Through its namesake social media marketing platform, Buddy Media enables content publishing and marketing program assessments across social channels such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter. Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff said in a news release that the proposed deal taps into the expected rush of marketing department spending over the next few years and would be coupled with the social monitoring capabilities and offerings it added with its acquisition of Radian6 in March 2011. Salesforce.com Radian6 SVP Marcel LeBrun noted that the Buddy Media platform would be part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud offering for the “ability to manage the entire social marketing lifecycle.”
The deal has been approved by Buddy Media’s board of directors and is expected by Salesforce.com to close at the end of October. Established in 2007 and counting HP, Ford and Mattel among its clients, Buddy Media is based in New York City and has been cited as one of the numerous employers that are part of a recent Web 2.0 tech boom in The Big Apple.
It’s also one of four big-money deals recently announced in the social marketing space. Oracle bought out another independent social marketing platform provider in a deal May 24 for Vitrue. In late April, Intuit made its own move in the social marketing and CRM space with a deal for Demandforce, followed up a few days later by Teradata in a deal for cloud marketing integration provider, eCircle.
Justin Kern is senior editor at Information Management and can be reached at justin.kern@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IMJustinKern.
