Salesforce.com is on a mission to help our customers become customer companies, to help them connect with their customers, employees, partners and products in entirely new ways. A core part of becoming a customer company is transforming marketing from the old ways of untargeted, unsolicited interruptions, to the new way of engaging, transparent and targeted communications.

I don’t have to tell readers of the salesforce.com blog that social media has transformed marketing forever. Our community has been speaking about that for the last few years. Today, I’m excited that we’re doubling down on one of the fastest growing areas of social marketing: social advertising. Social ads are going to be an $11 billion market by 2017, and 64% of advertisers say they are going to increase their spend in 2013.
 

A year ago, Salesforce Buddy Media was the first company to integrate social advertising with social publishing in one powerful suite of applications. And while social advertising has created an opportunity to reach a huge number of consumers along with a completely unprecedented opportunity for targeting, there are still many more possibilities.

Today we’re announcing an important milestone: salesforce.com is delivering our new social advertising application, Social.com. For the first time, brands and agencies will be able to power social ad campaigns with the world’s #1 CRM, Salesforce CRM, and the world’s #1 social listening application, Radian6. By empowering both brands and agencies to connect social ad campaigns with real-time customer and social listening data, campaigns can be more relevant and effective than ever before possible.

For more details you can check out Social.com or watch in real time this morning on Salesforce Live, where salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff will be joined by guests including Twitter Chief Revenue Officer Adam Bain, Omnicom Digital CEO Jonathan Nelson and others. 

For those of you who like visual content, here is our infographic on the state of social ads and Social.com: