Tag: Social.com

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Salesforce starts redirecting $2.6MM domain social.com to its Salesforce Marketing Cloud site [UPDATED]

Social.com

After acquiring the domain name social.com nearly two years ago, Salesforce.com is finally putting it to use.

Earlier today, the cloud computing company began redirecting the name to its Salesforce Marketing Cloud website, located at www.salesforcemarketingcloud.com.

The purchase of social.com, the biggest domain sale of 2011, was initially kept private.  Though the name still sits behind WHOIS privacy, a little sleuthing back in 2011 using Network Solutions’ “Forgot Your Login?” page, turned up Salesforce.com as the buyer.  The transaction was later confirmed by Marc Benioff at Salesforce.com’s Cloudforce New York in November 2011.

Salesforce revealed the Marketing Cloud during Dreamforce ’12, which the company describes as the world’s only unified social marketing suite.

A redirect may or may not be the best use of $2.6 million domain name, but at least it’s doing something.

For the past two years, the domain name didn’t resolve to an active web page on the web.

Salesforce made no official announcement regarding the use of the name, but with its marketing cloud facing competition, it looks like it’s going to start taking advantage of some type-in traffic.

UPDATE 1 April 23, 2013:  Salesforce.com is expanding its social ad offerings with a new product called Salesforce Social.com, reports TechCrunch.

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Talking about this story: Domain Name Wire

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Top 10 Stories of 2011: #5 Salesforce revealed as $2.6MM social.com buyer

Marc Benioff

The biggest domain sale of 2011, with a price tag of $2.6 million, was social.com. 

The domain sold in June and was co-brokered by Marksmen’s Cyntia King and Moniker.com’s John Mauriello.

As to who purchased the domain name remained a mystery, that is until I broke the story that the buyer was none other than Salesforce.com, the enterprise software company that has paid millions of dollars for domains such as database.com and data.com.

Number five in the Top 10 stories of 2011 here on Fusible, with nearly two hundred tweets, was revealing Salesforce.com as the buyer of social.com in September.  

The story also exposed a flaw within Network Solutions’ password retrieval system, which has yet to be fixed.

Though some doubted whether Salesforce.com was the buyer after my story ran, Marc Benioff confirmed publicly at Salesforce.com’s Cloudforce New York in late November that he did buy social.com, saying “We don’t have a product for it yet – it’s just a placeholder.”

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Salesforce’s Do.com moves into Private Beta, app almost ready for prime time

Do.com Beta

Salesforce’s latest product Do.com, a business productivity application whose slogan is “Do and it’s Done”, has come out of alpha and moved into private beta.  According to the Beta sign up page, which popped up online this week, Do.com is near release and invitations are being sent out as fast as possible.

No public information has been made available, and very little information can be gleaned from the website other than it’s some type of business productivity application.

A quick search on Google using “site:do.com” shows that a subdomain, assets.do.com, was set up on the site.  “Assets” in the Salesforce world refer to, “specific products your customers have purchased, including a serial number, date of purchase, or any other information related to an individual sale.  Depending on how your organization uses assets, they can represent a competitor product that your customer has or versions of your products.”

At the end of August I wrote about Do.com launching a “Coming Soon” site, after noticing the domain name transferred from the marksmen.com server where it was brokered to a different server.

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Salesforce.com is the mystery buyer of $2.6 million Social.com [UPDATED]

Salesforce.com Social Enterprise

Salesforce.com appears to be the buyer who paid $2.6 million in late June 2011 for social.com, this year’s top selling domain to date, that has been publicly reported.

The buyer in the social.com sale, which was co-brokered by Marksmen’s Cyntia King and Moniker.com’s John Mauriello, was never revealed.  The purchase set off speculation about the new owner ranging from Twitter to Living Social and even Salesforce.com.

However, up until now there hasn’t been any clear idea as to the buyer.

The primary contact for the domain is Alica Del Valle who is the Trademark Counsel at Salesforce.com.  It didn’t take very much research at all to figure it out.  It started with a few Google searches and I was able to connect the dots after using Network Solutions’ “User ID recovery tool” even though the domain was behind its not-so-private registration services.

I went to the Network Solutions “Forgot Your Login?” page and entered the domain social.com, then clicked the button: Retrieve Your User ID.   The resulting page showed Alica Del Valle as the primary contact, as shown here.

No big news, as others had already done this before but just never connected the name “Alica Del Valle” to Salesforce.com.

Alica Del Valle according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, is not only the attorney of record for Salesforce.com (scroll to bottom of filing), but has been the Trademark Counsel at Salesforce.com since July 2011 according to Alica’s own LinkedIn page.

Earlier in the week I had guessed Salesforce.com was the buyer of Social.com after discovering Salesforce was the buyer of Do.com, a “Coming Soon” site for a yet-to-be launched business productivity app.  The company had brokered the domain Do.com through Marksmen.  Do.com was also hidden behind Whois privacy at Network Solutions using the very same moniker “ADV”.  The privacy was finally removed two days after my Do.com story ran, officially revealing salesforce.com as the owner.

Last week at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff welcomed more than 30,000 attendees to the Social Enterprise.

At the time of this story being published, the Whois information for social.com remains regsistered to “ADV” behind Network Solutions’ private registration services.

The web address still does not resolve to a web page, however the buyer no longer appears to be a mystery.

Updated Nov. 30:  Marc Benioff confirmed publicly at Salesforce.com’s Cloudforce New York that he did buy social.com.

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Talking about this story: TechCrunch, Louis Gray, Domain Name Wire, BillHartzer.com and Elliot’s Blog (blog)

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Salesforce to launch yet to be revealed Do.com, get things done with anyone

Do.com by Salesforce

Salesforce.com has been announcing a number of new products recently, but one product that it hasn’t publicly announced as of yet, is a productivity app called “do” which can be found on the website Do.com.

The slogan on the homepage reads: “The app to get things done with anyone”

The Coming Soon page went live today. 

I discovered the site earlier this evening, after noticing that the domain name transferred from the marksmen.com server to its current server awsdns-52.com on August 26, but for the past several days no website was online.

In July I stumbled upon socl.com a secret Microsoft project while monitoring Marksmen’s name servers.  Marksmen brokered the sale of socl.com and also co-brokered the sale of social.com for $2.6 million to a mystery client. 

The mystery buyer behind social.com has yet to be revealed, but you can officially add Salesforce.com to the bunch.  Social.com is the largest publicly reported domain sale so far in 2011.

Dreamforce, the cloud computing conference held by Salesforce.com is currently being held in San Francisco until September 2.