“For the first time ever, it’s possible to directly connect your social media marketing to real business results. Fans and mentions are great, but what really matters is how these impact your bottom line [...] start seeing the quantifiable value of social media.”

Businesses can filter the data generated by the SocialAnalytics tool in order to measure “the value of the Facebook like” as Chad Warren, the senior manager for product marketing at Adobe, explained at the SocialAnalytics launch in London last week.  According to news site V3 the new Adobe software gathers information from a number of social networking platforms, drawn from across the web, and integrates the results, providing detailed reporting on just how many conversions take place, and how many times a brand or product is mentioned, in realtime:

“Adobe SocialAnalytics allows companies to capture all publicly available data from Facebook and Twitter, as well as comments from blogs, forums, message boards and other popular sites such as Dailymotion, Hulu and YouTube.”

CMO.COM reported this week that social media marketing is now established as the key advertising strategy for businesses online, and a rapidly expanding empire, drawing the analogy that if Facebook were a country populated by its 750 million users, then it would in fact be the third largest in the world, and going on to state: “Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day; and one in four of adults over 65 now participates in a social-networking site”, there is no question, that this is a remarkably long reach for businesses to extend amongst the online community.

Businesses using the SocialAnalytics platform are also able to conduct searches that are more complex, eliminating and including data to obtain granular detail about products or brands on the web.  This is done by utilising a ‘natural language process algorithm’ enabling the SocialAnalytics software to identify whether the mention of a product or brand online is positive or negative, to within 80% to 90% accuracy, as V3‘s Khidr Suleman explains:

“The results are then displayed in graphical format showing mentions, page views, unique visitors and potential audience. Other parameters can also be displayed to generate correlations [...] the software can also analyse the sentiment of comments to show whether a brand is receiving positive or negative feedback.”

During the product launch, Morris went on to use the example of popstar Beyoncé announcing her pregnancy during the MTV Awards, which lead to a record 8,800 tweets being published per second; Adobe then used their SocialAnalytics software to track the effect on the MTV sites web traffic:

“SocialAnalytics enabled MTV to link spikes in Twitter mentions with activity on their web site, which is where they are selling ads.  MTV experienced a 40 per cent increase in hourly unique visitors and 55 per cent in hourly page views due to this announcement.”

Longer term plans for the software are to include the ability to monitor mentions made on Google+ and LinkedIn, a functionality that is currently under development.

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This was followed by holes found in Adobe Reader and Flash Player and perhaps unsurprisingly; Internet Explorer 7 and Windows MPEG2 ActiveX control.

Suspicious PDF file downloads were the top method for web based attacks representing nearly half of them. The report also found 6 attacks on Internet Explorer, 1 targeting Adobe’s Shockwave Flash and 2 that targeted MPEG2 ActiveX controls.

Although Internet Explorer was the most attacked browser it only had 45 reported vulnerabilities whereas Mozilla’s Firefox had 169, this shows that attacks are often based on the availability of a programs exploit code.

Surprisingly only one browser has less vulnerabilities found than Internet Explorer; the new kid on the block Opera only had 25, with Apple’s Safari showing 94 and Google’s Chrome had 46 found.

All of the browsers had fairly similar windows of exposure which worked out to be roughly 1 day. This refers to the timescale between when an exploit code affecting a vulnerability id made public and when it is patched.

Chrome and Safari showed the worst results in this with Chrome taking 2 days and Safari taking its time with 13 days.

The report would appear to have shown negatives for all of the browsers but the prevailing story will inevitably be the validation of just how vulnerable Microsoft’s Internet Explorer really is.

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The partnership between Google and Adobe will see Adobe’s Flash Player coming pre-bundled with the Google Chrome browser. This move has been met with mixed reactions as many experts have begun to question Google’s commitment to emerging web standards such as HTML5. They are evidently favouring the use of flash which is just a proprietary plug-in for internet apps of the richer sort.

Al Hilwan, analyst for IDC, believes that the partnership may be more beneficial for Adobe than it is for Google. The Flash player is a truly ubiquitous tool, 99% of all internet users have downloaded it, probably within the first 24 hours of having downloaded an new browser, it is that fundamental.

This new partnership will take away the annoyance of having to download the plug-in for your internet browser, and perhaps more significantly it will allow for any flash updates to be downloaded via Google Chrome’s automatic update feature.

Whilst this will be incredibly beneficial to Adobe, Apple are going in the opposite direction from Google and are still refusing to integrate Flash capabilities to the iPhone or iPad as they claim that it takes up resources.

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