Social Media Monitoring has been the focus of a podcast series released over the last few weeks in the wake of Google’s announcement they’ll be retiring Google Reader.

As the producer of an online social media monitoring course based on Google Reader, I’ve been intently evaluating free Google reader alternatives such as Feedly and Netvibes.  After an in depth evaluation of these two contenders, I also wrote a post comparing them for Venture Beat last Friday.

While Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which bundles Radian6, Buddy Media and Social.com, isn’t free, in the quest for thoroughness, I decided to include their offering on this evaluation to check in and see what’s new over there.

Radian6 is the monitoring and engagement module, Buddy Media is the publishing platform and Social.com (acquired by Buddy Media) as a way to manage paid social media campaigns. They’re currently in the process of integrating those three platforms seamlessly together.

What was most interesting to me about our conversation about CRM software, the primary business Salesforce is in.  Imagine the KPIs you could generate if they acquired a company like Quicken or Sage and integrated it with their CRM and Marketing Cloud products.  The, in my opinion, would a big data trifecta.

In this episode, Jeffrey L. Cohen, from the content marketing team at Salesforce Marketing Cloud and I discuss content marketing, social media monitoring, engagement  dashboards and big data analysis. Jeffrey is also editor at Social Media B2B (a blog I’ve written for in the past) and author of The B2B Social Media Book.

Social Media Monitoring Topics Discussed:

Top of the sales funnel lead generation content marketing

Brian Solis’s cluster funnel analogy

Understanding the content marketing agency funnel

Creating content that solves the customers problems

Using content marketing to make sales reps more productive

How to motivate service agents

Social media is always a hot topic

Integrating online sales and marketing through lead scoring

Winning purchase consideration through the best educational materials

Third-party semantic analysis products

Richard Binhammer’s social media avalanche analogy

Radian6’s social media monitoring features