The companies available for acquisition in the social CRM space just got a whole bunch smaller.
Corporate giants Salesforce, Adobe and Oracle are building a monster. Acquiring social media management systems Virtue, Buddy Media, and Context Optional these companies are poised to make a move to dominate the social marketing, listening and CRM space. With these recent acquisitions the space has been officially validated and now the real showdown begins. How quickly these giants can move to provide a simplified and effective social media tool for enterprise level brands to deploy across their organizations will be paramount to their success.
What do these tools do?
Enterprise level tools enable brands to create custom content, publish to social channels, provide moderation and allow for the measurement of performance from these social properties. Some of that custom content that is created can be anything from building contests to designing custom Facebook tabs and applications. In fact it’s these custom pieces that help drive fan engagement, which is what brands crave and easily creating them is key. Creating custom content that fans can interact with is what enables data capture, which is the holy grail of marketing.
The marriage of CRM and social marketing begins
Publishing, analytics and creation are necessary to have but the money is in the data, hence the common theme with all the acquisitions. These big CRM companies are trying to create the one stop social media nucleolus tool for enterprise brands. By doing so they will empower brands to not only publish content but also to create a CRM of social fan data that ties and tracks a specific fan to any actions they engage with on any of the brands social profiles. Knowing who your fans are and how that fan is engaging with you will allow the ability to better target your fan demographic through ads and other digital marketing mediums.
True enterprise level products are being built and a leader will emerge if usability and simplicity don’t come as an afterthought of the tools design. Many of these platforms are very complex in nature requiring advanced CSS skills to create many of the web app designs that drive the engagement and capture data. The people who are using these tools on a daily basis need something that allows them to create content and publish that content quickly, this doesn’t look as “simplistic” as some of these platforms try to bill themselves as, does it?
Where do we go from here?
If the past several months are any indicator about what is about going to go down in the social media technology space we are in for one hell of a showdown between some major powerhouse companies. It’s going to be the first company that can take a Steve Jobs like vision of simplicity and elegance and apply that experience to their platform. That company will lead this race and my bet is that its not going to come from any of these corporate giants listed above but instead from a company that can be nimble and move quickly with the nature of the industry to deliver an experience that is fluid, elegant and powerful to suit their needs.
By – Adam Lazzara
Follow @AtlantaSnoop
10+ Years of SaaS 
Nice piece, Adam. In addition to these acquisitions of Tier 1 SMMS providers is the trend toward “doubling-up” with nearly parallel acquisitions of Social Intelligence, or listening platform providers.
Salesforce acquired Radian6 in advance of the Buddy Media acquisition and now Oracle has announced their intent to acquire Collective Intellect to provide advanced analytics and enable Enterprise brands to
garner actionable insights. There’s a lot of value to be derived at the intersectintersection of Enterprise. BBgrade SMMS
Adam, my comments were posted prematurely. Dam Droid!
Thanks for the comment Scott, yea its certainly interesting to watch these companies make these big moves. Something tells me though that its going to be difficult to get any innovation from them though.