A storm is gathering in the clouds, not just with #Sandy moving towards the northeast US, but with rumbling within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This week, it emerged that Salesforce.com's biggest acquisition, social media campaign manager Buddy Media, is losing more than $40 million a year, while Salesforce's social media markeing firm, Radian6, is reorganizing and shedding jobs.

Salesforce spokesperson Jane Hynes’ statement in part: “With the integration of Radian6 and Buddy Media, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is rebalancing its resources to support its growth, including moving from a hub to a distributed model for certain customer-facing roles, consolidating marketing, and dramatically increasing investments in R&D. Fewer than 100 people globally have been impacted.”

Salesforce acquired Buddy Media in August for $745 million, a time it was churning through more than $42 million a year, while Radian6, Salesforce’s previous marquee acquisition was cash-flow positive at the time of its $325 million acquisition in March of 2010.Continue reading...

Social media monitoring has never been more necessary, or complicated. In the wake of acquiring Seesmic last month, HootSuite is getting more sophisticated — just as Twitter is clamping down on limiting third-party clients. HootSuite's just-launched Command Center, lets users monitor their social media mentions, publish and engage other users, all while analyzing and measuring results in one dashboard.

The goal, CEO Ryan Holmes tells VentureBeat, is “a hub where every social interaction can be seen, studied and spread.” That's the holy grail for marketers looking to wrap their bosses' heads around ROI (or some other kind of object) every time social media enters the conversation. 

A virtual ‘situation room,’ or ‘master control,’ HootSuite enables large enterprise companies to control all social activities real-time with dashboard views that include blocks such as, "Twitter Daily Retweets," "Twitter Follower Growth," and website visits.Continue reading...

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is busy pitching Wall Street and Madison Avenue on FB advertising, calling it "incredibly effective" in her first post-IPO interviews. She's not the only Facebook exec defending the efficacy of ad campaigns using the social graph, even as the FTC raises privacy concerns about FB's new partnership with Datalogix for ad metrics, and social ad skeptic GM challenged the site's analytics.

With its stock down 43% since its May IPO, new initiatives to increase revenue including mobile ads and now the Datalogix union are attempts by the social behemoth to wean marketers off clicks, which is the key metric pitched by Google. Instead, Facebook is focusing not on the click-through rate (CTR) but on the number of times a user sees an ad (and whether the campaign has reached its target audience) as more effective metrics to track in marketing.

Indeed, Facebook reports that fewer than 1% of in-store sales tied to brand campaigns come from people who clicked on an ad.Continue reading...

On the eve of Advertising Week, Nielsen announced a modest uptick of 2.4% in global ad spending in the second quarter. And now that Advertising Week is upon us, the ratings giant is out with its latest metrics on how the rise of online video and digital platforms are upending traditional ad models.

According to the new Nielsen Cross-Platform Report, “in addition to watching 34-plus hours of TV per week, the average American spends nearly five hours online on the computer. More than half of Americans now watch video online, with online viewing increasing average weekly video consumption to roughly 35 hours.”

Nielsen is pitching its clients to rethink how they view the viewer, and that an online viewer is equally valuable to the advertising ecosystem as a television viewer — a message that coincides with the kick off of Advertising Week in New York, and the launch of Nielsen Cross-Platform Ratings for multi-screen ad measurement to Madison Avenue.

After extensive trials across the advertising ecosystem with brands including ESPN, Facebook, Hulu and Unilever, the new product delivers unduplicated and incremental reach, frequency and GRP measures for TV and Internet advertising. Their new measurement includes the number of people who watched a campaign digitally, those who watched on TV, and the intersection of those two audiences.Continue reading...

Two months after pulling its paid ads from Facebook, General Motors is "in talks" to return to the site as a paid advertiser in return for access to "better data," according to the Wall Street Journal (which broke the original story of the pull-out on May 15th). GM CEO Dan Akerson and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg have spoken about the issues — GM's desire for better measurement and analytics to gauge the effectiveness of any paid Facebook advertising — that led to the falling out, WSJ reports.

GM's chief marketing officer Joel Ewanick and Facebook's global ad sales head Carolyn Everson reportedly met for the first time at the recent Cannes advertising festival to discuss what would bring the automaker back to the table, the Journal heard from a source. At that meeting, "Everson said Facebook is willing to provide GM with better data on how their ads can turn into dollars, as it has agreed to do with other advertisers, this person said. Facebook won't provide any special treatment for GM, however."

Whether or not GM can take credit for getting Facebook to improve its metrics and reporting (or receives any "special treatment," cheaper ad rates or additional data), it's certainly good news for other marketers feeling a similar need for more granular data in the never-ending quest to "prove" the ROI of paid Facebook advertising.Continue reading...

The Interactive Advertising Bureau just announced the "rising stars" of new ad units, including AOL's Project Devil format and YouTube's new billboard format, demonstrated in the video above.

But how to determine if they're effective? There is no consistent method for measuring the effects of digital media, even as it increasingly becomes the currency driving the industry.

That's why, just as apparel-makers are seeking to create a common set of metrics around sustainability, the three kings of marketing and advertising in the US (including the IAB) are joining forces to come up with a unified set of standards and metrics to measure the ROI of digital marketing.Continue reading...