Salesforce expands social enterprise offerings with new version of Radian6

Salesforce has taken further steps down the path of social networking by launching the Radian6 Social Marketing Cloud.

In recent months, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has been talking up the importance of what he calls the social enterprise' and Radian6 Social Marketing Cloud is another nudge in this direction.

According to Salesforce, this new version of Radian6 will extend the social enterprise to marketing allowing the establishment of conversations among customers. It will do this by tackling five particular areas:

*Social Monitoring - capturing 150 million sources of social media conversations across the web including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, blogs and other online communities.

*Social Insights - New analytics to filter through the noise, identify relevant conversations and perform marketing campaign analysis. Now including third-party providers such as Klout, OpenAmplify and OpenCalais, Social Insights provides an additional level of information like demographics, influence, geolocation, sentiment and topic categorisation to conversations

*Social Engagement - The Radian6 Social Engagement Console enables companies to engage with customers directly where the conversation is taking place.

*Social Workflow: Companies will now be able to organise massive amounts of social media conversations by applying sophisticated analysis and rules.

*Social Websites - Siteforce allows marketing organisations to quickly build socially rich websites to engage with customers and prospects.

The new product is set to shake up how marketers engage with their customers said Marcel LeBrun, senior vice president and general manager for Salesforce Radian6.

"Social media is the single biggest change in marketing in the last decade. Social enterprises recognise that social media provides real-time opportunities to delight customers and prospects. The Radian6 Social Marketing Cloud will enable every company to be at the forefront of this exciting industry shift," he added.