Years ago, I remember hearing about a company called RapLeaf and its desire to create the equivalent of the eBay Feedback  Score, a universal quantification of one’s reputation. Look at the score and you would have an instant understanding of their person. Unlike eBay, whose Feedback Score relates only to their activity within the auction site, RapLeaf wanted to create a score that transcended any particular site. That meant gathering data across sites. Unfortunately, their plans for creating the repository for reputation didn’t catch on, but showing their roots as successful entrepreneurs, Auren Hoffman and company, did what Max Levchin did with Slide. He transformed the business into something else that works.  Today, RapLeaf leverages their expertise in social media data aggregation to offer businesses a way to understand their customers better by having access to their social activity.

Calling today’s RapLeaf a startup version of Axciom or any number of data providers that if given some data can append it with additional is both accurate but selling short the uniqueness of RapLeaf’s data aggregation. I read a tweet recently that said, “2009: nearly 23% of Facebook users earn > $100,000/year; 16% for MySpace; 38% for LinkedIn.” The data came from a recent CNN Article titled, “Does your social class determine your online social network?” Regardless of one’s own personal feelings about the various social networks, as seen by this report, if you can know to which social networks a user belongs, you can glean some pretty insightful information that will help you make some potentially important business and marketing decisions. All a company needs in order to work with RapLeaf is a customer or potential customer’s email address. From there the process mirrors a more traditional data append service. As for what information, RapLeaf returns, here is a graphical representation instead of just a list.

So how are those in the online lead generation space using RapLeaf. To give you a hint of the potential power, a good friend of mine once joked that he would be more than happy if others didn’t learn about RapLeaf… and he meant it. An interesting example in my opinion comes from a not so obvious sector, those in payday loans. They use the RapLeaf data as a feedback loop. In other words, many in the space have found correlations between the quality of a lead, i.e., its likelihood for payback, and the social networks with which they belong. That correlation is probably not something we will see in a CNN article, though.  A more traditional example comes from outside the world of online lead generation where an agency or brand will desire to segment its users based on their social activity. This way, they can create custom segments and invite users to dialog with the company outside of just email. They can write those with Facebook accounts to become fans of their Facebook page, which will lead to both higher activity from that segmented blast and lower costs (by not sending a Facebook message to non-Facebook users).

Not unlike other data providers, RapLeaf charges on a query volume basis, and companies can access the data by sending over files or in real-time through their API. Many in the online lead generation space have extensive familiarity using third party data providers and will wonder whether another source can really add value. Not addressing the lead scoring products but only data append, TARGUSinfo and eBureau have the largest share of market in the lead gen space (or so I believe) with Service Objects and Melissa Data being names mentioned frequently as well. The first two have products that focus on the robustness of primarily a phone or postal data whereas RapLeaf focuses on the robustness of an email address, and what you can learn by understanding not just email robustness but social strength – age, gender, and number of friends. Social networks, though, change very fast. LinkedIn today might imply a professional on the whole, but in two years, who knows. So, like any data set, making the most of it means continuously using it and not just a one time check or broad assumptions. Higher cost, but quality in leads to quality out.

RapLeaf is based in San Francisco, California.

About RapLeaf by RapLeaf:

“Rapleaf is the leader in online people information search. Rapleaf’s services help top retailers, political organizations, airlines, hotels, banks, insurance companies, and other leading firms gain consumer insight, plan online media, and manage fraud risk in real-time. Today, Rapleaf has processed over 1 billion transactions and is one the largest people databases in the world with insight into 300+ million consumers. “