There’s a post about Social Proof from Social Media Examiner that basically says displaying social media widgets from Facebook and Twitter (that are somewhat customized by the person visiting your website) are an effective engagement mechanism.

Chris Brogan gets mystical with his The Game You See post which suggests that we always have 3 chessboards in life – what we’re doing now (the game we see), what we understand our game to be (the game we understand) and the where we want to be (the game we want to play).  He takes that model and applies it to himself and says that as you master the game your playing now you can sense the next game (the one you might want to play).   According to Brogan…

… Sometimes, we get these reversed. We think we want to play another game, and we think we have the wrong game in front of us. But lots of times, that’s just an error in perception, or in our growth. A lot of times, the game in front of us is the better game. We just haven’t learned how to play it well. Yet.

Honestly, I hope it’s like – maybe we need to define the games we are playing and the one’s we want to play.  Anyway, go read his post and see if you get the same thing out of it that I do.

Has anyone noticed a new service called Paper.li?    It’s kinda a customizable online newspaper you can create for yourself, or subscribe to, on any subject you want – I have been finding my content appearing in a number of Paper.li sites including The Twitter Text Analytics Pros Daily.  There are also some self promotion tools built in (you can log in via Facebook or Twitter and spread the news to your friends in both networks).   I found the articles (posts) interesting (besides my own appearing there).

The biggest theme of the last few days is Google’s acquisition of a few more Social Media Platforms – which I expect will be integrated into the GoogleMe platform by November (that’s a realistic date, I suspect, given the amount of sheer real estate they are snapping up lately).   For example, last week Google bought Angstro and this week Google bought Social Deck.  My suspicion – if we look at all the recent acquisitions (there be 5 or 6 in all in the Social Space) they probably reflect aspects of the new GoogleMe platform to be.    Like I say – I’m seeing “November” in my mind – but I would not be surprised if happens before.   Maybe Google will wait till the Facebook Movie comes out on October 1st – let that all play out – then release GoogleMe to the rest of us.     We can pretty much go to the bank with the notion a prototype or several prototypes are living and being experimented on within Google right now.  I have wondered how well platforms that have been developed for largely different purposes can be combined effectively – I guess we’re about to find out in a month or two.

I was at Greg Verdino’s book signing last week at the Roger Smith Hotel for his MicroMarketing Book – now there’s going to be a half day seminar on MicroMarketing on September 27th in NYC – this sounds like a good event to go to and I’ll try to make it (if I have the time).

Who’s ready for a workday field trip? It’s gonna be a good one. On September 27th, I — in conjunction with David Vinjamuri’s Thirdway Brand Trainers, Powered and New York University — will be hosting a half-day microMARKETING symposium (hey, that’s just a fancy way of saying meeting with presentations) at NYU’s Kimmel Center in the heart of New York City.

I found a very interesting post at Smart Data Collective the other day titled The Long Term Value of Community Relations – the post is does not focus on Social Media at all, and does not even mention it, yet I think there is a tie in with Community Managers for Brands and qualifying the value of that activity.

…. Today, a fair portion of marketing executives manage their budgets much like an investment portfolio. And in an era of tight budgets where every dollar should be justified, there is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. However, sometimes “value” is much more than the sum of a column in a spreadsheet, especially when programs such as community relations make such a positive difference in the places we work and live.

Questions:

• If marketing budget is allocated to community relations, how would you suggest that “value” be tracked and measured?
• Should community relations expenditures come from the marketing budget, or elsewhere?

Then again -  perhaps Jeremiah Owyang has some answers or suggested approaches in his CMO Matrix: How Social Technology Must Integrate with Traditional Marketing, a Horizontal Approach suggesting the “social media stuff” we’re all doing is going to get integrated, must get integrated with the rest of marketing – let’s hope Social Media changes the rest of marketing, making it more real, better, and not the other way around – as a lot of marketing is pretty  dry – and Social Media is just the reverse – so how is that all going to be integrated?  Interesting….

I’ll have some answers to those questions (hopefully) in my webinar with Compete.com on September 28th (waiting for a landing page so from compete so I can promote it) – also check out the Compete.com profile manager that allows you to get detailed profile listings for your site audience by just putting in their JavaScript code to your site – I just put the code on Webmetricsguru.com (it’s another way Compete is adding value).

Getting back to Community Management – the reason I focused on this post The Long Term Value of Community Relations is the possibility there may be a way to value Social Media Community Management and managers as a branding investment – more on this later (as it’s hard to get to dollars and cents unless you can implement the full, 360 degree tracking I have suggested recently, needs to be in place).

There’s also yet another new analytics service from Disqus – see Disqus Analytics Will Give Us More Insight Into Our Audience — Even The Trolls – haven’t had a chance to play with it yet – looks good though – read the TechCrunch post to get an idea of the Disqus offering.   And of course, who in the Web Analytics space can ignore ComScore’s acquisition of NedStat the other day!   You know, 2011 is going to be the year of convergence …….

