Salesforce brings Social Studio deeper into its Cloud family

In May, Salesforce announced that it was combining the social technologies from its Radian6 and Buddy Media acquisitions into a new Social Studio suite inside its ExactTarget Marketing Cloud.

Today, the company unveiled Phase Two, with a more complete integration into the Marketing and other clouds that populate the Salesforce universe, a new interface designed for simplicity, and new features.

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The deeper integration means that there’s now a single sign-on and a unified navigation across the Marketing Cloud. There’s also a newly rebuilt social listening engine, which had been part of Radian6 and which monitors a billion data sources across the world of social. It offers such new-to-Salesforce views as a word cloud of conversations around a given topic.

Two of the social channels — Twitter and Facebook — can be turned on for free, VP for product marketing Gordon Evans told VentureBeat. Google+ and Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo are also being added to the channel groupings. And a new Analyze Module lets you analyze the sentiment of a conversation.

But the Marketing Cloud isn’t the only one getting attention from Social Studio. Social content from Social Studio can now be monitored inside the company’s Social.com social ad solution, enabling better coordination of ad placement and timing.

Integration with the Service Cloud lets companies more easily monitor social communications so that they can route issues to customer support.

New leads from social conversations can be routed directly in the Sales Cloud, and social data can be added to the B2B side of the house, over in Pardot marketing automation.

How does this “next generation” of an integrated Social Studio stack up against competitors?

“Customers are telling us why they’re choosing us,” Evans said, because “listening, engagement are all in one place.”

“You don’t have to have multiple tools,” he said, adding that this empowers “the head of digital marketing to drive social marketing into sales and services, and [provides] a single view of the customer.”

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The pricing for the Social Studio remains the same, about $1,000 month. This is roughly equivalent to the pricing for the enterprise version of, say, cloud-based social media management platform Hootsuite, and it’s less than the $2,000/user/month for Oracle’s enterprise-grade Social Marketing Cloud.

But Salesforce retains one key advantage its competitors will never have: the integrated family of its particular clouds.