Jeff Ragovin, Chief Strategy Officer for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, recently presented at iMedia Brand Summit in Coronado, California. After his presentation, titled "The Art and Skill of Customer Listening in the Digital World," Jeff joined iMedia's Bethany Simpson to discuss the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and the opportunities brands now have in today's social marketing landscape. You can watch the full interview above or read the highlights below.

Bethany: Tell me about the Marketing Cloud. What is this?

Jeff: The Marketing Cloud is an amazing product that we've started to integrate right now. The Marketing Cloud is Radian6, which is listening, we're now sucking in 400 sources across the web, and we're now building out a platform that is a social switchboard. If you think about someone getting a job at your company, or talking about a product that they like, you can now route that to different people so that your entire organization is built on this social enterprise. Then you've got the Buddy Media components, which is really, 'I want to launch presences everywhere. I want to launch my Facebook presence, I want to launch my Twitter presence, I want to launch on my website with all these social hooks. Then I want all these analytics for the ROI that goes behind it.' So for the first time ever, we are now able to truly determine the value of a share. That's the best part. Social's been really exciting the last few years, because it's been about building connections and engagement. Now it's about turning connections into customers for life.

Bethany: Would you say that attribution has matured? Can we figure out why people did what they did?

Jeff: I think in the early days it was all about testing. We were really creating the space as it went along. Now, we've got these customers, we know that they love us, how do we flip them into brand advocates and have them work for us, have them go out and tell people to buy a product. We already do that in real life. We tell people to buy products all the time. Social has just created an instant transparency to connect with brands and connect with friends in real-time.

Bethany: What does that look like when it's done right? Does Facebook have the right model? 

Jeff: It's not just Facebook. You really need to have one system where you can engage, create your presences, do social ads. Right now what we're dealing with is an industry where there's a lot of specialized partners out there, and a lot of the brands are going to this company to do X, and this company to do Y. And essentially what they're doing is fragmenting their data, which is causing a ton of problems. So what we're actually doing is coming up with the first unified social platform in the world.

Bethany: You make it sound so simple. We've been waiting for this. This is a really great product set. 

Jeff: I've never been so excited. We've been working on this for five years. We now essentially have the future in our hands. And now what we're doing is turning connections in customers, insight into action, and we are creating real customer profiles on people. So we know this person commented 16 times, we know what they bought. And the users are opting into this: for people that don't want to do it, they don't have to. But for people that want to be brand advocates, we are taking that and amplifying that out. Customer relationship management is now turning a corner where social is fully integrated into it now.

Bethany: What companies are you seeing that are doing this right? Who can we really model after?

Jeff: With Ford, social is now in their DNA as a company. Everything they do touches social. You look at Carnival. Carnival Cruise Lines is really humanizing their brand. They're talking to people. It's not about pushing 'Hey, come on this cruise, go on this ship.' It's about talking to people every day. You look at JetBlue. JetBlue response times on Twitter, it's under a minute. Their entire team is just phenomenal.

Bethany: I know that a lot of companies are struggling to develop brand loyalists, but some companies are doing it so successfully, so I think that everyone can do it.

Jeff: Everybody can do it: B2C, B2B, it doesn't matter what vertical you're in. If you think about the customer at the end of the day, and you think about what they want, and you put a layer of conversion tracking underneath that, and think about sharing, that can actually influence that content that you're pushing out. So it's not just about coming out with content and seeing if they like it. We already know what they like. Now we're creating that content that people are enjoying.

Learn more about how the Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help your brand listen, publish, engage and measure. Or, watch the Salesforce Marketing Cloud keynote presentation at Dreamforce 2012 below: