Startup Idea Every Day #6: Social Media Intelligence

This is the sixth post in my series, "Startup Idea Every Day", where I offer a new idea for a startup every day, for 31 days (January 2014). On a side note, this is getting exhausting. I really hope this stunt drives traffic.

Social media is the driving force behind "big data", a term I'm not a fan of, but more on that later. What always drives me crazy is that social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and G+ rely almost solely on advertising to make money, which is absurd because they have some of the most valuable assets under their nose, and it seems like they don't even know it. I'm proposing an idea for a company that can search social networks and identify the presence of a brand, idea, or movement within a given geography, using social media as the worlds biggest automatic survey, not the worlds most over-saturated ad network.

Using an API, it would be possible to hypothetically ask all of Facebook a question, such as "Coke vs. Pepsi?", and then map the answers from hundreds of thousands of users.

Well that's really neat, but who would buy that product? The product, which i'm calling GeoSocial, could be sold to medium to large size companies that are expanding, for the sake of identifying new markets and correcting bad branding. Another possible avenue of sale is to political campaigns, which could use social networks to determine which states, cities, or counties would be an optimal use of their time.

What I really like about the idea is that it puts new life into the idea of the social network. Social networks are more than just a way of interacting, they are a way of cataloguing human interaction. Social networks are here to stay, I just want to put them to good use.