Experience Delivers

Build brand, drive demand and extend your reach with web experience management

In just one week, we all will be turning to London for Europe’s biggest digital marketing event of the year: Adobe Summit, The Digital Marketing Conference. Following on last year’s success, we can again expect a great community of digital marketing leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs who are sure to deliver fascinating insights and best practices to solve marketers’ growing challenges.  No doubt that next week will spark new ideas and accelerate many others. Here’s a peak at what’s in store for Web Experience Management:

·         Curious about the true value of enabling marketers to self-publish in 40 languages and 72 countries to establish a digital presence that captures and sustains their audience’s attention?  Then join SAP’s Shawn Burns, Global VP of Digital Marketing and our Loni Stark in their session on “How to Stand Out: Survival of the Most Relevant.”

·         Interested in taking a closer look at how pharmaceutical reps’ sales presentations, delivered on a iPad, can be authored centrally with Adobe Experience Manager, Analytics and PhoneGap to return actionable leads and meeting notes? Don’t miss Miro Walker, CEO of Cognifide and Cédric Hüsler show how to “Build blockbuster mobile apps the easy way!”

·         Looking to have several of the most popular digital marketing myths debunked? Get great insights from Stevin Treurniet, Senior Marketing Consultant at DSM and Adobe’s Marcel Boucher on the do’s and don’ts of personalisation and brand engagement in their session, “The marketer's guide to solutions for building brands online.”

These are just three of the twelve sessions in the Web Experience Management track. There’s much more, including sessions focused on:

·         Digital Asset Management – how marketers are taking new approaches to creating, managing, and delivering digital assets for dynamic multichannel experiences

·         Experience-driven commerce: Turning passion into purchase

·         The 10 hottest new features in Adobe Experience Manager

Don’t miss it!  Choose your Web Experience Management session before they fill up.

All of this great content and networking comes on the heels of the newest release of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM 5.6) which features a host of new capabilities in Digital Asset Management, Social and Mobile, as well as even deeper integration with other Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions and Adobe Creative Cloud.   

Adobe Summit is the premier opportunity to hear directly from Adobe, our customer and partners gathering in London why Adobe Experience Manager has been named THE leader Web Content Management for Digital Customer Experience in latest Forrester Wave report.

We look forward to seeing you in London!

Gunnar Klauberg (@Aeroid)

As mobile Internet use increases, new devices find their way into the pockets of consumers around the globe and tablets replace PC’s, everyone’s feeling the pressure to go and do mobile, sooner rather than later.

But how? App or mobile Web? Native or hybrid? iOS or Android? Responsive? All those options can make things seem confusing.

So let’s start from the consensus: Mobile will be massive!

But that’s about it in terms of common ground. For each product, market, region, age group, and income the needs of the mobile visitor look very different. But, in fact, that’s actually the opportunity for digital and mobile marketers—there is no single truth or recipe for success. The opportunity is to quickly make sense of your customers’ mobile needs and priorities and use the most flexible approach to optimize for success.

With the new release of Adobe Experience Manager (and CQ 5.6)—which we announced today —marketers get the support they need to be flexible and shape spot-on mobile experiences.

Surprisingly, many companies still don’t have a mobile presence.

IAB counted 45% of the 2012 Fortune 500 list without one (June 2012) and Magus found 80% of the FTSE100 missing out (Feb 2012). The relative lack of depth of mobile content and options to transact with big brands is another issue. After a couple generations of touch phones with more than manageable screen sizes, it’s a growing surprise to me every time such numbers are published. 

When I read a recent article by SapientNitro’s Tatjana Dallmann-Krieger on mobile brand experiences (Note: article in German) I wondered what made her recommendation for mobile so special? Don’t get me wrong, her points are all valid: Relevance, Usability, Design, Performance, Fun. And more than often, I personally wish people would avoid technical gimmicks and pay a bit more attention to these. 

Any effective communication needs to be relevant, understandable, timely, and pleasant. Many would know this from preparing a presentation, for example, rather than designing a mobile experience. If you took the time and prepared your slides correctly, you would research the topic, map out your audience’s needs, organize your ideas, test the concept, draft your communication structure, design slides, and rehearse. This is a proven way to influence and drive some action, e.g. a sale.

Interestingly a presentation and a mobile experience are very similar. You get the chance of more or less exclusive attention with your audience for a short amount of time, which you could lose pretty quickly. In mobile you have the additional challenge that politeness does not apply. In presentations it’s not uncommon to walk out after 30 seconds. Lost attention can be regained, but in mobile there are many possible mistakes leading to terminal abandonment of the communication scheme by the customer.

The uniqueness in designing effective mobile experiences doesn’t lie in “reduction”. Stressing the presentation analogy, great presentations often are completely minimized: less text, less information, more audience, more relevance. Yet, we have quite different kinds of “performances” in mobile and stage presentations, both the app’s and the presenter’s effective use of resources to influence are key but only unique by way of the medium used. I would call this “technique”, for which design needs to be aware.

So what is it? What makes mobile experience design so unique? I think Tatjana has a great point when she writes, “By no other way does the brand message gets so close to the audience then by the mobile device accompanying their owners around the clock throughout the day.”

When you think of a mobile experience as a constant companion, it will allow customers to remember you as an aid for certain situations in your daily life. The brand/app that is there quickly when needed and is humble enough to not waste precious time on the go will be well remembered. In this setting, it’s totally okay to leave a shopping basket half-filled or a transaction incomplete. It’s a mobile reality that I have to switch attention abruptly. A great experience allows customers to pick up where they left off and for the context to be personal. This personal context is the coherency of the brand in the customer’s multi-device world, allowing me to connect to it and continue from all my devices.

Today, none of the other devices in this multi-device world are as important as mobile, because its ubiquitous and personal nature is unique and key to brand experiences.

Gunnar Klauberg / @Aeroid
Product Marketing, Adobe CQ and Web Experience Management Mobile

The new definition of mobile conversations will put new requirements on content accessibility and “conversation optimization” (hoping we all remember Cluetrain Manifesto thesis #1).

We have seen a few attempts to reintroduce “voice” into mobile. It seems to be a contradiction, as it is the technology that was born around voice conversations. With Siri things are getting a bit more serious than those early voice commands and address book lookups that brought us short moments of angst of being misunderstood and calling our boss on the weekend, or worse. We now can interact with services and content available outside of mobile phones with a still somewhat limited conversation. But this additional accessibility of the mobile device is now promising to go beyond just initiating calls.