Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Salesforce.com (see previous CloudAve coverage) today announced that they are acquiring Radian6, a company helping organizations monitor and engage with their customers on social media, for $326 Million to boost the social intelligence of their products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Chatter and Force.com. Anyone who had seen the demo of their Service Cloud 3 release will not be surprised by this acquisition. Radian’s technology lets organizations monitor hundreds of millions of conversations across multiple social networks and engage intelligently to increase sales and customer satisfaction.
When the conversations through social networks boomed and spread like wildfire, businesses were completely clueless on how they should react to this new age marketplace where consumers are empowered more than ever before. It took some time before they could even understand what really hit them. In fact, businesses were behaving like a deer in front of the automobile headlight, completely clueless on what is happening to their brands and how to react in order to protect their brands. Once tools like Radian6 came in to help businesses get some grasp on the social media revolution and brought some order to the chaos confronting them, we started seeing some smart organizations engaging with their customers in a fruitful way.
Radian6 was founded in 2006 and their platform captured hundreds of millions of conversations every day from many different social networks to provide some actionable intelligence for these organizations. Radian6’s products included
- A monitoring platform designed to help companies track and analyze their social media efforts
- An engagement platform to help companies connect with individuals and communities online
These products helped organizations improve sales, support, have better perspective on their brands and gain intelligence on their competitors’ brands.
When Salesforce.com released Service Cloud 3, we gained some insights on how they are planning to convert their CEO Marc Benioff’s vision into reality. Along with the collaborative features, they also added features that will let any organization monitor and engage with the conversations happening across social networks. In fact, Service Cloud 3 was designed to take these conversations and directly convert them into support tickets and knowledge base seamlessly. The technology that enters through this acquisition will go a long way into improving these products further. If they execute the merger of these technologies right, Salesforce.com might be able to multiply their enterprise marketshare manyfold.
Even though the conversations on social media sites increase the risks for any business because of the open and viral nature of these conversations, tools like Radian6 helps them gain intelligence which they would have never got in the traditional setting where open conversations were not possible. By bringing in these tools right into the Salesforce.com’s products, they are empowering these organizations elevate their sales and support processes to a much higher level. In fact, when I saw the price tag for this acquisition, I was a bit worried that Salesforce.com is overspending but I changed my opinion when I saw the existing client base of Radian6 and the value it brings to Salesforce.com’s existing portfolio of products. This is definitely a smart move by Salesforce.com after Heroku.
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