Mediaboss Marketing

SAN FRANCISCOSalesforce.com's debut of enterprise file-sharing solution Chatterbox this week at Dreamforce hints at the cloud software company's further foray into powering the social enterprise.

Employees who store files and documents in the cloud using Chatterbox can simultaneously update the status of a project or file right within the enterprise collaboration tool Chatter. Employees can then collaborate on work assignments in real time. Chatter has also been extended to the Service Cloud for direct customer interaction.

Discussing Chatter as the backbone of Salesforce.com's new Chatter Communities for Service solution, Leslie Ament, vice president of customer intelligence research and client advisory services at Hypatia Research Group, remarked that "I would assume [Salesforce.com] is repurposing applications for business processes.

"If Salesforce comes up with a Chatter 'platform'that can be interesting for enterprise play," Ament told CRM. But, she added that "budget is usually owned by line of business function, and it depends on who owns the budget and who is in the driver's seat [for example, sales, marketing, or customer service]. The fact that they [are tapping into Chatter] for each of the modules is interesting. It gives customers choices."

Commenting on Salesforce.com's launch of Marketing Cloud, which combines the social marketing capabilities afforded by the Radian6 and Buddy Media acquisitions, allowing companies to listen and respond to customers, measure performance, and tap into social advertising, Ament noted Salesforce.com's integrations with companies like Marketo and Silverpop. Eventually, her estimation is that "the roadmap may well include other marketing partners that are part of the Salesforce.com ecosystem."

In an interview with CRM, Heidi Melin, senior vice president and chief marketing officer for Eloqua, discussed the company's latest product release, Chatter Inside Eloqua, and also noted that the company has already plugged in to Marketing Cloud. Marketing Cloud allows Eloqua to "take the information and data from social listening, connect it to demand, and [then get it] out to the lead management process," she said.

A recurring theme at Dreamforce was that chief marketing officers will increasingly make technology-purchasing decisions; the very nature of customer service solutions has been turned upside-down because the customer's voice has been amplified by social media. Unilever, for instance, uses Buddy Media and lets customers customize their own social ads on Facebook.

"If I could predict [what will occur next] in the industry, 2012 and 2013 will be when companies move away from social experimentation and into ROI justification," commented Rob Tarkoff, CEO of Lithium Technologies, a developer of social communities and social marketing software. "There is behavior change and transformation. It's 'How can I do this in a way that makes money?' I think there will be a lot more scrutiny."

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Social Media Experimentation to Shift to ROI Justification

ATLANTA, Sept. 20, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --PictureU, an Atlanta-based experiential and social marketing company, was recently chosen from a field of over 650 metro Atlanta businesses as one of Atlanta's "Best Places to Work" by The Atlanta Business Chronicle in their 8th annual "Best Places to Work" program. The selection marks a first for the 14-year-old experiential marketing company.

PictureU was recognized in the "small" business category, which is classified as companies with a workforce of 10 100 employees. Additional categories included "medium" for workforces of 101-to-500 employees and "large" for companies with over 500 employees.

"This recognition is particularly special to me because the positive feedback is a direct response from our staff," said Walt Geer, President of PictureU. "PictureU always strives to provide a positive and open work environment, and this acknowledgment is confirmation that our employees enjoy the PictureU culture and are excited about coming to work."

Nominations were accepted in June through the Atlanta Business Chronicle website for organizations with workforces based in the metro Atlanta area. Organizations that made the initial cut were provided surveys from a third party research vendor Quantum Workforce, a workplace analytics and business performance consulting firm.

Workers from each nominated organization were then surveyed using set criteria that calculated a points-based score. The top 60 "small", 30 "medium" and 10 "large" businesses with the highest tabulated scores ultimately composed the 2012 rankings. All data and scores were generated from responses of the organization's employees without influence from management.

PictureU has worked with dozens of event marketing agencies and well-known brands such as Coca-Cola, Budweiser, Geico and Chevy. Its proprietary experiential marketing technology and services have brought millions of smiles to consumers and bottom-line results to its clients at prominent sporting events, concerts, trade-shows, national marketing tours, fairs, festivals, and countless other events.

