Oracle += Involver += Collective Intellect

Involver made an announcement today that they are getting snapped up by Oracle.  This is Oracle's third social acquisition following Vitrue in May and Collective Intellect in June.  Considering there are quite a bit of overlap between Involver and Vitrue and rumors that Involver was on the market looking for buyer, it does not look like it was a great exit for folks at Involver.

Oracle is on an acquisition roll;
who will it be next?

What is certain, however, is that there is a definite pickup in level of acquisitions in social media marketing and analytics space.

As Oracle enterprise solution becomes more social to compete with Adobe, SAP and Salesforce, this only means social media marketing segment will experience faster consolidation during the second half of 2012.  There are still several players out there in social media marketing space, such as Wildfire, Syncapse, and Shoutlet.  There will be increasing pressure on these companies to find strong partners or merge with bigger players.

Eventually I see social media marketing, social CRM, social analytics and social monitoring companies getting merged into one category.  All these platforms are there to help customers listen to what their customers are saying and uses that information to engage with them better.  In other words, social media is a communication channel through which company can have informal conversation with its customers.

In 12 - 18 months out, we'll start seeing social getting tightly integrated with enterprise marketing, CRM, and analytics software.  For social media companies, they must act now to broaden their story.  For customers, they must realize social not is a fad going away, and start putting together strategy to leverage social.