by Angela Guess
Loraine Lawson of IT Business Edge reports, “Social MDM is raising concerns among privacy groups and some analysts, and to be honest, I completely relate to their concerns. Then I received a briefing on an actual social MDM product, and learned that there’s actually two faces to social MDM: one clever and revolutionary; the other also revolutionary, but a bit frightening. When people talk about social MDM, they usually mean the mining and integration of social media data into MDM. This sounds great from a corporate perspective. You can use social data to correct data in your MDM and use it to expand what you know, then turn that knowledge into a sales pitch. Someone posted that they need a new computer? Great, let’s spam them with ads — but for individuals, it’s a bit menacing, a bit too ‘up in my business’.”
She continues, “I recently received a briefing about Informatica MDM 9.5, which included a look at how this type of social MDM works. It showed the MDM system picking up information not just from your posts, but from your friends’ posts as well. I don’t want to pick on Informatica, because I’m sure other vendors are working in this direction. Being first to market has its advantages and disadvantages; concept criticism comes with the territory. It was impressive, but I confess to being a bit appalled by how easy this mining of social data would be with this new release. This, I think, is the more frightening aspect of MDM. This type of social MDM extends beyond sentiment analysis into pulling information about customers, including relationships and any information on past purchases, out of social networks and into your MDM systems.”
Read more about this side of social MDM here. Then, read about the “pleasantly surprising” side of it here.
