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).