It’s been a little while since we entered the world of Penny Wilson, Hootsuite’s CMO, so I took the chance to chat with her at Adobe Summit last week, and specifically to congratulate her on the news that Hootsuite had been named Adobe Exchange Partner of the Year.
I asked her about the synergies between Adobe and the social media management platform. “I think they have the best-in-class marketing and creative cloud products, and they saw us as being best-in-class in social. They have a social product, but they saw us as being leaps and bounds above that; and obviously saw the opportunity that social provides for marketers and across the whole organization.”
Hootsuite, said Wilson, has a very open eco-system: “It’s easy to partner with us.” Hootsuite co-sells with the Adobe sales team, and helps craft solutions which plug directly into Adobe Experience or Creative Cloud customers’ platforms. Hootsuite itself uses Creative Cloud and is considering Experience Cloud as a future option.
Social, of course, is integral to CX for many customers. Does Wilson recognize competing on experience as a significant trend? “Absolutely. You see a lot of Chief Digital Officers, Chief Experience Officers, Chief Customer Officers, and what they’re looking at are ways to make that experience consistent across their organization, and then making it a much better experience. I think those are the companies that are differentiating themselves.”
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News of yet another acquisition by Accenture Interactive, which seems to have been sweeping up interesting point solutions recently (remember Macklevision?). This time, it’s MXM — or Meredith Accelerated Marketing — which the CX agency has agreed to acquire from the Meredith Corporation. MXM, not its prospective owner, is an integrated marketing agency, employing technologists (450 of them) alongside creative and performance marketing staff. The move is aimed at extending Accenture Interactive’s reach into the consumer brands, automotive, and financial services verticals, and expanding its studio footprint in key U.S. locations.
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Social media management is one thing, social analytics another, and here comes NetBase (a social media analytics platform) with a warning that poor social analytics can mean a hit on revenue. A new report on North American social media analytics use, based on interviews with some 700 professionals, claims that:
- 56% of those surveyed agree that social analytics make their campaigns more successful
- But 38% just don’t know (where are those metrics?)
- The most popular use of social for businesses is customer service (73%), but a surprising 53% of respondents thought real-time social reactions to negative comments “not important.”
The takeaway is that social is still not informing large swathes of business activity; and even where it’s seen as important — direct customer engagement — brands are not fully committing.
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Finally, what’s in your diary? The NY AdTech meet-up tonight should be top of your list. The topic is GDPR, there will be a happy hour, and our senior editor Hillary Adler will be moderating the former and enjoying the latter. Also coming up for us next week, the Demandbase ABM Innovation Summit in San Francisco, and Marketing United in Nashville; that one’s taking place in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Guess the Opry was booked already.
