This may have passed you by last week, but a bomb fell in the world of social media monitoring.

Salesforce.com, the business services company snapped up Radian6, a leader in the world of SMM tools, for a mere $340m.

The deal is reportedly structured as a combination of cash and stock, with $4m earmarked for the owners of the Canadian based company.

In 2009, Alterian purchased SM2 from Techrigy for a reported $5m. Sm2 itself was only created in 2006 and this illustrates to me just how fast things are moving in this world.

Now I’ve researched SMM tools at length over the last year and whilst here are differences between the leader players, essentially the technologies and reporting systems are pretty similar – just that one was worth $5m in 2009 and just two years later, another is worth around $335m more.

So why has this happened? Whay did Alterian get such a bargain and could they now be tempted to look for a buyer of SM2 and pocket a huge profit?

The sheer power that these tools offer to brands in intelligently listening to just what its customers and prospects are saying about them, their products and competitors is awe inspiring and Salesforce.com have obviously woken up to this – I’m sure they knew already…

I’ve been talking to many UK businesses about SMM technologies and the power that they have. Most people are taken aback that these tools could possibly exist in the first place, I have to prove their very existence in some cases, but when that doubt is overcome and people have seen real examples of their uses, a light bulb lights up above their heads.

Are you using these listening tools? Do you want to?

Let’s talk…