Salesforce.com's Social Marketing Cloud uses the assets from the company's Radian6 acquisition to provide a complete, Web-based social marketing platform.
Salesforce.com
(NYSE:CRM) Nov. 30
introduced its Social Marketing Cloud, an effort to get
ahead of the rest of the market by using social media to market and sell
products to customers.
The
Social Marketing Cloud leverages and builds on assets from
Radian6,
a social media monitoring company Salesforce.com picked up earlier this year.
As the leading provider of customer relationship management (CRM) software in
the cloud, social media monitoring is crucial to the company's clout among
Web-based businesses.
Salesforce.com
is propping up the Marketing Cloud with five pillars, which Salesforce.com CEO
Marc Benioff and his lieutenants will detail at the company's Cloudforce event
in New York City later this morning. This new cloud strikes at the heart of
Salesforce.com's strategy around social, mobile cloud software for businesses.
Marcel
LeBrun, senior vice president and general manager of Salesforce.com's Radian6
unit, discussed Marketing Cloud pillars with
eWEEK ahead of the event.
The
first component of the Marketing Cloud is Radian6's social monitoring software,
LeBrun said. Radian6 "listens" to more than 150 million sources, such
as Facebook, Twitter and blogs on the Web, to help customers get a handle on
not only what is being said about their company, but what is being said about
industry rivals.
Social
monitoring's function is delivering chief marketing officers (CMOs) information
to get a competitive advantage by knowing the way their business is perceived.
Salesforce.com is charging $600 a month per deployment for social monitoring software.
The
next pillar is social insights, or the ability to go deeper into industry
knowledge about a brand. Social insights pulls capabilities from some of the
best insights technologies in the world.
The
Marketing Cloud will include influence analysis from Klout and intention
analysis from OpenAmplify, as well as OpenCalais' mentions of places, products
and other objects. Customers can pay for those insights, which are priced at $60
per user, per month and are available now.
The
next pillar, social engagement, is another Radian6 technology. LeBrun said his
team has added a software extensions library, such as hottest memes or topics;
Facebook management capabilities to let employees respond to conversations on
their Facebook page from Radian6; and one-click Salesforce.com integration.
This
last effort lets any conversation happening in Radian6 be turned into a contact
or a case on Salesforce.com with a single click.
A
brand-new product, and the next pillar, is the social hub, Salesforce.com's
stab at a workflow and process automation application. This is an important
component that connects social applications to other enterprise systems that customers
use.
"How
do you scale the 20,000 conversations per day and get precisely those
conversations about this product to that product manager?" LeBrun said.
Social
hub, which is available in limited release for $1,200 per deployment, per month, will
build a social profile and contact record inside Salesforce.com CRM about
anyone talking about a particular product.
The
last pillar, SiteForce, is a development platform based on Salesforce.com's
Heroku platform. This is a drag-and-drop development tools studio that lets
businesses build their Websites entirely in the cloud. SiteForce costs $9,900
per year.
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