FLIRTing with the Crowds

The professional creative world is stuck with Adobe. That’s one thing that is not going to change anytime soon. However, although the usability of Adobe products is usually on a pretty ok level, Adobe’s products are far from being perfect and stable, while at the same time demanding increasing amounts of firepower with each iteration.

The most demanding users are naturally the ones with greatest pains and now they have joined forces to create Dear Adobe, a site that gathers Adobe users’ gripes from all around the world and facilitates the wisdom of crowds to find the most popular issues of concern.

Now, a few years ago this would probably have been handled by Adobe’s lawyers through an ultimatum to shut the site down on the threat of a lawsuit. How times change: Adobe’s staff has actually started to work with the site’s maintainers to work out what their users’ most acute concerns are and how to deal with them. This shows a great understanding by Adobe of the tenets of true marketing spirit in the age of social media - joining and fostering a genuine conversation. You can’t always invite the people to your party. However, if they’re having a party without you but still talking about you, you should go in and join the talk with an open mind; close them down and tell them to shut up and they’ll just move to another address - and they won’t have any nicer things to say about you than they had before…