What a week, and yes, only Tuesday. Tomorrow morning my colleague Alexander Shyshko will pick me up at 5:30 in order to fly up to the other side of my universe – otherwise known at Crowd Factory Portland. Those offices are filled different kind of creative genius, imagination and brilliance as compared to that of the San Francisco office. It is also full of social media code. You can call it an application, a platform, a tool, a solution – there are so many ways to look at what we do, but in the end we just deliver the results customers trust. The concept of Social Media ROI is no longer this foreign intangible “thing,” it can now be reported in cold hard crunching numbers.

Last week I sat in on one of those webinars that you if you are like me, get 58 emails a week to attend. Everything from SEO for Twitter to Generating More Leads With Social Media via Facebook. One of the first things the said was “I had thought this topic would generate more than 200 attendees.” The company presenting and topic is not THAT important, and in fact I think I tuned out after 15 minutes because everything the Presenter was saying was a compilation of articles I read on Mashable over the last 2 months.

What you just read was the former New Yorker in me.  Now I will do this in a more, let us say friendly Midwestern tone.  And I was born in Pittsburgh, so I can play both parts here).

There are most likely 1000’s of people who have never heard the term webinar. These same professionals may have a personal Facebook page but the company they work for has no presence or understanding of how to implement a social media campaign – so they attend what is an extremely informative webinar to understand the basics and for that I applaud the presenter.

After reviewing some notes from the Web 2.0 conference a few weeks ago I was reminded of a blurb I wrote in my notebook (an actual notebook made of paper, written with a pen), that out of ~350 people in one session, more than half of the room consisted of marketing professionals and of those ~175 people maybe 10% of those folks had any understanding of the web analytics let alone social media analytics as it related to their company’s website.

So, let’s bring this all together and look at the facts:

1. I am going to the Crowd Factory office in Portland tomorrow.

2. There are limitless options to learning what you might call “Social Media 101” – webinars, whitepapers and more.

3. I am from Pittsburgh

4. I lived in New York City for almost 9 years and I am not a bitter person.

5. Many do not take advantage of the resources out there or…maybe it that people know that the social materials are there, but don’t have the time or interest?

When I arrive in the Portland offices I expect to meet the team and at have an in-depth and finally in person (WebEx only goes so far) conversation about what YOU want and what our CUSTOMERS WANT and/or NEED (and for some, YOU might already be a CUSTOMER, and we are happy you are reading this).

I also hope to gain more insight into our products so that when the marketing guy comes to you and starts writing 500-1000 piece blog posts I can talk directly to you and not around you filled with a lot of sales talk that sounds scripted and from a teleprompter – to which that last webinar felt like.

Stay tuned, we’ll most likely be taking some cool videos of the group up in Portland and I look forward to hearing from our friends, fans, followers, readers, bots, old college roommates, anyone really – because this is not such a niche world that any given person reading this does not have a valid viewpoint on how social media affects their lives.