Eloqua announced today that it will OEM Salesforce.com Chatter, a social collaboration application. This is significant, as it introduces new capabilities to consider when selecting or using a marketing automation platform (MAP) – namely the use of a social tool to facilitate marketing automation platform program development and solicit marketing automation platform program feedback from marketing and sales.

Eloqua announced today that it will OEM Salesforce.com Chatter, a social collaboration application. This is significant, as it introduces new capabilities to consider when selecting or using a marketing automation platform (MAP) – namely the use of a social tool to facilitate marketing automation platform program development and solicit marketing automation platform program feedback from marketing and sales.

These new capabilities will be available to Eloqua marketing users as “Chatter inside Eloqua” on all versions of Eloqua10 (not Eloqua9) in late 2012 at no additional cost. Each marketing automation platform program within Eloqua will have a program-specific Chatter feed, which can be used to help with program development (e.g. asking for feedback on the program or obtaining a status update on an asset). Eloqua will also provide for a general Chatter feed on the platform’s home page, which the user sees after logging into the application. If a company already has a corporate instance of Salesforce.com Chatter, it can be connected to Chatter inside Eloqua. In addition, all Chatter history will be available to an organization for an audit log.

While the capabilities that Chatter inside Eloqua will provide Eloqua customers are intriguing, its full value is dependent on how Eloqua extends its functionality over time in the following areas:

  • By infusing the use of social media into marketing automation platform program development when Eloqua adds workflow and approval management into the Eloqua platform, Eloqua could offer users the ability to grant approvals and provide feedback via Chatter.
  • From a service delivery perspective, where the use of social media is now infused in the program development process, Eloqua could extend the ways its customers already request product support (email, phone, support portal) to include Chatter inside Eloqua.
  • Given Eloqua’s focus on benchmarking in its Revenue Performance Management (RPM) module, Chatter inside Eloqua could be harnessed as a communication device; it could broadcast the success of a marketing automation platform program and tactic results, and compare them with an internally specified benchmark or the average response rates received by similar organizations.