In Salesforce.com’s Deal for Radian6, a Nod to Facebook’s Rise

As the social Web becomes increasingly important to consumer brands, Salesforce.com is responding by loosening its purse strings.

The company announced on Wednesday that it had agreed to buy Radian6, a social media monitoring company, for $326 million in cash and stock. Under the deal, expected to close in July, Radian6’s founders may collect an additional $14 million, depending on vesting conditions.

“With Radian6, Salesforce.com is gaining the technology and market leader in social media monitoring,” Salesforce’s chief executive, Marc Benioff, said in a statement. “We see this as a huge opportunity. Not only will this acquisition accelerate our growth, it will extend the value of all of our offerings.”

When it closes, the acquisition of Radian6 will be Salesforce.com’s largest to date. The company, based in San Francisco-based, recorded $1.7 billion in revenue for 2010 and made a string of small to medium-size acquisitions in the last few years, including Heroku — a Web-based application platform it bought for $212 million less than four months ago.

For Salesforce.com, the bet on Radian6 is a bet on the Web’s social conversation and the growing need, among corporations, to analyze chatter and engage consumers. The service, which counts companies like Dell, General Electric and PepsiCo as clients, allows businesses to monitor multiple social media streams, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and personal blogs, and engage with its audience in real time.

Over time, Salesforce.com plans to integrate Radian6’s technology into other parts of its platform. For instance, Salesforce.com’s Chatter service, a private social network for companies, will soon include data from Facebook, Twitter and other external streams.

“A decade ago, when we founded Salesforce, we looked at Amazon.com as the key consumer company, now the world has changed,” Kendall Collins, the company’s chief marketing officer, said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “Now, we look to Facebook and YouTube.” According to Mr. Collins, it’s all part of the company’s larger vision of “Cloud 2” — a cloud computing environment that is social, mobile and open.

Over the past year, Salesforce.com has been adding social elements to its services. The company recently connected its customer service platform, Service Cloud 3, to Facebook and Twitter, and it has grown increasingly close to Seesmic, a social media application. In February, the company teamed up with the Softbank Group to invest $4 million in the service.

If it decides to make another acquisition in this space, Salesforce.com has some dry powder available. At the end of last year, the company had about $1.4 billion in cash on hand.

The Radian6 deal is expected to add $45 million to $50 million in revenue next year. The company now expects revenue of $2.075 billion to $2.1 billion for 2012.