It seems to be the right time of the year. At the end of a quarter, companies are buying companies. Just look at how ebay grabbed GSI Commerce yesterday. Suddenly the former number two in the retail industry is becoming a competitor for Amazon.
However, even more interesting for me was how quick the Social Media Monitoring (SMM) industry is becoming mature these days...
At a time when marketers are realizing the importance of social media monitoring but still have their internal issues with the listening and analysis technology, Social Media Monitoring is being boosted into awareness by the deals that have happened this week. In one week we have two mergers... Meltwater - a social media monitoring provider -buys the Social CRM company named JitterJam; and today Salesforce - one of the leading CRM technology companies - acquires Radian6, one of the top Social Media Monitoring providers. All of which will give the "new" companies the opportunity to become leading suppliers of SocialCRM in the future.
Alterian's James Eiloart, SVP Sales and Marketing Europe, gave me their feeback on the merger of their main competitor in the Social Media Monitoring arena...
"The purchase of Radian6 by Salesforce.com endorses the importance of the Social Media Monitoring market which we invested in 2 years ago when we acquired SM2/Techrigy, bringing this capability to mainstream marketers and highlighting these tools as something which all organisations need to embrace. However we also recognise it's not just about the tools or access to tools, it is about having the skills to use them at the micro level, and also being able to use social media data at a macro level, in context of the broader marketing picture. This is why we acquired Intrepid last year who bring the Social Media Monitoring insight services and also consulting to help our partners and clients really use Social Media Monitoring to generate real value across the organisation."
The micro and macro level will probably become the next challenge for marketers and business leaders. Identifying important communities and social influencers, or analyzing Social Media does only make sense if marketers understand how to answer the Social Media ROI question. And this is a question of understanding the value of conversations. Businesses are build upon these pillars and their ground will be the evolution and execution of SocialCRM which will speed up as a business topic now that these mergers are done.
Spot On!
Social Media Monitoring has become mature... and goes out to get married. Just some weeks ago, Gartner VP Michael Maoz predicted SocialCRM is taking holidays, the social media industry makes an interesting move towards aligning the best of breed from social media and CRM technology. The importance of the social media monitoring tools for the SocialCRM development becomes clear when listening to Forrester analyst William Bandt. He shows some real interesting examples of companies already making use of SocialCRM by showing the value for sales and marketing teams on targeting, acquisition, retention, insight and collaboration with customers.
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