Adobe has announced the general availability of Adobe Social, its social marketing solution, which utilizes the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, and includes extensive analytics into social engagement, as well as ad and app creation, and engagementn and social listening tools all in one platform.

We had a chat with Adobe’s John Mellor and Jeff Jordan, who demoed the offering, and it’s quite impressive. “We’ve moved beyond CRM without leaving it behind,” Jordan says.

“The prob­lem for most mar­keters is that they have a hard time see­ing what influ­ence the rela­tion­ships they have nur­tured on social net­works have on cus­tomer behav­ior,” says Adobe’s Lawrence Mak. “Where exactly does it make an impact? The ‘soft met­rics’ of social marketing—Likes, com­ments and retweets—don’t directly point to how social impacts pur­chase deci­sions along the cus­tomer jour­ney. So instead of strate­giz­ing based on busi­ness data and results, mar­keters are rely­ing on their intu­ition that social media impacts their business.”

The analytics go so far as to let you see which conversations (and who is engaging in them) are driving revenue, and how much these conversations are actually worth in a dollar amount.

The app creation feature is pretty cool in that it allows you to quickly and easily make a social app with some simple dragging and dropping, potentially saving tons of time and costs. Jordan says with this product they’ve “sidestepped the entire process” of app development.

And of course there are measurement and targeting tools for the apps you create.

This includes personalized landing pages:

Then you get to analyze your campaigns:

“We’ve all been there, that awk­ward ado­les­cent phase,” says Adobe’s Brad Rencher. “For­tu­nately, most of us, but not all of us (you know who you are) grow out of it. Social mar­ket­ing is no dif­fer­ent. After an awk­ward ado­les­cent phase, social is becom­ing a grown-up con­tribut­ing mem­ber of busi­ness. Just like those year­book pho­tos that we hope will never sur­face — with the mul­lets, braces, and unfor­tu­nate “why-did-I-ever-wear-that” wardrobe com­bi­na­tions — so has it been with social. Like my two high-school friends who didn’t want to leave it all behind and cried on grad­u­a­tion night, social doesn’t have a choice; it has to grow up. Social must mature from fuzzy met­rics to real busi­ness impact and rev­enue, because that is the influ­ence met­ric that mat­ters most to businesses.”

“Our cus­tomers rep­re­sent the top brands in every ver­ti­cal mar­ket, and they’ve lived it,” he adds. “They have been invest­ing in the future of social since they saw its poten­tial to cre­ate more mean­ing­ful expe­ri­ences for and authen­ti­cally con­nect to con­sumers. Our customer’s drive to deal with this new real­ity is the rea­son we built Adobe Social.”

Adobe has spent about $2.5 billion in the digital marketing department over the past couple of years, and this appears to be the real beginning of what we will see from the company in that space.