Customer Relationship Management

One of the basic outcomes of any Master Data Initiative is to create a golden view of a profile from disparate sources. In case of Social MDM, this profile is that of a customer (existing or prospective)

One of the biggest challenges in Social MDM is to identify correctly all the sources of this customer information.  Google Plus, Google's latest and perhaps the most compelling competitor to Facebook thus far adequately underscores this challenge. All companies who have a social CRM strategy in place overnight need to tweak it to make sure they are reaching out to all the prospective customers who decide to move or to Google+ or at least maintain a dual presence across the networks.

As individuals become more and more concerned about their online presence, it may become more challenging for companies to reach out to customers.  Some feel Facebook today is about transparency; the more information we put about ourselves, the more the marketers stand to gain from it. Not everyone is comfortable with this and Google Plus sensing a need offers various enhanced security options to users so that they can decide what kind of information they would like to share and with whom? Increasingly social networks are likely to become less transparent and more "closed" to everyone beyond a select set that the user chooses. In such a case the traditional "push" strategy of marketing is unlikely to work. Companies need more a "pull" strategy where in prospective customers see definitive value in the company's offerings.

The initial success of Google Plus also shows that the nothing is permanent in the realm of social networks. Facebook was once considered the last word in social networking; however the initial success of Google Plus (20 million? and counting) is likely to encourage many more players to enter this space targeting niche customers. A fully mature social networking model is likely to have a slew of social network sites each targeted towards a specific audience. The challenge in this case will be for a company to correctly identify the social networking sites that its intended audience frequents else it would be talking to wrong audience in the first place.
500 million profiles on Facebook seem like a huge captive audience for marketers but as discussed above, it is likely that we are going to have an end state of several social networks of significantly smaller subscriptions. The challenge for companies is to trace their customers as they move across social networks to ensure that changes in the customer's social networking habits do not lead to break in the "conversation" with the customer. The company's MDM should store relevant information to enable the marketing team to identify the same customer as he moves across the web.

In addition to retaining the existing customer, the challenge is to identify new prospective customers in a changing social networking landscape. It is here that companies need to rethink their social MDM strategy. A social Master Data hub will in time need to evolve to  beyond storing demographic  and financial data and store subjective information like attitudes, moral beliefs, aspirations etc. so that marketers can align their brands promise to the correct target audience as it moves across the cyber world.

Google Plus may succeed or fail. Only time will tell. But the writing is clear on the wall- companies need to rethink their social marketing strategy and therefore their social MDM strategy so that they can meaningfully engage their target audience on the World Wide Web.