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Daily Archives: June 14, 2012

Salesforce.com leading the Marketing Cloud

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On the 4th of June 2012, the much anticipated announcement that Salesforce.com, inc would acquire Buddy Media was made.  By uniting Salesforce Radian6 and Buddy Media, we are now seeing the leaders of the Marketing Cloud fully emerge.

This is what salesforce.com had to say in their recent press release:

salesforce

By combining Buddy Media, the world’s leading social media marketing platform, with Salesforce Radian6, the world’s leading social media listening platform, salesforce.com will deliver the first comprehensive Marketing Cloud that will allow customers to listen, engage, gain insight, publish, advertise and measure social marketing programs. With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, CMOs will be empowered to manage the entire social marketing lifecycle.

Buddy Media, the world’s leading social media marketing platform, enables the world’s top brands and advertisers, including Ford, Hewlett Packard, and L’Oreal, to connect with more than a billion customers on Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and more.

“Salesforce.com now has the number one players in social listening and marketing – Radian6 and Buddy Media,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “With CMOs surpassing CIOs in spend on technology within the next five years, our Marketing Cloud leadership will allow us to capitalize on this massive opportunity.”

About Buddy Media

Founded in 2007, Buddy Media started as an idea to empower chief marketing officers (CMOs) and agencies to organize their teams and optimize their social media marketing programs. The Buddy Media platform allows customers to publish content, place and optimize social advertising and measure the effectiveness of social media marketing programs. As a result, customers can determine which content is driving the most engagement, test different strategies and understand which campaigns are delivering the greatest return on investment. Leveraging Buddy Media’s award-winning social media marketing platform, companies can connect and engage with more than a billion customers across Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and more.

With 8 of the top 10 advertisers as clients, Buddy Media is the clear leader in social media marketing. The company currently has nearly 1,000 customers, including major global brands like Ford, Hewlett Packard, L’Oreal, and the world’s largest marketing agency groups such as IPG (Interpublic Group), Omnicom, Publicis and WPP. Buddy Media is the only company to be named a charter Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, Google Engagement Solutions partner and LinkedIn Certified Developer.


The 4th Annual Cloud Computing World Forum

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Once again the ROD team were out and about at the 4th Annual Cloud Computing World Forum event held in London.  Theresa Durrant, gives us her opinion on the two day event.

CCWF at Earls CourtWhilst the attendance was good, I was slightly disappointed with the lack of attendance from the likes of Google & Amazon. However, the two day event was packed with talks from some of the leading specialists, which saw the conference theatres struggle to find room to accommodate everyone.

The exhibitors were dominated by Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Providers, Virtual Desktop Service Providers and those offering Cloud Security Solutions, which backed up the promise that this event was not aimed at technical people; but more at IT Managers and CIOs as a way to plan their future cloud and IT strategy.

I managed to attend several of the conference speeches and demonstration, including the Google App Demo by Jon Watson, and came away buzzing with ideas.

I was even fortunate enough to find a seat in the Microsoft theatre to listen to Matt Ballantine, Principle Evangelist. His topic was about Cloud & the Future of IT, but whilst the topic was very tantalising, the prediction proved to be very elusive. At the very start Ballantine informed us that his speech would reflect little on what his predictions were, and was merely a response to fit in with the title of the presentation. Slightly perturbed by this development, we sat on anyway, and listened to Ballantine outline his 5 practical approaches to his green field thinking strategy which included “Avoiding Stupider faster” and “Providing a service”. Not by any means ground breaking topics, but still very interesting and engaging none the less.

To sum up, strategy is no longer about IT projects with a business element, but is about business projects that have an IT solution. The future of any project should start with a holistic view of the organisation, before talking about systems. And whilst it might be tempting for CIOs to lock-down the desktop, beware this could be counterintuitive as it restricts innovation and experimentation.

All-in-all a very productive couple of days, with plenty of food for thought.