Oracle Extends the Customer Conversation

Oracle links social monitoring platform with cloud services.

Last year, when Teradata's Aprimo unit asked marketers to name their top strategic goals, more were worried about improving their operations than were concerned with engaging customers in relevant conversations. When it comes to social media marketing, conversation is cheap, but monitoring and managing engagement is dear. That's why so many marketing software providers continue to march out products attempting to integrate social media campaigning with traditional marketing operations—the latest being Oracle.

In what it calls an “aggressive integration strategy,” the company introduced Oracle Social Relationship Management Suite at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin today. Oracle marketers claim that the new product, which includes features from recently acquired Eloqua, can eliminate the inconsistencies, duplications, and delays common with social media marketing. The promised result:  more fluid and measurable campaigns that helps users manage required actions and collaborate more smoothly with coworkers.

“Marketers are transitioning from building audiences in social media to creating broader experiences for customers in the channel,” says Erika Brookes, Oracle's VP for product management. “This is a product aimed at giving [marketers] a better understanding of how to turn social media efforts into viable and measureable components of their marketing operations.”

The cloud-based platform can be integrated with other Oracle applications such as RightNow Cloud Service and Oracle CRM. “You could create a landing page on Facebook through Eloqua that could capture all leads coming through Facebook and enter them into the Eloqua system,” Brookes says. Marketers can track social media campaigns for lead-generation effectiveness and use the system to adjust content on the fly.

“Marketers are facing scale and agility issues when it comes to integrating social media,” Brookes adds. “It's not just about knowing what's being said on social media, it's about knowing what's being said and being able to react to it quickly.”