Salesforce has unveiled its latest product in the public cloud market.
Salesforce wants marketing departments to use the cloud - which it calls Marketing Cloud-to seek out and listen to its target audience, and tailor their marketing campaigns in both content and the way adverts are delivered.
Social networking plays a major part as Salesforce continues to push its social Chatter business social networking offering into all its products.
“To say that marketing is social is an understatement,” said Brett Queener, executive vice-president of the marketing cloud at Salesforce. “Social represents the biggest change in marketing in 60 years.”
“What we hear from customers is that we have been doing social with a few people in the corner but this isn’t working anymore.
"It is really, really hard to train an organisation to deal with this explosion of social networking with the rate it is coming in. We now all have the opportunity to do social networking right.”
The main dashboard features six areas the company claims marketing executives need to reach potential customers, all running in Salesforce’s public cloud.
This includes a "Listening" feature to enable users to sift through millions of social networking conversations to find an audience talking about their company or about a service they need.
The "Content" feature allows users to create an advert and send it out over social networks, targeting people by age, location, marital status or other defining aspects.
There is also the ability to engage with customers talking about you over social networks; respond directly to queries or complaints; analyse social content on your firm or advertising campaign; track the return on investment of any new or existing projects; and push forward the ones doing well.
A lot of the features have been brought into Salesforce thanks to the acquisition of social network monitoring firm Radian6, bought in March 2011; and social marketing company Buddy Media, which Salesforce bought in June 2012.
Merging Radian6 and Buddy Media proved the basis of the Marketing Cloud product.
Marketing Cloud doesn’t come cheap though, with fees starting at $5,000 per month, depending on the number of users.