• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 20, 2011

Adobe will launch a suite of multichannel marketing tools today that sit on the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform. The move is the first step toward tying back-end business technology and content management to social signals. It allows marketers to tap data across an entire company to launch and monitor campaigns.

Multichannel marketers can deploy the suite as a stand-alone system or integrate each of the five modules with their company's back-end enterprise resource planning, merchandise, customer relationship management database, inventory replenishment system, and more.

Web Experience Management, Integrated Content Review, Social Brand Engagement, Selection & Enrollment, Unified Workspace, and Customer Communications make up the set of tools supported by the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform.

The tools were designed to "map to the stages, or decision points, an online consumer goes through," such as learning about products and services through email, mobile, search or social, said Kevin Cochrane, Adobe's vice president of enterprise marketing. "Companies need to think about integrating all their tools," he said. "If a customer is having a support problem with a product or a service, you don't want to cross-sell him a product or a service at that time because he'll only get enraged."

The three tools -- Social Brand Engagement, Selection & Enrollment, and Unified Workspace, which provide consumers with insight into a brand's products -- will launch in beta, but should become available by the end of the year. Some companies have begun to build communities and marketing campaigns with the tools.

For example, Kellogg's has tapped Social Brand Engagement to build a branded online community, Kashi.com, a social community where 800,000 registered users get tips on healthy living. Here consumers can access coupons and recipes for Kashi foods. Dunkin' Donuts also captures consumer profiles in the Adobe platform to provide targeted promotions through a variety of advertising channels.

Aside from the profile information stored in the Adobe platform, the tools will pull profiles from Facebook, LinkedIn and other sites across the Internet to build a social graph about the brand's customers. The social graph is created with rights permission by the consumer, of course.

"Our heritage in marketing comes from the creation of desktop tools, but last year we added analytics, with the acquisition of Omniture," Cochrane said. "By leveraging the ubiquity of our runtime platform to deliver engaging dynamic digital experiences we can support cross-channel marketing from desktop to mobile to iOS devices."

Adobe integrated apps acquired from a series of acquisitions with its traditional document services. This means all core content and document services -- from business process management to rights management, Web application services to digital asset management -- are built into one platform.

Cochrane, who last year landed at Adobe through the acquisition of Day Software, said the suite literally takes four minutes to download. But companies that want to tie the tools into back-end ERP or CRM systems will find it takes a little longer and requires IT support.