Monday, September 24, 2012

Facebook and Salesforce.com strengthen partnership

Facebook and Salesforce.com are teaming up to help businesses better target specific consumers via facebook. At the company's annual conference last week, Salesforce introduced the "Salesforce Marketing Cloud" which is basically the amalgamation of Radian6 and Buddy Media, 2 social media companies the firm has acquired over the last year, that allows companies to introduce advertising campaigns on Facebook or similar such sites. The Cloud allows for the filtering of information stored on salesforce.com to find individual facebook or twitter handles, thereby being able to connect with these customers in the social media medium. Now, the capabilities of Salesforce's cloud is being interlinked with Facebook's audience targeting feature we spoke about in class that was launch about a month ago - meaning that direct ads can be targeted to facebook users whose handle has been culled from Salesforce's information in the first place.

Salesforce was just added to Facebook's "strategic partners" list of ~10 companies. This list means that these partners will receive better customer support and also have premier early access to Facebook's products in development. While it is clear that individual-level consumer targeting has been happening in the digital space for some time, this strengthened partnership between salesforce and facebook underlies the fact that the process is here to stay and companies will make a healthy dime if they can figure out how to optimize this type of consumer outreach.
-Laura Hawkins

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