Launched earlier this year, Chirply maintains an online community of artists and graphic designers, and it crowdsources creative designs from the community for paper-based greeting cards.

While much has been made of how social media is changing consumer behavior, advertisers are struggling to keep up with and make sense of this shiny new toy. Matthew Goldman is the executive director of product management for subscription ad products at ATT Interactive (parent of YellowPages.com). Goldman is ATTi’s point man on social strategies for its advertisers.

What’s hot in social media investment this week? Social commerce, crowdsourced content hubs, apps specialists and, yes, social media monitoring. This week’s freshly funded startups brought in a combined $409.9 million, thanks mainly to SocialLiving’s massive $400 million haul.

Visible Technologies hosts a cloud-based social media monitoring platform called “Visible Intelligence” that is built especially for enterprises looking to build and monitor a social voice. The company bills the efficacy of the platform on its easy integration architecture and its up-to-date understanding of the social network universe.

London-based Qriously is a mobile ad developer that uses proprietary sentiment analysis software for real-time and location-based ad-delivery.

Google launched +1 [on March 30], basically its answer to Facebook’s Like button. When you click on a ‘+1′ icon displayed on a URL, it shows up in Google search results when you are signed in. And if you have social connections within the Google empire (e.g., Gmail contacts) you will see which of your connections has +1?d the URL. While I am digesting the possibilities I thought it might be helpful to summarize some initial reads on the +1:

InsideView hosts a social CRM software platform that aggregates unstructured information on a particular topic or brand from a number of sources including traditional news, financial markets and social media networks. This information can then be used to develop sales leads.

Virtue has developed a social media management platform that helps clients create and maintain their social media presence while effectively engaging with their followers to monitor the results.

GetJar is the largest independent app store with, as of February, over 1.75 billion downloads of 145,000 featured apps from 330,000 registered developers. It works with an open market approach, so nearly every mobile device is supported across all major platforms.

The crowded social media monitoring sector got a whole lot more interesting this week with Salesforce.com’s $326 million bet on Radian6. Never mind that it’s the third such alliance or investment Salesforce has done in this space in the past two months. It’s a move that’s got investors buzzing. Two of the four firms we list this week in the roundup are active in the monitoring/analytics category. Watch this space for even further shakeout.