The Interconnection of Master Data Management MDM and the World of Social Media

With hundreds of millions of people joining varying social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ and so on, social media platforms have become extremely dominant tools in allowing business owners to interact and get connected with customers in ways that simply weren’t possible before.  Social Master Data Management (Social MDM) is the new revolution in business data processing that ties the knot with customer and product centricity with big data to fundamentally improve customer experiences and product strategy, adding the additional intelligence.  

The notion behind Social MDM is to connect the organization’s internal customer information with external data about these customers from social networks.

Taking a Deeper look at Social Master Data Management MDM:

The information on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or MySpace can be of utmost importance in terms of deciphering the needs of customers. While many companies have created brand or product pages on social media platforms such as Facebook and Google+ to promote product promotion or customer service, there have been few initiatives focused toward integrating social media as a new channel for identifying, acquiring and servicing customers.

In order to pursue this, organizations need to integrate social media platforms with their existing MDM strategies so that data from the social platforms enhances the customer data acquired from other internal or external sources.  

MDM comes with varying degree of challenges, including:

• Identification of their real customers on different social media platforms.
• Efficiently linking customer’s social media profiles with the internal MDM profile.
• Extracting real time information from the social sites and turning it into relevant information which can be used later.

How MDM Taps Into Different Social Networks?

As soon as the organization becomes sure to add social media as a source of customer data, they start pondering on the quest and resources from where the data can be procured. While tapping data from social networks is a different ballgame, there are four ways to garner this data:

1. It begins with scanning social media platforms and matching the total collected information with that of existing customer base.
2.  Directing users of social media to like or follow the organization or brand on different social media platforms.
3. Attaching social media information about a customer or a prospect when he or she comes to the company for gathering information or service via social media.
4. Proactively seeking customers for their social media touch points.

From marketing standpoint,MDM master data management today is better poised than ever that not only sustain to provide authentic and to the point information about customer data, but to deliver broad, sustainable business impact by averaging available social information.

Although in its current form we have slew of questionnaires than answers regarding the Social MDM approach, but there are lots of insights from subject matter experts around this idea, that is truly promising.

Bottom line: Businesses that coup Social information and outperform their competition, they must take into consideration MDM isn’t an exception.