So it’s that time of year again. Many of us have spent the last week eating too much turkey and shortbread, racking up credit card debt and testing our liver’s limits with delicious nog-based holiday libations. And so with the looming dawn of 2010, we may be thinking about a New Year’s Resolution to mitigate some of that damage.

Unfortunately, studies show that New Year’s Resolutions don’t really work for most of us. Though we start with the best of intentions, 25% of our resolutions are history within a week of making them. And only 12-22% of us actually stick with them for the year.

However, it seems that one way to help keep your resolve is to share your resolution with the world, say by tweeting about it, or putting it up on Facebook. Sure, if you send out constant Twitter updates about your big resolution you might annoy your friends and make them feel bad about themselves… but you might just actually stop smoking, reduce your Whopper intake, or quit your online porn habit.

According to Wikipedia, 12% of New Year’s resolvers meet their goals. But, that number increases to up to 22% among those who shared their goal with friends and family. Public shame, it seems, is a powerful motivator. So, given that statistic, it only makes sense that broadcasting your resolution to the world, via your favorite social media tool, will give you a much better shot at keeping on the straight and narrow path.

Of course, there’s one big problem with all this. Since social media has recently been declared, by some, unhealthily addictive, it’s probably not a bad idea to make a resolution to stop spending so much time heeding the siren’s call of Twitter and Facebook. And therein lies the Catch-22. My recommendation: forget big changes and just stick to small resolutions like, say, avoiding trans fats, or cutting down to one pack of cigarettes a day.

2010 may be the end of the beginning for social media in many respects but while the novelty may wear off for many the utility has just begun to be realized for some. In 2008/09 we saw social media and the Obama campaign lead the Democrats to victory and then afterward invite the world to visit Whitehouse 2.0, we saw Iranian political protesters reaching the world and each other through Twitter, and we saw the power of social media over the physical infrastructure of the internet after the death of Michael Jackson crashed the internet.

So is all the exciting stuff over? Not really.

In 2010 social media will see growth from business, in particular larger businesses who have finally caught on to the tangible utility of social media by driving customers into physical storefronts on Black Friday via Twitter and Facebook. Social media ROI will become quantifiable as companies really start to explore this medium as a revenue generator, understanding the psychology of consumers once again becomes key in this capitalist scouting mission already underway. It will continue to be explored in a political context as well as by NGOs and philanthropists and supposedly, old people will start tweeting. Not fun enough for you? Read on.

Few of us bloggers have been really comparing the sociological aspects of social media to social trends that appear to play themselves out over and over again in the corporeal world. We may have new toys but the psychology that drives our behavior hasn’t changed a whole lot over the past year compared to these technologies. One changing aspect of social media that many analysts have predicted is an increasing exclusiveness of social groups. We will build our enclaves and hideouts, our social media tree-forts if you will; just as we do in the wild and in cities. (I consider the wild to be anything outside of a city pretty much)

Augmented reality will also be factored into new apps and developments explored through social media platforms. Layers is a great example of an augmented reality app and it was explored here in senses earlier this year.

So don’t despair, the fun isn’t all spent quite yet. 2010 should be shaping up to be another fascinating year for social media.

A strong marketing campaign can get people through your door, on to your website or on to your high speed commuter train in the case of Eurostar, but your service while they are there is just as much a part of your marketing as any creative work you do (or contract out) leading up to that moment. Eurostar failed miserably to address this aspect of their marketing when their fleet underwent a significant failure involving five trains in the Chunnel. (For you North Americans unfamiliar with this term it’s like a huge underground drug tunnel you’d find from Mexico to Texas or from  BC to Washington State only for normal people and trains). The failure earlier today left thousands wondering exactly what was happening and as passengers and their loved ones waiting in London became increasingly unimpressed with the lack of communication from  Eurostar, they began to twitter up a storm. Like trapped killer bees just itching to burst out of the hive the stranded passengers railed against the transportation company while quite surprisingly the PR team at Eurostar were oddly silent. Eurostar is recognized as having a slick PR and Marketing track record so one would imagine that they would have been able to deal with this ad hoc pretty well. Not the case.

