Very interesting - Salesforce, who’s doing all the right moves will acquire Facebook CMS company Buddy Media for $800 Million. Well, Buddy Media has built more than that over the years - the 5 years old company started as a simple CMS to build Facebook Apps, which then integrated with the Graph API, built reusable modules, analytics, profiling, and more.
Salesforce has had a strong offering, and are getting all the right components to become the one-stop-shop for all [social] CRM needs.
Many observers had assumed that Facebook, or a big ad holding company like WPP, would end up acquiring Buddy Media — especially since WPP is already an investor in the company, and recently announced a deal to route all of its Facebook ad buying through the company.
Instead, it appears that Salesforce intends to use Buddy Media to extend its core customer relationship management offering. The presumable logic: Acquiring Buddy Media will help Salesforce’s clients reach their customers and leads where they are spending lots of online time. Last year, Salesforce bought Radian6, another social media platform company, for $326 million.
Buddy has raised a reported $90 million. Investors valued it at $500 million during its most recent funding round in August 2011.
