Taking a step into the social media marketing industry, Oracle is purchasing Vitrue, the two companies announced Wednesday. Vitrue helps corporations disseminate their messages and advertising across popular consumer social media platforms, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube and Google+. It coordinates social media marketing campaigns, analyzes the results and helps organizations interact with individual consumers on a more individual basis. The company offers these services though its own hosted social relationship management (SRM) platform. Oracle plans to infuse Vitrue's services with Oracle's own data management and analytics capabilities, which should give customers more insight into how effective their social media campaigns truly are. Since its launch in 2006, Vitrue has built up a large client list, including such well-known entities as McDonald's, American Express, Domino's Pizza, Procter & Gamble, and Lowe's. Vitrue has offices in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Cincinnati, Dallas, Atlanta and London Oracle expects to close the transaction within the next three months or so. Vitrue will continue to operate as an independent company until then. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, although TechCrunch, the technology news site that focuses on venture-backed startups, estimated the deal to be worth about US$300 million. Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com
