Salesforce.com Adds Real-time Social Intelligence Through Acquisition of Radian6

By Barb Mosher (@barbmosher) Mar 30, 2011 Comments

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Salesforce.com (news, site) has announced a definitive agreement to acquire the social media monitoring platform Radian6 for US $326 million.The plan is to integrate the service into Salesforce products Chatter, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud and Force.com, clearly demonstrating the importance that social media engagement is playing in today's organizations.

Following is a segment from an interview CMSWire conducted this month with Salesforce EVP Alex Dayon. In this session he discusses sentiment analysis and the company's integration with Radian6.

Social Engagement and CRM

In one of the interview segments CMSWire did with Salesforce.com EVP Alex Dayon, he stated that social engagement and CRM are being blended together to support the way organizations really engage with their customers. He also said that the number one challenge for organizations is monetization of that engagement.

Which means the acquisition of Radian6 makes perfect sense. Salesforce will now be able to integrate social media monitoring capabilities into all its products, helping organizations better understand the needs of its customers and how to support them.

In the following interview CMSWire talked with Chris Morace of Jive Software about sentiment analysis and the Radian6 acquisition:

Editor's Note: Watch additional segments of our interview Alex Dayon:

Social Media Monitoring

Understanding the value proposition of social media engagement is critical. The online experience is no longer just about the website, which means basic analytics like traffic and number of visitors, while still important, are not necessarily the critical measurements organizations need to know if they are doing things right (or wrong).

Radian6 offers both a monitoring platform and an engagement platform, both of which will likely fit nicely into Salesforce products. Salesforce has outlined the planned integrations:

Sales and Service Clouds: Both support and sales teams within organizations will have real-time social intelligence at their fingertips.
Chatter: The integration will provide Chatter customers with not only important information about activity within their company, but also information on activity in public social networks like Facebook and Twitter and blogging platforms.
Force.com: Force.com is Salesforce's development platform, which means the integration of Radian6 will provide developers with access to social media monitoring and engagement capabilities which they will be able to build into their applications.

The deal, which isn't expected to be final until July 31, 2011, is for US$ 276 million in cash and US$ 50 million in stock. Along with that, roughly US$ 10 million in stock and US$ 4million in cash will be issued to the founders over two years (subject to vesting conditions).

While the acquisition isn't expected to have any effected on Salesforce's Q1 results, quarter 2 and the entire year's results will be positively effected with the addition of Radian6 revenues.