Who can change a business's published facts

The list of writers

Control over a fact is not the same as ownership of it. For a typical company the set of parties able to change what is published includes:

• The public, through suggested edits on map and search listings and review-style corrections.
• Platforms, through automated updates that merge data from several sources.
• Aggregators and data suppliers, whose feeds overwrite downstream directories on refresh.
• Manufacturers and distributors, through their locators, portals and catalogs.
• Former employees and former agencies who still hold access to a claimed listing.
• The company itself, through its own site and the profiles it claimed.

What changes, and why it goes unnoticed

Most overwrites are not malicious. A platform reconciles two sources and picks one. A feed refreshes with data that was correct a year ago. A well-meaning visitor corrects a department's hours from memory. The effect is the same: a published fact changes without anyone at the company deciding to change it, and nothing notifies them.

The change is usually found by accident, through a customer, a missed call, or a wrong answer from an assistant. By then the old value may already have been copied elsewhere.

Detection needs a reference

A change can only be seen as a change if the company has a record of what the fact is supposed to be. The record states each value, where it came from, who confirmed it and when. A scheduled comparison reads each public copy and reports the ones that differ.

Without the record, the company is reduced to checking whether a listing looks right, which cannot detect a plausible wrong value.

Authority is not the same as access

The record also settles a question every party eventually raises: who is allowed to change which fact. The company may be the authority for its hours and its services. The manufacturer is authoritative for what it authorizes the company to sell. The distributor is authoritative for the account and territory. An edit by the wrong party to a fact is an error even when it is accurate on the day.

What a source record contains

That record is the foundation described in Business Truth.

• The fact and its current value.
• The source of the value: a system export, a document, a named person.
• Who confirmed it, and on what date.
• The authority for that kind of fact.
• The public copies that carry it, and when each was last read.
• The history of changes, including the ones the company did not make.

Questions