Salesforce adds Social Advertising to Marketing Cloud
Salesforce launched a new service called "Social.com" as part of its Marketing Cloud offering. Social.com allows you to create ad campaigns for Facebook and Twitter. It actually came to Salesforce via its Buddy Media acquisition but Salesforce has re-launched it as a separately-branded product.
Salesforce says you can create sophisticated ad campaigns with all kinds of segmentation based on customer data stored in the core CRM, plus in future it will supposedly be integrated with Radian6 to better target ads based on Facebook or Twitter data (e.g., segmentation based on Twitter #hashtags).
Digital Marketing has fast evolved from what it was when we released the first version of our Digital Marketing Technology evaluation report. Marketing Automation, Social Media Monitoring and Social Media Marketing used to be stand-alone capabilities in the not too distant past. Now we're seeing (nascent) attempts to integrate these and consequently, a new breed of suite vendors is emerging. You could argue -- and we do argue -- about the quality of integration among different modules within these suites, but that should improve with time.
Social Campaigns is an area we evaluate in detail in our Digital Marketing Technology report. In the near term, this contextual advertising capability provides something of a differentiator for Salesforce, and it will be interesting to see how other suite vendors -- most notably Oracle -- respond. Just remember advertising is just one small piece of the social marketing puzzle.
Meantime, we're updating our Digital Marketing Technology report with new reviews of these suite vendors (Oracle, Salesforce, and Adobe) as well as several other updates. Stay tuned.