Social Enterprise Takes Center Stage At Dreamforce 2011 As Vendors Roll Out New Tools

“Our social enterprise vision fundamentally changes how companies collaborate, share and manage information,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “By creating social customer profiles, employee social networks, customer social networks and product social networks, companies can delight their customers in entirely new ways.”

Social media features were also prevalent as part of the Cloud Expo, as several marketing automation vendors unveiled new product features and social enhancements. 

Fresh on the heels of announcing its plans for an IPO, Eloqua, launched its Social Media Suite at Dreamforce, which consists of four components designed to provide users with the ability to improve form conversions, increase campaign reach, monitor real-time conversations, and even score leads — all based on a prospect’s social media behaviors.

New features of the Social Media Suite include:

·      Klout segmentation to add each prospect’s level of influence into the database and enable users to score leads based on their social activity;

·      Socialsign-on toimprove form conversion by giving visitors a one-click option for form completion. Sign-on from LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter accounts are all available;

·      Twitter for sales can publish a live feed of a prospect’s most recent tweets in the Eloqua Profiler dashboard; and

·      Socialsharing tools to facilitate the spread of promotions by allowing recipients to share relevant campaigns across their social graph. Future versions will enable marketers to use a “drag and drop” interface to incorporate “social currency” icons, such as Facebook “Likes” and Google “+1” directly into landing pages.

“Today, getting a full view of the buyer requires understanding more than a prospect’s role and function,” said Joe Payne, CEO of Eloqua. “It requires insight into what content they create, which social channels they participate in, and who they trust and influence. You need to see and participate in the conversations buyers are conducting with their trusted peers in business. Our new social suite is a game-changer for the Revenue Performance Management industry because it finally gives marketers the ability to incorporate social media at all stages of the buying process.”

In addition, cloud-based marketing automation provider Pardot announced significant upgrades to its software to help SMB marketers make better use of powerful social media tools. New features include: automated access to sales prospect social media profile data and posts from within the Pardot system, and the ability to schedule and send social media messages to prospects from Pardot’s platform. 

“There’s no denying that social media is a powerful force in today’s marketing world,” said Adam Blitzer, Co-Founder and COO of Pardot. “But until now, marketing automation platforms have lacked the tools that are necessary to truly engage sales prospects in a social media environment.”

Through integration with Qwerly, Pardot automatically populates its system with prospects’ public social profile data using his or her email address.  The Pardot platform can pull information from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, among other leading socialnetworks. Social data also is displayed in a prospect’s CRM record through Pardot’s integration to salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and NetSuite.

Pardot has also added social posting features to help marketers quickly and easily manage their social media sharing.  Users are able to schedule Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn posts in advance.  And via Pardot’s existing bit.ly connector, all links in a post will be automatically shortened and tracked, with the option to use custom, branded bit.ly URLs.  Users can also share web-based versions of their Pardot emails — for example, a monthly newsletter — through social channels, streamlining the process by which information is broadcasted across digital channels. Posts can be scheduled to send from multiple accounts and across multiple social sites, as well.

Banking On Behavioral Data

In addition to a heightened focus on social media integration tools, marketing automation vendors are also emphasizing the importance of behavioral data for demand generation. TreeHouse Interactive, provider of marketing automation and partner relationship management (PRM) technology, announced new functionality for its Marketing View automation product. The new capabilities are designed to enable marketers to gather behavioral information at a company level to more effectively generate leads within those organizations.

Marketing View now gives marketers a broader picture of company level interest in products or services offered, and enables them to score, purchase target and nurture leads based on that information.

While tracking, scoring and targeting leads based on individual behaviorhas been a staple of most high-end marketing automation systems, achieving this on a company level has been difficult, if not impossible. The new functionality in Marketing View is designed for companies who sell BtoB and rely on databases where tracking by individual behavior is limited to revealing only a partial profile of interest.

Also announced during the show, Salesforce.com and Dun and Bradstreet (D&B) have launched Data.com, the vision to unify sources of business data and available to Salesforce.com customers directly within their CRM.

Salesforce.com and D&B will integrate their company information with Jigsaw’s contact information to deliver unified company and contact data in the cloud, all directly from within Salesforce CRM.

For Salesforce customers, Data.com is designed to enable market segmentation and targeting for sales and marketing professionals to execute complex account plans and custom marketing campaigns, creating a highly targeted pipeline directly within Salesforce CRM.