"Our firm's successes begin and end with our employees. Without the talented professionals here at PictureU, we could not deliver the exceptional work we pride ourselves on daily," Geer said. "We are truly honored and excited to be a part of such a distinguished group of businesses."

ABOUT PICTUREU

PictureU is a 14-year-old national provider of imaging technology-based marketing and data capture solutions in the experiential and social marketing space.The company enables 1:1 consumer interactions at live events on behalf of brands that wish to create a positive brand experience, capture valuable consumer data, and enhance their social media marketing campaigns.

The company's mobile smart-device technology creates real-time interactions, integrates with Facebook and Twitter, and provides measurable results. They take live marketing viral via consumers' own social networks thus extending brand reach and loyalty. In 2012, the company will engage with millions of consumers at thousands of events nationwide on behalf of global brands such as GEICO, Chevy, Budweiser, and Coca-Cola at NASCAR races, pro sports arenas and stadiums, concert tours, fairs, festivals, rodeos, and pro golf tournaments.

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PictureU Makes Debut In Atlanta Business Chronicle's 2012 Best Places To Work

BURLINGTON, MA--(Marketwire - Sep 20, 2012) - Awareness Inc., the provider of social marketing solutions for brands and agencies, today unveiled the results ofits social monitoring campaign for X-Factor -- the most talked-about series premiere in TV history.

Across the two-night Season 2 premiere, X-Factor garnered a record-breaking 2.9 million brand-related conversations across social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, and Reddit. Awareness' flagship product, theSocial Marketing Hub, monitored all 2.1 million conversations and then leveraged the software'snewly announcedSocial Marketing Automation suite to collect the profile and social behavior information of 1.1 million unique viewers who discussed X-Factor during the premiere. For comparison, The Voice premiere clocked in 16,000 brand-related mentions with 15,000 unique authors. In addition, The Voice judges generated 31,000 mentions while X Factor judges raked in 200,000 mentions from 72,000 viewers.

"By using Awareness' Social Marketing Hub and, specifically, the social marketing automation suite, we at FOX and X Factor can gain a much deeper understanding of our audience," says Bryan J. Gonzalez, director of emerging platforms of FOX Digital. "By analyzing the social profiles of 1.1 million newly identified fans, we have an opportunity to learn a great deal about our fan's favorite shows, other interests and viewer demographics."

The new Social Marketing Automation capability, fully integrated with the Awareness Social Marketing Hub, is comprised of three core components that equip marketers with the tools to increase their social marketing sophistication:

"We are pleased to have FOX as a premier client using our Social Marketing Automation suite. As social TV grows in importance, effective social monitoring and prospecting is critically important to viewer attainment and retention," says Brian Zanghi, CEO of Awareness. "For FOX to collect and analyze 1.1 million unique new viewer profiles, they can enhance their segmentation and targeting among key target demographics."

About Awareness, Inc. With a unique combination of technology, experience and thoughtful support, Awareness enables smart marketers to efficiently and effectively generate ROI from 100% trackable social media interactions. It is the leading provider of OnDemand Social Marketing Automation Software designed specifically to address all key aspects of social media marketing -- from demand generation to customer acquisition and social customer engagement. The Awareness Social Marketing Hub, the company's flagship social marketing software, is the only solution available that ties Social Prospecting, Social Scoring and Social Profile Database into one solution resulting in a detailed social marketing ROI. Awareness works with some of the world's leading brands and marketing agencies including Major League Baseball, FOX Broadcasting, NBC Universal (Comcast SportsNet), Raidious, American Cancer Society, Tiger Woods Foundation, The Carlsberg Group, Mindjumpers, Nuance, Demandware, Trend Micro, and Computer Associates.

Backed by NorthBridge Venture Partners, Awareness is headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts.

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Record-Breaking Season Premiere X-Factor Drives 2.1 Million Social Conversations and Over One Million New Fan Profiles

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