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Software as a service provider Salesforce.com
announced plans June 4 to acquire Buddy Media, a provider of a social media
marketing platform, for $698 million in cash and stock, but a stock analyst
warns that Salesforce faces formidable competition when Oracle unveils its
cloud service offering later this week.

The Buddy Media platform allows customers to create and execute social
media-based marketing campaigns that publish content, place social advertising
in the right places and measure the effectiveness of those marketing programs.
The Buddy Media acquisition, which is expected to close sometime in the third
quarter of 2012, follows
Salesforce’s acquisition of a similar company, Radian6, for $326 million in
March of 2011.

In a conference call announcing the deal, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said
Salesforce looked at 10 different companies, but chose Buddy Media because it
is the top performer in the social media marketing space.

“Buddy Media is the No. 1 provider in this area. The more time I spent [with
them], the clearer it was to me that we needed to buy No. 1,” Benioff said.

As social media marketing gains traction, chief marketing officers (CMOs) are
getting IT budgets that rival those of CIOs to spend on this new marketing
approach, said Marcel LeBron, senior vice president of Salesforce’s Radian6
business.

“Social has gone from this thing that [CMOs] are experimenting

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