If a company runs a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system all employees are supposed to enter their interactions with customers and prospects including adding new accounts and contacts if it’s the first engagement.
With the rise of social networks first engagements are increasingly done in those networks. Furthermore new employees often bring old contacts from former employments with them thus utilizing an established relationship that probably is manifested in one or more already existing social network connections.
As explained in the post Social Master Data Management the term ”Social CRM” has been around for a while. We now see CRM solutions where the account and contact master data primarily is build on extracting those data from social networks.
I have just tried out such a solution called Nimble.
If you are more than a one-man-band company it’s interesting in what degree you are willing (or forced) to share your connections as master data entities for the CRM solution.
In Nimble you have the choice of differentiate for each network. I would probably freely choose a setup with Twitter and LinkedIn as shared with the team, but Facebook as private:
But that is just how I think based on my way of using social networks.
There is a fundamental data quality versus privacy issue around utilizing employee’s social network connections as master data for CRM and eventually enterprise wide Master Data Management (MDM).
All things equal data quality will be best if everyone contributes within reason. Not at least in sales, but also more or less in other functions, you are hired also because of your relations.
What do you think?
Liliendahl on Data Quality 