Salesforce Marketing Cloud teams up with 20 social-analytics vendors

“Some of these insight providers are pure-play, based just around understanding particular language sets,” said Charlie Wood, Salesforce Marketing Cloud's area vice-president for APAC, Japan and India, in an exclusive interview with Campaign Asia-Pacific.

Salesforce launched Marketing Cloud last month, the result of a merger of two of its acquisitions, Buddy Media and Radian6.

Of particular interest to global brands, said Wood, is Soshio—an analytics company that specialises in Chinese-language social networks, including Sina weibo and Tencent Weibo, in terms of both context and relevancy.

“Partnering with Soshio will provide our clients with real-time insights from these social networks,” he said.

The native platform of the Marketing Cloud supports 17 different languages, including Japanese, Korean and Mandarin, and is about to release Hindi, Thai and Bahasa Indonesia / Malaysia. But vendors like Soshio add "contextual, intent-based understanding of China’s social network”, Wood explained.

Clarabridge specialises in data mining and business intelligence and is capable of providing multi-language sentiment analytics (across nine languages), which are intended to help companies gauge customer feedback.

The inclusion of Klout will enable companies to target customers based on their degree of social influence, “Marketers can opt to segment audiences by topic, insight and influence—then choose to either respond to people with highest influence or to follow them closely, listening to conversations, understanding their social circles and where they hang out,” said Wood.

The full list of the 20 vendors which will be part of Salesforce is: Bitext, Calais, Caterva, Clarabridge Link, EpiAnalytics, Kanjoya, Klout, Kred, LeadSift, Lexalytics, LinguaSys, Lymbix, Metavana, OpenAmplify, PeekAnalytics, Rapleaf, Solariat, Soshio, The SelfService Company and Trendspottr.

Their offerings will be fully integrated into Salesforce Marketing Cloud along with a new “credits-based” pricing model. The basic edition, for example, includes includes social listening, content, engagement, advertising, workflow, automation and measurement starting at US$5,000.

Along with this package, clients will receive 1,000 partner credits, which can be used to add selected partner services to their dashboards. “It’s a flexible platform which can be turned on and off at will,” Wood said.

The aim, he added, is to produce a “single unified platform that the modern marketer and customer social service people can use”.