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NEW YORK – Salesforce.com brought its Dreamforce event east to New York to hammer home its message that “business is social” to enterprise customers and partners in the Big Apple.
At the New York event, known as Cloudforce 2012, Salesforce.com set forth is social business agenda and introduced some new pieces to its cloud computing pie. For instance, the company introduced next-generation analytics for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Announced at Dreamforce in September in San Francisco, the Marketing Cloud ecosystem enables companies to identify sales leads, discover advocates, uncover social influence, track sentiment in multiple languages and more—empowering marketers to make better business decisions based on social media data, Salesforce.com said.
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said the marketing cloud came together out of two acquisitions the company did, Buddy Media and Radian6. Michael Lazerow, chief marketing officer of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and former CEO of Buddy Media, said although the Salesforce Marketing Cloud only launched last month, they have built an ecosystem of 20 strong partners. Indeed, Salesforce.com said 55 percent of the Fortune 100, and leading brands, including Air Canada, Carnival Cruise Lines, Ford, Hewlett-Packard, Southwest Airlines and Unilever, are turning connections into customers for life with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
With the expanded Marketing Cloud ecosystem, companies are able to make better business decisions based on the massive amounts of social media data created every day, all from a single dashboard.
“150 million social conversations are happening every day, and now companies are truly able to take social insight and turn it into action by focusing on the conversations that matter,” Lazerow said in a statement. “Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s new social analytics help brands discern signal from noise to deliver real business value.”
IDC reports that spending on social networking is up 47 percent, the highest growth in spending for any technology category. A 2012 IBM CEO study reveals that social will become one of the top two ways companies can engage customers at the expense of traditional methods. And according to a University of California at Berkeley study, social media users create enough data every day to equal the print collection of the U.S. Library of Congress, the world’s largest library.
Today, companies are looking for ways to tap into the value of social media data. In fact, a recent McKinsey Global Institute report states that companies that rely on brand recognition can increase margins by as much as 60 percent by using social technologies to connect with customers and to generate sharper consumer insights. The Marketing Cloud is the most comprehensive social marketing suite that enables companies to manage social listening, content, engagement, advertising and measurement all in one place.
“The Marketing Cloud, the most comprehensive social marketing suite, announced its next generation of analytics tools that help companies shift from passively listening on social media to generating business results as they turn insights into action,” said Robert Begg in a post on the Salesforce Website.
“Social media has a growing impact on our B2B marketing practices at CA Technologies,” said Michelle Accardi, vice president of Internet Marketing, CA Technologies. “Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to go beyond listening to proactively engaging with customers. With the social intelligence provided by insights, now we can quickly distinguish which social posts ask questions, express a need or problem, and identify our brand champions and act on that information.”
The expanded Marketing Cloud ecosystem brings together 20 of the industry’s leading social analytics vendors to help companies accelerate their shift from passive social listening to driving real business results, turning insights into action. Now, Marketing Cloud customers can access sophisticated analytics that enable them to identify sales leads, discover advocates, detect trends for any topic or keyword, uncover social influence and analyze content in 17 languages. In a few clicks, users can select multiple analytics services to create a dashboard that delivers a single social snapshot of their company using the analytics that are most valuable to their specific business.
The Marketing Cloud ecosystem includes partners Bitext, Calais, Caterva, Clarabridge Link, EpiAnalytics, Kanjoya, Klout, Kred, LeadSift, Lexalytics, LinguaSys, Lymbix, Metavana, OpenAmplify, PeekAnalytics, Rapleaf, Solariat, Soshio, The SelfService Company and Trendspottr.
The new Marketing Cloud credits-based pricing model is designed to offer companies an easy and flexible way to pilot, purchase and combine social analytics offerings from 20 partners.
Generally available today, the Marketing Cloud basic edition includes social listening, content, engagement, advertising, workflow, automation and measurement, and starts at $5,000 per month, which includes 1,000 partner credits.
Additional blocks of 10,000 credits can be purchased for $100 per month.
Marketing Cloud social analytics from partners as add-on packages are now available in the Marketing Cloud dashboard.