The Great Cash-Out got under way in May when Oracle paid $300 million for Vitrue, a cloud-based firm that mans social media communications for McDonald’s, American Express and Gillette, among others. Oracle followed that acquisition by gobbling up social media monitoring firm Collective Intellect for an undisclosed sum in early June.
Meanwhile, Salesforce.com paid $745 million for Buddy Media, a Vitrue competitor that counts Ford Motor and Hewlett-Packard among its clients. Soon after, reports circulated that Microsoft was interested in buying Yammer, a provider of a Facebook-type solution for businesses, for $1 billion or so. Just last week, the smallish Syncapse bought a smaller social media firm, Clickable. That flurry of activity came after Adobe bough Efficient Frontier, another player in the social CRM space, back in November. Don’t expect things to die down, either — the latest industry rumor is that Facebook is going to buy Wildfire Interactive.