How Social can MDM get?

Jun 06, 2012 by Jim Harris in Data Management, Master Data Management

I recently joined the new LinkedIn Group for Social MDM created by Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen for promoting vendor-neutral discussions about the integration of social media data into master data management (MDM) implementations. In this blog post, I would like to ponder just how social MDM can get by briefly examining what I see as its three biggest challenges.

1. Identity – How do you identify that someone on Twitter or Facebook is your customer? Most social media profiles are sparsely populated with identifying attributes, many times limited to only a name. Data quality professionals know that matching on name only creates a lot of false positives. For example, @JimHarris on Twitter is not me, neither are most of the many other Twitter users named Jim Harris.

2. Relevancy – Assuming you resolved the identity challenge (and asking your customers to provide you with their social media profiles might be the only reliable way), the next challenge is just how relevant is your customers’ social media data? The vast majority of your customers’ activity on Twitter and Facebook has absolutely nothing to do with their relationship to your company, products and services.

3. Privacy – When the relevancy challenge is temporarily overcome, such as when one of your customers has a Facebook discussion with their family and friends about your latest product release, prompting you to want to target said family and friends as prospective customers, it raises the thorny issue of privacy. Even if your customer opted into Social MDM, and accepted your privacy policy, does that make your customer’s social network your prospect database?

What Say You?

Obviously, each of these three challenges could – and should – be explored in further detail. But I would like to get your initial impressions about the integration of social media and MDM. How social do you think MDM can get? And how social do you think MDM should get?

Read this related Jim Harris blog
post:The Semantic Future of MDM

Tags: Facebook, LinkedIn, Master Data Management, social media, Twitter

4 Responses to “How Social can MDM get?”

Henrik Liliendahl Sørensen

Jun 06, 2012

Jim, thanks a lot for following up on the quest for what Social MDM is and how far it goes, which is exactly the purpose of the LinkedIn group.

In a press release from May 2011 Gartner (the analyst firm) highlights Three Trends That Will Shape the Master Data Management Market. One of them is the links between MDM and social networks.

But there are for sure a lot of things to be explored.

As you say, Twitter doesn’t offer the best of breed in social network profiles. Profiles are short and have usually very low calories.

Facebook and LinkedIn, and similar services around the world, has much more to offer around profiles and relationships, but are as you say guarded by privacy settings.

One thing I have noticed from my own work is that LinkedIn (Xing, Viadeo…) offers best of breed information about contacts within business entities.

Traditional external sources for business contacts usually applied to business directories have had major data quality issues with completeness, timeliness and other data quality dimensions.

The information you find on LinkedIn is much better aligned with the real world.

Some years ago I have started out chasing what Social MDM can deliver in that perspective in the post Who is working where doing what? .

So, while Facebook and B2C gets most of the talk these days, my feeling is that B2B and the relevant social networks for that will produce the most business cases for social MDM in the near future.

Reply to this comment
- Jim Harris
  
  Jun 07, 2012
  
  Thanks for your comment, Henrik.
  
  You make an excellent point, as always, about the distinction between B2C and B2B. I agree that the latter will produce the most business cases for Social MDM. The former is where, according to the Gartner trend analysis (thanks for the link) “much social media analysis will be at the aggregate trend level,” especially for sentiment analysis, which is an example of where Social MDM is rendered moot from my perspective, because no identity is established between the aggregate sentiment data and the customer master data, and its link to the product master data doesn’t really seem, to me at least, to need to be called Social Product MDM or even managed within the context of a MDM program (i.e., marketing has always performed marketplace analysis, so even though word of mouth has become word of data, why do we need to include this within the scope of MDM initiatives?).
  
  I think that most of the other B2C business cases (where individual customers are identified) for Social MDM are actually going to cause data privacy to become an even more important, and hotly debated, issue than it already is.
  
  Best Regards,
  
  Jim
  
  Reply to this comment
shaloo shalini

Jun 14, 2012

It can get more social than this

Thanks for this interesting piece. I believe social MDM can’t be a one way street. What about ‘inadvertent data leakage’ from B2B and B2C? Take a simple case where one of the customer has access to whitepaper and shares the ‘direct link’ of that whitepaper with friends/family over social media? The expected access path is that a user would register (leave an email id ) and then get to download but once many get the direct path, all the marketing stats and data collection behind the scenes for that whitepaper would be a suspect.

best,
Shaloo

Reply to this comment
- Jim Harris
  
  Jun 15, 2012
  
  Thanks for your comment, Shaloo.
  
  You raise an excellent point about inadvertent data leakage, which from the perspective of the company looking to implement Social MDM would be a bad thing. However, what is more interesting to me in the scenario you provided, is what if a company could track the sharing of a whitepaper direct link within a social network?
  
  The data privacy issue is whether or not the friends and family who received the direct link should be considered prospects (just as the person who downloaded a whitepaper via an email id is). As I asked in my post, if someone opts into Social MDM, and accepts the privacy policy, does that make the person’s social network a prospect database?
  
  If so, then when you opt in, you are opting in your entire social network — in which case, are you, but not the company, violating the data privacy of your social network?
  
  Best Regards,
  
  Jim
  
  Reply to this comment