Oracle ties its social intelligence apps to LinkedIn

Oracle has hooked up its SRM (social relationship management) software suite to LinkedIn, a move to give marketing and customer support staffers a way to reach the business-oriented social network's 300 million users.

The LinkedIn integration provides the ability to publish LinkedIn Company and Showcase pages, which can be targeted according to factors such as geographic location, company size and industry, Oracle said in its announcement on Wednesday.

It will also be possible to interact with commenters on these pages, Oracle said. There's a degree of analytics as well, such as reports on the number of comments a particular posting generated, according to Oracle.

Oracle SRM is just one component of the company's bevy of software tools aimed at reaching customers and prospects through multiple channels, which it built up through a string of acquisitions over the past couple of years.

To that end, also Wednesday Oracle announced a series of enhancements to various components in its marketing cloud product family.

One major update focuses on so-called "look-alike" modeling. This sort of modeling lets marketing teams looking to find new prospects do so by building models based on customers with desirable attributes.

Marketers can then apply the models to Oracle's BlueKai platform, which aggregates customer profile information from more than 200 data providers. The marketers can sift through the hundreds of millions of profiles BlueKai gives access to and find matches for their look-alike models.

It's possible to generate "very rich" models with just a few clicks, said John Stetic, group vice president of products, Oracle marketing cloud.

Another enhancement announced Wednesday is aimed at pushing marketing content to mobile devices.

"Everybody gets that mobile is affecting marketing activities," said Steve Krause, group vice president of product management for Oracle marketing cloud. "You're seeing the need to do mobile better everywhere."

Oracle's Responsys marketing automation tool can now push SMS (simple message service) notifications to customers' mobile devices, but with a higher level of sophistication than simply an all-out blast to a master customer list.

For example, customers may personally opt to receive SMS messages from a website that features flash sales or daily deals involving limited quantities of a product, with the SMS serving them notice to move fast if they want the product.

"We're moving from a model where everyone gets the same SMS to a model where it's more triggered and personalized," Krause said. "This is about a larger shift. We need to provide marketers the ability to get their message to customers when and where they want it."

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris' email address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com