by Angela Guess
Jim Harris recently discussed the challenges facing social Master Data Management on The Data Roundtable. He explains, “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.” The first challenge is 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.”
The second challenge is 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.” The third is 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?”
