Software as a service (SaaS) giant Salesforce.com has released a new social marketing cloud platform called Marketing Cloud, which it says will assist firms in marketing their products by connecting them to social media.
Marketing Cloud is claimed to unify social listening, content, engagement, advertising, workflow, automation and measurement to help in help in marketing the products.
The new Marketing Cloud social media software, developed by incorporating Buddy Media’s social advertising product with Salesforce’s Radian 6 social-monitoring service, will allow firms to track the feedback about their brands on social media
Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said the new products double down again on the company’s vision for the social enterprise.
"Our core mission is to help our customers connect with their customers in a whole new way," Benioff said.
Salesforce.com CMO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Michael Lazerow said marketing is undergoing its biggest shift in decades, as brands move from traditional strategies to connecting with customers and fans globally through social media.
"Salesforce Marketing Cloud empowers brands to take advantage of this shift, turning insight into action and connections into customers for life," Lazerow said.
Salesforce acquired Buddy Media in June 2012 in $750m transaction, defeating search giant Google.
Salesforce has also launched Work.com, which is a human resources management software, in addition to Chatterbox, a new file-sharing tool that will place Salesforce in opposition to the likes of Google Drive, and storage startups Box.net and Dropbox.
However, Huddle CEO Alastair Mitchell believes salesfroce.com may have missed a trick with its Chatterbox launch.
"It’s becoming increasingly evident that today’s enterprises need much more than just secure file sharing. We’re continuing to see huge demand for content collaboration tools across the enterprise that replace SharePoint and include important sync and file sharing features, but go beyond these to provide a single secure platform for everyone in the enterprise to share knowledge – not just files," he said.
"True collaboration needs to happen across the firewall, with the entire enterprise ecosystem of customers, suppliers, partners and stakeholders, and this is a million miles away from just sharing files within an organisation," Mitchell added.
According to Salesforce Chatterbox will be on sale in early 2013. The company also said that it will start incorporating client information from services including Facebook and LinkedIn with internal customer data to offer broader customer profiles.
