Michael Lazerow, co-founder and CEO of social marketing software company Buddy Media, sees plenty of intriguing possibilities ahead, once the deal for his company to be acquired by Salesforce Radian6, a CRM software specialist, completes later this year.

The tie-up is less about exploring efficiencies today, he stresses, and more about readiness for a digitally connected tomorrow, where the marketing department has become a major hub for software investment.

Social media programs, meanwhile, should help bridge the gap between brand marketers and salespeople working in separate divisions today, creating opportunities for a unified service that can address both sales and marketing needs.

“There is so much we want to build,” Lazerow said, speaking to Media Business Asia in Singapore during digital marketing conference AdTech.

“I am not looking at this as how do we slam parts together,” he added. “Where it makes sense, we’ll figure out ways to integrate but we may still buy, build or partner.”

The deal with Salesforce shouldn't be too much of a surprise, mirroring similar deals in the software industry combining CRM and social media, such as Oracle’s acquisition in May of Buddy Media rival, Vitrue.

Lazerow sees Salesforce and Buddy Media bound together by a common vision, of the social enterprise.

“They were coming at it from a more internal company focus,” he said. “We were more external, in terms of how you engage with seven billion people.”

Asian acceleration

There is one immediate advantage from the Salesforce acquisition - access to around 2,000 sales people employed by Salesforce worldwide. Once a product takes off, growth is determined by the speed at which Buddy can staff up.

As demand for social media services gathers pace, the company is finding it hard to keep up.

“They help us by solving our distribution needs, by getting us to more clients,” Lazerow said. “Their clients are asking for it.”

Lazerow helped found Buddy Media five years ago, but the company only hit upon its metier, of selling social media management tools, around two years ago.

An Asian presence is even more recent, via an office set up in Singapore last October, led by ex-Yahoo APAC VP Ken Mandel.

The team in Asia is still lean, focused on key markets within the region, serving a client base that includes United Spirits, Kingfisher, Vodafone, Commonwealth Bank, OCBC, ESPN Star Sports, SingTel and Nissan.

Operations also got a lift in May, when GroupM named Buddy Media as preferred partner worldwide for social media ad buys.

GroupM’s parent WPP meanwhile, once seen as a potential buyer, had also acquired a 5% stake in the company in 2010.

Brand-owners reorganize

Some of the world’s largest advertisers have already responded to the challenges of an increasingly data-driven world, calling in large technology companies such as Accenture or Oracle to advise on company-wide overhauls.

This will speed up the adoption of math-based marketing, benefting companies such as Salesforce and Buddy Media.

The helter-skelter pace of change, however, makes it difficult to predict what kind of tools marketers and agencies will value in the future, Lazerow cautioned. Nontheless, he feels well placed to take on larger rivals.

“The product of the future is yet to be written but we think it’s going to involve an easy to use marketing cloud,” he said.

“According to Gartner, the CMO is going to spend more money on technology than the CIO, and they will need easy to deploy software," he added.

“To me that’s going to beat out expensive heavy traditional legacy software. That’s always been Salesforce’s competition. They’ve always competed against Oracle, SAP and Microsoft.”