A new year is right around the corner, which means we all get a chance to start anew — in business, life, love, or whatever your current rut might be.

So what are YOUR new year’s resolutions for social media? Do you want to streamline your web experience, or maybe try a few new tools? If you haven’t made any resolutions yet for 2009, here are a few suggestions:

• * Start blogging
• * Blog on a daily basis
• * Blog on a weekly basis
• * Try Twitter
• * Make a private Twitter account and a business Twitter account
• * Update your LinkedIn profile — and your resume!
• * Clean up your Facebook profile — do you really need all that flair?
• * Make a video — even a webcam monologue — so you know how it’s done
• * Consolidate your online experience — cancel those unused accounts, etc.
• * Organize your Flickr photos — add titles, descriptions, tags, etc.

Are you doing something different? Leave us a comment and let us know!

Image by Timothy K. Hamilton.

How many businesses do you think are using Twitter? A few of them are listed here — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Some of these businesses are using Twitter for personalized customer service. Some are using it as a bulletin board. And others are encouraging their employees to use Twitter all by themselves, rather than asking them to do so as the “official voice” of their company. (We do a little of everything.)

Is it working? Is Twitter paying off for these companies?

Ask Frank Eliason, who’s been manning the ComcastCares account since its inception — and who’s tackled hundreds of customer service issues in 140 characters or less.

Ask Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, who mixes his Twitter business with pleasure — and makes his company seem all the more human while doing so.

Or ask Dunkin’ Donuts, who deputized one employee, “Dunkin’ Dave,” to serve as the company’s informative (and amusing) public face on Twitter.

If those three household names think Twitter is worth their time, imagine what YOU could use it for…

Image by feelslikemagic.

The winter holidays mean a lot of things to a lot of people: family, food, gifts, gift receipts, waiting in long lines, scavenging for stocking stuffers, running out of ribbon…

This year, the organizers of the Business Smart Tools conference would like to propose a different kind of holiday wish: Creative Concepts Celebrates PEACE.

To help, we’ve created a Facebook group where our friends can discuss what peace means to them — whether it’s the personal kind, the worldwide kind or the kind that only comes after the holiday shopping is over and we can finally refocus on the things that really matter.

So instead of flooding the postal service with holiday cards, or agonizing over which arbitrary gift your sister-in-law will dislike least, perhaps you can find some peace of mind with us this holiday season.

With the arrival of YouTube came the advent of “viral” videos — clips that spread from viewer to viewer at an alarming rate.  Sometimes they’re funny or satirical, and sometimes they appeal to our deeper emotions and our need to connect on a personal level.  But they always involve something that other people WANT to talk about, which makes them easy to pass along, over and over.

Ever since “viral” entered the marketing lexicon, experts have been clamoring to teach businesses how they can create “viral” campaigns that will turn their products into beloved household names.  “Give us a product,” they essentially claim, “and we can craft a campaign that people can’t HELP but talk about.”

Which, of course, is a lie.

Any successful “viral” video catches lightning in a bottle.  It succeeds because it’s new, different, unusual or emotionally charged.  It rarely has anything to do with a product or service, and if it does, that product or service is often ancillary to the actual buzzworthy content of the video.  (For example, when Doritos solicits armchair videographers to create their own Super Bowl commercials, everyone who discusses the resultant ads talks about the creativity of the videos or the marketing campaign itself… but not the chips.)

Buzz happens because a product or service is worth talking about in the first place.  If you have to invest conspicuous amounts of money into an ad campaign intended to generate “viral” buzz about your company, you may want to ask yourself why your customers aren’t already buzzing about your products and services in the first place.

Social media isn’t about inventing buzz from scratch.  It’s about empowering your customers to speak more clearly and practically about the things they like (and don’t like) about your company.  Because one video in a million will become “viral,” but nothing spreads faster than the truth.

Photo by iba.

Long ago, advertising followed this timeline:

* You buy ad space in a newspaper.
* The newspaper runs your ad.
* You get additional business because of your single ad.
* Repeat.

The media may have changed, but the concept has remained the same: advertising is a one-time shot at getting someone’s attention. Thus, advertising campaigns were born, to ensure that the same ad has multiple chances to reach the same people, over and over.

But what happens on the internet, when everything is both instantaneous AND eternal?

Fellow blogger Chris Abraham thinks social media may be changing the timeline of web advertising into something that’s both longer AND multifaceted. Now, social networks provide web users with numerous ways to FIND your business online. And the “long tail” permanence of most web content means a video or blog post you created in 2005 is still being discovered anew by Google searches even today.

All of which means that YOUR company needs to approach social media not in terms of “what we need to say TODAY,” but rather, “what we need to ALWAYS be saying.”

So… which elements of your company are SO universal, they belong in EVERY aspect of your online presence?

Photo by mfakheri.