Radian6, which was acquired by Salesforce for $326 million earlier this year, has offered some of the world’s largest brands a web-based social media monitoring platform. Brands like Dell, GE, Southwest Airlines, Kodak and UPS use the service to monitor, analyze and engage in ‘hundreds of millions’ of social media conversations. But until now, Salesforce has not integrated Radian6 into its suite of cloud-based products. Today, the CRM giant is unveiling the new Radian6-powered social marketing and monitoring cloud.
Salesforce says the social marketing cloud extends the social enterprise to marketing with new features in social monitoring, insights, engagement, workflow and websites. The Social Marketing Cloud, says the company, will help social enterprises transform the massive volume of social media conversations into meaningful engagements.
Radian6 will continue to offer a powerful social media monitoring client that allows companies to parse and manage large volumes of social media conversations from millions of sources. Agencies and marketers can monitor overall volume, share of conversation, geographic distribution on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and filter by keyword, media type, date range and more to view conversations.
But Salesforce is taking it a step further with its Social Insights product. This new service, which is available today, provides analytics to help marketers understand the impact of a marketing campaign and have the flexibility to respond to customer sentiment and reaction in real-time. Social insights actually allows users to understand what is being said in these conversations.
Radian6 previously offered a Social Engagement feature that enabled services like Facebook page management and more. Social Engagement has been updated to include an extension library and enhanced application support to be able to engage with customers directly where the conversation is taking place, whether that be on Facebook, Twitter or other social channels.
A new pillar of the Social Marketing Cloud is the Social Hub. The Hub will automatically route relevant social content to products like the Salesforce CRM for quick engagement and response to customers or prospects. With the Social Hub, users can populate social customer profiles, route social conversations, an create contacts and cases in Salesforce. The Hub is also integrated with Klout as well.
Lastly, Radian6’s existing Social Websites feature allows users to build socially rich websites and widgets to engage with customers and sales prospects.
This seems to be the first step in Salesforce’s Radian6 integration. Noticeably missing is any meaningful Chatter integration. In the past, the CRM giant has said ‘the combination will create a “bridge between public conversations and Chatter” and “enhance the Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud products with social intelligence that customers can act on. Developers building on the Force.com platform also will be able to tap into the power of Radian6, putting the social web into everything they build.”
Clearly there is still more to come when it comes to Radian6’s presence in the Salesforce ecosystem of products.