As described in “MDM Is Critical to CRM Optimization,” accurate, consistent and trusted customer master data is foundational to the ability of organizations to engage with their customers in a confident and competent manner, and to provide those customers with an optimized experience from the marketing, sales and service perspectives. Social applications for CRM (See “The Nine Types of Social Applicaitons to Consider for Your CRM Team”) focus on supporting organizations in leveraging the data contained in formal and informal customer communities to enable consistent engagement among employees, customers, partners and prospects. Because the data within these applications is exclusively based on social-media-based information, these solutions need the ability to link the social profile data to customer master data contained in more-traditional internal systems (like legacy CRM applicaitons) and data stores.