My consistent lament about the social technology space is there are too many people claiming they do everything and too few people doing everything. For every monitoring solution that says they have engagement tools, workflow management and killer analytics, there’s a killer analytics solution that claims to have monitoring, engagement and workflow management.
The truth is always somewhere South of what they sell. They’re all typically good at one thing and meh at all the other stuff.
I’ve said before that the golden era of social technologies is yet to come. When the top monitoring solutions merge with or acquire the top engagement solutions, which have merged with or acquired the top analytics solutions and so on, then we’ll see software that can solve your problems in one packaged solution.
Salesforce has tried to do this — and has a done a nice job — with its acquisitions of Radian6, Buddy Media, ExactTarget and the like. Unfortunately, you have to have an incredible marketing budget to afford even a small part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Oracle has made a nice play, too, as have some others.
But what intrigues me is when you see some of the smaller players joining forces to offer integrated solutions. Today, we have another entry in this evolution.
Sysomos, once acquired but then spun off by Marketwire, acquired Expion today. The former is a social media monitoring solution with a few layers of what I call “listening” (deeper analysis to perform conversational research for consumer insights) and a decent workflow management and engagement platform. They promote themselves as an analytics solution, but they’re rooted in monitoring. The later is an enterprise social media engagement and content management system geared toward franchise and multiple location/department businesses.
Both are strong players in the social technology space. Both are great companies with great people.
(I guess this is a good time for a disclosure or two. Expion is a former client from my Social Media Explorer days. I’m a big fan and very good friends with much of the original dozen or so employees. Amber Naslund, Sysomos’s SVP of Marketing, is also a good friend. As is Sheldon Levine, Sysomos’s community manager.)
Here’s what this acquisition could mean:
- A monitoring platform with an adequate engagement platform can evolve to become stronger on engagement and add a component of content management and hierarchy of service to an already strong product
- A top-tier content management product can add a layer of monitoring and listening it has only offered as a plug-in from other sources in previous iterations, making it more uniformly strong across features
- The blending of the engineering talent could produce an integrated product (probably 1-2 years down the road) that could certainly compete with anything the Salesforces and Oracles of the world are engineering.
- The post-acquisition grab mentality of Sysomos’s leadership (they sold once so they’re not anxious to pay for junior’s college tuition anymore) means they *can* manage these two companies in a way that undercuts the enterprise-only focus of the bigger competitors in the market. I’m not saying they’ll go small business, but they can certainly make a product that is strong and more affordable.
Certainly we are in the era of social technology market contraction. More and more of these companies are going to be bought, sold, merged and perhaps even disappear. For brands, you need to ask about those end-games and partnership when selecting your social technology. There’s a good chance what you sign up for will not be the same before your contract is up.
Oh, and cheers to Sysomos and Expion. I’m tickled for this, truly.