LinkedIn has a section called companies. When browsing around on LinkedIn you are sometimes hinted to follow a company that LinkedIn think will be of interest for you.
The other day my hint included two identical logo’s for the old Master Data Management (MDM) vendor called Siperian. Curiously and data quality geeky as I am I checked and actually there are two Siperians on LinkedIn companies:
Both have an identical head quarter address in California, USA.
So, even MDM vendors have created duplicates.
Also, Siperian was acquired by the Data Integration giant Informatica some years ago, so you should expect that the Siperians was emptied. But that is not the case. Some Siperian folks still claims working for one of the Siperian duplicates (though many also for Imformatica at the same time).
Now, I was not sure about the legal status of the old Siperian company. So I went to another social network called Companybook. On that site the company registry is based on an external business directory.
Here it seems that the Siperian company in Toronto, Canada actually still exist, though marked as owned by Informatica.
So, I’m still looking for that single source of the truth out there. Until then I will mashup the external sources out there with my internal MDM vendor knowledge as told in the post yesterday called Mashing Up Big Reference Data with Internal Master Data.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 
Interesting post Henrik, I think this demonstrates the need for data governance actually, someone needs to administer these social outposts as they would their own internal party data.
I had to advise one of our sponsors recently that their management team according to LinkedIn were linked to a small services company in Brazil, instead of their actual UK company, all because someone had created a duplicate company name without the “Ltd” suffix.
It’s important for companies to realise that “their data” no longer has traditional boundaries but it still needs to be mastered.
You’re right Dylan. Social MDM goes both ways. Collecting reference data and maintaining your own data.