Salesforce to acquire social metrics company Radian6

San Francisco—Customer relationship management company Salesforce.com—which hasrapidly become much more than a CRM company—plans to acquire social media monitoring company Radian6 for $326 million in cash and stock.

Radian6 is a leader in the social media marketing ROI arena, offering dashboards and social keyword sentiment analysis. It boasts such customers as Dell Inc., Eastman Kodak Co. and United Parcel Service. The deal is expected to close this summer.

Salesforce.com has aggressively expanded beyond its original CRM model. Earlier this month, the company announced a new version of its Service Cloud platform, enabling marketers to listen in and interact with customers on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites. And last year, the CRM company acquired “crowd-sourced” database Jigsaw Data Corp. to feed its customers' sales-lead funnels.