Salesforce.com brings Radian6 into fold

Salesforce.com has begun integrating social marketing platform Radian6 into its wider cloud portfolio, nine months after acquiring the company.

The social networking analytics platform, bought in March this year for $US326 million ($318 million) earlier this year, sources information from networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Until now, however, the offering had effectively existed separately from Salesforce.com's other offerings.

The cloud provider overnight announced the Radian6 Social Marketing Cloud in the first attempt to fold the software into the greater product offering, providing tie-ins with its popular customer relationship management solution as well as the Siteforce website platform.

The social networking platform did not appear to integrate with Salesforce.com's own internal social network, Chatter.

The integration ties into salesforce.com's increasing focus on social networking, with CEO Marc Benioff using two speeches at his own Dreamforce conference and one during Oracle OpenWorld conference this year to emphasise the need for companies to "become social".

"We see there's three steps in organisations becoming social enterprises: step one is around creating the customer social profile, step two is creating the employee social environment and that's Chatter, and step three is about that customer and product networks, [Radian6]," said Tony Armfield, vice-president of enterprise sales for Australia.

Salesforce.com was unable to clarify whether the integration marked a change in the physical deployment of the Radian6 platform onto the company's own data centres, the closest of which is located in Japan.

The integration marks the first major upgrade to Radian6 under Salesforce.com's ownership, including plans to launch a "social hub" which would provide rules-based routing of conversations about a company to relevant marketing or support staff.

The new feature, currently in beta testing with select customers, would come at a premium. While a basic implementation starts at $US600 a deployment a month for Radian6, customers would have to pay double that price for the Social Hub when it is released.

A beefed-up analytics engine providing "social insights" from third-party services such as Klout is also available from $US60 per month, with API deployments beginning at $US5000 a year.

Radian6 garnered significant interested before its acquisition by salesforce.com this year, with 2500 clients on its register.

Locally, it is used by Virgin Australia, Jetstar and Vodafone, the latter of which intends to tie the platform with its call centre, email support and forum postings for support staff.