Mediaboss Marketing

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

BURLINGTON, MA--(Marketwire - Sep 13, 2012) - Awareness, Inc., provider of on-demand social marketing automation software, today announced results of its State of Social Media Marketing Survey, available in the report 'The State of Social Marketing Report: 7 Major Findings & In-Depth Analysis'.

The survey, which Awareness conducts bi-annually, was administered in July 2012 and received responses from 450 marketers from a cross-section of industries, company sizes and levels of social marketing experience. Survey respondents represented executive and senior management roles (45%), mid-level management (28%) and marketing support roles (15%). Content areas covered in the report include:

"Our State of Social Media Marketing report reveals that brands struggle to measure ROI, despite the volume of marketers with social media presence and experience," offered Brian Zanghi, CEO of Awareness, Inc. "Brands remain ill-equipped to tie their social marketing initiatives to business results. However, companies experienced in social marketing are applying new technologies to identify and segment prospects and buyers, such as social CRM and social marketing automation to drive business value."

Survey Findings

Overall, the report revealed that marketers have yet to tap into the full potential of social. Few are using key enabling technologies such as social CRM, which when adopted more widely, will be used to integrate social prospect and customer data with traditional sales and marketing data, providing a layer of insights that will help marketers be more effective and efficient in the social age. Only 16% of marketers who responded to the survey are currently using a social CRM, although an additional 21% plan to by this year's end. Socially mature brands are adopting Social CRMs faster -- brands with a social marketing budget of over $100,000 have a social CRM adoption rate of 44%, with an additional 26% who plan to use such a system by the end of 2012.

While 68% of marketers state they are interested in further expanding their social footprint, followed by an interest in publishing content more frequently, a full 50% see the need for tighter integration between social and the rest of marketing and 35% want better integration between marketing and the rest of the business. This metric points to a maturation of social marketing, as integration of social data with other marketing disciplines creates a more complete customer picture.

Savvy marketers are interested in measuring their effectiveness, by measuring ROI, brand effectiveness, and customer engagement. To measure revenue generation, marketers look to:

In addition to these key findings, the State of Social Media Marketing Report identifies top-level trends including the leading challenges faced by marketers, cited as proper ROI measurement (58%) and managing and growing social media presence (44%). More mature organizations cite their top challenges as measuring ROI (64%), full integration with the rest of marketing (41%) and integration specifically with lead generation and sales (32%).

"We expect leading social marketers to apply new frameworks and strategies to measure social ROI, including a growth in social prospecting and social scoring to turn the broader social web into a lead generation pipeline," says Zanghi.

The State of Social Marketing Report: 7 Major Findings & In-Depth Analysis is available for download here.

Link:
New State of Social Media Marketing Report From Awareness, Inc. Identifies Top Trends and Challenges Facing Marketers

Bohemia, NY (PRWEB) September 12, 2012

On September 12, 2012, social media marketing agency, fishbat, Inc., released a statement following Mark Zuckerbergs post-IPO public interview with Tech Crunchs Michael Arrington.

According to Scott Darrohn, COO of fishbat, Inc., during the course of Zuckerbergs interview with TechCrunch, Facebooks stock went up by over 4%. Darrohn continued to explain that the interview was focused on addressing concerns investors have regarding mobile applications and ad placement. fishbat, Inc. released their video press release series, fishbat Splash to address how the newest changes to Facebook will effect its stock and the face of social media marketing.

We want to make more money to build better services, stated Zuckerberg, the 28-year-old Facebook founder. A focus on iOs and Android platform integration will be a driving force in sales for the social media giant, as well as the growth of recently acquired photo-sharing platform, Instagram. Facebook users can also expect to see a change to Facebooks search capabilities, which will become more commercially driven, and Facebook gaming due to the 235 million gamers on the network.

IIn response to some of these changes, Darrohn states, There will be some money coming into Facebook, Im sure their next quarter earnings are going to be significantly higher. Darrohns full insights on the future of Facebook, social media, and digital marketing, are available through fishbats video press release, fishbat Splash.

fishbat, Inc. is a full service online marketing firm. Through social media management, search engine optimization (SEO), web design, and public relations, fishbat strives as a marketing firm to raise awareness about your brand and strengthen your corporate image. #######

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Social Media Marketing Agency, fishbat, Inc., Releases Statement Following Zuckerberg's Post-IPO Public Interview

Bohemia, NY (PRWEB) September 07, 2012

On September 7, 2012, social media marketing agency, fishbat, announced the inception of Reel Time, their weekly podcast series.

A leader in effective online marketing strategies, fishbat provides online marketing tools and innovative digital platform practices for all business strategies. Reel Time marks the genesis of fishbats newest method of disseminating social media and digital marketing advice to current and potential customers.

The objective of Reel Time is to keep businesses au courant with social media and digital marketing strategies. Anybody wanting to increase their knowledge of ways to increase brand awareness can receive advice from fishbats digital marketing experts. While creating engaging content and fine-tuning various aspects of operation on a digital platform, fishbat has reached a milestone in social media marketing. Each installment of Reel Time highlights and expands upon a specific online marketing advantage or innovation that companies may not be familiar with.

Scott Darrohn, COO of fishbat, Inc., states, Theres a lot of information out there that people arent familiar with in our industry. With fishbat being a leader in our industry we feel that being as social as we [fishbat] are, we want to have the ability to pass it forwardWe want to be able to share our information out with other people that are in our industry or many companies themselves that are looking to get involved on the digital platforms. And the best way really to do it is to have a weekly podcast go out that addresses each topic individually.

Reel Time, a fishbat Podcast, is downloadable on their podcast page and on iTunes.

fishbat, Inc. is a full service web marketing agency. Though social media management, search engine optimization (SEO), web design, and public relations, fishbat strives as a marketing firm to fully bring awareness regarding your brand and strengthen your corporate image.

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Originally posted here:
Social Media Marketing Agency, fishbat Announces Launch of Podcast: Reel Time

HootSuite announced today that it has acquired Seesmic, a competitor in the social marketing management software space. Both companies develop platforms that allow people and businesses to coordinate and monitor their marketing across multiple social network platforms.

Weve always been big fans of Ryan Holmes and the HootSuite team, since the days we were all pioneering the social media landscape. said Seesmic CEO Loc Le Meur. Were thrilled today to announce that Seesmic is joining HootSuite, and were excited for our users: they are becoming part of the HootSuite family, and they will be able to continue to build their brand and social business.

HootSuite and Seesmic were founded around the same time in 2008, though it took a year for Seesmic to move into its social network marketing platform development. HootSuite focuses heavily on marketing its services to its business clients, which it says includes 79 of the Fortune 100 companies. Over the past year, HootSuite has added support for many niche and business social platforms.

I have always had a lot of respect for Seesmics CEO, Loc Le Meur, and the role Seesmic has played in advancing social business. said HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes. We are thrilled to welcome Seesmics users into the HootSuite family.

Details of the acquisition, including how much HootSuite paid for Seesmic, have not been disclosed. In addition, HootSuite was vague on what the future holds for the Seesmic client. HootSuite did, however, invite Seesmic business customers to subscribe to HootSuite Pro, suggesting that Seesmic may be shut down or rolled into HootSuite in some way. Whatever the case, its clear that HootSuite acquired Seesmic for its talent and clients, not its platform.

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HootSuite Acquires Social Management Startup Seesmic