Salesforce buys Buddy Media for $689M to become a marketing powerhouse

Confirming rumors from last week, enterprise cloud computing titan Salesforce said today that it has agreed to purchase New York City-based Buddy Media for $689 million.

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Buddy Media offers social media analytics for some of the biggest brands in the world, including Ford and Hewlett-Packard, and together with Salesforce’s Radian6 it will power Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud. Salesforce will buy the company for $467 million in cash, $184 million in common stock, and $38 million in vested options and restricted stock units.

“Buddy Media’s mission is to eliminate the current state of anarchy in social marketing,” Buddy Media co-founder and CEO Michael Lazerow said in a statement today. “With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marketers will be able to unify their efforts to better organize their teams, optimize their social programs and deliver real business results.”

Salesforce says the deal has been approved by Buddy Media’s board and is expected to close by fiscal Q3 2013, ending October 31, 2012. The company expects the deal to add an additional $20 million to $25 million in revenue for the fiscal year 2013.

Notably, the acquisition marks the largest exit for a New York company since Google bought DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in 2007, Greycroft’s Ian Sigalow (a Buddy Media investor) pointed out on Twitter this morning.

Buddy Media previously raised a whopping $54 million round last August, and had around $90 million in funding altogether.

Update: In true social media fashion, Lazerow recorded a touching and inspirational video (below) to share his feelings about the acquisition. Now will someone stop peeling those onions…

Photo credit: Andy Dean Photography/Shutterstock

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