Business directories have been around for ages. In the old days it was paper based as in the yellow pages for a phone book. The yellow pages have since made it to be online searchable. We also know commercial business directories as the Dun & Bradstreet WorldBase as well as government operated national wide directories of companies and industry specific business directories.
Such business directories often takes a crucial role in master data quality work as sources for data enrichment in the quest for getting as close as possible to a single version of the truth when dealing with B2B customer master data, supplier master data and other business partner master data.
A classic core data model for Master Data in CRM systems, SCM solutions and Master Data hubs when doing B2B is that you have:
- Accounts being the BUSINESS entities who are your customers, suppliers, prospects and all kind of other business partners
- Contacts being the EMPLOYEEs working there and acting in the roles as decision makers, influencers, gate keepers, users and so on
Today we also have to think about social master data management, being exploiting reference data in social media as a supplementary source of external data.
As all social activity this exercise goes two ways:
- Finding and monitoring your existing and wanted business partners in the social networks
- Updating your own data
Most business entities in this world are actually one-man-bands. So are mine. Therefore I went to the LinkedIn company pages this morning and updated data about my company Liliendahl Limited: Unlimited Data Quality and Master Data Management consultancy for tool and service vendors.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 