Chris Selland's tumblog

May 30

cute, but they forgot ‘iPad’

May 29

Social Market Consolidation - It’s Here

In case you haven’t been paying attention, the Social Media/Marketing marketspace is starting to consolidate - rapidly.

What’s driving this consolidation is M&A activity by the large cap market leaders, most notably Salesforce.com who is apparently about to purchase Buddy Media for more than $800M. This follows Oracle’s just-announced $300M acquisition of Vitrue.

Salesforce started this a bit over a year ago with their $326M acquisition of Radian6, which instantly made life significantly more difficult for other social analytics startups. I know all too well - I was one of those other startups.

The problem is that with the massive proliferation of early-stage startups these past few years, there are simply not enough seats for them all to find a buyer, go public or otherwise exit.

5 years from now, 5-10% of the vendors on this extremely complicated chart below will be part of a much bigger company, and most of the remaining 90-95% will no longer exist.

If you’re in the latter group (or if you didn’t make this chart at all) - best advice I can give you is to hire the best Bus Dev person you can find. Quickly.