Today I presented at the Social Media Camp Long Island on Social Media Monitoring for Local Restaurants using solutions and approaches evolved from my work with Radian6 and Havana Central Restaurant chain. Originally, I was to co-present this with Cecilia Pineda Feret, but she could not make it I presented it alone.

None the less, I did not come up with work entirely alone – Cecilia and the folks at Havana Central weighed in on this presentation yesterday and helped me fine tune it for today.

I hope you listen to the whole thing as a lot gets covered and if you go past the beginning you’ll find a lot of depth – it’s actually worth listening to all of it – but that’s just my opinion.

Here’s the presentation I gave which is washed out in the video ( I guess in order to get the audience to see the video we had to sacrifice getting it to appear online – oh well, in this case it was a neccessary sacrifice).

There were a couple of other thoughts I had today given the material covered in the two other sessions I attended.  First of all – the material and the level it was covered at were very basic today – almost too basic for me (but I’m not the target audience).   Still – there’s so much effort being made to reach out to people that don’t understand what Social Media is and a what it’s for or how to operate within Social Media -that little effort or time is left to do anything else than cover the basic stuff, over and over and over.

Having said that – sometimes the basic stuff has some hidden ideas far beyond what the presenters realize they’re giving out – and I think I got one insight but decided not to share it at the conference – but I’ll hint at it here.

It goes something like this ……

1. You promote a business in Social Media (say …. a Facebook Business page .. you know, one where you can have people who used to be able to become Fans but now can just “like” a page, join.   One such page being cited had 400+ people who liked the page over the last few months.
2. It occurs to me (and was not something the speaker realized, I bet) those 400+ people who are liking the business page are also people you can market to.
   1. 1. ……. But so are many of their friends!
3. In the old days, before Social Networks – you’d just sign up people on a list – then you would market to those people – because that’s all you knew about – the people on your list ………. but that’s no longer true.

With Social Networking we not only know who “you” are – we also know who all their  friends are – with a few more turns of the key we could also figure out which of those friends are more likely to be interested in the same things the people in your list (or the fans of your page – those who said they liked the page).

So … let’s say you had a page with several thousand “fans” or people who liked the page – and it was a subject that was clearly identified – say … fighting BP and the Gulf Oil Spill …..

Let’s say that you have a pretty good idea that just about every one of the 18,500 fans has strong feelings of dislike about BP and a belief against offshore drilling.

With a bit of work you could take those people, get the total list and then figure out how many friends they all have – Radian6 does something similar with Twitter Followers  but no one I know of does it for Facebook.    If you had enough data you could expand your list of people several hundred times simply by looking at the likelyhood that someone who signs up for a page like Make British Petroleum (BP) PAY for the Gulf Coast Oil Spill also have many friends who feel the same way ……. get my drift?

This is one way Social Media tracking and lead generation is so different than it’s  traditional equivalents.

Why?

I think it’s related to the affinity – people will tend to gather with others who have similar values and beliefs – and to some extent, that’s even true of virtual friends or hybrid relationships.

As “Affinity” is such a power force in human behavior – it also corresponds to a natural force – cohesiveness – the binding energy that holds molecules together.

It occurred to me while listening to a very simple presentation about Social Media for people who were largely just getting started – could be valuable because it got me to think about a very familiar subject in a somewhat different way.

And while few companies have the wherewithal to figure this all out (but I have a pretty good idea of how to do it) and produce useful results – no doubt, there are a few companies that have figured it out – and my guess is they are flying under the radar – quite happy and quite prosperous.

And, I have to admit – I’m hearing about cases like this more often lately  – we are tempted to think that some issues haven’t been solved yet – yet hidden from view there often exist business entities that have largely solved the problem but aren’t particularly interested in having you or I know about it.

Oh well … who knows, maybe that’s the right way to do it …. not sure.