Mediaboss Marketing

Salesforce has made some pretty hefty bets on social monitoring, engagement, content and advertising with the acquisitions of Radian6 and Buddy Media. As you may remember, the CRM giant shelled out $326 million for social media monitoring company Radian6, and most recently, social media marketing giant Buddy Media for $689 million. Today, Salesforce says it is bringing the best features from both platforms into one productthe Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

As the company explained in a briefing this week, the aim of the marketing cloud is to give campaign managers and Chief Marketing Officers the ability to turn insight into action when it comes to social signals and data. The key components of the product are social listening, social content, engagement, social ads, workflow and automation and measurement.

Salesforce says it is seeing a major transformation take place on the marketing industry due to the emergence of social networks. The company says that CMOs will surpass CIOs in spend on technology within the next five years and that social advertising will be the largest growth area of online advertising by 2013. Clearly theres a market opportunity for Salesforce to offer a comprehensive solution for CMOs that leverages the power of both Buddy Media and Radian6.

Here are the six components of the Marketing Cloud:

Social Listening: This allows users to listen to data from more than 400+ Million social sources, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, online communities and more, allowing companies to turn insight into action. The Marketing Cloud now supports a total of 17 languages for social listening, and with the launch of a new Apple native iOS app, social listening is also available via mobile devices.

Social Content: Marketing employees can create and deploy social content to customers wherever they are on social networks, websites and mobile devices. Customers can now add social components to all content to maximize reach and leverage asset libraries to maintain brand consistency. With more than 50 social applications available, ranging from contests to video players to photo galleries, companies can engage fans with content.

Social Engagement: Companies can respond and connect with customers on their channel of choice, build a community of advocates by connecting with customers when and where they are most engaged and spark conversations that extend beyond simple text by attaching videos, images and links. Users can access exactly what they need without sacrificing security through granular rights and permissions.

Social Advertising: The Marketing Cloud allows users to manage and execute optimized social ad campaigns on Facebook and other sites, including sponsored stories and mobile newsfeed ads. Companies now have the ability to turn engaging content into compelling social ads, and optimize them with demographics and KPIs, by leveraging data to identify which ads and demographics deliver the best performance.

Social Workflow and Automation: Users can run analysis and rules to organize the thousands of conversations happening across the web by automatically routing relevant social content for quick engagement and response. The Marketing Cloud automatically populates social customer profiles, helping marketers create relevant programs based on consumer interests to align sales and improve customer service.

Social Measurement: Businesses can now track campaign results in one dashboard and leverage real-time data to adapt campaigns to be more effective, and create new campaigns and show exactly how engagement is driving revenue or other conversions. Marketers can create multiple, custom dashboards via a library of drag-and-drop widgets to deliver relevant, actionable insight to everyone, from the community manager to the CMO.

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Salesforce Blends Buddy Media With Radian6 For Its New Social Marketing Cloud

When Salesforce acquired social marketing software company Buddy Media in June for $689 million, the CRM giants execs said the resulting Salesforce Marketing Cloudmerging Buddy and Salesforce-owned social analytics firm Radian6would result in the companys fourth billion-dollar business. At Salesforces annual Dreamforce conference today, the companys chairman and CEO Marc Benioff will provide attendees with a peek at what that business looks like.

While the Buddy Media acquisition only closed in mid-August, Buddy Medias and Radian6s technologies have already been integrated to the point of launching a unified social marketing suite.

At first glance, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the product most envisioned when the Buddy Media deal was announced. Marketers can use Radian6s social listening tools to gauge what their customers are interested in and then use Buddy Medias offerings to act on those insights. Thats something brands have been able to cobble together by working with multiple social marketing and analytics firms, but to get the insights to translate into actions, the marketers have either had to hope the companies technologies could talk to each other or figure out their own workaround to make that happen. Neither solution has satiated marketers who want one set of data in one view, said Salesforce Marketing Cloud svp and gm Marcel LeBrun, who formerly ran Radian6. The market has been asking to bring both of these things together, he said.

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud keys in on six areas that meld Buddys and Radian6s strengths: social listening, social content, social engagement, social advertising, social workflow and automation and social measurement. Most of those six are pretty self-explanatory. Through Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marketers can see what their customers are interested in or saying about them, create social posts or apps that apply those insights and buy ads when they want to extend the reach of that content, particularly after tracking positive ROI.

Standard as that sounds for an all-in-one social marketing platform, Salesforce does have some differentiators. For starters, Radian6 has access to Twitters firehose. On top of that, Buddy Media is pretty tight with the social platforms it builds on. Case in point, last week news broke that Facebook was ending its Reach Generator product in favor of Promoted Posts, but not all Facebook ad partners had access to build the latter tool into their platform; Salesforce Marketing Cloud did and has done so. And through Salesforce Radian6 Insights, Marketing Cloud customers can sift in-depth analytics like sentiment and intent through the tools eight analytics partners.

