Salesforce.com’s ExactTarget Marketing Cloud unit has combined Radian6 and Buddy Media into a single offering called Social Studio.
Consolidating these social tools allows the company to sell a one-stop social solution, reflecting a maturing market on the client side where most companies have gotten their social media management (organization, process, and now tools) in order.
ExactTarget can now consolidate its focus on winning marketshare on a bigger stage: marketing, inclusive of social media. Over the past five years, social media has been a catalyst driving technology innovation and marketing opportunity. Now that most brands have figured out where to play and how to win in social, the focus returns to the big picture and bigger budgets.
The Radian6 Buddy Media Social Studio offers everything a brand requires to manage social media: collaborative workspaces, calendars and workflow, multi-platform publishing, listening, and content analytics. I expect the offering to compete primarily against Oracle’s Social Cloud, Sprinklr SxM, and Adobe Social. However, the ExactTarget, Adobe, and Oracle solutions are parts of larger marketing clouds and enterprise platforms, which can help open doors to the larger budgets of the CIO and influence of the CMO, beyond the scrappy social media team that exists at many brands.
The Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud
Brands will be increasingly offered incentives to commit to a single vendor’s marketing cloud and must weigh the benefits and discount of a single solution versus the risk and cost of self-integrating best-in-class point solutions. Very few brands operate entirely under a single vendor’s cloud today and this is a zero-sum game. For example, JetBlue is referenced as using Radian6 Buddy Media social studio and last week JetBlue was referenced as a Responsys customer. What happens next? Does JetBlue convert to the entire Oracle Marketing Cloud, ditch Responsys for ExactTarget, or continue to operate different tools in what appears to be different silos of the organization? Most brands are going to be asking themselves similar questions over the months ahead.
Challenger brands may believe that “you don’t have to be the biggest to be the best.” However, the market is clearly heading in a direction that values the ability to deliver on a truly customer-centric perspective. Adobe’s Marketing Cloud has a master marketing profile and Oracle’s Marketing Cloud has a universal customer profile. Brands need a single perspective on the customer across the entirety of MARKETING, not just social media. Ultimately the large marketing clouds will win while incorporating innovative features from smaller startup vendors. Although the product name is a mouthful, the Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud Radian6 Buddy Media Social Studio is an inevitable step towards consolidation and single-source management of the customer relationship/experience.
