Charlene Li led a FastForward 09 session titled Transformation Based on Social Technologies, She began with the comment that despite her title, social media is about creating relationships and not technology. Charlene offered an approach to create these desired relationships. First learn and listen then encourage dialogue, help them, innovate with them.

What I found very useful was the series of examples she provided. Here are some of the better ones that I wanted to remember, Paula Thorton was sitting next to me and checked out all the sites. She twittered many of the links so I was able to quickly obtain them.

H&R Block created a Facebook page to create dialogue, establish a relationship not to sell. They answered factual questions about taxes and then broadcasted their answer to demonstrate their expertise. Many of the questions came from younger people, one of their target populations. 

Comcast has established a Twitter feed at Twitter/comcastcares. You can DM the guy who runs the feed with questions and he responds. They also go out and look for people having problems.

Starbucks set up a community site called Mystarbuck.com. People can submit ideas and others can vote. Starbucks responds to questions on the site.

Paul Levy, the CEO at Beth Isreal Hospital in Boston has a blog and he covers about all kinds of issues at his hospital. I have been a follower of his writing for some time.

Dell put search in their forum so people can better find stuff in the usual maze that forums offer.

Techmeme does search on selective blogs, not the broad masses so you tend to get higher quality results.

Technorati will find blog posts on a topic and rank by authority. I have used Technorati for years but have not really focus on this use so I will try it.

You can aggregate Twitter feeds to look across an audience to see what is being talked about and even where. NYT Times provided an example that analyzed Twitter feeds during the Super Bowl and sorted them by a variety of comparisons like team support and ad support.

One Riot does searches and covers how hot the results are. It is search based on audience activity.

Yelp reviews on food places. I have seen them many times when I look up restaurants.  Charlene added that they also rank the profilers so you can see the source.

So I came away with a lot of useful new links. I hope these help you also. Here is the FASTforward 09 Video Interview: Charlene Li, Altimeter Group.