Managing Social Profiles in Your CRM (Part 3)

Part 3: Forming Unique Identities

In this series of three blog posts we're investigating a few technical challenges for social CRM solutions. In part one we looked at the problem of finding people on social networks. In part two we discussed hiding various issues with social network APIs. And in this last part we look at the problem of duplication of network profiles.

When you're working with social data from multiple networks, you inevitably encounter a number of challenges concerning people's on-line profiles. I will list a few of them here:

Vanity urls
Websites like Facebook and LinkedIn enable their users to define vanity urls (short names for their online profiles). This is optional. Some users have them, other users don't. This can pose a problem for social CRM systems because search engines sometimes give the original (long) URL to people's profiles, and sometimes the short vanity URL. Such differences need to be resolved before evaluating links to people's on-line profiles.

Renamed accounts
On Twitter and other networks it is possible for people to change their user name. But most tools use this user name to link to a person on Twitter, meaning that such references can become invalid. Social CRM systems may need to figure out that accounts have been renamed, and that they need to link to people's new user names.

Multiple profiles
When people have accounts on multiple networks, it would be nice to know which profiles belong to the same person. For example, when you know someone's Twitter profile, and some time later you get in contact with that person on Facebook, it would be nice to know that it is in fact the same person that you already have connected to via Twitter.

There are no out-of-the-box solutions that address each of these challenges. But we can count on it that multiple businesses are trying to solve such issues with people's social network profiles. Because they must be solved in order to build a social CRM solution that treats customers as complete unique identities, and not as a messy collection of broken social network data.

(go to part 1: Finding Social Profiles, part 2: Hiding Network Issues)

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