Social Master Data Management (Social MDM) is about linking the increasing trend of doing business via social media using what we may call “systems of engagement” with the traditional way of supporting business using what we call “systems of record”.

Engaging Human Resources

Creating systems for sharing knowledge between employees within your organization and not at least sharing what knowledge exists among employees has been around for long. Such systems rely on a basic employee master data foundation typically based on core employee registries made for employee contract and payroll functionality.

In a modern organization human resource administration is affected by the way work and live today. Doing work may be done in many other ways than through a traditional employee contract and we are increasingly moving between branches in different countries with different payroll systems often leading to assigning the same individual a complete new identity as a human resource.

Managing employee and other human resource master data will have to embrace this reality in order to ensure effective use of the human resources available and making it possible for all your human resources to help with that will be a big help.

Following Your Customer’s Digital Footprint

The growth of social networks during the recent years has been almost unbelievable. A lot of activity takes place within social networks and some of this activity relates to buying, recommending and using your products and services and your competitors’ products and services.

Your ability to follow your customer’s and prospective customer’s footprint in the social networks, and other big data sources, will, if not today, be a competitive advantage tomorrow.

You will make the most out of this if you are able to link your traditional collection of customer transactions with the footprints of the customer in the social world. That link will have to be made in a master data hub.

Supporting Complex Sales

Doing social MDM is as a natural consequence of adapting social CRM (Social Customer Relation Management). Many CRM systems are supporting B2B (Business-to Business) activities helping with keeping track of what’s going on with a lot of contacts related to a business account.

Traditional MDM has been much about a single view of the business account and the legal entity behind. As social CRM is much about the relations to the business contacts, the people side of business, we need a solid master data foundation behind the people being those contacts.

The same individual may in fact be an important influencer related to a range of business accounts being the legal entity with who you are aiming for a sales contract. You need a single view of that. So many sales contracts are based on a relation to a buyer moving from one business account to another. You need to be the winner in that game and the answer to that may very well be your ability to do better social MDM.

Sharing Product Data

Product master data are often reborn many times. This happens inside organizations and it happens in the ecosystem of business partners in supply chains encompassing manufactures, distributors, retailers and end users.

Inside an organization it may happen that the purchase function enters a product description fit for the purpose of handling procurement. But this description may not fit the purpose of appreciating and describing the product in the selling process if it’s a resell product or service or it doesn’t fit the engineering process if it’s a spare part or a tool.

As a supplier of products and services through selling channels you are interested in that your descriptions, images and stories around products and services are consistent and timely.

Optimizing Product Information Management (PIM) for multiple purposes requires sharing product data both inside the organization and with your suppliers and customers. In doing that you need that side of social MDM we may call social PIM.