Why Online Giants Woo Twitter Jon Markman | Tuesday, October 4, 2016 at 7:30 am
Marketing has changed. Now it’s all about real-time analytics, artificial intelligence and feeding both with massive amounts of data. To succeed you need all three.
Twitter (TWTR) shares surged 39.7% in about three months after several news outlets reported the social media company was engaged in takeover negotiations with a number of big technology and media firms.
It’s not a surprise founder Jack Dorsey attracted suitors. Twitter has a huge trove of real-time information. A year ago, it became the lone reseller of that data through its Gnip subsidiary.
By putting the company up for sale a year later, Dorsey put all of his customers on notice. A new owner might raise prices or even refuse to renew existing contracts. Suddenly bidders came knocking.
The bidders have included A-listers such as Alphabet (GOOGL), Microsoft (MSFT), Verizon (VZ), Disney (DIS) and Salesforce.com (CRM).
You never really know how much something is worth to you until you’re faced with the threat of losing it.
Alphabet saw this coming long ago. Twitter’s real-time data is a perfect fit for its Google subsidiary. Yet two years ago, the price was too high and no other bidders lined up. It could wait, so it did.
The emergence of Salesforce shows just how much things have changed. Salesforce is a cloud-computing company. It’s major claim to fame is a product to help companies execute better customer relationship management, or CRM.
Salesforce needs data to optimize the AI platform it named after Albert Einstein (above, circa 1921).
And while the customer relationship manager might not seem like a logical fit with Twitter, Salesforce bet the farm on Einstein, an artificial intelligence platform that its customers can apply to sales, service and marketing.
Now Salesforce needs data to make Einstein work. It’s in a bind. Brent Leary, co-founder at CRM Essentials, told TechCrunch:
“Salesforce’s competitors are snapping up [data sources] and will integrate them into their platforms to add additional perspective and intelligence. If this deal with Twitter happens, it’s to add a constant flow of information into their AI platform, to marry it with their transactional and customer information.”
Such a deal seems even more pressing after it lost out to Microsoft in the LinkedIn (LNKD) sweepstakes.
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