by Angela Guess
Stephan Zoder of Informatica recently discussed the fallbacks of turning to social media data as an MDM silver bullet of sorts. He explains, “Recently I had a number of meetings with clients who are looking at social media to enrich master data in their legacy data warehouse to improve their batch and real-time campaign effectiveness. They are primarily looking at Facebook as their marketing salvation to create as close to one-on-one offers as possible but there are multiple ways to skin this cat. Surprisingly, I have seen this thinking primarily in emerging markets. It reminded me how some countries jumped from having a poor fixed line phone infrastructure catapulting themselves to 3G wireless for all citizens within a decade. The decision makers who were part of this overnight communication transformation assume that master data management (MDM) works the same way.”
He goes on, “As such, it appears to me that some IT and marketing leaders are conspiring to push the technology envelope of what is definitely doable, yet financially and practically questionable given the expense and value derived but more importantly, given the current state of their master data. They are thinking about phase two or three instead of phase one in their MDM initiative. As marketing executives ask for more data to get more out of their campaigns their IT liaison is happy to oblige. Let’s remember, MDM is an organizational journey with a number of sprints in between not a single 100-meter dash. First, clean the data you have in phase one before you throw ‘good’ social data on top of ‘bad’ legacy data. If it is not done right a firm may not only have wasted precious resources or soured the corporate MDM experience for years to come but it may also face the wrath of its consumers who now ‘dislike’ your campaigns within a second.”
