News

The Pedowitz Group (TPG), announced its acquisition of social media and social CRM consulting firm Metz Consulting. Focused on providing its marketing clients with social revenue marketing services and expertise, social media expert and author Adam Metz joins TPG as the agency’s first Director of Social Business. Fellow Metz Consulting associate Christina Fan has also joined the company as Associate Revenue Engineer.

“We are extremely proud to join The Pedowitz Group team and look forward to providing our social revenue marketing strategy to TPG clients as part of their expert revenue marketing team,” Metz said in a press release.

Salesforce.com recently announced its acquisition of Dimdim for approximately $31 million in cash, which will extend the Salesforce Chatter collaboration platform with critical real-time communication technologies, following the Facebook model of combining real-time collaboration and communication into a single integrated service.

The acquisition will enable Salesforce.com to build on the momentum of 60,000 Chatter customers, accelerating the industry shift to Cloud 2.

HubSpot’s Unified Inbound Marketing System Scores High
For Ease-of-Use, Optimization, Lead Management and Analytics

Web site development and content management is in many cases a frustrating chore in a fragmented space. The dizzying array of programming choices – with Google Analytics and various business intelligence tools thrown into the mix – has stalled many a mind-numbing “we need a new web site” meeting.

With the Federal Reserve recently downgrading their economic growth projection for 2011 to 3% from 3.6%, many industries and companies will once again be challenged to return their revenue to an upward angle. This reality is expected to present a continued opportunity for the automation space, as more companies look to transform their sales and marketing strategies.

Despite more than 1,500 new companies deploying marketing automation in 2010, many analysts were disappointed with the growth curve for the category last year. As a broader range of industry verticals are seeing the benefits of automation technologies, industry insiders are projecting growth rates will continue to climb this year.

Salesforce.com challenged developers to build the next killer app on the Force.com platform at AppQuest 2010. While over 100 apps were submitted, BranchIt Corporation, provider of cloud-based relationship discovery solutions, was selected as the winner. Built using Force.com, BranchIt for Chatter is immediately available for deployment on the ChatterExchange, an entirely new category of social apps on AppExchange 2.

BranchIt for Chatter is designed to uncover relationships held by employees across the entire company and feeds them through Salesforce Chatter to users. Specific functionality includes automated contact syncing, relationship discovery, relationship strength scoring, contact following, account following and related management reports. The application makes use of Chatter, Jigsaw, Apex code, Visualforce, various e-mail platform integrations and is accessible via standard web browsers and mobile devices.