There’s also an interesting  TED talk on The Technology of the Heart I plan to listen to this weekend.   Also – found The State of Localization, InfoGraphic interesting – if a bit hard to read and there’s also a new site on Social Media Case Studies which should help some of us who are looking for successful case studies in Social Media (though I have only looked at a few so far and they all seem from the WOM association).

That’s about it for my web journal right now – the best stuff I’ve read over the last few days (and my thoughts about it).

I first heard about Recorded Future from Mathew Hurst’s blog The Recorded Future is Here where a brief introduction to this new analytics platform was shared.  Basically, Recorded Future is akin to Adaptive Semantics and Crimson Hexagon in that it creates structure and meaning from unstructured data using a combination of machine learning and custom programming.

Matthew Hurst picked out this quote from the Recorded Future website

“This definitely reduces time in figuring out what may or may not be happening in the future based on what has been happening in the past. It cuts that time in half. “

What’s interesting about Recorded Future, besides the interface, which is somewhat different, is that it has a data structure for the Future – projected things that might happen.  Here’s what I  mean, I constructed a query based on company layoffs anytime in the future and Recorded Future tried to project some based on content that has been created on the web already.

I spent some time yesterday talking with Chris Holden from Recorded Future – I’ll be playing with the platform for the next month or so to put it through it’s paces and see where I might uncover some new application or insight that would be useful both to Recorded Future and my readers.

It would be interesting if this platform could actually be predictive – not sure that is what it’s really for -  I get the impression it’s strength lies in research – pulling together information for journalism (ie: a newspaper) but it’s also got uses for the Military – (ie: examples of terrorist activities) are one of it’s pre-built data structures (you can use it with a company or individual’s name and pick a time period in the past, present or predicted future.

Here’s a movie you can watch  – meanwhile – I’ll go and play with it some more.

I really need to get my hands around this platform before I’ll say more about it – often think it takes a good 10-20 hours of looking at a new platform to really get a feel for it – often, to be honest,  i haven’t spent that long.   But here’s the thing about this one – I need to figure out what I would use it for, myself – then apply Recorded Future and see if the results are better that what I could get any other way.

BTW, Recorded Future is a company that has operations in Boston, Washington DC and Sweden, I believe – they are in a process of raising their profile (as I don’t think too many people are aware of Recorded Future yet).

I got the news today about Alterian and Intrepid, which also covers Lift9 Analytics according to Warren Sukernek.

My take is that platforms such as Alterian/Techrigy/SM2, Radian6, which may have started as self serve platforms, are finding they need to build consulting arms fast in order to meet corporate clients whose needs require integrated solutions that are not easy to put together.   The details of  Intrepid’s acquisition are covered at the Intrepid blog.

“….. As part of our integrated launch plan, Alterian has prepared service packages that will immediately add value to customers deploying Alterian’s SM2.  Once customers and partners understand what and how to ask compelling marketing and research questions around social data, the platform will become that much more valuable. I’m confident that our social media expertise will be a welcome augmentation to Alterian’s marketing platform for both customers and partners.”

Notice the education level – the platforms don’t really provide insight by themselves (actually, I’m not sure a platform, by itself, any platform, provided insight – that comes from analysts culling the data and overlaying meaning onto the numbers).

Here’s the Alterian Press Release covering the acquisition

Alterian Acquires Intrepid, an international social media analytics firm

Acquisition enables Alterian to provide packaged solutions that will help Customers and Partners to accelerate their Social Media strategies

London, U.K. – 01 September 2010 – Alterian (LSE: ALN), the leader in customer engagement technology and solutions, today announced that it has acquired Intrepid, an international market research and social media analytics consultancy. The acquisition further strengthens Alterian’s market leadership position in social media marketing, and its application to the mainstream marketing mix.

Intrepid is a consulting business with a heavy focus on providing insights using social media data, enabling social media to be integrated as a core element of mainstream marketing.   The company has around 40 staff, and offices in Seattle and London as well as a rapidly growing social media analytics team in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Intrepid is a long standing user of Alterian’s social media monitoring and analytics product, Alterian SM2.

The acquisition of Intrepid allows Alterian to expand its support for clients and partners in the area of social media marketing. Alterian has seen growing demand from brands and partners for packaged social media solutions that include best practices, services and software, delivering benefit even where the partner or brand does not have the in-house staff to use the software and generate insights directly.

Alterian CEO, David Eldridge, commented:

“With the explosion of social media, many brands are well aware of the need to harness this exciting new channel as a key and integral part of their marketing mix.  However, a large proportion do not yet have the necessary in-house skills to use social media analytics to best effect.  The addition of Intrepid into the Alterian portfolio gives our partners and customers access to an extremely talented group of people with a deep track record in social media analytics and market research,” said Eldridge. “It also strengthens our leadership position in social marketing, one of our fastest-growing areas of the business, as we help marketers address new channels and build engaging dialogues with their customers.”

