Salesforce Expands Marketing Cloud, Social Analytics To Challenge Oracle

Company Says Social Data "Can Provide Data, Influence, And Intent."

Shares of Salesforce.com jumped nearly 9 percent Wednesday. Salesforce

Salesforce (Nasdaq: CRM) is adding a wide array of social analytics tools including Klout, Kred, Kanjoya, and PeekAnalytics to its Marketing Cloud in an effort to help businesses better understand and manage relationships with their customers.

Salesforce, the San Francisco-based enterprise tech company that specializes in customer relationship management (CRM) software -- so much so that it even chose “CRM” as its stock ticker symbol -- said that the expanded social offerings will improve the service provided to clients through its Marketing Cloud, a feature introduced last month in an effort to offer marketers and advertisers a wealth of social data.

When Marketing Cloud was first introduced, the service only featured four different types of social analytics from the company’s recent acquisitions of viral marketing vendors such as Buddy Media and Radian6. The new offerings announced Friday brings the total number of social analytics types to 20, and will feature a new pricing structure based on “credits” available to clients. The basic edition of Marketing Cloud will start at $5,000 a month and includes 1,000 credits, with additional blocks of 10,000 credits available for $100 more per month.

The expansion of Salesforce's social analytics offerings comes shortly after the company’s archrival Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) began snatching up similar companies including Involver, Intellect, and Virtue last summer.

In an interview with VentureBeat, Rob Begg, VP Marketing for Marketing Cloud, said that the goal of the new partnerships was to offer clients a wider ecosystem of available social analytics toolsets than previously available, and thereby better gauge any number of consumer-facing interactions.

“The goal is to not just get behind the ‘what’ and ‘where,’ but get to the ‘who,’” Begg said. “You can use these new social analytics providers to make sense of large data sets. It can provide intelligence, influence, and intent.”

Social analytics give CRM-fueled business the advantage of being able to measure the online influence of different customers and break them down into different demographic groups without having to conduct first-hand surveys or other costly, invasive, and potentially inaccurate measures.

“In order to uncover valuable actionable insight available through social media, it is critical that companies can engage with what is being said across all of their key markets,"Antonio Valderrábanos, CEO of Bitext, on of Salesforce's new partners, said in a statement on his company's blog. "Our multilingual sentiment analysis solution, integrated into the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, will ensure companies know exactly what their customers are talking about and how they feel no matter where they are located."

Salesforce is expected to speak in greater detail about the expanded offerings at a conference in New York City Friday.

Shares in Salesforce dipped slightly to $149.04 in late-morning trading on Friday after jumping as high as $151.25.

The full list of the 20 services Salesforce.com now offers through its Marketing Cloud are below:

• Bitext

• Calais

• Caterva

• Clarabridge Link

• EpiAnalytics

• Kanjoya

• Klout

• Kred

• LeadSift