Oracle Is Turning Up The Social Media HEAT

Oracle (NASDAQ:ORCL) announced on Tuesday that it had acquired social marketing firm Involver, its third such deal in as many months, for an undisclosed sum. San Francisco-based Involver, which was founded in 2007, offers a set of tools that allows companies to develop consumer experiences across Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and other social networking sites.

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Involver’s core technology is Social Markup Language, which is a templating language that allows developers to build complex user interfaces without writing much custom code. The company also offers a drag-and-drop tool that runs through Visual SML. Another tool aggregates conversations from multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts into a single dashboard. Oracle says Involver’s tools make it possible to build Facebook fan pages “in minutes.”

The company is said to have helped create more than a million fan pages and its current customers include ad agencies, media companies, and consumer brands, such as Best Buy (NYSE:BBY), MTV Networks (NASDAQ:VIAB), Razorfish, and USA Today (NYSE:GCI).

Oracle has been making big splashes in the social media sphere and acquired Vitrue, a social marketer, in May, followed by a purchase of Collective Intent, a social media-monitoring company, last month. Oracle plans to integrate all three companies into a unified Oracle Social Platform for sales, marketing, and customer service via social networks.

“Companies are looking to harness the full potential of social media to increase brand loyalty, connect with potential customers and anticipate buyers’ needs,” Oracle said in a statement.

The merger is expected to close by September.

The social media M&A sphere has been extremely active lately, with Salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) buying Buddy Media for $689 million in June and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) acquiring Yammer for $1.2 billion in July.

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