John Song, founder and CEO of Intrepid, added:

“We believe this acquisition will have a positive effect on all of Alterian’s current business lines and will accelerate our ability to help organizations that know they must move quickly to integrate social marketing into their customer engagement activities, but may not have the necessary resources and methodologies to do so.  Our vision and our company culture align perfectly with Alterian, and we are excited to become part of this fast-growing company.”

Acquisition Reflects Growing Demand for Alterian’s Social Media Solutions

The Intreprid acquisition reflects the strong and growing demand for Alterian’s social media marketing solution, Alterian SM2, and for the social media features that are offered as an integrated component of Alterian’s offerings in email marketing, web content management, campaign management, and web behavior analytics.  It also provides, through the Ho Chi Minh team, a rich pool of language skills to help further enhance Alterian’s offerings in the important Asia Pacific region.

Growing demand for Alterian’s social media marketing software solutions is driven by increased awareness that consumer expectations have changed forever, based on the emergence of new digital channels and internet-based social media. A new world of communications has emerged that many brands are struggling to understand. Alterian’s solutions help marketers to address this challenge.

For more information, please visit www.alterian.com/intrepid

About Alterian

Alterian (LSE: ALN) enables organizations to create relevant, effective and engaging experiences with their customers and prospects through social, digital, and traditional marketing channels. Alterian’s Customer Engagement solutions are focused in four main areas: Social Media, Web Content Management, Email, and Campaign Management & Analytics.

Alterian technology is utilized either to address a specific marketing challenge or as part of an integrated marketing platform, with analytics and customer engagement with the individual at the heart of everything. Working alongside a rich ecosystem of partners, Alterian delivers its software as a service or on premise. For more information about Alterian visit www.alterian.com or the Alterian blog at www.engagingtimes.com.

Brandtology is starting a new Social Media Analytics Academy – was just notified about it today and wanted to share the news with my readers (press release)- esp those in Asia.  Right now I haven’t seen a course offering – it will be all hands on and in person training, though.

Within the various courses offered by Brandtology, participants would be able to learn about the Social Media landscape in the Asia Pacific Region, with focus on the unique characteristics of each market.

For instance, although Twitter is wildly popular in most countries, it is banned in China, which has its own version called Sina Weibo, while Taiwanese prefer a micro-blog with a timeline by the name of Plurk.

More importantly, the courses would also touch on the measurement and evaluation of Social Media Success, and the use of data analysis tools and services for identifying what creates viral effects online, as well as determining top influencers and key engagement channels.
“Data without analysis is meaningless.

What’s more important is to be able to go beyond simplistic statistics such as buzz, views and re-tweets to find out the driving factors of internet word of mouth, and the overarching concerns of netizens about a brand and its products,” Dorothy Poon, Programme Director of Brandtology Academy, opined. “Extracting actionable insights and using social media analytics to create an effective feedback loop is more important than merely finding out what’s being said and not doing anything about it.”

At the end of the course, participants will be required to undergo a rigorous certification process and demonstrate sound understanding of the key concepts taught in the course.

The first two runs of the Social Media Analytics courses in September are already fully booked and the third run will commence in October. For inquiries, please email academy@brandtology.com or visit http://www.brandtology.com/academy

I spoke with Dorothy Poon a few weeks ago over lunch and dinner where she was visiting New York for Brandtology meetings – the Academy was a hush rumor then – it may have been alluded to in our conversations, but not actually discussed.   I was also speaking with Jay Vasudevan who who introduced me to  Brandtology  and is my primary contact.

According to Jay,  Brandtology Academy will provide sessions in September and they  will be in person,  open for anyone who is interested in learning about Social Media – analytics, monitoring etc.

It’s tempting to see parallels between Brandtology Academy and Omniture’s Certified Professional Program or even the Web Analytics Association Certification for Web Analytics that recently got underway (though it was discussed when I was still part of the WAA Board).    On the Pro side, for certification, there is so much material and disinformation about Social Media  out there that a professional training program with certification, what Brandtology and the WAA offer, is appealing both to applicants and employers.

On the other hand, there are those who feel social media is too young a field to have certification – one being TheBrandBuilder – since it’s not clear what best practices are in many cases.   More often, I’m at odds with TheBrandBuilder (actually, we agree on most things, to be honest) – and I’m with him on this but his emphasis on existing organizations such as the AMA and PRSA instead of the vendors differ with with the approach Brandtology has embarked on.

On the other hand, one could say the same thing of Omniture’s Certification, or before it, Novell’s CNE – these are all vendor created programs – the certifications have not tended to carry beyond the institutions that created them.

Olivier Blanchard argues certification and accreditation is a given, it’s more how it’s done who is doing the accreditation.

Will Brandtology Academy be one of several new Social Media Analytics training centers?

Only time will tell – perhaps we’ll be seeing several academies in 2011.  However, in this case, I’m for the Brandtology Academy as it not only proposes to give a good foundation for Social Media Analytics but it focuses on Asia – an area that rich and thriving but where not much attention has been paid by monitoring vendors – even though the market for social monitoring and social media, I believe, is exploding in Asia Pacific.