This may be a classic example of when great PR and Marketing depends on a perfect set of circumstances and when confronted with a monkey wrench in the machine it all falls apart. Marketing is service, service is PR, when you are a service provider they are the holy trinity of your brand and company culture. The business culture of your company needs to back up the gloss and sweet talk with appropriate communication and attention to your most valuable asset- THE CUSTOMER. I am shocked and appalled that Eurostar could drop the ball so badly with this and I am pleased as punch to see that social media once again has put a massive company and its public relations machine on its heels when its service failed to live up to its marketing. I have stressed this so many times, service is where you knock it out of the park after marketing and PR tee it up for you. Eurostar needs to take a long hard look at what has happened here and seriously address the bumbling response it gave to the crisis, because their competitors are likely drooling like Hyenas right now.  The company has apparently withdrawn its existing marketing campaign and is reassessing how to move forward in 2010.  Best of luck Eurostar, while you might have withdrawn your marketing strategy but I would wager to say the problem lies in your communications and your service itself. Incorporating your service and your company culture into your marketing plans may serve you well moving forward.  It’s OK for machines to break down once in a while, people understand that, but a communications breakdown is much harder to forgive.

The internet was shaken to its core this week by the news that popular singer and girlfriend-puncher Chris Brown will no longer be using Twitter. Despite the terrible blow dealt by his absence on the popular social media site, Twitter shows no signs of shutting down their operation. In fact, they just released a list of their top-trending topics in 2009, revealing that, yes, people use the site for things other than reading tweets from Chris Brown.

The list of top Twitter trends is broken up into six categories: News Events, People, Movies, TV Shows, Sports, Technology and Hash Tags. Interestingly, they didn’t reveal actual numbers of tweets sent about each topic, but merely where it ranked on a top 10 list for each category. That’s probably good though, as we’d most likely all be embarrassed if we learned that, say, Adam Lambert prompted 50 or 100 times more tweets than something more traditionally discussion-worthy, like swine flu.

Speaking of H1N1, it showed up twice on the top 10 list for News Events, though it was surpassed by news about the Iranian elections. We can attribute a lot of that Twitter traffic to the fact that election protestors in that country were using the site as their main source of organization and communication. Incidentally, that fact may be the reason that Twitter, along with an Iranian pro-reformer site, were hacked yesterday by a group calling themselves “Iranian Cyber Army“.

In the People category of top-trending topics, the list was topped by Michael Jackson, with Susan Boyle and Adam Lambert rounding out the top three. And there, comfortably in the #5 spot? Chris Brown. Though given his behavior in the past year, it’s unlikely he’s in the top 10 because of his own fascinating tweets. So we can all hope that, somehow, Twitter can soldier on without him.

The world used to be simpler. There was the brick n’ mortar world, and there was the internet-y world. But with the passage of time, everything’s getting all mixed up. Here are three products and services that in some way blend the two worlds in ways that both useful, and confusing for someone of advancing years, such as myself or your Dad. And yes, they’re all available for purchase in time for the upcoming holiday season.

TweetBookz – Tweets, by design, are meant to be ephemeral and short-lived. You see a funny picture, think up a witty pun, or have an interesting bowel movement, and you tap out a quick 140 character post about it. It gets sent out to your friends and associates and is quickly read and forgotten. Or so we all thought. But TweetBookz take this uniquely online world and give it a permanent, paper-y presence on your coffee table. Or, more likely, in a dusty box in your attic. The idea is simple: you pick 200 of your very best tweets and this company turns them into a book, with one tweet per page. For the sake of veracity, you’re not allowed to go in and edit your tweets after the fact to make them more awesome. And you’re also not allowed to borrow any from some funnier, smarter or sexier Twitter user. It’s gotta be all you. So if I were to create a TweetBook myself, it would consist of 200 identical pages, each saying: “Got up, did some writing, watched reruns of The Office. Tty tomorrow!”  They cost around $25.50 for the hard-cover edition. And you have to go hard-cover, because this will be something you’ll want to read and re-read for decades to come.

Amazon’s Instant Video Streaming with DVD Purchase – What’s the crappiest part of buying  a DVD from an online retailer, instead of down at Best Buy? That’s right, it’s the infernal waiting for it to arrive in the mail. Well, the wait is over. Now when you purchase certain hard-copy DVDs from Amazon, you get instant access to a streaming version of the movie. It’s only available to US purchasers at the moment, and only for about 300 TV shows and movies. And, for now, it’s only for a limited time. But if it’s popular, you’d have to think they’ll roll this feature out on a much bigger level. The best thing about this is that you can buy DVDs as gifts for people, and still get to watch it yourself via the streaming version.

VeriFone’s iPhone Credit Card Payment System – So you’re selling some vintage Scobby Doo collectibles to a guy who saw your Craigslist ad. You meet him (somewhere public and well-lit, I hope) and he doesn’t have any cash. No problem. Just swipe his credit card through this little iPhone gizmo, and his money will instantly be yours to enjoy. It brings the joy and convience of ecommerce to the brick and mortar world of, well, wherever you happen to be. To operate this, you have to pay a monthly subscription fee, so it’s really only meant for relatively high-volume sellers, like delivery pizza parlors, door-to-door salespersons and prostitutes. But if there’s anyone like that on your holiday shopping list, you know what to buy them.

