Jay LeonardIt seems like every time I open my Google Reader, a new company in the social marketing space is getting acquired. Already we’ve seen Radian6, Vitrue, Buddy Media, and Collective Intellect join the enterprise software fold. The latest social marketing player to be gobbled up is Involver, which is being acquired by Oracle for an undisclosed sum.
While the startup and investment community is undoubtedly thrilled with another big exit, the marketers who use or evaluate these tools may have an outlook that’s much less rosy. As we’ve seen elsewhere in the marketing technology industry—particularly with the consolidation of campaign management vendors—acquisitions raise serious questions about integration, service and support, ongoing product development and roadmaps, and more. As the social marketing technology buying spree reaches a fever pitch, perhaps the more important question to ask is “Amid all of this buying, who had the foresight to build?” Who saw the social wave coming, and moved quickly enough to develop integrated capabilities for managing these new channels? Certainly not the enterprise software behemoths, as TechCrunch’s headline (“Oracle Acquires Social Marketer Involver As Enterprise Giants Buy Rather Than Build For Tomorrow”) so aptly captures.
Neolane has always prided itself on building for tomorrow. When the company was founded in 2001, we understood the movement that was already afoot, building our cross-channel marketing platform from the ground up for digital/interactive marketing. At the time, our native email and mobile marketing capabilities were unique among campaign management vendors. Since then, we’ve been first-to-market in several other areas, including social marketing automation, inbound personalization of Facebook brand pages, and most recently, 1:1 push notifications and in-app content via mobile apps.
Before you buy into the acquisition hype, consider that while enterprise software vendors are (finally!) promising to tear down the silos and bring social media into the fold, there is still plenty of work to be done. Moreover, the end result may never be truly seamless. On the other hand, those who organically built and offer seamless capabilities for managing social media along with other marketing channels are already there. For marketers, this means faster time to market and the ability to outflank the competition now—not in 12 to 18 months.
What are your thoughts on the recent social marketing acquisitions?
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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