Salesforce.com‘s acquisition of Radian6 yesterday was quite the news yesterday. This was especially interesting following their recent investments in Hubspot and Seesmic and the acquisition of Jigsaw last year. This reflects a general trend where the B2B lead management (demand generation) and social media world are fast coming together and are no longer separate silos.
Social media is becoming a key building block for a successful brand management and customer engagement strategies. With social media companies can join conversations about their brands and stay connected to their customers and prospects.
The question is: Why did Salesforce.com acquire Radian6? With Hubspot’s lead generation and engagement platform, Salesforce.com needed capabilities on the Social media side and Radian6 fills these gaps. This acquisition will further break down the silos between lead management and social media.
Radian6 social media monitoring and analytic capabilities will allow for tracking online conversations and behavior of business contacts already existing in Salesforce.com. Radian6 could also allow for a bridge between public social networks, (Facebook, Twitter, blogs and online communities) and Salesforce Chatter, the private secure social network for the enterprise.
From a technical perspective, this allows Salesforce.com to further expand the Force.com platform, where developers will be able to build applications and plug-ins into Radian6. This enables Salesforce.com to extend its developer and partner ecosystem with technology not available anywhere else.
The overarching question is whether this is the beginning of an entry of Salesforce.com into the consumer marketing (B2C) arena or if Salesforce.com will augment the B2B demand generation platforms like Neolane, Eloqua, Marketo and others. The latter scenario presents an immediate opportunity for these vendors to leverage and integrate the social profile data available from Salesforce.com as most of them already have an existing integration to Salesforce.com.