Marketers have had a lot of fun using social media but it’s been difficult to quantify the results of many activities past. Depending on who you talk to the profit generated by social media is either hidden because the consumer doesn’t generally make a purchase through the platform itself, or because the effects are often strongest concerning brand loyalty or brand recognition but not necessarily translated into purchases right away. Today is the busiest shopping day of the year in those United States of America (Black Friday) and a big social media experiment of sorts is going on. Traditional media has been swept aside in favor of tweets and friends, and today of all days social media and retailers may have an affair to remember.

Several major retailers made significant Black Friday/Cyber Monday investments on a number of platforms including most notably Twitter and Facebook, in anticipation of a frenzy of activity today. Before today’s shopping mayhem began Sears, with more than 150,000  Facebook fans, held a sweepstakes on their website offering items at Black Friday prices early to selected customers they had engaged through their page while Toys R Us is letting its fans vote to determine which merchandise should go on sale Cyber Monday, the first business day after the holiday weekend and traditionally a busy online shopping day. For those interested in Cyber Monday deals I highly recommend www.goeyeball.com (check earlier post for more details)  where you can make your own time and money saving customized bargain hunter bot, AKA your eyeball, that scours the best prices online for selected items.

Social media as a marketing tool works great when you truly have something worth marketing. Regular prices don’t work people into a frenzy like they used to (did they ever?) and the value of social media as a contact point should never be doubted by retailers. I think what we’re seeing today though is a real coming out party for the new media, showing the utility of it in directly influencing consumer patterns over a smaller temporal scale but with incredibly high density or volume. It shows that social media when used strategically (like all marketing should) has profound utility. Just having a fan page or a twitter account isn’t going to drive people to your store (meaning larger temporal and low density or volume) but some of the imaginative uses of social media we’ve looked at in this post, and there are several others we have overlooked,  are examples of social media at work in the business cycle.  Large companies are finding ways to use it that directly can be quantified, hopefully silencing a lot of critics and naysayers in the process.

Justin Bieber is, I’m told, a pop sensation that drives the tweens crazy. And not just the usual junior-high level of crazy. We’re talking stampede-through-the-mall-thereby-potentially-crushing-other-tweens-to-death crazy. And therein lies the problem…

Last Sunday, Bieber was scheduled to appear for an autograph signing at a mall in Long Island, NY. Thousands of fans of the diminutive, young crooner showed up at the mall, drawn by the promise of catching a glimpse of their high-pitched hero.

The crowd was shrill and excited and, as it grew larger and larger, increasingly unruly. At that point, the police pulled the plug on Bieber’s appearance, and forbid him from entering the mall and causing an even larger ruckus.

So things had pretty much progressed the way you would expect from a Justin Bieber appearance at a mall in Long Island. But that’s when things got a little weird.

The police, alarmed at the possibility of thousands of twelve year-olds looting the mall when denied an autograph, came up with a plan to calm the crowd. They asked Bieber’s record label representative, James Ropo, to send a tweet from Bieber’s Twitter account asking the crowd to calm down.

When Ropo refused the request, the police arrested him. Yes, in what may be the first case of its kind, he was incarcerated for refusing to tweet.

Police Detective Lieutenant Kevin Smith was quoted as saying: “We asked for his help in getting the crowd to go away by sending out a Twitter message… By not cooperating with us, we feel he put lives in danger and the public at risk.”

Can you hear it? A strange maniacal and giddy laughter faintly travels on the wind. I can hear it loud and clear from my office here in Vancouver…it sounds really close. Shhhh. It sounds like it’s coming from Washington State…yes, close to Seattle. Wait, I know that twisted giddy laugh…it’s Microsoft!

A few weeks earlier here in Senses Land we mentioned how Rupert Murdoch had basically lost his mind and was considering banning Google from accessing his many newspaper’s websites- like the blood sucking freeloading leeches they are. I mean really, don’t these guys at Google have any mid 20th century business-sense? Offering a free service that directs millions of people to Rupert Murdoch’s various newspapers and websites without asking anything in return. I mean come on! Where do they get off? It should be a crime to offer such a convenient service that millions of people use. To think that people would do that rather than walk outside in the freezing cold snow or pouring rain to the nearest newspaper stand and buy a physical copy of The Wall Street Journal or sit at home waiting for something interesting and newsworthy to be “reported” on by Fox News is just shocking. And Rupert Murdoch has been shocked long enough! Here’s the plan:

