An afternoon session at Deals 3D focused on social media’s impact on deals. The panel titled “Social Media and Deals: The Saturday Night Play” featured Cityvoter CEO Josh Walker and Signpost CEO Stuart Wall.

Signpost features “deal scouts,” which are ambassadors who talk to businesses and get rewarded (rev share) for signing them up for new deals. ”Early on we got these core people — like Yelp’s core foodies — who like going out and finding deals. This comes about in a forum-like environment.”

On both Signpost and Cityvoter, voting is a key component to vote up or vote down deals (and places), which then surface accordingly in their distribution. Cityvoter is in fact the original player in this space (pre-social explosion) to facilitate social voting around local entities.

Cityvoter is using that model as a foundation for engaging and targeting users for deals. It currently has 60 million registered votes, 3 million registered voters, and is live in 15 markets, according to Walker.

In Seattle, for example, 200,000 unique people vote. But more important, by voting these users are raising their hands and opting in to receive deals from these businesses. This has some powerful targeting implications where intent and affinity are clearly present.

“The reason they are there is because they love that local business and that’s powerful,” he said, adding that 30 percent of its traffic comes from Facebook. “If you think about it that means that lots of people are sharing with their friends and family to vote.”

There was little talk about weekend warrior deals after all — though social influence on deals was well explicated. Here’s a video play on the panel anyway.