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I’m sure most teachers will agree that hearing about their peers’ experiences and getting their advice is incredibly valuable. Learning new techniques and approaches, what’s worked and what hasn’t, is what helps keep teaching fresh and inspired. That’s why we’ve just launched a new public discussion forum on the Adobe Education Exchange.

In a nutshell, the forum enables members to share ideas so they can keep up to date with the latest tools and innovations. There are more than a dozen different forum topics including teaching & learning and educational technology, so members can discover as well as contribute new ideas that will help others spark creativity in the classroom.

It’s really simple to start a new discussion – all you need to do is click on the collaborate tab on the top level navigation bar and fire away your questions or top tips. With more than 50,000 members, there is bound to be a member out there who shares your interests! Current discussions include everything from how to incorporate HTML5 into the classroom to the best ways to teach students how to use Photoshop.

So what are you waiting for? Check out the Adobe Education Exchange website for more information and start sharing today!

Marc Blinder, Director, European Operations, Adobe

Just as data from the computer age helped shape finance in the 1970’s, it has also become the digital revolution’s gift to marketing. Gone are the days where marketers are on the back foot as to justifying how their campaigns are working; the availability of real time data gives them instant access to exactly what is and isn’t working on their campaign so they can tweak and optimise it accordingly. This coupled with the availability of tools which predict and measure campaign results, has given marketers a much bigger say into the company strategy and budgets – much like the role of the finance team.

In order to get to this stage however, marketers need to understand exactly which metrics to measure for each channel, in order to successfully play back that channel’s ROI in the boardroom. With the ease of capturing behavioural data online there’s certainly no shortage of such metrics, but the trick is to know what key indicators are important for each channel and observe these accordingly.

Take Facebook ads for example. There has recently been some interesting debate around just how effective this form of marketing is. On one hand, reports have suggested Face­book adver­tis­ing is not very effec­tive and in com­par­i­son to Google pro­vides sig­nif­i­cantly less value. Other reports however have highlighted brand successes through the same method which begs the question, are people measuring this form of marketing correctly?

Typically, Facebook ads should be mea­sured by soft and hard met­rics. Soft metrics include reach and engage­ment and hard metrics include the impact on rev­enue, profit, mar­gin and offline store sales across all mar­ket­ing and sales chan­nels of a business. Where some marketers have struggled in the past however is because they feel that social chan­nels should be mea­sured using the same mea­sure­ment mod­els and account­abil­ity as search mar­ket­ing efforts.

Unfortunately, this method is flawed because consumers are not spending time on social chan­nels to imme­di­ately buy goods and ser­vices, like they often are when engag­ing in online searches. Instead, they tend to use social plat­forms to con­nect with their friends, social­ise, share con­tent, and par­tic­i­pate in dia­logue around things that they are expe­ri­enc­ing and think­ing.  Advertising on Face­book, for brands who don’t sell online games or flash deals, is more like adver­tis­ing on TV – it increases the likeliness to buy, but it often takes time for a user to convert.

Read on for some common themes we have seen from some of our clients’ suc­cess­ful Face­book campaigns….

1. Sig­nif­i­cant and sus­tained ad budgets – suc­cess­ful Face­book cam­paigns must have mean­ing­ful ad bud­gets with sig­nif­i­cant reach, as a Facebook ad only sees the desired effects when it reaches a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of users.
2. A strate­gic long term view -  the best social cam­paigns are well thought out with strate­gies designed to build audi­ences and engage with them in a mean­ing­ful way, so they: 1) grow a fan base, and 2) increase loy­alty to the brand. For the mar­keter this means a strat­egy to cre­ate mean­ing­ful con­tent that is rel­e­vant to the fan base at a given point of time, and con­stantly updat­ing con­tent so that the mes­sage remains fresh.
3. Data is used as an asset – the remark­able thing about Face­book adver­tis­ing is both the tar­get­ing and data that the adver­tiser can obtain with appro­pri­ate per­mis­sions from the user. A good exam­ple is to build apps where the user vol­un­tar­ily agrees to pro­vide infor­ma­tion and then launch and mar­ket to them with the sup­port of Face­book ad buys. Through this, the ad buys drive audi­ences to the app and the data from the app can be lever­aged to make the app expe­ri­ence more inter­est­ing and the whole process more effi­cient.
4. Good con­tent is key – adver­tis­ing will have min­i­mal impact if you don’t have mean­ing­ful con­tent. You need a good com­mu­nity man­ager and mod­er­a­tor to under­stand when to place con­tent, what con­tent to place and how to mea­sure the effi­cacy of con­tent. If you fail to develop good con­tent, your fans and the Face­book plat­form will ignore your mes­sage.

Act local – it’s a mantra for multi-nationals the world over. However, it’s often easier to say than do, especially when it comes to digital marketing. Issues of quality, control and ownership often push firms down a ‘vanilla’ route of centrally created content.

