The following is a guest blog from our friends at Salesforce.

The Marketing Cloud Delivers a New Generation of Social Analytics

Oct 19 2012 By Robert Begg in Marketing Cloud

The Marketing Cloud, the most comprehensive social marketing suite, announced its next generation of analytics tools that help companies shift from passively listening on social media to generating business results as they turn insights into action.

Marketing Cloud customers can access sophisticated analytics that enable them to better identify sales leads, discover advocates, identify the most timely and trending information for any topic or keyword, uncover social influence, analyze content in 17 languages.

“Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to go beyond listening to proactively engaging with customers. With the social intelligence provided by the Marketing Cloud, now we can quickly distinguish which social posts ask questions, express a need or problem and identify our brand champions and act on that information,” said Michelle Accardi, vice president of Internet Marketing, CA Technologies.

The social analytics tools in the Marketing Cloud now pull data from partners Bitext, Calais, Caterva, Clarabridge Link, EpiAnalytics, Kanjoya, Klout, Kred, LeadSift, Lexalytics, LinguaSys, Lymbix, Metavana, OpenAmplify, PeekAnalytics, Rapleaf, Solariat, Soshio, The SelfService Company and Trendspottr.

In order to make deployment of Marketing Cloud easier, we are introducing a credit-based pricing model that offers companies an easy way to pilot, purchase and combine analytics offerings from the ecosystem. Marketing Cloud is generally available today.

The Marketing Cloud is the most comprehensive social marketing suite that enables companies to manage social listening, content, engagement, advertising and measurement all in one place. Today 55 percent of the Fortune 100 are using the Marketing Cloud to transform their marketing for the social era and progressive companies such as Air Canada, Carnival Cruise Lines, Ford, Hewlett Packard, Southwest Airlines and Unilever are making better business decisions with our tools.