It has been a very eventful 6 months for Salesforce: the acquisition of Exact Target, the release of Social.com, the huge changes to its developer platform and culture, and of course the company’s recently-announced partnership with Oracle. Even for a company that never ceases to amaze, SFDC has been keeping followers on the edges of their seats, lately. Today it made another huge announcement–Salesforce will be the first (and presently, only) social listening software that extends into the Russian and Chinese markets. The software will soon be able to identify sales leads, social influence, customer sentiments in 22 languages, and more across the social networks of these two markets, including Sina Weibo and Tencent of China and Russia’s VKontakte. In a few clicks, companies will be able to select the analytics that are most valuable to their specific business to create a dashboard that delivers a single, social snapshot of their company.

According to ZD Net, Radian6 currently monitors more than 650 million sources globally in 22 languages, but the addition of these two huge markets will dramatically continue to expand the software’s reach. After Salesforce’s acquisition of Radian6, and the release of the resulting Marketing Cloud at Dreamforce last September, users have been able to socially “listen” like never before. When a company wants to hear what people are saying about their brand, product, or service, they can perform a social scan and get feedback from Twitter and Facebook conversations–however, until now they were unable to do so in two huge markets, China and Russia. This development brings an estimated 1 billion customers out of the shadows, and into the scope of huge brands, like Lenovo, Unilever, or Ford (Forbes).

Reportedly, SFDC got footing in these countries through forming relationships with the leaders of the social sites. As both countries’ governments have very publicly fought against such sites, this was surely a difficult feat to pull off. These countries were considered the last large markets left in the dark, and their inclusion marks an unprecedented level of reach for a marketing software. As 55 of the Fortune 100 are using the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, this development is a huge victory for American business. Currently, Radian6 is scheduled to be running for China in 2013 and Russia in 2014, and pricing will be available when the services are publicly released.

Are you interested in learning more about how Salesforce.com’s Radian6 can get you in-tune with your customers? Give us a call, we’re here to listen!