Whether we know it or not, most of us have probably accepted the fact that on the web, our data is now currency. Anywhere we go on the web, people want us to provide our name, email address and tons of other info in exchange for entry/access to their sites and platforms. Facebook, blogs, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Digg, Technorati, you name it. If you want to be on it, you will be registering and providing personal details in order to do so. Usually it’s nothing harmful (though sometimes the information we share is more sensitive than others), but our data has effectively become conventional consideration in the online world.

Naturally, companies have been using this data in order to market their products and services “more effectively.” And one way they’ve found to accomplish this is with the “social CRM” platform, Rapleaf.

Until it was brought up during last Thursday’s panel discussion, I wasn’t familiar with Rapleaf. Drawing from my past life in which I was a digital marketing account manager, I certainly know that companies have been looking for ways to better target their marketing for a while now. But heretofore, aside from behavioral advertising, there weren’t very many reliable tools companies could use to create direct, targeted marketing efforts that would really see any degree of success.

Of course, it was only a matter of time and as of today, Rapleaf claims to have data on somewhere near 400 million users.

It describes itself as, “…a San Francisco startup that crawls for publicly-available people information across the social web, and builds products and analytics on top of this data. With data on hundreds of millions of people, we have one of the largest social graphs and social databases in the world.”

As such, the company offers several “products” to users, but the basic idea is to leverage it’s intelligence in order to better target your customers. So you provide Rapleaf with an email list of all customers who have opted-in to your distribution list, and Rapleaf combs a whole mess of social media sites to find information including gender, age, geographic location, the number of “friends” a user has on a given site, and more, which gives you a snapshot of your customer base on the social web. The idea is then that you will say hey, 50% of our customers are men, between 25 and 40, on Facebook, with more than 250 friends, maybe we should market our new beer recipe to these guys, and do it on Facebook?

Really it’s just a way to beef up your customer’s profiles in your records. You probably only asked for a name and email address when they signed up (and maybe a street address), but Rapleaf also knows how old your customers are, whether they are male/female, where your customers social profiles are (on which social networks, that is), and more. It actually even knows how many of your customer’s profiles are private on each social network and whether their profiles are “active” (they’ve logged into the account within the last six months) or not.

To give you an idea of what some of the info Rapleaf provides might look like (click to enlarge)…

And click here for a sample Rapleaf customer report, which oughta give you a good idea of the type of data they provide.

Anyway, it’s hard to tell how reliable such a service is without actually using it. And as I personally have no customer data to analyze, I obviously have no reason to use it. So if you’re looking to build more robust customer profiles, you’ll have to fly solo on this one. But if it’s a good enough tool for Edelman, it’s a good enough tool for me and maybe you too. Only one way to find out…