Salesforce's big bet: Marketing will be social

Salesforce has acquired Radian 6 last year.  Earlier this year, Salesforce added Buddy Media.  Salesforce has been making investments on social media for a while.  They are now combining these with Chatter and making a big bet on marketing.  Led by social media explosion, Salesforce is betting that CMOs will look for  SaaS marketing tool.



It's not just Salesforce jumping in to provide marketing solution.  Oracle, Adobe, and Google are all putting their own pieces together to enhance their marketing tools to become social.  All of these companies have made investments on social media recently, and they are seeing the same trend.  More and more marketing teams are looking to invest on social media marketing, and driving product selection decisions.

Social Media Spend as a Percent of Marketing Budget
Source: CMOSurvey.org

Combining the emergence of social marketing tool with explosion of data from ubiquitous mobile devices, it's easy to see how big data analytics will be the next important piece to cloud marketing tool offering.

Michael Lazerow: the guy behind Buddy Media

Buddy Media is getting acquired by Salesforce for $800 million.  It is the biggest exit from NYC-based start-up in last 5 years.  The guy behind Buddy Media is Michael Lazerow.

He made an personal video post after signing the deal:

Salesforce += BuddyMedia

Even before ink is dry on Oracle acquisition of Vitrue last Wednesday, there is another report of social media marketing company getting acquired by bigger fish.  Salesforce looks to be in its final stage of acquiring Buddy Media for over $800 million.  All Things D reported that Salesforce was a winner in competitive bidding war with Google.

Out of major social media marketing platform providers, Vitrue (Oracle), Context Optional (Adobe), and Buddy Media (Salesforce) have been picked up in the past 12 months.  This would leaves Involver, Wildfire, Syncapse and Shoutlet.  I would think that Google and other big email marketing players are looking to pick up social media marketing platform in the near future.

Given heightened awareness around Facebook, all these activities confirms that big companies are seeing opportunities to go after social media marketing as yet another marketing channel.  This is great news for everyone in social media space, as I blogged earlier.

I think we are still in early stage of social media marketing maturity cycle.  There is still a room for social media marketing solution that goes beyond traditional marketing team and letting everyone become their own marketers, just like how Google Adwords created a market place for search display ads.

And of course new social networks like Pinterest, Path and Tumblr will keep all of social media marketing tools  on their toes to constantly catch up and respond.