Salesforce.com announced today that it is combining acquisitions Radian6 and Buddy Media into one Social Studio product that combines both analytics and listening with engagement and publishing.
The new product takes the listening and analytics capabilities of New Brunswick-based Radian6’s software and combines it with larger New York-based firm Buddy Media’s social publishing software and bundles it all into the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud suite. In a press release, Salesforce summarized the features of its newly relaunched software:
- Collaborative Calendars – Manage all future and past content with an intuitive and fully featured planning & scheduling tools designed for teams. Content calendars are interactive, scalable, and can filter views by all post metadata, including label, author, status and social account.
- Publishing – Create and schedule content for global networks including Facebook and Twitter with an intelligent network centric platform, beyond a simple text entry tool. Compose content, specific to each network to deliver an unmatched experience. Marketers can confidently compose content, and preview prior to going live.
- Integrated Engagement – Monitor and respond directly across global social networks with unmatched simplicity. Ensure active engagement pre, during and post campaign – and align engagement objectives, teams and permissions with other content goals. Use macros — automation for classifying, reporting and routing content — and workflow to scale engagement.
- Enhanced Analytics – Monitor how content is performing, what is performing best, and view the analytics of a particular post or a subgroup of posts by label, campaigns, or any particular target.
It also emphasized that the Social Studio software is an open platform and independent software vendors (ISVs) are welcome to build applications on top of it. A select partner program launched along with the software today and included Getty Images, Kontera, Nexgate, Pressly, Rallyverse, Shutterstock, ShopIgniter and Trendspottr.
Toronto-based Pressly says it’s contributing a tool that allows Social Studio users to easily create a branded online page that companies can use to share their own content, or their curated content. It has embedded calls-to-action and advertising that is designed to drive conversions. The content’s impact can be tracked with analytics.
Analyst Peter Kim of Constellation Research described the move as one more step towards Salesforce providing an end-to-end marketing solution into one consolidated package. He views it as competitive against Oracle’s Marketing Cloud and Adobe’s Marketing Cloud. It’s likely marketers will be feeling the pressure to decide whether to place their bets one a sole solution or attempt to cherry-pick different software pieces for their needs, he writes:
“Brands will be increasingly offered incentives to commit to a single vendor’s marketing cloud and must weigh the benefits and discount of a single solution versus the risk and cost of self-integrating best-in-class point solutions. Very few brands operate entirely under a single vendor’s cloud today and this is a zero-sum game. For example, JetBlue is referenced as using Radian6 Buddy Media social studio and last week JetBlue was referenced as a Responsys customer. What happens next? Does JetBlue convert to the entire Oracle Marketing Cloud, ditch Responsys for ExactTarget, or continue to operate different tools in what appears to be different silos of the organization? Most brands are going to be asking themselves similar questions over the months ahead.”
Click through to read Kim’s full assessment.