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It’s already been an exciting year for us with several developments on the new hires and product fronts, and it’s about to get even better with Rapleaf expanding across the country.

Rapleaf’s home will always be in San Francisco (where we’ve been since 2006), but we just opened a Chicago office (led by Phil Davis, our new General Manager of Marketing Services). And on March 1st, we will be opening a New York City office.

Please don’t hesitate to stop by if you’re close by or ever in town.

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Despite some recent reports claiming otherwise, what you post on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites does not impact your credit score.

A recent SmartMoney article clarifies how banks and financial firms use social media information, saying that it’s limited to use by “marketing departments – as opposed to those charged with making credit and lending decisions — to help with ‘offer sorting.’” In particular, companies use this data to decide on the types of advertising and mail promotions to send out to prospective customers.

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Loyalty Lab, the leading provider of high-engagement CRM, loyalty and rewards platforms for consumer-focused companies, today announced its integrated partnership with Rapleaf.

Leveraging Rapleaf’s capabilities as the largest provider of social data, Loyalty Lab now makes it possible for clients to easily integrate influencer scores into their loyalty program for enhanced offer targeting, campaign management and rich advocacy programs.

Loyalty Lab and Rapleaf have developed a joint solution to import Rapleaf influencer data directly into Loyalty Lab’s system, where it becomes a key attribute for segmenting program members and aligning them to offers based on the strength of their influence scores.

“Consumer marketers intuitively know that a certain segment of their customer base disproportionately drives the highest and most positive volumes of brand advocacy,” notes Loyalty Lab CEO Matt Howland. “By adding the incredible insights provided by Rapleaf’s social data, our clients now know exactly which customers will best amplify their marketing communications, great offers and high-touch service.”

Examples of how top marketers integrate Rapleaf and Loyalty Lab include:

• Distribute discounts to customers who are more influential, based on their “connectedness” within the client’s customer base
• Improve offer relevancy by marketing offers based on the purchase behavior of friends
• Acquire new customers by providing incentive for influencers to tell their friends
• Test and preview new products and services with the most influential customers

“Loyalty Lab’s focus on permission-based marketing is a perfect environment for using social data to its maximum potential. The definition of a loyal customer can now be expanded from those that make the most purchases themselves to those that influence the most purchases through their social connectivity,” adds Rapleaf CEO Auren Hoffman.

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“I am delighted to be part of a fantastic team as we provide our social media data and consumer insight to fuel our customers’ acquisition, retention and data intelligence activities.  With our unique data and technology capabilities, we will continue to launch innovative marketing services products in 2010,” says Phil.

Prior to Rapleaf, Phil was President of ConsumerBase, SVP at Equifax, and COO of Daleen Technologies. Phil holds a B.S. in Human Development in Organizations from Vanderbilt University.

Phil is a general sports enthusiast who played collegiate rugby and is now an active tennis and paddle tennis player. When not working at Rapleaf or competing on the courts, Phil enjoys spending time with his wife and two daughters and traveling around the world.

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It wasn’t too long ago when Rapleaf only had data on a handful of people. Today, with our people database growing rapidly, we have insight into over 375 million consumers, including their demographics, psychographics, social network memberships, friend counts and more. We’re proud to help leading businesses better understand their customers in our continuous quest to improve the consumer experience.

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