Salesforce.com-Buddy Media Deal Just The Beginning

Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Buddy Media is just the beginning of a trend. Forrester Research Senior Analyst Melissa Parrish predicts more partnerships and acquisitions in this space. Parrish says in her recent blog: “I don’t expect acquisitions to slow down just because Buddy Media has been bought. In fact, I expect the entire space to accelerate — both acquisitions and the adoption of these platforms by companies looking to grow their social presences.”

She further adds that Salesforce.com’s acquisition of Buddy Media is no surprise given marketers’ increasing need for a comprehensive social media management platform (SMMP).

“First of all, brands are maturing in social media, and they’re realising they need something like a true social software stack to manage it all, especially as social media spreads across the enterprise and grows beyond the boundaries of just the marketing department. To truly manage their growing social presences, they need ways to get more employees involved while still enforcing their social media policies — and that means a software stack that offers all of the benefits of an SMMP (robust editorial workflow management, moderation tools, easy page and application creation, influencer identification, content archiving, and analytics) as well as deep social intelligence and CRM capabilities.”

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She goes on to mention that no single SMMP offers deep listening and non-social CRM today, and no listening platform or non-social CRM offering currently delivers what an SMMP can. So, she says, acquisitions were inevitable.

“Second, when I talk to marketers about their requirements for these platforms, one of the things that comes up high on everybody’s list is integration with other enterprise systems. The two systems that get mentioned the most? Non-social analytics (usually Adobe/Omniture and Google Analytics) and non-social CRM (usually salesforce.com, sometimes Oracle and SAP.) Well, Adobe already jumped into the game when they bought Efficient Frontier who had previously acquired Context Optional. And of course Oracle made their play just a couple of weeks ago with their acquisition of Vitrue. Many of the SMMPs already integrated with salesforce.com anyway, thanks to client demand, so they were the logical choice for making a high-profile acquisition,” says Parrish.

According to the blog, her advice for organisations is, “Look for more partnerships that bring together enterprise listening platforms with SMMPs. Look for SMMPs to support more and more social networks beyond just Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And most importantly, look for both tech companies and brands to continue to take social more and more seriously as it proliferates across the enterprise.”