Salesforce Buys Social Media Monitoring Company Radian6 For $326 Million | Hacker News Reader

Salesforce Buys Social Media Monitoring Company Radian6 For $326 Million

techcrunch.com

39 pointsjoetek18 comments

Good for them! What most people doesn't know is that Radian6 founder, C. Newton, also founded Q1 Labs ( a successful security company ) and was kicked out of it a few years ago by the "board"...

Instead of giving up, he formed a new company and did very well for the second time.

Steve Jobs all over again? :)

some gems from the TC comment thread:

"SCRM comes of age in a big way by connecting inbound social media activity to customer acquisition and retention strategies... Congrats!"

"sf.com validates and values that businesses need to deploy a "listening platform" to monitor all forms of customer conversation."

marketing people are so cute

The first comment is fairly legitimate, if phrased vapidly. Social CRM is a real topic of discussion for anyone playing in the CRM space. If you look at classic customer acquisition and retention strategies, they are based on the data we were able to capture 5-10 years ago. It takes a while for "new" data (social media activity, in-depth demographic and financial information) to work its way into the practices of CRM users. There is a lot of opportunity to improve acquisition strategies by targeting the friends and influencers of customers (ie. Social CRM), but most of the major players have had trouble delivering on that promise in their products. The acquisition is a big deal and other CRM vendors will have to respond. The second quote you posted is indeed meaningless.

As someone who has used Radian6 before: Good luck, Salesforce... you'll need it.

Interesting earnout structure for the founders, considering the company raised so little. I don't know how $14M over three years on top of $326M creates much incentive to hang around.

I wrote some thoughts,. one of the important things from a CDN perspective is that Radian6 was not just built in Canada but funded here as well.

http://startupnorth.ca/2011/03/30/salesforce-acquires-radian...

CDN or canadian?

Not content delivery, but CDN as in Canadian.

People use CDN to refer in shorthand to Canada, even though it's not part of any official shortening or abbreviation. The Canadian currency is officially abbreviated as CAD although many folks incorrectly think it's CDN. :-)

I'm excited to see if any of this money makes it back into the Maritime startup community.

This is an area where Ottawa does extremely poorly. Very little mentorship and money made it from the telecom generation of founders to today's generation.

I've often found Salesforce software janky and frankenstein-ish. Radian6 is a great acquisition but hopefully they won't try and marry it into some of their other software.

Don't you think they'll merge in alot of the functions for social monitoring? Seems inevitable.

I wonder if there will be any more acquisitions in the social media monitoring. I think the best candidate is Visible Technologies.

It's a good day for New Brunswick!

It's a great day for New Brunswick! May it inspire a new generation of Maritime startups.

You guys from NB?

i live in fredericton. i was amused and delighted to see my hometown mentioned in a tech crunch article. a disconnect i never thought i'd see.

congrats to the radian6 guys, and here's to hoping q1 labs is the next big canadian tech success!

I live in Toronto, but I think maritimers are awesome.

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