Social Master Data Management has been an interest of mine the last couple of years and last week I have tried to reach out to others in exploring this new era of Master Data Management by creating a group on LinkedIn called Social MDM.
When reading a nice blog with the slogan ”Welcome to the Real (IT) World!” by Max J. Pucher I came across a good illustration by John Mancini showing the history of IT and how the term “Systems of Record” is being replaced (or at least supplemented) by the term “Systems of Engagement”:
Master Data Management (MDM) includes having a System of Record (SOR) describing the core entities that takes part in the transactional systems of record that supports the daily business in every organization. For example a golden MDM record is describing the party that acts as a customer on an order record while the products in the underlying order lines are described in golden MDM records for the things dealt with within the organization.
Social Master Data Management (Social MDM) will be about supplementing that System of Record so we are able to further describe the parties taking part in the new Systems of Engagement and link with the old Systems of Records. These parties are reflected as social network profiles that are owned by the same human beings who are our (prospective) customers, part of the same household or are a contact for a company being a (prospective) customer or any other business partner.
For a guy like me who started in IT in the mainframe era (just after it had ended according to the above illustration) and went on with mini computers, PC’s and the internet it’s very exciting to be moving on into the social and cloud era.
It will be good to be joined by even more data quality and MDM practitioners and anyone else in the LinkedIn Social MDM group.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 
This is a most interesting and thoughtful observation and I believe represent a pardigm shift that is needed for marketing efforts in the future , this also ties well the post you have Social MDM and System of Engagement. The nexus of these two concepts when added with existing Data Quality techniques(Data Profiling, Fuzzy Matching, etc…) will define the future .
Thanks for commenting Ira. Indeed, much of the social wave begins within marketing, but should eventually embrace all of the business and thus make the need for Social Master Data Management beyond supporting multi-channel activities.
Social MDM or customer data integration that includes social data is being discussed a great deal across many industries – especially retail.
Thanks for commenting Frank. Sure, it seems obvious for enterprises doing retail to add social media to the current multi-channel embracement many retailers are doing including getting the needed customer data integration up to speed with the business strategy.