Salesforce adds 20 partners to its Marketing Cloud

Bitext, Calais, Klout, Kred, PeekAnalytics among new vendors

Enterprise cloud computing titan Salesforce announced Friday that it is expanding its Marketing Cloud ecosystem, signing on 20 new vendors in order to help companies make better business decision.

Partners in the Markering Cloud ecosystem now include Bitext, Calais, Caterva, Clarabridge Link, EpiAnalytics, Kanjoya, Klout, Kred, LeadSift, Lexalytics, LinguaSys, Lymbix, Metavana, OpenAmplify, PeekAnalytics, Rapleaf, Solariat, Soshio, The SelfService Company and Trendspottr.

"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," said Michael Lazerow, CMO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, said in a statement.

"Salesforce Marketing Cloud's new social analytics help brands discern signal from noise to deliver real business value."

Saleforce introduced the Marketing Cloud in September, calling it “the most comprehensive suite for social marketing,” which harnesses the power of Radian6 and Buddy Media, two companies purchased by Salesforce earlier this year.

The Marketing Cloud has six features: social listening, content, engagement, advertising, workflow, automation and measurement.

• Social Listening, which offers customers real-time listening at scale From 400+ million social sources, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs, online communities, in order to gain actionable insight and uncover marketing opportunities.

• Social Content, which allows customers to create compelling social presences with over 50 social applications available, ranging from contests to video players to photo galleries.

• Social Engagement, an ability for companies to 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.

• Social Advertising, which Saleforce customers can use to manage and execute optimized social ad campaigns, including sponsored stories and mobile newsfeed ads.

• Social Workflow and Automation, which gives customers the ability to organize teams, processes by applying sophisticated analysis and rules to organize conversations happening across the web by automatically routing relevant social content, so that they can quickly respond.

• Social Measurement for tracking campaign ROI in one dashboard, which gives marketers the ability to 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.

The Marketing Cloud basic edition starts at $5,000 per month, and it includes 1,000 partner credits, though additional blocks of 10,000 credits can be now be purchased for an additional $100 per month.

Marketing Cloud social analytics from partners as add-on packages are now available in the Marketing Cloud dashboard.

Salesforce says that the Marketing Cloud, which is available in 17 different languages, is being used by  55% of the Fortune 100. Air Canada, Carnival Cruise Lines, Ford, Hewlett Packard, Southwest Airlines Unilever and the National Football League are among its customers. 

Salesforce acquisitions

San Francisco-based software company Salesforce, founded in 1999, has also made some big acquisitions recently, purchasing online editing platform Stypi for an undisclosed amount in early May.

In June, Saleforce purchased  Buddy Media for $689 million. Buddy Media currently helps maintain advertising, ads and pages on social networks. While it is best known for its work with ad-targeting for Facebook, Buddy Media also utilizes Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

In March of 2011, Salesforce bought Canadian social media monitoring platform Radian6 for $326 million.

Salesforce currently has 100,000 customers, and had net income of over $64 million in 2011, out of over $1.6 billion in revenue. 

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