Is Adobe Socal the answer to social media measurement

Since the beginning of social media, it has long been debated how useful the channel of communication is for businesses. When creating messages, businesses often craft them to reach a specific audience. Posting these messages and hoping they reach these potential people is no longer enough. Knowing the specific outcomes behind social media efforts is becoming more and more necessary as people are looking to find faster and more effective ways to reach their goals.

Previously, there were only a couple of ways for people to track their outcomes. A popular tool, Klout, uses a scoring system for the amount of interaction displayed over several different social media websites. Also, people were able to track how many clicks were produced by a web link through sites such as Bitly. Quite possibly the most effective was Radian6 for seeing how messages reached people. Although these were steps in the right direction, these services still leave a lot to be desired.

Recently, Adobe expanded its Digital Marketing Suite efforts with the new Adobe Social. Launched in Sept.  2012, the program is meant to help people learn their ROI (return on investment) for social media.  The program is intended to actually provide a dollar amount matched up with a specific action taken, such as how a mention by someone makes a difference in revenue and not just who messages are seen by.

Users of the program can connect their Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, blogs and other platforms for evaluation and measurement. Centralized publishing, automated targeting and personalization, conversation monitoring, tracking competitors and application creation are some of the other features of this new product, which can all add to the overall ROI for a campaign.

Now, the question remains on how useful this tool really is. At this time, it is probably too early to speculate the success of the program. No reviews have been posted for the product and Adobe is just now starting to promote Social through commercials. If the product can really do what it claims, it will undoubtedly be a useful material for any social media effort.