Shift begs to differ.

“We’re bringing the market alternative to the closed, rigid marketing cloud that Adobe and Salesforce have created,” Shift CEO James Borow told me yesterday. “If you look at their marketing clouds, it’s really only about companies they’ve acquired and built. But the problem is, as the market moves, you really can’t acquire or build companies fast enough.”

The concept of a marketing cloud is a interoperable suite of tools that together provide the digital marketer — and today, is there any other kind? — everything they need to find, understand, attract, engage, monitor, communicate, and track consumers, fans, and customers.

Today, that’s largely about search and social.

So what Shift has done is assemble what Borow considers an all-star cast of digital marketing tools together in one platform. It’s not buying them all and not integrating them all into one inseparable suite, but making them all available in one environment, with a certain amount of interoperability, data share, and single sign in.

“Ultimately, we’re trying to break down these silos of communication,” Burrow says.

Today, those tools include:

• Aggregate Knowledge (media buying intelligence platform)
• Convertro (conversion-tracking and ROI optimization)
• Curalate (marketing and analytics for Pinterest and Instagram)
• Expion (social media management)
• Fan Appz (personalized social media marketing)
• Kenshoo (search and social ad tools)
• Moontoast (rich media social ad creation)
• Offerpop (social media marketing campaign platform)
• Optimal Analytics (Facebook advertising and analytics)
• SocialFlow (conversion tool for Twitter and Facebook)
• The Trade Desk (online media buying platform)
• GraphEffect (social advertising)

Shift has brought all these tools together within one network with its own graph, somewhat analogous to Facebook’s social graph, that tracks marketing actions and attention-needed data points within each tool and provides that data in a social-network style feed.

In other words, yes, sort of like Facebook for your marketing campaign.

Source: Shift

Shift marketing cloud

The result is that all the members of your marketing team, whether internal, freelance, or at an agency, can visit the site and see what’s happening with your marketing campaign in a simple, linear view. The site incorporates a permissioning model so that people in different roles see appropriate information, and many of the updates are generated by the tools you’re using themselves.

So, what’s the cost?

“Shift is totally free,” Borow says. “And Shift will always be free.”

You can sign into Shift, create teams, invite colleagues, and go to the “app store” to install marketing apps. If you have existing accounts with them, they’ll just automatically sync up and you can use those tools within Shift’s collaboration network. If you don’t and you do happen to sign up to a new tool, Shift will take a small revshare from that transaction.

“Today, we feel like we have a really competitive stack against all the other marketing clouds,” Borow told me, adding that Shift will be adding new tools and companies on a quarterly basis. “The enterprise to date has focused on closed systems, but our thesis is that closed systems end up less dynamic and less competitive.”

That may be so, and there’s a lot in Shift’s open marketing cloud.

But there’s also so work remaining to be done. Integration between the participating apps is a little slim right now, with some integrations requiring developer work. Customer relationship management is perhaps the most obvious gap at the moment, especially considering that is natively to Salesforce clients. All of which is coming, Borow said.

And, as the company adds more tools to the toolbox, the solution will become more compelling with time.

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Those are some of the questions social media marketing firm Offerpop hopes to answer for you with two new interesting tools released this morning into public beta.

The New York-based company, which already works with brands like Pepsi, Gap, and MTV, wants to help you better understand your audience — not just your fans, and turn your ongoing data collection into a simple, actionable asset. And the new tools are already boosting engagement by 84 percent for brands like Viacom’s Logo TV and increasing fan loyalty by 195 percent.

What’s really new?

“It’s the first time I’ve seen a product offering get a sense of your full social engagement,” Offerpop’s director of content marketing Jesse Noyes told me this morning. “Not just the people who have liked you, but all the people who have engaged with you in any way.”

The two new tools are a Facebook post database, which shows what kinds of content is driving engagement, virality, and clicks, and a fan database, which helps you build rich profiles of your Facebook fans and enriches them over time. Twitter, which Offerpop also offers campaigns on, is coming soon.

The tools not only tell you that the post last week about Brad Pitt’s graying hair resonated well, but also that all your posts that reference aging movie stars generally go viral. And with about three clicks, you can generate a list of your fans — and non-fans — who are responsive to similar messages.

“This also works for people who aren’t fans of your page,” Offerpop CEO Wendell Lansford said. “That’s a completely unique offering … no one to my knowledge is doing this.”

The new fan database tool automatically calculates scores for three key metrics based on people’s behavior: loyalty, engagement, and influence. In the future, Lansford hopes to have tools that enable you to post to Facebook specifically targeting groups based on those profiles, but currently marketers can do three fairly powerful things with data: They can email sets of users based on what they’re most likely to respond to, target specific people with specific ads, or find look-alikes of the people who are their most loyal and engaged fans.

“Right away, we started making valuable discoveries about what our fans find interesting,” Shawn Hollenbach, a digital marketing manager at Logo TV said in a statement. “We were able to use these insights to inform our promotional strategy and drive value beyond social marketing.”

The new products are available immediately in public beta on Offerpop’s site, and anyone using the company’s campaign tools has access to them at no extra charge, the company told me.

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The social media marketing platform that competes with the likes of Wildfire, Sprinklr, and Involver grew 440 percent last year, went global, and added companies like Coca-Cola, Amazon, and L’Oreal — you may have heard of them once or twice – to its now 8,000-strong client list.

How? Through the back door.

“We’ve basically built our company around the notion of a self-service platform,” chief executive Wendell Landsford told me from New York today. “People try for free, and if they see value, they keep using the product.”

That started with perhaps humble beginnings with small companies as social marketers created Facebook photo contests and Twitter retweet offers. But it led to massive opportunities at some of the largest corporations in the world.

“As we got success on the self-service product, we started to be adopted bottom-up in enterprise organizations,” Wendell said. “In companies like Unilever, Viacom, or Pepsi, some marketer might try OfferPop. Then we’d reach out, establish a relationship, and get more exposure in these companies, which broadened our footprint.”

Initial success led to Offerpop codifying these opportunities into a sales process, and the company now has a specific division of its sales force dedicated to key enterprise accounts. It’s the new enterprise sales model, Wendell says, with Salesforce.com as its “poster child.”

The model works for upstart young startups. But it also has significant benefits for enterprise companies. As Wendell says, one massive bonus to this model is that a product “has to prove its worth … companies don’t end up with shelfware.”

Offerpop, which closed a $5.7 million series B founding round in December, is now expanding internationally, opening an office in the U.K. and one other to-be-determined location. That’s a direct result of having internationalized the product, translating it to 17 different languages in early 2012. (Which, by the way, is also helpful for major brands, who typically do business internationally.)

Perhaps the most interesting news, however, is the new product suite that Offerpop will be announcing in February. While the company wouldn’t release full details yet, Wendell did give me a sneak peek: “big data.”

“As companies use Offerpop and expand to 350 campaigns or more, there’s a ton of data that gets built up and captured,” he said. “Historically, that’s been kept in individual campaign reports, but it doesn’t provide cohesive, actionable insight.”

So Offerpop is pulling out all the data from all of a company’s campaigns, enriching it with everything that it knows about the company’s fans and customers — including the content they tend to respond to — and making is useable for better marketing on social media, as well as multichannel marketing via email, online marketing, and more.

It’s probably not a coincidence that this product sounds perfect for enterprise as well.

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