October 19, 2012
By Judith Aquino, , Leonard Klie, Editor, CRM magazine and SmartCustomerService.com

Salesforce.com Adds Social Analytics Partners to Marketing Cloud

NEW YORK (Cloudforce) -- A month after unveiling the Marketing Cloud, Salesforce.com announced today that it has expanded its marketing solution to include partnerships with 20 social analytics vendors, giving customers more ways to analyze their data and uncover greater insights.

"What we're hearing from our customers is that they want to do more with their social data," says Rob Begg, vice president of product marketing for Marketing Cloud. "They want to know who these people are, what their comments mean, and which comments are actionable."

The Marketing Cloud suite of products also brings together technologies that Salesforce.com gained through its acquisitions of Radian6 and Buddy Media.

The Marketing Cloud Social Insights partner program includes Bitext, Calais, Caterva, Clarabridge Link, EpiAnalytics, Kanjoya, Klout, Kred, LeadSift, Lexalytics, LinguaSys, Lymbix, Metavana, OpenAmplify, PeekAnalytics, Rapleaf, Solariat, Soshio, The SelfService Company, and Trendspottr.

"Kred is invaluable for Salesforce Marketing Cloud customers who want to monitor and engage with influential people on social media who are talking about their market or keywords. No other influence measure is built on the depth or immediacy of data that Kred provides. Kred will be instrumental for marketers who move beyond Likes and follows to converse with members of the social media communities that form around brands and shared interests," said Andrew Grill, CEO of Kred, in a statement.

"Today's leading brands recognize that social media is transforming the way they connect with customers on a global scale," said Michael Lazerow, chief marketing officer of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. "By leveraging the power of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, partners such as Kred are empowering companies to take advantage of this shift and turn insights from millions of conversations about their products, brand, and industry into actions that strengthen customer relationships."

"150 million social conversations are happening every day, and now companies are truly able to take social insight and turn it into action by focusing on the conversations that matter," Lazerow added. "Salesforce Marketing Cloud's new social analytics help brands discern signal from noise to deliver real business value."

Salesforce.com plans to add more companies in the coming months, which will eventually include "hundreds" of vendors, according to Begg. "It's similar to the App Exchange, but for the Marketing Cloud," he adds.

Through a credits-based system, companies can select multiple analytics services to create a dashboard that delivers a snapshot of their company using the analytics they selected. Customers can use the analytics to identify sales leads, discover advocates, detect trends for topics or keywords, uncover social influencers, analyze content in 17 languages and monitor multiple Chinese social media platforms, including Sina weibo and Tencent weibo.

The basic edition of the Marketing Cloud, which starts at $5,000 per month, includes 1,000 partner credits. Customers can buy additional blocks of 10,000 credits for $100 per month.

Salesforce.com also used the Cloudforce event to introduce its new Chatter Communities for Service and Marketing, and ChatterBox, an enterprise file sharing and collaboration tool similar to Dropbox. Also new to the company is Salesforce Identity, which allows for a single sign-on for all of a company's business apps from within Salesforce; Salesforce Canvas, a new developer platform, and Salesforce Touch, a mobile application development platform.

Down the road, the company will also make available a new Salesforce employee management application called Work.com. Work.com is a social networking app that can be used to evaluate employee performance, provide feedback to colleagues, and send coaching notes, according to John Wookey, executive vice president of social applications and Work.com.