Is Google Looking To Buy A Social Media Management Firm To Keep Tabs On Facebook? (GOOG, FB)

Consolidation continues apace in the social media campaign management sector -- with Salesforce.com's acquisition of Buddy Media, Oracle's of Vitrue, and Syncapse's of Clickable -- and the deals will likely keep coming if the gossip we heard last week is true. (Oracle recently snapped up Involver and Salesforce got GoInstant, too.)

There are several obvious, gigantic acquirers sitting on the sidelines who'd very much like to get a piece of the action: Google, IBM and SAP have all pursued and/or rejected potential deals in the sector. We've heard this piece of information twice now, from two different sources.

It could all be just gossip, of course. But it's plausible gossip: There are a lot of small companies doing various forms of social media campaign management right now, probably more than the market will ultimately bear. Consolidation seems likely.

More importantly, social media management companies are able to extract a lot of interesting data from Facebook when their clients run campaigns on its various properties.

If Google were to buy one of these companies -- and it's bought ad management firms such as AdMob and DoubleClick before -- the business would give it insight into how Facebook works. It would also blunt Facebook's competitive aggression to Google (it's tough to stick it to a competitor when that competitor is running millions of dollars in business on your media).

Neither Facebook nor Google immediately responded to a request for comment.

Related:

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/is-google-looking-to-buy-a-social-media-campaign-management-firm-to-keep-tabs-on-facebook-2012-7

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