Yes, it's the day before Christmas, and hopefully you've started to close up shop and are ready to spend some much-needed quality time with your family. If you're still reading this article, I applaud your commitment and I thank you for inviting my voice to be heard! As a thank you for engaging with me today, I wanted to let you in on a little secret; one that might become more prevalent in 2009 if the trend I see continues.

What form must marketing take to survive and thrive in a changing media landscape? What role will the agency play going forward? These are some of the questions many in the marketing community will be mulling over holiday breaks. Like a cliffhanger before a commercial break (that you can't TiVo past), 2008 is quickly coming to an end by posing some intimidating questions. Want to see what happens next? Stay tuned and watch the drama unfold in 2009 after a short break. Not that patient? Read on.

Search has been a very trusted friend to the digital marketer for some time now. With its basis in performance and direct response, search, when thoughtfully addressed, comes through for us.

If you're a marketer trying to spread an idea through online social networks, you may be better off disregarding people with the greatest number of connections. That's according to Daniel Romero, a scientist at the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, and HP Labs, who recently sent me his team's latest paper on the online social networks that "truly matter." According to the report, the volume of social network connections a person has is a weak indicator of how prolific a poster someone is. What really matters are actual friends.

I have been spending a lot of time thinking and talking about what "getting to the other side" of the recession likely means for media companies. However, the more time that I've spent on this question, the more I've become convinced that there is a critical truth here that is largely inescapable. The most important factor for most media companies in surviving recession will be the condition in which a particular company enters the recession, and the conditions of its particular market segment. For some, even the greatest strategies won't be able to overcome horrific conditions. Here are some examples …

Years ago I pretty much gave up trying to explain to my family what I do for a living. I knew they were proud of my accomplishments thus far and that was all that really mattered. Of course, times change. In the last month I've experienced two events that signified the mainstream-ification (if that's a word) of what we do. Finally, what I do makes some sense to my family!

By merging and integrating their content, social and advertising assets, Yahoo and AOL would be best positioned to face the threat of becoming irrelevant as MySpace, Facebook and other, more social, portal replacements continue to grow. I have pointed out before that Yahoo and AOL both have considerable social assets in the form of members using email, IM, Answers, Fliker, fantasy sports, games and many other properties. But the availability of features within social networks that can replace many of the benefits people get from using Yahoo and AOL's suite of standalone products is a massive threat on the immediate …

Most of us take stock this time of year. At minimum, we generally look straight down the path ahead based on where we feel we are -- and reset our footing. As we do so, the confluence of history, tradition, family life, logistics, commerce and all kinds of forces in the world at large certainly test our personal thresholds for stress.

"I hate these damn pop-up surveys!" a colleague cried earlier this week as she tried to complete a transaction on a Web site. And understandably so! With market competition up and the economic outlook down, it seems like pop-up surveys are bombarding us with increasing frequency. But in this age of permission marketing, it seems like pop-up surveys too often cross the line.

As we all know, the Tribune Company filed for bankruptcy this week. With $13+ billion of debt, less than $9 billion of assets, mounting debt payments, revenues falling through the floor, a financially engineered capital structure that made even complex debt swaps and sub-prime derivatives look simple, and a novice ownership team that was still trying to learn the newspaper business, it was only a matter of time. Many believe that the Tribune bankruptcy filing represents just the first domino in an inevitable series of sweeping announcements and events involving traditional media companies. I agree with that notion. I think …