Salesforce.com Courts Facebook-Friendly Buddy Media

Facebook Apps In Action

Buddy Media may be the next puff of cloud software to merge into the Salesforce.com marketing cloud.

Salesforce.com CEO talked about "the beginning of the marketing cloud" when his company acquired acquired social media-monitoring firm Radian6 last year. Now, Peter Kafka at AllThingsD reports Salesforce.com is on the verge of closing a deal to acquire Buddy Media for more than $800 million. Buddy Media is a social media management company best known for its tools for managing Facebook applications, pages, and marketing campaigns. Buddy Media has also branched out into covering Twitter, Google+, and enhanced YouTube pages.

According to AllThingsD, Buddy Media is pursuing Salesforce.com's bid over a similar offer from Google.

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Buddy Media recently added a Facebook ad buying product, BuyBuddy, based on its own acquisition of Brighter Option.

With Radian6, Salesforce.com got monitoring and analytics capabilities for market research, along with tools for engaging with customers by responding to their social media posts. But it is not a publishing or marketing outreach platform. Buddy Media would provide the software for drumming up interest and generating response to campaigns, which could then be caught in Radian6's monitoring net and driven down the marketing funnel to CRM.

The purchase of Buddy Media would also counter the acquisition of Vitrue that Oracle announced last week. Vitrue is a close competitor to Buddy Media.

Neither company has confirmed the rumored acquisition, and the AllThingsD report said the details were not final.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

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