For Investec – an international specialist bank and asset manager serving corporate investors and high net worth individuals – the challenge was to move from a single on-line presence in Johannesburg to a 15-region digital marketing platform that would allow the company to take advantage of local opportunities, often at relatively short notice.

Using Adobe CQ, part of Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, Investec now has a global web experience platform that delivers a distinct, local visual and user experience without being limited to generic-looking templates or designs.

What does this mean for Investec? It now has a highly decentralised web experience management platform with powerful content authoring tools and global brand management capabilities. In practice this means its digital marketing team can now react quickly to local opportunities and changing customer trends with relevant regional and customer-specific content.

And the results? Because Adobe CQ takes away the organisational complexity normally associated with multi-region content creation and publishing, Investec has been able to focus on delivering compelling, creative content that drives the business forward. For example, when Investec signed a midnight deal to sponsor Tottenham Hotspur football club in the English Premier League (seasons 2010/2011 and 2011/2012), the firm was able to launch a major microsite the following morning

Online traffic has also doubled since the system went live, along with a vast increase in the volume of both global and locally published content. It has also laid the foundations for multichannel communication, enabling Investec to respond to, and engage with, its customers regardless of time-zone, location or device.

“Our web presence plays a vital role in providing the level of service our clients expect from a world-class firm,” says Diarmaid Crean, Global Online Marketing, Investec. “Having our web infrastructure on Adobe CQ makes it simple for personnel throughout our organization to author and publish content, everywhere we do business, quickly and easily.”

Manny Vaghuela, Adobe’s Solution Consulting Director and Fahim Salim, Investec’s Web Development Manager can be seen discussing Investec’s moving to the Adobe CQ platform (a process described as re-platforming) during a recent webinar.

The discussion also covers the evolution of content management software and how Investec is using Adobe CQ to optimise its content to meet marketing goals and keep up with evolving consumer and technological demands.

The full case study, with more information on the Adobe CQ platform including how it allows Investec to add local, dynamic content can be found here.

Check out our webinar around replatforming web marketing systems in the age of the multi-channel consumer below.

Why the legal industry must embrace technology to improve productivity and increase security

Article by Anke Schnedler, marketing manager, Adobe Systems

In a fast-paced industry with a huge digital output and major security implications, the need for a robust document management system is not just important, it’s critical. For busy law professionals the ability to easily access, share and work on documents is par for the course: when it works, no one notices, but when it goes wrong, all eyes fall on the IT manager.

As we all know, solicitors, lawyers and barristers have always spent a serious amount of time assembling cases, filling in forms, and compiling letters, briefs and presentations. They then need to exchange these documents with clients, outside counsel and the courts and need a trusted method to control access to, and limit distribution of, confidential information.

As courts implement new electronic filing systems, IT departments need to support staff by equipping them with document collaboration tools that not only increase efficiency through the review and repagination process, but enable them to protect sensitive information, even when documents travel outside of the document management system and corporate firewall. Also key is the ability to have searchable solutions that archive and maintain an audit trail of emails and their attachments.

As a result, many firms are looking at their current document management solutions and cost effectively standardising them across their business. Herbert Smith LLP, a law firm headquartered in London which advises clients from its network of offices across Asia, Europe and the Middle East, is a great example of a firm that is boosting efficiencies, managing and protecting sensitive information and in turn offering an improved client service. Its aim was to revamp many of its administrative, document-based processes in order to drive efficiency across the organisation.

Using Adobe Acrobat, they were able to assemble case documents efficiently, redact sensitive information securely, improve collaboration across legal teams and complete forms electronically. In addition to reliably redacting sensitive content from case documents, the firm’s staff can now encrypt and password protect PDF files that are delivered to outside teams, helping better safeguard sensitive case details. Indeed, document controls and security rules ensure that only those with permission can access documents and control who opens, views, prints, copies, and modifies files – both inside and outside the firewall.

For further information on how Adobe is helping Herbert Smith LLP prepare, protect, and deliver professional communications in PDF click here.

We are now back from a jam-packed few days at the Adobe Digital Media Education Summit in Istanbul and wanted to tell you about the fantastic time we had!

The conference was a unique opportunity to hear from leading educators about how they implement digital media in film, video and design schools, as well as gaining insight into how technology ties into teaching goals.

We kicked the conference off on Tuesday evening with some welcome drinks at Bahçeşehir Üniversitesi, which gave us the opportunity to get to know the speakers and attendees we would be spending the next two days with.

Wednesday and Thursday were full of interesting workshops and heated debates, where we had the chance to hear from some of the best speakers in the industry including Andy Balzdell (CelAction), Lee Brimelow (Platform Evangelist, Adobe) and Sue Tong (The Illuminated Film Company).

Here’s a snapshot of what some of you were saying on Twitter:

Thanks so much to everyone that joined us in Istanbul – we couldn’t have done it without you.

If you haven’t joined our LinkedIn group yet then you can do so by clicking here.