Earlier this week social media guru Brian Solis posted a blog entry about the state of social media. It is long, detailed and fascinating. It brings together much of the data and thoughts that have been published over the last six months or so and puts it all into perspective.

In this week’s newsletter I gave out a list of all the great blogs (corporate and personal) from our elite roster of speakers at the Social Media Marketing Summit. This time around, since I’m all about spreading the Twitter love, I thought I would once again encourage you to get on Twitter and follow these fantastic folks. They have great things to say – even in just 140 characters.

I’m finally back from my 10-day road trip to CJU and BlogWorld. Back-to-back conferences means lots of schmoozing, a ton of great ideas, a laundry lit of action items, hundreds of business cards to input, interesting people to follow up with and much catching up to do.

It’s been a great CJU so far this year. This morning’s keynote, Guy Kawasaki, spoke about innovation and offered some interesting pearls of wisdom. Jupiter analyst Patti Freeman-Evan was uplifting by telling the crowd that her research showed online marketing to be nearly recession proof. The two sessions i hit today (Web 2.0 and one on managing search and affiliate marketing) were both very informative - offering good examples of success stories. Tonight is the awards dinner. And tomorrow there are more sessions. I’ll have lots of details in the next post including the Horizon Award winners. As always the networking is stellar and the event is first class.

I have a confession: I’m a lousy marketer. You’d think that someone who writes about online marketing for a living would be much better as translating everything I pick up from interviewing experts and have transformed into a marketing machine. But I’m a journalist by trade, have been for more than 20 years, and marketing has always had a different connotation for me. For me, marketing equaled self promotion, and as a journalist we are taught that the story is not about us, but rather those we are writing about.

It’s been a busy week. Many of you are trying to ramp up online marketing campaigns for the fast-approaching holiday season while trying to usher the kids back to school and settle into a new daily routine.