Microsoft and LinkedIn – A Path to Personalization
There has been no shortage of articles and opinions, both positive and negative, since
Microsoft announced a $26.2 billion acquisition of
LinkedIn. Headlines and hypotheses range from
improving CRM, data monetization, and advertising revenue to more personalized insights that
enable Cortana to generate recommended actions.
In fact, many of the capabilities that LinkedIn provides will help in better B2B engagement and marketing. Here are 3 such examples:
Data is the Lifeblood. Data as a Service is the
Transfusion.
With 433 million members, LinkedIn provides one
of the best – if not the best – sources of professional
profile data out there, coveted by every marketing
and sales person and, of course, recruiters.
For companies looking to be more personalized in
their marketing, having seamless, real-time access
to any third-party licensed or free public data for
data quality and augmentation of customer profiles is essential. However, today, receiving and
loading data from third-party providers is still an
IT laborious ETL process, with business users unhappy with the speed and accuracy of updates.
Enterprises should view Microsoft’s goal to make
LinkedIn profile data available on demand to their
customers in Office 365, Dynamics CRM, and other
applications as a table-pounding case for realtime Data as a Service (DaaS) access from all their
third-party data vendors.
Data Quality and Accuracy Will Be the Priority
Microsoft is acquiring LinkedIn even though approximately 100 million of the 400 million users (as
detailed in LinkedIn’s Q3 2015 results) visit LinkedIn on a monthly basis, and likely not all of them
are there to update their information.
That doesn’t bode well for the quality and accuracy
of the data. LinkedIn relies on the power of selfmanaged profiles, so information related to each
user might only be updated if the user has gotten a
new job or is beefing up the profile in the hopes of
finding a new job.
An approximate 25 percent refresh rate isn’t acceptable for B2B marketing, where corporate customer data is continuously renovated and
maintained through a steady stream of internal and
third-party sources. Just as Microsoft’s data
monetization hopes lie with maintaining and improving data quality, enterprises that have not yet
put reliable data measures in place can’t hope to
succeed. Fortunately, new cloud-based master data
management (MDM) offerings have made data
quality, and a unified view of customers and products, affordable for companies of all sizes.
Profiles are Interesting, but the Graph of Relationships Matter
As mentioned, we’re in the age of customer engagement, backed by hyper-personalization. While
name, contact information, company, and job title
are fundamental data constructs of CRM and marketing automation, affiliation, affinity, and peer
relationships matter even more.
To achieve this level of personalized, relevant insight, both Microsoft and LinkedIn have to continue to leverage the power and technology of
graph to capture, manage, and maintain data
across relationships of entities at limitless scale.
The power of graph extends beyond people-to-people connections, across all entities. This is often
described as a 360-degree view.
The New Way Forward in B2B Customer Engagement
Strictly Marketing Magazine September/October 2016
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