But Salesforce Marketing Cloud doesnt only look to connect marketers with its customers. The platform has borrowed from Salesforcee enterprise collaboration tool Chatter to embed a Facebook News Feed-like stream on its home page. LeBrun said Chatter is at the heart of the Marketing Cloud. The aim is to break bureaucracy. A brands marketing team will be able to interact with each other within the stream, but also see how its social campaigns and applications are performing. The Chatter integration brings even more specific use cases. For example, an auto brands social media manager could come across a customers Tumblr post saying how much they love their car. The social media manager might want to share that post to the brands Facebook page and buy ads against it, but need permission from a higher-up to do so. The manager could put the post in the approval queue, and the higher-up would see the request in his or her feed.

While social is the focal pointfor now at leastof the $5,000-a-month Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a major selling point is its integration with Salesforces CRM platform. Following the still-spreading philosophy that social isnt a silo but a thread that connects all marketing channels, customers of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud can receive a message from their own customers on Twitter and find that person within the marketers customer database stored with Salesforce for what former Buddy Media CEO and now Salesforce Marketing Cloud cmo Michael Lazerow calls a 360-degree view of the customer. That database is further refined the more a customer interacts with a brand as more data is appended, he said.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud isnt the only all-in-one social marketing platform to hit the market recently. Two weeks ago Adobe rolled out the fruit of its Efficient Frontier acquisition with Adobe Social. But Salesforce and Adobe will hardly be the only marketing software companies to have launched such products by years end. Next month Salesforce competitor Oracle will hold its annual conference, a ripe time to unveil the fruits of its several social acquisitions. And while Google has yet to close its acquisition of Buddy competitor Wildfire, the company has already said the social marketing firm will anchor the social side of its end-to-end DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform.

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Salesforce Takes Social Marketing Into the Cloud

The robust browser best suited to low-powered phones or slow connections gets a social networking and news reading boost through Opera's Smart Page.

Solid Facebook support and links to webapps like Gmail are the key features of Opera Mini's "smart" Home page.

A single new feature called Smart Page is the capstone to Opera Mini 7.5 for Android (download), finally bringing to Android Mini fans a feature that iOS Mini got back at Mobile World Congress in February.

Launching today, the Smart Page is a single-serving site from which people can check their social networking feeds, news sites, and recommended links based on their region. The social networking feature works with Twitter, Facebook, and the European social networking vKontakte.

Opera Mini is best known as a cross-platform browser that offers "Turbo," a compression option that can reduce bandwidth use by up to 90 percent. It's a good option for people on rate-limited mobile services.

Somewhat confusingly, the Smart Page is actually labeled as the Home tab, and it resides next to the Speed Dial tab.

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Android's Opera Mini gets a socially networked Smart Page

The robust browser best suited to low-powered phones or slow connections gets a social networking and news reading boost through Opera's Smart Page.

Solid Facebook support and links to webapps like Gmail are the key features of Opera Mini's "smart" Home page.

A single new feature called Smart Page is the capstone to Opera Mini 7.5 for Android (download), finally bringing to Android Mini fans a feature that iOS Mini got back at Mobile World Congress in February.

Launching today, the Smart Page is a single-serving site from which people can check their social networking feeds, news sites, and recommended links based on their region. The social networking feature works with Twitter, Facebook, and the European social networking vKontakte.

Opera Mini is best known as a cross-platform browser that offers "Turbo," a compression option that can reduce bandwidth use by up to 90 percent. It's a good option for people on rate-limited mobile services.

Somewhat confusingly, the Smart Page is actually labeled as the Home tab, and it resides next to the Speed Dial tab.

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Android's Opera Mini gets a Smart Page

Posted on September 20, 2012, Thursday

KUALA LUMPUR: The emergence of social networking websites, such as Facebook and Twitter, has helped government agencies such as the Royal Malaysia Police (PDRM) to communicate and promote their services and activities to communities that they serve.

Bukit Aman public relations officer DSP Lai Lee Ching said, the new media had been used to educate young people and the general public in efforts to fight and prevent crime all over the world.

Therefore as an appreciation, PDRM will celebrate the second anniversary of using Facebook as well as the first anniversary using Twitter tomorrow via online, Lai told Bernama when contacted here.

She said, the police were using the social network as a platform to reach out to the younger Internet savvy generation, posting updates on high profile cases, tips for crime prevention, and updates on key community policing initiatives.

She also acknowledgeed the fact that social networks such as the Facebook and Twitter, were great tools for solving crimes and they also created space for police to share information about themselves with the public.

The police use these media connections to keep the public informed about unsolved crimes and post valuable information such as surveillance videos on the web, she added.

Moreover, the younger generation played a vital role in using social network such as Facebook and Twitter, she said.

The social media offers us (PDRM) an outlet to communicate with and educate the public, as well as form relationships with community members and to fight crime, she said.

The Facebook profile page is http://www.facebook.com/PolisDirajaMalaysia while the Twitter profile page is http://www.twitter.com/PDRMsia.

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Social network helps police to communicate with people