Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. (Photo: Wikipedia)

After rumors began swirling on Twitter about layoffs at Salesforce, the cloud-computing company confirmed to Business Insider that it has laid off a fair chunk of its Radian6 employees. Salesforce says that less than 100 employees were impacted, but considering that Radian6 boasts only 320 employees total (according to Crunchbase), that's still almost a third of the staffers being shown the door.

Radian6, a social media monitoring platform, is an integral part of Salesforce's big play for a piece of the social marketing space. It acquired Radian6 back in March 2011 in order to build out the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

In June of this year, Salesforce also acquired New York-based social media marketing company Buddy Media for a reported $689 million. We noted then that an acquisition of Buddy Media made sense following Facebook's bungled IPO. By hiring an "IPO-friendly CFO," Buddy had signaled its desire to go public, but after Facebook's shares dove following its own IPO, that left less room for social marketing companies to successfully follow in its footsteps.

Radian6 and Buddy Media offer complementary products within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Radian6 provides a way for companies to listen to how people are talking about their brands on social platforms, whereas Buddy Media offers a full-scale social marketing dashboard—including publishing and analytics—for brands.

The layoffs at Radian6 also come on the heels of Salesforce filing documents with the SEC regarding its acquisition of Buddy. Though many noted at the time of the acquisition that the purchase price seemed a little high for the social media marketing company, details revealed in the SEC filing show an even grimmer financial situation.

First, the actual acquisition price was even higher than originally reported, at $745 million. The filings also show that Buddy Media lost $20 million in the first six months of 2012, up from $3.5 million in January to June of 2011.

According to Business Insider:

Buddy Media does not appear to be scaling toward profitability. Rather, it's going backwards — losing more money on its revenues as it grows....

In 2011, its losses were 34% of its revenues. In 2012, they're 114% of revenues.

In 2011, Buddy Media spent $12.8 million to make $10.2 million in revenues; in 2012 it spent $35 million to make $18 million.

Given Buddy Media's financials and the layoffs at Radian6, could Salesforce be looking to shutter--or at least phase out--its fledgling social marketing arm?

Competitors like Adobe Social (where this reporter used to work) are ramping up with massive advertising campaigns in an effort to assert their market dominance. Or perhaps the solutions offered by Radian6 and Buddy Media had too much crossover, and Salesforce is attempting to trim the fat while honing the Marketing Cloud.

For its part, Salesforce argues that it's simply "rebalancing its resources," according to a statement sent to Betabeat:

With the combination of Radian6 and Buddy Media, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the undisputed leader in social marketing and the only suite that allows brands to unify social listening, engagement, advertising and measurement. With the integration of Radian6 and Buddy Media, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is re-balancing its resources to support its growth, including moving from a hub to a distributed model for certain customer-facing roles, consolidating marketing and dramatically increasing investments in R&D. Fewer than 100 people were impacted globally.

Update:

A Salesforce representative has clarified that the layoffs were not concentrated solely on Radian6, but instead spread throughout the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (which could include Buddy Media employees).

Michael Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media (flickr.com/leweb3)

AllThingsD is reporting that social marketing company Buddy Media is in talks to be acquired by Salesforce for $800 million. We had been hearing similar rumors ourselves, and reached out to Buddy Media last week, but the company refused to confirm, saying only, "We've been hearing this kind of chatter since the day we started the company, and it has always turned out to be false."

An acquisition for Buddy makes sense--Facebook's bungled IPO (its stock dropped another 10 percent today) left little room for companies with offerings reliant upon Facebook to go public themselves. And judging from Buddy's hiring of an "IPO-ready CFO" last August, an IPO was its preferred route.

There's also the fact that social marketing's current manifestation is inherently unsustainable. Sooner or later, big brands are going to figure out how to manage their own Facebook pages in-house, and refuse to pay the high premiums offered by companies like Buddy. Plus, startups like One Public offer similar services, but for free.

"We had been hearing about Buddy Media's acquisition by Salesforce last year as well, but I think their primary objective must have been to go Public," Fahad Khan, CEO of One Public, Inc., told us via email from the D Conference. "However, post-Facebook IPO, many IPO dreams have been shattered. Buddy's sale is one of those shattered dreams."

Mr. Khan added that Buddy's possible acquisition by Salesforce "is nothing but good news for smaller players like us as it will level the playing field. Two other big players (Context Optional and Vitrue) have been acquired already....these players will be busy integrating their products with acquirers while smaller players can focus on serving the ever moving target of satisfying global brands and their agencies."

Sources told AllThingsD that "the two companies have agreed to terms that will value Buddy Media at more than $800 million, but that the transaction hasn’t closed yet. People familiar with the deal say Buddy Media chose Salesforce’s offer over a competitive bid from Google."

The acquisition would make Buddy one of the last big social marketing companies to be acquired, and the largest one to date. This reporter's former employer, Context Optional, was picked up by Efficient Frontier last fall, and Efficient Frontier was nabbed by Adobe earlier this year; Oracle bought Facebook marketing platform Vitrue for $300 million just last week.

Salesforce itself bought social media monitoring tool Radian6 last year, so an acquisition of Buddy--a much more robust social marketing platform--is a smart move by Salesforce to, as AllThingsD reports, "extend its core customer relationship management offering."

"The acquisition is all about data," confided one industry insider. "That's why companies like Adobe and Oracle and Salesforce are gobbling up social media marketing companies--there's data out there to be integrated into the larger story."

Of the potential Radian6 and Buddy Media pairing, our source added, "That marriage will probably be pretty interesting."

Buddy Media declined to comment "on rumors and speculation."