Over the past two years, Salesforce.com has embraced social media marketing as a key part of its long-term growth strategy. Today, as the company consolidates its acquisitions of Buddy Media and Radian6, some industry-watchers are asking whether a marketing automation vendor might be the next item on its shopping list.

The speculation has focused on Salesforce.com's recent embrace of the term "marketing cloud," and whether the company aims to extend the concept beyond its current focus on social media marketing.

"I am really excited about the Marketing Cloud," Benioff said during the company's Q1 earnings call. "I really think it is a multibillion-dollar opportunity just as we've seen the Sales Cloud is and the Service Cloud is and the platform is . . . By the time we get to Dreamforce [in September 2012], I think now we'll have a lot to talk about in regards to the marketing cloud."

Marketing automation software provider Marketo announced last week that the company had signed its 2,000^th customer and had a year-over-year enterprise growth of nearly 200% during the first half of 2012. In addition, the company added a quarter of its total customer base in the first half of 2012 including GigaOm, Panasonic, SurveyMonkey and Vantiv.

Vantiv’s Corporate Marketing SVP, Moira Tamayo, commented on why the company chose to partner with Marketo: "Vantiv chose Marketo's comprehensive marketing automation and sales effectiveness solutions because of our complex lead management needs. With Marketo, we in the Vantiv Marketing team are building an integrated pipeline that lets us deliver warm, qualified leads through the pipeline for sales teams to close with high success rates.”

Social media today is an important part of the big picture of B2B marketers. Yet keeping track of what your customers are saying about you on social media – and turning that chatter into useful insights – can be an incredibly challenging task.

On Tuesday, CRM vendor SAP announced a new product designed to cut this challenge down to size. Dubbed "Rapid-Deployment Solution (RDS) for Sentiment Intelligence with SAP HANA," SAP says the application can be deployed in as little as six weeks to extract and analyze real-time customer data from social media feeds.

Pinterest has grown by leaps and bounds in recent months, and the site has attracted growing attention as a social media marketing tool. Unlike other social media sites, however, relatively few third-party vendors currently provide add-on tools for the Pinterest platform.

Now, that's beginning to change. Yesterday, Pinfluencer officially unveiled what it bills as a "robust big-data analytics and discovery marketing engine for the Pinterest platform." The cloud-based service provides detailed data on pinned content, repins, followers, follower time engagement and other key metrics. Pinfluencer's analytics can also identify trending Pins, influential Pinners, and Pins that drive e-commerce, as well as allowing a company to compare its Pinterest activity against its competitors.

The Marketing Automation Institute (MAI), has announced a strategic partnership with the Sales Lead Management Association (SLMA), to offer MAI certification courses to SLMA members. The partnership is designed to provide “cross training” to sales leaders who are using marketing automation solutions.

 “The certification courses MAI offers will be a great addition to SLMA’s curriculum,” said Carlos Hidalgo, Executive Director of the MAI. “Our goal of this partnership is to bring a focus on marketing automation to SLMA members to further their understanding of marketing automation and how it impacts sales.”

Editor’s Note: The following article is the second in a two-part series highlighting how B2B companies are using social media from cold to close. This installment explores the use of social selling tools.

By Owen McDonald, Contributing Author

Marketing and sales teams today struggle to decode social media streams. They must decide how best to use the information they gather for social sources, and how to analyze its efficacy for their demand generation efforts.

But that cryptic area is now yielding its secrets. Business Intelligence, CRM and marketing automation vendors, as well as providers of social platforms, are refining their systems to monitor social media and to identify genuine prospects based on their social media behavior.

This week, the Lenskold Group launched its annual research survey on lead generation marketing performance and ROI. The survey, sponsored by The Pedowitz Group and conducted with support from Demand Gen Report, is designed to help B2B lead generation marketers get insights into current best practices, and how they can use these practices to improve their own performance.