Rapleaf announced a partnership with NetProspex, as Rapleaf will enhance NetProspex’ marketing contact database with “a social layer of data” with the goal of allowing “B2B marketers to successfully decipher the social demographics of business prospects and customers.” Read the release.
Joel Jewitt, Rapleaf’s VP of Business Development, discussed the partnership and B2B social data.
AdExchanger.com: What unique benefits does accurate social data present the B2B marketer?
JJ: Millions of professionals are now maintaining social profiles about themselves that can help the B2B marketer understand them in important ways. The outward face that business people show to the marketplace now usually include public Linkedin pages, some public portion of their Facebook profiles, their Twitter presence, and often many other sites like Myspace, etc. Because of this, B2B marketers now increasingly have the responsibility to understand professionals on many more levels than just their title and company. By taking into account all of this new information, B2B marketers can communicate with them in ways that are much more meaningful.
Given the B2B focus of this partnership with NetProspex, is B2B or B2C core to Rapleaf’s business? Or do you even see it this way?
A key mission of Rapleaf is to help businesses access the public information available about professionals and consumers, and use it in responsible ways to improve their ability to begin and maintain new kinds of relationships. These new kinds of relationships are characterized by communications that are much more meaningful than in the past when professionals and consumers didn’t invest energy to publish information about themselves to the community. Now that people are taking the time to create and maintain what are basically microsites about themselves, with a lot of information about their characteristics and preferences, B2B and B2C marketers need to listen and incorporate this in their marketing or they will be left behind.
How do you address privacy concerns around social data being married to the NetProspex database?
Rapleaf only links to data that is public; published by people to the outside world. Any data that is marked private in any way is not accessed by us.
By John Ebbert
