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24-05-2012 08:55 Awesome Sauce Media social media marketing

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Awesome Sauce Sauce Media Social Marketing - Video

Oracle is acquiring Vitrue, a cloud-based social media marketing campaign creator that enables customers to create, manage and measure social media marketing campaigns on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Google+.

Oracle said that Vitrue, combined with Oracles existing sales, service, commerce, social data management and analytics capabilities, will create the most advanced and comprehensive social relationship platform, according to a news release.

Terms of the acquisition of Atlanta-based Vitrue, which is expected to close sometime this summer, were not disclosed.

The Vitrue acquisition news of May 23 follows by one day the announcement by Oracle enterprise software rival SAP of its $4.3 billion acquisition of Ariba, which is a provider of cloud-based collaborative commerce applications used primarily in business-to-business environments. While Ariba and Vitrue have different business models, both acquisitions represent efforts by the on-premise software giants to deliver software via the cloud. Vitrue is a software as a service (SaaS) provider.

The combination of Oracle and Vitrue is expected to help organizations develop more meaningful customer engagements with consistent brand experiences, improve their return on investment across multiple channels and social media, and enhance customer service through real-time responsiveness to their communication with companies, Oracle stated.

While social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are popular with Internet users, marketing departments have also realized that they can be an effective way to engage with the millions of members of those social networks and perhaps influence their buying decisions. According to comScore, social media sites now reach 82 percent of the worlds online population. comScore also estimates that the average amount of time people spend on social media sites grew by 35 percent in 2011 and that there are 3.2 million business pages on Facebook.

Already, Vitrue provides social networking services for businesses and manages 1.3 billion social interactions for 500 different brands, including Dr. Pepper, McDonalds, Procter & Gamble, Southwest Airlines and Yahoo.

The worlds greatest brands have been built by creating meaningful relationships between organizations and their customers," said Reggie Bradford, founder and chief executive officer of Vitrue, in a prepared statement. He added that as part of Oracle, Vitrue can deliver its social media marketing platform to Oracles many enterprise customers.

The array of services Vitrue offers for customers social marketing campaigns include publishing of content to social media sites, managing communities of consumers engaging with the site, and building customizable applications on Facebook to further market to consumers. Other Vitrue services include delivering customized modules for Facebook features, such as Pinterest and Instagram, as well as creating Facebook games and providing deep analytics of the impact of social media engagement using technology from Vitrue and Facebook.

The proliferation of social media and an increased demand by consumers to engage with brands across multiple social channels is driving chief marketing officers to look for an integrated social marketing platform, said Thomas Kurian, executive vice president for product development at Oracle.

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Oracle Buys Vitrue to Add Cloud Social Marketing to App Portfolio

Marketo yesterday launched Marketo Social Marketing, a suite of products to make every marketing campaign inherently social.

The suite's first offerings, Marketo Social Boost and Marketo Social Promotions, include a new collection of social campaign applications, such as video sharing, voting, sweepstakes and referrals. The products are tightly integrated with the company's marketing automation platform, so marketers can add a word-of-mouth marketing lift to every campaign, track the impact of individuals' sharing through social channels, and nurture relationships with the most influential customers.

Marketo Social Boost's features include a Facebook Page builder, voting and polling applications, video and event-triggered sharing, social comments, and ratings.

Marketo Social Promotions allows users to deploy customer referrals, sweepstakes, contests, and "flash deals" that enable them to not only reach their prospective customers in social channels but also reach all of their prospects' friends. Because it's completely integrated with Marketo Lead Management, marketers can include social promotion in multichannel campaigns, and then capture and manage resulting sales leads.

"As more companies evolve their marketing campaigns to leverage the potential and reach of the social Web, they require more powerful collaboration and revenue management tools to understand the true value of social engagement," said Denise Terry, director of social media at RingCentral, in a statement. "Marketo's Revenue Performance Management platform has helped us optimize our marketing program investments for several years, so we're thrilled to see the capabilities extend to our social campaigns through integration with Marketo Social Boost and Marketo Social Promotion."

With Marketo Social Marketing, marketers can now collect detailed information about which prospects are sharing their content and campaigns, and use lead scoring techniques to determine who has the largest social reach and who generated the most referrals. This rich social data enables companies to identify these influencers' impact on their business. Then, businesses can use lead nurturing to engage these important influencers on a large scale.

Both Marketo Social Boost and Marketo Social Promotions are fully integrated with Marketo's Lead Management and Revenue Cycle Analytics products. As a result, every social campaign can take advantage of Marketo's strengths in email marketing, landing pages, lead nurturing, and lead scoring campaigns. New prospects and influencers identified in social channels become part of the customers' strategic lead database, fully unified with prospects found using traditional channels.

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Marketo Introduces Integrated Solution for Social Marketing Automation

Social media is taking over as the recognized way to spread the word about your brand and its products. Today it is essential to have an online component to your marketing efforts and sites like Facebook and Twitter are some the hottest spaces available. The wine industry has been one of the fields to take the most advantage of the new platforms. In fact, wineries have an online presence rivaling anything they have ever tried before.

A slide show available from Slideshare.net, featuring research by ABLE social media marketing has provided us with some interesting details about how prominent social marketing has become in the wine industry and the amazing results the efforts have yielded.

To get things rolling take a look a this chart revealing how many wineries are on Twitter and Facebook. The study focused on France and the United States, but I am limiting my discussion to the United States only for now.

Heres the same information for Fickr and YouTube:

Half of the wineries form the survey have more than 500 fans on Facebook and well over a third have at least 500 followers on Twitter. The survey creators wondered what contributed to wineries having many fans. The answer? Almost half of them have dedicated marketing managers that create and promote advertising on social media platforms.

About 30% are using Facebook ads for promotion and 47% of them say the ads actually do attract business. 28% of the wineries report that Twitter helped draw in some new business. Both platforms scored in the mid 60% range for engaging customers in a winery brand. Facebook ads resulted in people visiting the winery in 58% of cases and Twitter did the same in 45% of the cases.

So we can see that social media is having a dramatic impact on wine drinkers. Almost three quarters of wineries say they plan to have more activity on social media platforms and the half that currently has no presence on Facebook says they do plan on breaking into social media in 2012.

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How Social Media Revolutionized Wine Marketing & Sales

Oracle announced an agreement to acquire cloud-based social marketing platform Virtue.

Virtue is designed to let marketers manages social marketing campaigns across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google+ from one place.

Oracle wrote in a blog post:

The proliferation of social media has changed the way that organizations and consumers interact. Vitrues social marketing platform helps organizations enhance their social marketing efforts to the next level of social engagement by giving brands the ability to scale across multiple social networks, target messages from global to local, create unique and consistent brand experiences, and publish content that engages fans and drives leads.

Together, Oracle and Vitrue plan to enable a unified social experience across customer interactions, resulting in meaningful customer engagements with consistent brand experiences across all channels and media; improved return on investment for social sales and marketing campaigns across paid, owned and social media; and enhanced customer service through real-time responsiveness and high touch engagement.

The worlds greatest brands have been built by creating meaningful relationships between organizations and their customers, said Virtue CEO Reggie Bradford. As a part of Oracle, we can help our customers ensure that consistent high-touch social engagement is delivered across marketing, sales and service interactions.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though TechCrunch indicates the price is $300 million. The deal is expected to close this summer. In the meantime, the two companies will continue to operate independently.

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Oracle Acquires Virtue, A Social Marketing Platform