Salesforce.com's Radian6 eyes social marketing transition

Salesforce.com rolled out a series of Radian6 tools designed to meld marketing with social networking, route customer responses via outlets such as Facebook and Twitter and build customer data profiles.

In an interview, Marcel LeBrun, senior vice president and general manager for Salesforce Radian6, outlined the plans, which revolve around the so-called social marketing cloud.

"Marketing has been about eyeballs and companies aren't working to win hearts and minds," said LeBrun. "Social marketing is rotted in listening and engagement and is a big shift."

That take sounds a bit fluffy, but Salesforce.com is on to something. The Radian6 dashboard is designed to gauge what's being said about brands on social networks and respond effectively. The real win is customer profiles that include phone numbers, email addresses as well as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn personas. To get those profiles, the Radian6 Suite needs to be hooked up to Salesforce.com's Service Cloud.

The Salesforce.com marketing overview went like this.

In this social customer response scenario, a customer's social handle is logged just like a phone call would be.

Salesforce.com's target market here is the chief marketing officer, who may be receptive and have the budget to buy into Radian6's services. Radian6, acquired earlier this year by Salesforce, is launching new social monitoring tools, analytics, engagement apps, listening hubs and a social Web site option.

The demo of the Radian6 tolls highlighted TDBank's system. The screens below illustrate comments on various social networks and prioritizes customers with the biggest megaphone and number of followers. Obviously if Suze Orman is yapping about your brokerage you might want to respond.

Meanwhile, campaigns can be sorted based on content, location and sentiment.

As for the pricing, Salesforce is offering a series of plans. Radian6 starts at $600 a month for companies. Social Hub is $1,200 a month in a limited release and the Web site marketing hosting service---Siteforce---will start at $9,900 a year for companies. The Radian6 Insight service are priced at an individual level---$60 a month per user.