Just a brief post, I hope, to work out an idea a client of mine, in the Restaurant Business expressed to me recently.  Let’s say you running Social Media for a business and you want to not only get the people who are in the area looking for your  type cuisine into the restaurant – but also to find those people who are searching for related things – and get them into the restaurant – and use Social Media to reach them, to reach out – but first you have to identify them so you can reach out.

One idea – say, you serve Cuban food – is using a tool like Sysomos Map to find what people are saying in their posts when they also talk about that type of food.   And, bear in mind that this is a larger community than those who might visit the restaurant at the time (before doing work to optimize the site and copy on it).

One way would be to look at the blogs who use associated terms – like Sysomos does – and then include that copy plus create more content around it – and reachout to others who are local and writing about the same stuff to drop by, if you can.

But what if you could go one step further – and figure out what people search for before the settle on your cuisine?

Using Microsoft AdLabs Search Funnels is one way to do it  (if it’s a term that Microsoft has data in this tool for – which isn’t always the case) – you can do the same technique I mentioned above on those terms above – perhaps geo-locating them as well – and extend the community that way.

And then, finally – you identify influentials and reach out to them.

What do you think?  Would you do it differently?