Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Dayon, Executive VP of Applications, Salesforce.com (Part 2)

SM: Right. Given that that’s what’s going on in the world, how do decide what to acquire, what to bring in to Salesforce.com?

AD: Salesforce is, obviously, not an early stage company. We are a $3 billion company today. We’ve hundreds of thousands of customers, pretty much of all sizes. My position at Salesforce is to continue to grow and find emerging opportunities as well as to grow our existing businesses. So, my role in terms of acquisition is to look at the market coverage and make sure that there are no blind spots. For example, when we decided [in 2011] to acquire Radian6, it’s because we felt we had a blind spot for marketers of companies of all sizes. In the marketing space, we realized that whether you are a five-person company or you’re the largest consumer goods company, you need to engage in social media. You need to monitor and connect that to your business processes. We had a blind spot. We decided to make a buy. When we look at what it takes to monitor millions of tweets every day, to monitor billions of blogs every day, to be the Google of the social world, you have to buy the best in class in the space, which is what we did with Radian6. That has been a super successful acquisition. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Dayon, Executive VP of Applications, Salesforce.com (Part 1)

We’ve talked a lot about Salesforce.com on this blog. Those of you who follow it know that I talked to CTA Marc Ferrentino in July 2011 for my Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing series. Once a company that focused primarily on facilitating customer relationship management for its clients, Salseforce has started branching out into platform as a service and other areas. My conversation with vice-president of applications Alex Dayon will focus on his perceptions of the mobile and social worlds as well as Salesforce’s evolution. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Jewell, Founder and CEO of Spruce Media (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You needed to provide this service.

Rob Jewell: Yes. We had to build a layer of services on top of that to ensure our clients were successful. Our thoughts have always been that as these channels mature, clients tend to want to bring advertising in-house. We’re in the process of handing the reins over, so to speak, to a lot of our advertisers and licensing that platform and letting them manage it on their own.

SM: What is the minimum spending threshold at which you take clients? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Jewell, Founder and CEO of Spruce Media (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: That would be great for the Facebook API. Facebook right now [has] three billion [dollars in advertising revenue] or something?

Rob Jewell: Yes. I think they’re probably four billion.

SM: Four billion. So, how much of that is going through this kind of optimization? How much is going direct?

RJ: I don’t have exact numbers, but from things I hear, at least half of it is going through the ads API companies. The ads API program is fairly new. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Jewell, Founder and CEO of Spruce Media (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: A customer or lead?

Rob Jewell: A lead, someone who has signed up for Living Social’s daily deals newsletter.

SM: So, Living Social decided to go with your media buying team and technology over its own media buying team and technology to buy on Facebook. Would you talk in a more specific way on what it is that you do differently and why is your team or your technology so much better? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Rob Jewell, Founder and CEO of Spruce Media (Part 1)

Most marketers today know that a social medium like Facebook is a powerful advertising tool. But in 2008, when Rob Jewell founded SocialCash, Spruce Media’s predecessor, using social media to market businesses, products, and services had yet to become common practice. Although social advertising is gaining traction, there is still far much too unmonetized advertising inventory out there on the Internet, on mobile, on social, and on the Web in general. There are all sorts of communities out there – not just on Facebook – that have unmonetized ad inventory.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Rob. Let’s start with some context on Spruce Media. Tell us a bit about yourself, about Spruce Media, what you do, what kind of business you’re in, and then we’ll take it from there. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Bill Seibel, Founder and CEO of Mobiquity (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Are there any other trends or broad industry directions you would highlight?

Bill Seibel: What we have to do is make sure we understand and deliver on any device that we have. Half of the companies in the world might make an argument that iPhones are dominating and are going to continue to dominate in the entire Western world. The other half would make the same case for Android. I think we’re split down the middle, but I guess that’s a good thing. I see projects getting bigger as you look at a business transformation project rather than just building an app. The apps sometimes can be built for $25,000, but we’re seeing a wide range of projects coming in at well north of $1 million. Projects, enterprise projects, are getting bigger. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Bill Seibel, Founder and CEO of Mobiquity (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Let’s talk about another example.

Bill Seibel: For the New York Post, we built the Android version and the Kindle Fire version of the publication, which is mostly around the device, but we also architected and built the subscription management on the back end. We do all the management of subscriptions and tie into their tracking systems so that if someone subscribes to the hard copy and is accessing the mobile version, that represents a different set of economics than if someone who is not a subscriber accesses the mobile version. We manage and tie back in to their back ends, and we manage the mobile version of the subscription system for all of their mobile products. >>>