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

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.

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