Adobe Social, incorporates technology from Context Optional and Efficient Frontier.
Adobe acquired Facebook advertising-management platform Efficient Frontier in November. Six months earlier, Efficient Frontier had acquired Facebook page-management platform Context Optional.
Adobe Social is an enterprise social platform competing with Buddy Media and Involver, enabling things like automated content marketing and social sweepstakes and competitions.
Customers tend to be medium to large…
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HCL Unica
Score 7.9 out of 10
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HCL Unica (acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018) is a suite of enterprise marketing management tools including marketing automation with cross-channel campaign management, budgeting and forecasting, project workflow management, asset management, brand management and spend management.
I used Adobe Social when I use to have my own business on social media. After many months I was having no success in finding the correct clients for my products. Using Adobe Social I was able to market and discover different ways of searching for the correct clients and later on helped my business grow.
I think it is wel suited for a business with a lot of one on one relations in the database. For example a supermarket that sells products to a client and gives a reduction on that product. It is nice if the selection process is not to complex and does not involve to many calculations. It is also nice if it is very clear what you want to follow up. In our environment we have lots of many-to-many relations. for example one product is held by more then one client. And that client might have more of those products with other clients. These kind of situation demands for a lot of calculations with derived fields(*), and there things go far too slow. Unica is probably not such a good solution for us, because our environment is too complex, and so is to process of creating the selection, we often have to change things in the selection flows. Because of the complexity it is difficult to see what the flow is exactly doing afterwoods, it also takes to much time to modify existing campaigns. The interface is not handy to work with, if you have long lists of variables, of tables or derived fields(*) you have to scroll through trough them, you can not really search them or reorder them. You can not drag and drop fields or other objects like derived fields in the flow, what would be easy if you have to make frequent changes to the proces flow. When you copy objects something the content of the object changes because the links with other objects or lost. (*) derived field: field to calculate something
Adobe Social lacks strengths, as I believe Adobe themselves have acknowledged, given their decision not to continue support or development. But if I need to list three strengths, the first would be it can publish to some social media platforms with a success rate of over 50%. If that's a strength.
It has workflow processes, but they are over-complicated and poorly designed.
It has some basic analytics, but Adobe consultants usually recommend referring to Adobe Analytics instead. Which is great if you actually use Adobe Analytics.
Ability to translate Multiple SQL queries into a very easy to use visual GUI.
Provides the ability to pre-define segments, run them once in off hours, store them in their own system tables for quick youth and a significant reduction in CPU utilization on the database.
It’s use of Reusable objects. Including user variables to pre-define calculations one time, macros that you can create and pass values to parameterize the SQL code And the creation of templates to easily replicate work.
It’s ability to bring in external data on the fly that can very easily be mapped into any flowchart.
It’s flexibility and creating UNIX script via triggers to automate sending of files to multiple vendors with different FTP sites
It’s flexibility in the output layouts that it can create.
It would be great if Adobe scheduled video uploads for Twitter.
A time change in a social post automatically puts the post back to Level 1 of approvals. It can be a big hassle to have to start the process over for such a small change.
Adobe uses a different algorithm to measure engagement our company does. It would be great to upload your own algorithm into Adobe.
Greater integration of real time (Interact) capabilities with outbound channels, in particular IBM eMessage Email & SMS delivery.
Additional outbound channels to be integrated into eMessage, including Facebook Fanpage & Twitter DM broadcasts. At the moment these are possible only through custom additional integration.
Support for additional marketing database technology, e.g. MySQL, Exasol, ParAccel, WX2.
Provision of database technology with software purchase, as Web technology (IBM WebSphere Express) is supplied for free, but no database is supplied - since IBM also market DB2, which is a supported technology it seems a shame.
I wasn't in charge of making the actual management decision, but I would absolutely renew Adobe Social. As I mentioned, it provides strong and in-depth analytics and listening tools. The reports that it generates are very thorough and easy to read. I loved the platform and would recommend it to anyone
There are three main factors to renew a licence: 1) Cost to migrate to another platform would be rather expensive and time consuming, plus the requirement of retraining employees to use a new tool 2) It has been proven time and time again that it is a market leader in the space (10 years +) 3) It can be built upon, with the addition of additional IBM EMM modules - despite theories it does have very strong digital capabilities.
The reason why I give this rating is that the overall platform is simple to use. You don't need to be tech-savvy or have a vast understanding of how to work a marketing tool. It is very simple to use compared to different platforms and you learn a lot of different ways to build your business.
The reason why I give this a 9 out of 10 in terms of support is because of the mobile app functionality. I have had many issues in terms of logging in and also loading pages. The app overall is easy to use but at what cost? Other than that it is great and I still enjoy Adobe Social.
Training was long and a little confusing. While a number of features carried over, they were still covered in this elongated training. It would have been nice to have training tailored to experience level with the product.
The implementation was done during our POC. We had a very mixed experience here, and have had some issues arise since based on the way the tool was implemented. An Adobe employee went ahead and made a change to our account that was unauthorized (helpful for our implementation) which caused issues in on boarding another team who needed the same change, but could not get it done without costly Adobe certification
- We had to rebuild a part of the datamart afterwards to tighten up and simplify the selection process. But as it was too time consuming to rebuild all the existing campaigns, we no run campaigns on different versions of the datamart. - The response tracking of the campaigns never worked out well, it was impossible to implement a direct response where there is a link between the lead and the response in our operational process
Hootsuite Enterprise is superior in many ways, but the biggest factor is probably that it is constantly evolving and adding new features, working directly with social media companies ahead of new releases. Adobe seems to have stopped developing their product.
The contact history and the response history are so powerful. You can track whatever you want to help the call center to push relevant offers to our customer. In addition, predictive models can be built, with patience, in IBM Campaign. If you have some complaints from the call center about any campaigns, you can easily validate it into the contact or response history.
Although we chose Adobe Social believing it could provide ROI metrics we could not get elsewhere, that turned out not to be the case. Site Catalyst can give us everything we need without Adobe Social
Adobe Social did not create greater efficiencies and speed up our activity within social media. In fact, it has done the oppposite. It is very cumbersome with little clear benefit.
