Becoming a socially enabled business is a challenge for every company and
salesforce.com is no exception. When we launch the Marketing Cloud at Dreamforce X (and give away a 2013 Ford Fusion Hybrid to celebrate!) it's worth taking a look back at how the Marketing Cloud came to be.

We launched the salesforce.com community back in 2005 in order to provide a discussion and learning forum for Salesforce users. While we weren't the first company to start to blogging, we embraced social quickly. Many of our employees signed up for Twitter when it launched to the public in 2006, and the company started our first corporate Twitter accounts soon after that.

Early salesforce.com community

As our social footprint expanded, our PR department realized they needed a way to monitor all of the social conversations about the Salesforce brand. In 2010, we became a customer of Radian6. The teams using the platform were amazed by its ability to turn a mirror to Salesforce and show how we look to the outside world. Once the Radian6 team joined salesforce.com as an acquisition in 2011, they became the first cornerstone to our social marketing transformation. Marcel LeBrun and team were leaders in helping us realize the power of "friends first, then customers" concept when engaging with clients over social channels. 

After that our social evolution transitioned to warp speed. We launched a series of Facebook accounts for our products, as well as Google+, Pinterest, SlideShare, YouTube, and LinkedIn company accounts, and it quickly became clear that managing all our content while maintaining a single brand voice was a big challenge. Meanwhile, Buddy Media had been founded to help developers and digital media managers organize and deploy their content on Facebook and other social media platforms in one place. As Michael Lazerow wrote when Salesforce first announced intent to acquire Buddy Media, "In 2007, sensing that businesses would need a way to manage and analyze their content on Facebook, we launched the first software product for Facebook page managers, called the Buddy Media Facebook Page Management System. Three years later, Buddy Media’s social marketing suite is now trusted by nearly 1,000 of the world’s largest companies, including eight out of the top ten global advertisers." As salesforce.com began evaluating a number of the providers in the social media content creation and management arena, Buddy Media was the standout leader. Now they make up the second key component of the salesforce.com Marketing Cloud.

Salesforce.com Facebook page 2009

We are excited to now deliver the world’s first unified social marketing suite and turn insights into action and drive real business results through social. Innovation at salesforce.com has always happened through our customers and we can’t wait to see what they come up with using the Marketing Cloud. 

Dreamforce starts on September 18^th and we have an incredible show lined up. Come learn all about the new Salesforce Marketing Cloud at our product keynote on Thursday at 1:30 PM. And let’s not forget that you’ll get a chance to win a new Ford Fusion Hybrid at the keynote by picking up a contest entry form there and redeeming it in the Campground by 3:30 PM that day. We will draw the winner at 3:45 PM. You can read the terms and conditions here. 

And to learn more about the marketing cloud check out the Marketing Cloud website.