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You see, starting today the Patriots are running a large-scale Help Vince campaign across New England as the team looks to engage its fans in the offseason. And to do that, it’s turning to SCVNGR to power an array of Patriots-themed location based challenges, badges, and treks as users vie for prizes, which include a grand prize lunch with a member of the Patriots squad. The Patriots will be promoting the ‘Help Vince’ campaign across New England with TV spots, billboards, and more. You can see the team’s site dedicated to the campaign here.

SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch says that the service can offer more customized experiences than competitors like Foursquare — where Foursquare simply offers badges, SCVNGR can prompt users to take a photo wearing Patriots gear, or complete a more engaging task. The Patriots can treat the ‘Help Vince‘ challenges as a sort of standalone, Patriots-themed game on SCVNGR; it would be harder to do that on competitors’ platforms.

Social Discovery Client.

for Facebook lets users easily filter updates from friends, create custom feeds, and block game spam

Feeds can be saved and organized.

Good old-fashioned reading is on the rise thanks to the booming popularity of e-readers. In 2007, a study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that half of 18-24-year-old Americans read no books for pleasure. The e-book era may be changing that. A Sony-commissioned survey conducted in May found that 40 percent of e-reader owners report reading more than they did with print books. Amazon says its customers buy roughly three times as many books after getting a Kindle. And finally, smartphone apps have re-popularized classic games and toys. The much-anticipated Scrabble iPad app hit the market this fall after the wide adoption of Newtoy’s Scrabble knockoff, Words With Friends. Electronic Arts has turned the classic Lite Brite into a digital experience.

The real question is whether solutions like these will be enough. By some estimates in just a few years we will reach a point where all the information on the Internet will double every 72 hours. Double. I'm running out of metaphors to describe the magnitude of this content creation. The predictable result of this is that brands are beginning to focus on content creation when they start to look at social media. What are we going to create, or what are we going to get our customers/patients/fans/audience/victims to create? Is that really the best question we could be asking?What if you were to ask about the person that makes sense of it all? The one who sifts through all the content and picks out the best and most worthy. This person is missing from most corporate communications teams. It's not a commonly defined role on any ebusiness teams. In fact, there are few jobs like this at all. The closest comparative role may be contained within the rising Library 2.0 movement (one I wrote about some time ago), but this is not frequently linked to business communication or marketing. If this role did exist, what would it be called?

Ann Taylor offered 25% off to Foursquare mayors and 15% off to each customer on his or her fifth checkin. These deals are great for Foursquare, and the theory is that they’re great for retail stores because those Foursquare users’ friends would see that they’re checking in, giving the stores some exposure.