Salesforce Launches Its Social Studio For Marketing Collaboration And Custom Integrations

Salesforce.com says it’s launching a new set of tools for marketers on social media designed to improve collaboration and integrate with third-party partners.

The full name of the product is a bit of a mouthful — the Radian6 + Buddy Media Social Studio. However, it points to the way that Salesforce has created its social media strategy through startup acquisitions. (That’s even clearer when you note that the Social Studio is part of the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud.)

“We’re entrepreneurs,” said Buddy Media co-founder Michael Lazerow, who’s now chief marketing officer for the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud. “We invented the market, we know where the market is going, and we’re creating a product that is being innovated on faster, and is supported globally, and that just is going to beat out these point solutions.”

Oracle last week announced its own Marketing Cloud, which was also assembled through the company’s various acquisitions. However, Lazerow argued that Salesforce had turned its acquisitions into a more unified platform.

I wasn’t able to get a full demo of the Social Studio, but you can get a basic feel for it in the video embedded at the end of this post. The features include workspaces for team collaboration, tools for planning and publishing social media content, for interacting with customers, and for examining the results through analytics.

In my conversation with Lazerow and Marcel LeBrun (former CEO of Radian6 and now a senior vice president of products at Salesforce), they highlighted two of the Social Studio’s features. First, there are the workspaces, which Lazerow said will allow marketers to “quickly spin up a team” while connecting those teams and incorporating the customer’s approval process.

“Brands can have thousands of teams, and now you can set up all these environments within one organization, with separate teams working on separate content, to really help them work together,” LeBrun said.

The other big addition is integration with third-party partners. At launch, the Social Studio integrates with stock photography services Getty Images and Shutterstock, as well as content discovery tools Kontera, Trendspottr, and Rallyverse. Through APIs and SDKs, it will also support custom integrations, Lazerow said, for example by adding apps and features for specific industries; he suggested that this is part of “the API-ization of marketing.”

Update: You can read more in this ExactTarget blog post, which notes that customers could create social media content in the Social Studio and then promote that content via advertising on Social.com