Salesforce Asks Partners For Help With New Marketing Cloud

Marketing Cloud, along with other initiatives, is expected to be officially announced Wednesday by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff during his keynote address at the Dreamforce 2012 conference in San Francisco.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a social networking platform for marketing, created by Salesforce and integrated with technology it gained from two companies it purchased in the last year. Salesforce bought Radian6, a social media monitoring provider, for $340 million in March 2011, and purchased Buddy Media, which manages social media accounts, for $689 million in August 2012.

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Susan St. Ledger, Salesforce's chief revenue officer and head of Marketing Cloud, told members of Salesforce's Cloud Partner Alliance at Dreamforce Tuesday that Marketing Cloud will tap into a $1.3 trillion marketing industry that is ripe for the change that Salesforce's social networking platform will bring.

"Social media has changed marketing forever," she told several thousand partners at the event. "Our job is to shift those marketing dollars."

She said Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are often unsatisfied with the results of the marketing dollars spent. In addition, marketing communication, branding and analysis are often inadequate within organizations.

"What we need from you is help in creating this new market. CMOs know they have to do something but they don't know what to do," she said. "It's about understanding how to tell CMOs there is a shift in the market to new methods that get them better ROI."

The integrated services offered by Marketing Cloud will be a new way of doing business, which partners can explain to CMOs, she said.

"We need you to understand how to build an integrated social platform," she told the partners. "The second thing is thought leadership -- we need you to understand the world of social platforms out there."

St. Ledger said the Marketing Cloud unifies traditional marketing tasks such as content, engagement, advertising, workflow, automation and measurement. She said with Marketing Cloud, CMOs can manage all social marketing activity and access related assets in one place.

The Marketing Cloud features include:

• Social Listening, tracking conversations across the Web, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs and online communities
• Social Content, allowing creation and deployment of social content to customers on social networks, websites and mobile devices
• Social Engagement, enabling connections with customers on their channel of choice
• Social Advertising, allowing optimization of social ad campaigns
• Social Workflow, promoting the organization of teams
• Social Measurement, tracking campaigns on a single dashboard

Salesforce Marketing Cloud will be generally available Wednesday, starting at $5,000 per month.

PUBLISHED SEPT. 18, 2012