By Chris Selland on May 29, 2012
In case you haven’t been paying attention, the Social Media/Marketing marketspace is starting to consolidate – rapidly.
What’s driving this consolidation is M&A activity by the large cap market leaders, most notably Salesforce.com who is apparently about to purchase Buddy Media for more than $800M. This follows Oracle’s just-announced $300M acquisition of Vitrue.
Salesforce started this a bit over a year ago with their $326M acquisition of Radian6, which instantly made life significantly more difficult for other social analytics startups. I know all too well – I was one of those other startups.
The problem is that with the massive proliferation of early-stage startups these past few years, there are simply not enough seats for them all to find a buyer, go public or otherwise exit.
5 years from now, 5-10% of the vendors on this extremely complicated chart below will be part of a much bigger company, and most of the remaining 90-95% will no longer exist.
If you’re in the latter group (or if you didn’t make this chart at all) – best advice I can give you is to hire the best Bus Dev person you can find. Quickly.
Posted in Featured Posts, Technology / Software, Trends & Concepts | Tagged Buddy Media, consolidation, M&A, oracle, Radian6, salesforce.com, Social Media, Vitrue |
Chris Selland is VP of Marketing at HP Vertica. He brings 20+ years of success driving demand and revenue via innovative online, search & inbound marketing programs as well as leading key strategic alliance & corporate development initiatives for entrepreneurial, high-growth companies including SoundBite Communications (NASDAQ:SDBT), Constant Contact (NASDAQ:CTCT) and Lumigent Technologies (acquired by BeyondTrust).
Chris is an established thought leader, speaker and author on customer strategy-related topics including CRM, Customer Metrics & Loyalty, Customer Support and Social Media Marketing, and was an Expert Advisor at Focus.com as well as a founding member of the Enterprise Irregulars. Earlier in his career he was VP of CRM and Internet Research at the Yankee Group, and later founded Reservoir Partners, a customer strategy research firm that merged with Aberdeen Group, where he became VP of Sell-Side Research.
Chris serves on a number of corporate and non-profit boards, and has a BS in Operations Research & Industrial Engineering from Cornell University and an MBA in International Business & Economics from NYU Stern School of Business.