Murdoch blocks Google so that millions of people can no longer see his newspaper articles through that engine, meanwhile he convinces everyone to start using Microsoft’s search engine Bing; clearly it will be the superior search engine now based on the fact that it is the only one where you can get the twisted right-winged drivel produced by Fox News and other Murdoch owned companies. So if you want what the rest of the world considers news you can still use Google and if you want what Rupert Murdoch considers to be news you can use Bing- oh and you can gall dang paying for it too (Or Microsoft can). The details of how that all works will be worked out between Microsoft and News Corp, who I predict will soon become known as News Corpse, as this kind of backwards logic will surely kill this company. Microsoft paying huge sums of money for exclusive access to what many believe is the most slanted and biased news in the world is also, in my opinion, not good for their brand or their pocket book.

I’m not the only one who thinks News Corpse is doomed. The founder of Twitter, Biz Stone, recently spoke about Murdoch’s plans at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) in London England. To use the main sound bytes, Stone said it was a “vain attempt to put the genie back in the bottle” and that it would “fail fast“. When considering how rapidly the technology and software that powers the internet changes, one can clearly see that putting a “paywall” around your content and burying it inside a search engine with a 10% market share is akin to going cyber-Amish. (Yes I am coining that term, you heard it here first. Rupert Murdoch has officially gone cyber-Amish)

That hasn’t stopped the giddy laughter from Redmond Washington though, as Microsoft has been looking for any way possible to chip away at Google’s market share of the online search industry. I’m not sure if making your search engine the only one where users can pay to get right-winged conservative news from an old man who hates the internet is the best way to go about it though.

And so begins Murdoch’s exodus into the online wilderness, welcomed and aided by another global opportunist; it will likely end poorly for the both. They have officially begun to work against the forces of internet-nature and because of this will surely be covered over by the jungle or swept away by the tide. This story is beginning to read like a Greek tragedy, where two heroes are destroyed by their own greed, ego and ambition. Blinded by their own arrogance and sense of invincibility they feel beyond censure of the gods and nature. (in this case Google and internet users)

What a swan song this will be for Rupert Murdoch.

There’s a new app available for iPhones that may help finally settle one of the grave issues of our time. To function properly, society has to be divided into haves, and have nots. Currently, one of the ways that happens is the stratification between those who own iPhones, and those who don’t. Those who don’t are obviously a mass of unwashed rabble who can be safely ignored. And those who do own one of the sexy little devices are awesome. But there’s a problem with this division – pretty much everyone now owns one. So if everyone is a have, how do we as a society know who to look down on? And how does an individual iPhone owner know whether to be filled with self-confidence, or to hate themselves for being part of the unwashed masses?

Thankfully, a new app has been released that will make it much easier to draw this important distinction. Visit the App Store right now, and for 99 cents, you can download “Fit or Fugly”.

Here’s how it works. You upload a photo of yourself (or a loved or loathed one) and then attach “anchor pins” to all the important facial features: eyes, nose, mouth, ears, dimples, etc. The app then uses the data collected from the anchor pins and measures your features against Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio. If your face is symmetrical, you’re declared Fit. But if your facial symmetry resembles that of Ron Howard’s little brother, you’re branded Fugly. Oh, and it works on pets too!

Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio, by the way, isn’t just something the app designers made up. It’s a mathematical formula that some maintain is an accurate means to determine how aesthetically pleasing things are, based on their symmetry.

But can Fibonacci’s Golden Ratio, and a 99 cent app, really tell you if you’re Hot or Not Fit or Fugly? I wish I could tell you, but I don’t own an iPhone.

There are inventions that make life better, like iPhones and the Slap Chop. There are inventions that make life worse, like the fat substitute Olestra (may cause anal leakage!). And then there are inventions that are sort of terrible and awesome at the same time. Like, for example, the world’s first Twitter-enabled bathroom scale.

When the Withings bathroom scale was first released a month or so ago, it was billed as the world’s first WiFi-enabled bathroom scale. It sends updates to your private webpage or iPhone, allowing you to track your ups and downs in an easy and convenient way. Which all sounds kind of handy, if potentially frustrating at times.

But the good folks at Withings didn’t stop there. The next logical step, it seems, was to create a scale programmed to send your weight out via tweet every time you step on the scale. Oh, and it will also send out your latest Body Mass Index details, too.

But if you think your BMI is TMI, you don’t have to use the Twitter and WiFi functions on the scale. They can be toggled on and off, most likely as the weight comes on and off. Lose a few pounds? Twitter that result. Put on a bit from too much leftover Halloween candy? Well then just turn off the tweet function, and get chubby in peace. Or better yet, do what I do and just avoid scales, mirrors and tight clothing until, oh, around March.