Back in December, I posted “11 Things To Keep In Mind During This Crappy Economy.” Here’s number 10:

Remember that every hardship also brings opportunity. Those articles in number four above have a lot of good stuff in them, but here a more practical way of looking at things. Yes, the economy is sucking wind. Yes, a lot of companies are freezing their marketing department hiring or maybe even doing layoffs. But guess what? Tons of work still needs to get done. So if you’re an independent contractor or consultant, you’re in pretty good shape. If you’re an independent contractor or consultant who isn’t part of the 90 percent that’s crap, you’re in very good shape.

It makes sense to me. If I’m in need of significant ongoing copywriting, for example, I have a choice: Bring on a full-timer or work with someone on a retainer basis. If I bring on a full-timer, I have someone in the office, but I also have to pay the cost of providing benefits. If I work with someone on retainer, I have to give up some measure of control, but I save some money and I probably get someone with deeper experience and expertise.

For my $.02, if I’m hiring, I’d prefer to go the retainer route. In this economy, deeper expertise at lower cost seems like a winner. But I wonder: Am I leaning in that direction simply because that’s the nature of my own business? Is something that seems to make perfect sense to me complete anathema to the world beyond my own virtual office?

So I decided to find out. Using the excellent HARO service, I posted the following query:

As a hiring company, you’re faced with a choice between retaining an independent marketing/PR consultant (greater experience, higher work quality, less time in-office) or hiring a full-timer (less experience, higher costs due to benefits and office space). Question: Which is your preference? More importantly: Why?

The responses started popping into my inbox just minutes after the HARO mailing dropped.

“My preference is for [independent contractors] and has been since 2000 when the trend seemed clear,” said Kathleen Carroll of The Branding Clinic. “Big companies are going to increasingly identify and focus on their core competency and outsource all those other activities.

“From a company perspective: It is better to hire independent talent –- you get the best talent at the best price,” she continued. “If a firm has someone on the payroll, they are most likely to staff that person to the job even if that person is definitely not the right person/talent for the assignment.

“IC arrangements assure the cream rises to the top. It incentivizes the IC to keep skills current and relevant so that companies continue to hire them. Sorta capatilism at its best!”

Donille Massa, Director of Marketing for Niagara Conservation, wrote to say that “having managed both independent and full-time PR consultants, there is no doubt that you get more results from retaining an independent consultant. In every case, they have always been more experienced, more focused, more knowledgeable and have had more PR contacts than a full-timer.

“Their use of time has always been much more efficient,” Donille continued, “and the cost savings is significant to say the least.  I have also found that independent consultants are much more professional and their writing skills have far exceeded those of a full-timer. It has also been my experience that PR consultants work much better independently, rather than having to punch a clock.”

Those are just two of the many responses I received to my query. Tomorrow (since this post is already longer than usual for even a long LOHAD post) I’ll present (as radio legend Paul Harvey says) — the rest of the story.

Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like Fonzie is warming up the motorcycle where Twitter is concerned.

One sign that the jump ramp is being pushed closer to the shark tank is the plethora of articles about how to increase the number of followers you have on Twitter. Here’s one from Kevin Rose. Here’s one from DoshDosh. Here’s one from TwiTip. I could go on for hundreds of column-inches, but go ahead and fire up Google and see for yourself: The Interweb’s lousy with this sort of advice.

I’ve read my share of these articles, and they all pretty much amount to conventional Twitter wisdom: Tweet links. Add value. Ask for retweets. And so on. Good tips as far as they go, but they’ll only take you so far.

No one’s giving you the real story about how to catapult yourself into the Twittersphere stratosphere, that rarefied air of five-figure followers that is one of the most coveted inhales of today’s geekerati.

Till now.

Pay close attention: If you’re jonesing to break through to the Twitterholic 100, these surefire tips really, really, really work. Promise.

1. Host This Week in Tech. If you can’t convince Leo Laporte (82,424 followers as I write this) to let you take his place as leader of the #1 podcast out there, an alternative is to become a guest on TWiT and pimp your Twitter name whenever possible; many of the 300k+ listeners on Twitter are bound to follow you.

2. Establish an influential global news presence. Like CNN Breaking News (129,833) and The New York Times (59,227), take a multidimensional approach to news dissemination, because you never know: Twitter may still be here long after your network collapses or your newspaper folds.

3. Become a cultural touchstone. Develop a persona that has the paparazzi stalking you 24/7. Win a Grammy. Pose nude on the cover of Harper’s. Hang out with Paris Hilton. Hey, it worked for Britney (59,388).

4. Sell shoes. Okay, I don’t get it, either. But the Zappos.com CEO has 49,242 followers. Go figure.

5. Become President of the United States. As I write this, Barack Obama has 230,551 followers. In your face, Vladimir Putin.

If it all sounds like too much work, you may want to forget about Twitter entirely and wait for the next wave of microblogging and/or hypernetworked instant messaging to take hold. Personally, I think 2 is the next 140.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re on Twitter, it’s going to take a lot more than whatever it is you do on Twitter to get you some followers on Twitter.

(By the way: That cartoon up top is from Geek and Poke, a great site you need to check out.)

That’s the interesting question that was asked by Jim Lodico in the Marketing & PR Innovators group over on LinkedIn.

