Salesforce
finally completed their Buddy Media acquisition. It's been in the works for a
while but the price involved - between $689-745 million - is kind of
staggering, given that's about what Salesforce earned in its entire first
quarter. Social media is the new gold rush!
(If you
don't know Buddy Media, they manage social media campaigns for major companies,
from strategy to applications. They're not a household name yet, but their
clients are.)
I want
to disagree with this comment from Marcel LeBrun but I'm not sure I can:
"Social media has caused the biggest transformation in marketing since the
Mad Men era, causing CMOs to completely re-think their strategies. By bringing
together market leaders Radian6 and Buddy Media, we are doubling down on the
Salesforce Marketing Cloud to provide CMOs with the ability to manage the
entire social marketing lifecycle."
It's
probably the Mad Men reference that strikes me as cheesy. We could split hairs
as to whether it's the Internet that's been the transformational engine, with
social media its chief piston, but yes, the marketing paradigm has been forever
changed. Still, the expectations for social media are so ridiculously high at
this point, with its ROI often more diffuse than expected. It's hard to say how
deals like this will be regarded in five years, as naively misguided optimism
or prescient and profitable.
But one
thing is for sure - the efforts of such massive capital and talent focused on
social media strategy will create a general education for the rest of us and
dispel a lot of the current business confusion on how best to leverage it.
Instead of scattershot content and platform saturation, businesses will able to
draw on a conventional wisdom that's
more strategic, more nuanced and more, well, wise.
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