The term “Social MDM” has been promoted quite well this week not at least as part of the social media information stream from the ongoing user conference of the tool vendor Informatica.
In a blog post called Informatica 9.5 for Big Data Challenge #2: Social Jody Ko of Informatica introduces the opportunities and challenges.
In the closing remarks Judy says: “There’s still a long way to go to bring social data into the mainstream enterprise, in part due to concerns over privacy and the potential “creepiness” factor of mining social data.”
As I understand it the spearhead Social MDM part of the tool release is a Facebook App that provides connectivity between Facebook and the MDM solution.
Industry analyst R “Ray” Wang examines this in the blog post News Analysis: Informatica Launches MDM 9.5. The analysis states that it now is time to “drive data out of Facebook and not into Facebook”.
The opportunities and challenges of driving data out of Facebook was discussed in a post called exactly Out of Facebook here on the blog some years ago.
Balancing privacy with data hoarding is still for sure a subject that in no way is settled and probably never will be.
Connecting systems of record in traditional MDM solutions with social network profiles is in no way a walk over too. The classic data quality challenges with uniqueness of records and completeness of data only gets more difficult, but also, there are great opportunities for getting a better picture of your customers and other business partners.
If you are interested in Social MDM and the related challenges and opportunities there is a LinkedIn group for Social MDM.
The group is new, less than a month old at the present time, but there is already a lot of content to dip into, including:
- A discussion called: What’s the business case?
- A survey on data quality mechanisms focused on author identity resolution in social media
- A poll: What is a good MDMish name for social network profiles?
Liliendahl on Data Quality 
How is Social MDM different from social network?
Essential question Muhammad. In my eyes Social MDM is about how organizations are able link customer and other party master data that traditionally has been collected as part of doing business with the social network profiles with whom organizations are engaging with as part of marketing through social media, doing social selling, making customer service using social networks and everything else social.
It will be interesting to see how MDM evolves to handle and define the complexities of unstructured data. Up until now, MDM was only solving the identity resolution problem, and not always doing a good job on gauging the confidence one had in source. With unstructured data and lots of it, the question will become “how do I park what I just learned from Hadoop into MDM?”
I look forward to joining the group.
Thanks Adam for joining the comments here on the blog and the LinkedIn group. This is surely new frontiers for MDM and it’s going to be interesting to see how this discipline develops.