Some people categorize social media as a nice personal distraction, while others view the networks as a means of marketing themselves or a specific brand, reaching out to consumers through Facebook, Twitter and blog posts. For Dylan Jones, a columnist with Data Roundtable, the social web can offer a front row seat to the effects of poor data quality.

Jones gives the example of a company whose critics were taking to fan pages, blogs and Twitter - the networks that it was using for marketing - to air their grievances about poor customer service and other problems. If the company is not taking note of these complaints and accordingly addressing their data quality, the problem could continue to spiral.

"I find that most organisations fail at linking root cause data quality issues to customer service impacts," Jones says. "There just isn't the corporate 'plumbing' and initiative to connect the customer issues reported to the underlying data and process faults."

In the physical world, details such as contact data are equally important. Service levels can also be negatively affected. For example, having the wrong listing for a client could mean a package is not delivered, and an unorganised database of customers may cause missed opportunities to offer special discounts or follow up on a sale.