Salesforce.com has made a $800m bid for Buddy Media, in amove that could create the first enterprise level platform to have a fully integrated social customer relationship management (sCRM) module. The news was first reported by All Things D, which cites unnamed sources as saying the two companies have agreed to terms of the sale, though the purchase is not yet final.
The reports suggest that Salesforce.com won a bidding war with Google to snap up the firm.
Buddy Media is best known for helping big brands navigate Facebook, but it has recently made a point of expanding beyond the social network to other social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.
The deal is likely to see Salesforce use Buddy Media to extend its core customer relationship management offering.
The combined companies would create one of the first sales contact systems that can handle message personalisation with genuine enterprise level solutions across multiple platforms and also with a major business to business user base.
Last year, Salesforce bought social media monitoring firm Radian6, another social media platform company, for $326 million.
The acquisition follows hot on the heels of Oracle’s acquisition of Vitrue and Adobe’s acquisition of Efficient Frontier.
Buddy has raised a reported $90 million. Investors valued it at $500 million during its most recent funding round in August 2011.