We took a few moments with Jennifer Deming, Group Manager and Content Strategy for the Creative Suite Business Unit to chat about the Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5) (client) launch on April 12th.

According to Deming, who led the Social Media efforts for this release, some key opportunities made it apparent that social media was the way to go, including:

• The excitement of the release – Creative professionals within the online community have been waiting with anticipation.
• The tools in place to measure – The acquisition of Omniture increased the potential to formalize how the efforts are measured.

The “aha” moment that really brought the power of this effort back to Deming was when Mike Saviage, Adobe’s Vice President of Investor Relations, called and said “let’s talk”. He wanted a briefing on the CS5 social media strategy. The efforts had reached Wall Street and came back to him through his peers.

As Deming states in the video, “There is no turning back.” From here on out Adobe is engaging and talking with customers in a way that will allow them to informally influence the product.

Following are just a few results from the pre-launch phase:

• Key Creative Suite accounts grew from 589,000 to 907,166 fans/followers as of April 5th, representing a growth rate of 54% from where they started.
• The first several days after the announcement, CS5 and Content-Aware Fill (a new feature in Photoshop CS5) made the Twitter trending topics in the United States and some parts of the world.
• In partnership with Gowalla, a global treasure hunt program called “The 12 Days of CS5″ gave creative professionals an opportunity to pick up a virtual copy of Creative Suite. @Creativesuite dropped hints about a location and the lucky person to arrive and check-in at the location at the time of the drop received a Creative Suite collection of their choice. The program garnered positive feedback from customers for the innovative approach.
• Adobe also seeded “sneak peek” videos, and the Content-Aware Fill video that showcases a highly beneficial innovation for the creative professional had more than 1.8 million views on YouTube (2.3 million views as of 4/12) and 40 million media impressions in less than one week.

Video Credit: Gary Goldhammer, Edelman Digital, Los Angeles