolve in order to cope with today’s multi-channel reality are their marketing and their user experience strategy.

Only if all of these four dimensions – organization, marketing, user experience and technology – are addressed in an integrated fashion, companies will be able to create outstanding customer experiences across the complete customer lifecycle, virtually as well as in the real world.

Previously a Day Premier Partner, the Solution Partner Conference in Barcelona last week was Cognifide’s first outing to an Adobe Event as an Adobe Partner. It didn’t take long for us to realise why Day is such a good fit with Adobe. People! From partners, marketers, and salespeople, through to developers, managers and evangelists, everyone shared the same buzz that something big is going to happen in 2011 at Adobe. That something being Customer Experience Management.

After a morning of great forward thinking keynotes, the Customer Experience Management (CEM) value proposition was outlined by Sydney Sloan and Ben Watson. This highlighted Web Experience Management (WEM) as 1 of 4 key plays that Erik Larson clearly positioned within the CEM Product Strategy later that afternoon. As a veteran Day CQ Solution Partner, we started to see more clearly where we could support Adobe in their rollout of CEM.

The Tuesday evening ice-breaker social event at Club Astoria saw key Adobe exhibitors demonstrate that latest product features to solution partners. It was here that I met technical evangelists Duane Nickull and Michael Chaize and was introduced to LiveCycle. After a quick impromptu design session with Duane and other partners, we had creative assets being exported from Photoshop and imported into LiveCycle as strongly type forms. Very impressive.

The following morning, I gave a talk on Building Marketing Technology Platforms for Engaging Global Brands. This talked to a number of ongoing challenges we face with our clients when executing their marketing strategies to deliver the best customer experiences across multi-channels to market. The 3 shifts in marketing (from traditional to content), technology (from silo’ed to integrated) and platform (from cms to marketing) are key to building a solid foundation upon which to integrate, aggregate and host marketing technology solutions. The talk concluded with the Skype.Com case study.

It was great to share a stage with Ed Van Siclen, who pretty much set the scene for explaining the shift from traditional marketing to more content/inbound marketing. Then a follow up session with Duane and Michael basically slammed dunked the key role LiveCycle plays in Adobe’s CEM vision for me.

Then as the event drew to a close, and business cards were exchanged, the attention swiftly turned to the next partner event scheduled for this March. We’re already making plans to attend. Great event Adobe and hope to see everyone in New Orleans.

DAY Software took center stage at the event with most presentations wrapping around the delivery of experiential content in a multi-device world. David Nuescheler, DAY CTO, was rockin’ the house and showing off the simple beauty of his baby, CQ5. Everyone was blown away by the speed and elegance of the solution. And, hey, if you were not able to attend, don’t fear. We have posted the presentations for your viewing pleasure — ENJOY!

I highly recommend the presentation on Day 2 — no, not mine! But the pitch from Cleve, CTO at Cognifide. It is a brilliantly articulated vision around the market dynamics and technical requirements of delivering compelling, emotional user design. It, in fact, made me feel a bit pedestrian in my view of this market segment.

Our partner community conference is back on the road and heading for New Orleans. We hope that you can join us on March 22nd and 23rd.

Back from Vegas, exhausted but energized.

Look, I wouldn’t wish a week in Las Vegas on my worst enemy, but the Adobe sales kickoff was outstanding — complete with truly mind bending technology, breakout sessions with comprehensive solution offerings tailored to solving customer pain points, and some inspirational validations of our vision from some of the largest companies on the planet who have engaged Adobe to transform how they reach and converse with their customers online.

And the week started off with a bang. On Monday, we announced our global partnership with Deloitte to launch the conference. This agreement is a culmination of several years of mutual commitment and really exemplifies Adobe’s growth in the enterprise software market. We were also the beneficiary of a couple of outstanding presentations from Mark White, Deloitte CTO, and Paul Clemmons, who took Adobe under his wing a few years back and has been instrumental in nurturing our partnership. The energy radiating off of the Deloitte team was contagious, but it didn’t stop there.

The interactive agencies, which joined Adobe through our recent DAY Software acquisition, were blown away. If I could bottle their energy and sell it…well, let’s just say that it would probably be illegal even in Vegas! All kidding aside, no company can deliver customer experiences from creative expression to wrapping content into the customer conversation to data insertion from legacy systems to human centric orchestration of process flows to the analytics that arch over the entire experience (and so much more in between). And these partners paid us back throughout the conference, leading so many great sessions. So, a huge shout out to Chris and team at Acquity – Dan and his team at SapientNitro – Jens from Logica – and so many other partners.
We truly value and appreciate the impact that our partners have on our business. From our global network of regional partners to our interactive agency partners to our global SI partnerships, we thank you for your support and the enthusiasm that you expressed around our vision ahead.

So, from the Enterprise Solution Partner team at Adobe, happy holidays, and we’ll see you in Barcelona on January 25th for what will sure to be another epic Adobe Partner Community Day. What? You haven’t registered? You know what to do – just click on the link below:
http://engagewithadobe.com/

As of today the acquisition of DAY Software is now complete.

So on behalf of the entire Adobe partner organization and our global Enterprise Solution Partners, we want to welcome the DAY employees and partner community to Adobe.  We are thrilled to have DAY’s market leading WCM solution, acting as the gravitational nexus pulling all of Adobe’s assets together as we lead our assault of ridding the enterprise of applications devoid of emotion.

As the legions of Adobe developers made their annual pilgrimage to MAX, the experiential revolution could be felt in every nook and cranny of every presentation and every new innovation.  As the red monk “govenator” pointed out: we are in the midst of another major tectonic shift.  Gartner echoed this sentiment, as well.  In fact, our only disagreement was whether this new wave of enterprise applications would enthrall or electrify the customer experience.  The drab, lifeless expression of enterprise applications, which impose a drone mentality on the user, is over.

And the marriage of the right-brain creative partners with the left-brain systems integration partners will create a formidable force.  Over the next several weeks, we will be communicating our partner cross-pollination plans.  On the surface, our objective is simple.  Long standing LiveCycle partners can accelerate their understanding of DAY software by engaging the talented partners joining the Adobe customer experience revolution.  And vice versa, we want DAY partners to lean on our longstanding partner relationships to accelerate their understanding of Adobe technologies that transform the user experience of enterprise applications.  We will unveil our plans next week, so stay tuned!