Mediaboss Marketing

How close can a marketer get to real time? Social marketing platforms aim to help brands insert themselves into social media conversations sooner and in more sophisticated ways. A spate of announcements promise to help advertisers react to trending topics or even see into the future.

On April 23 (yesterday), Salesforce.com announced Social.com, an extension of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The announcement was followed today by Adobe's Predictive Publishing for Facebook. The announcements followed Blab, a startup that launched its service on April 9 saying it can predict where social conversations will go 24, 48 and 72 hours in advance.

Social.com lets marketers integrate CRM information from Salesforce.com with data held by social media companies. For example, a marketer buying targeted advertising on Facebook could combine the interests expressed by Facebook users with its own customer information in order to refine the audience for a campaign.

The dashboard includes a "trending" word cloud that can help marketers identify topics or hashtags to which they can quickly tie sponsored stories, posts or tweets. Speaking at a Salesforce.com customer day in San Francisco, Adam Bain, chief revenue officer for Twitter, called this "buying into the moment."

Gordon Evans, vice president of product marketing for Salesforce.com, told ClickZ, "We can connect real-time social listening with ad campaigns. If a hashtag is trending and has positive social sentiment, you can buy ads against whenever someone uses that hashtag, via Twitter keyword targeting."

At launch, Social.com integrates with Twitter and Facebook. Evans says the company will work closely with other networks; it already has strategic partnerships with LinkedIn and Google.

Social.com uses social listening tech that Salesforce.com acquired with Radian6; it will eventually incorporate real-time bidding technology from its Buddy Media acquisition. It provides a simple point-click-and-drag interface to let marketers quickly set up social media campaigns.

At the promotional event in San Francisco, Jonathan Davis, chief executive of Omnicom Digital, said his agency would use Social.com on behalf of its clients to manage their campaigns. He noted that, typically, clients reserve about half of their budgets for real-time, optimized campaigns such as those managed on Social.com.

Adobe's Predictive Publishing for Facebook is a new feature of its own Adobe Social, which is in turn an element of Adobe Marketing Cloud. The dashboard plug-in predicts how well a Facebook post can be expected to perform based on the marketer's previous Facebook campaigns that were managed through Adobe Social. It also gives suggestions for improving performance with tactics such as changing the time of day or key words. The capability will be released with the 3.0 version of Adobe Social this summer.

"This data has always been available within the reporting module. Now, we're bringing the data into the publishing tool so marketers can use it as they create the post," says Emi Hofmeister, director of product marketing for Adobe Social. "The cool element is that we're predicting that this will get this number of likes, comments and shares so you can make smarter decisions."

Original post:
Social Marketing Platforms Will Allow Brands To ‘Buy Into Moment’