Salesforce.com goes social; gets nod from NZ cloud guru

Salesforce.com launched a series of products that boost the social networking and capability to its CRM (customer relationship management) software.

The US based company is best-known as the first to become an A-list software player with a product based purely on cloud software.

Now, with Oracle and SAP making forays onto its turf, it is pitching internet-based software as something that everybody takes as read; the key element now is now social media savvy.

To wit, the company has launched Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which merges the services of two of Salesforce.com’s recent acquisitions: Radian6, a social media monitoring company bought for $US336 million last year, and Buddy Media (bought in June for $US646 million; around the same time, Oracle bought a competitor called Vitrue). Buddy Media handles around 10% of the total advertising on Facebook, Salesforce.com VP and head of platform development Peter Coffee told NBR.

Salesforce says Marketing Cloud (which will sell from $US5000) is the first suite to unify social listening, content, engagement, advertising, workflow, automation and measurement.

Christchurch-based cloud computing commentator Ben Kepes – in San Francisco for the Dreamforce conference where the new products are being launched – gives new social suite the nod.

“Marketing Cloud ties together some existing Salesforce products and delivers something businesses need in the social age – the ability to both measure, and react to external social influences,” Mr Kepes says.

“I’ve seen marketing cloud in action and by gluing together the monitoring aspects of social and tying them to actual workflow and automation, Salesforce provides an end-to-end solution that will lower the barriers to entry into the social realm for its enterprise customers.”

Salesforce.com has also launched Salesforce Touch, an HTML 5-based mobile app. Last week we saw Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg say HTML 5 was one of his company’s biggest mistakes. The social network has now re