It got me thinking, which got me responding, which gave me today’s post:

The rules of professionalism haven’t changed any more than the Golden Rule has changed … truth is timeless.

What has changed, though, is that the social media tools that facilitate communication have made it easier for crappy marketers and lowest-common-denominator ideas to dominate the conversation, which in turn makes it harder for quality talent and ethical ideas to get noticed.

Here’s an example:

LinkedIn has a reputation for being a business networking site. Indeed, groups like Marketing & PR Innovators attempt to serve as focal points around which professionals gather.

Someone with relatively little online marketing experience joins an online marketing group on LinkedIn looking for information and guidance. Let’s say they want information on email marketing. They post a question, or maybe read through the existing discussions (if they can find any amidst all the junky threads).

The prevailing view of the posts they see tells them: Buying third-party opt-in lists is the way to go! Spamming has a bad reputation; it’s really nothing more than advertising, the same as direct mail.

(By the way, this is pretty much the way it went on one recent LinkedIn thread I saw.)

Maybe there are one or two dissenting voices, but any relative subtleties of the issue — the legal definition of spam vs. the perception of spam on the part of the email recipient, for example, or the idea that attempting short-term gain can have long-term negative consequences — are lost in the din.

So the prevailing view is taken as industry expertise … and the industry descends another step toward the seventh circle of marketing Hell.

I think it’s a real problem.

Takeaway for marketers: Are your contributions to the conversation raising or lowering the bar?

Maybe you haven’t delved into the world of Twitter yet. I’ve been there with an alter ego for over a year, and just recently began Twittering @LOHADdotcom.

The signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter can be frustrating — which is the main reason, I think, there are so many dodos on Twitter.

Here are some actual recent tweets culled from Twitter’s public timeline over the course of about a half-hour. I’ve removed the name of the Twitterer; I don’t want to be perceived as insulting anyone. Alternatively, you can go to Twitter right now and look at the public feed to find dozens (hundreds! thousands!) more tweets like these:

I can’t fall asleep.

Heading to the apple farm in SLO

I think I should curl up in bed and go to sleep.

Chloe Sevigny is such a fascinating creature.

Googling now

well my good mood is slowly starting to fade away.

Could thursday hurry up and get here?

Cleaning the bedroom

Battery’s dying. I’ll turn my phone back on tomorrow

Finally getting around to cooking dinner – just a little bit late. Tonight it’ll be ratatouille!

the snow has forced me to officially abort all plans of socializing tonite

The kids are down… now Heidi and I are going to try to plan out next week.

well, off to work midnight shift. be home after 8am

Just burnt the majority of the posters that one hung on my walls

I jumped out of a plane on the weekend and landed on my coccyx. Now it hurts to sit down.

Seriously. No editing. I didn’t make any of those up.

When one is faced with a flood of words that make Larry King’s old USA Today column seem like insightful criticism from Pauline Kael or Noam Chomsky, it’s no wonder the dodos flee Twitter en masse. Even a dodo isn’t that much of a dodo.

There are plenty of reasons for this mess of nothing, this wisdom internal monologue of the crowd that flows endlessly through the Twitter timeline, not the least of which is what I like to call “the glorification of the mundane.”

There’s a significant percentage of the population that thinks everything they do is endlessly fascinating to everyone. Everything they do. Everything. To everyone.

News flash: It’s not.

I think this derives in part from the perception, fueled by reality shows, that the most mundane elements in other people’s lives are endlessly fascinating. Why should anyone other than their husbands care what “The Real Housewives Of Orange County” — or Atlanta — or NYC — are up to?

So people think, “Well, if that can be a TV show, the mundane details of my life can be a Web site. Or a blog post. Or a Twitter feed.

But I digress. Back to Twitter — the place where I first heard about the U.S. Air water landing last week, where first-person accounts of the situation in Gaza can be monitored as the bombs fall, where breaking news breaks long before it breaks on the news.

There could be lots more of this good stuff, except far too many people simply aren’t paying attention to these “7 Ways to Be Worth Following on Twitter.”

More signal, less noise. That’s what makes someone on Twitter worth following … and, in aggregate, makes Twitter itself something far more worthwhile than it appears to many on first (and second and even third) impression.

Maybe “What are you doing?” on top of the Twitter page should change. Too many people take it too literally. Something along the lines of, “Say something worth reading” might be better.

Because no one really cares about every random thought that pops into your head. Unless, of course, you’re Larry King.

Takeaway for marketers: Signal-to-noise ratio matters not only on Twitter, but also on on your Web site, in your email communications, in your advertisements … and so on … and so on …

“…we’ll give you the world.” That’s the famous slogan of WINS, the all-news radio station in New York City. But when news happens, it’s amazing what you can access in 22 minutes or less with a laptop and an Internet connection.

Huffington Post reports that Israel’s ground assault on Gaza has begun. A quick bit of Googling reveals this Wired story about how YouTube and Twitter are weapons in the info war. Both stories contain comments from readers around the world ranging from the insightful to the insulting.

Another few minutes of searching reveals a slew of interesting real-time Twitter feeds of significance: the Israeli Consulate in New York, the Al Jazeera feed on the events in Gaza, a feed from Jordan under the name tweetsfromgaza and Gazamom, the feed of a Palestinian journalist living in North Carolina who seems to be in regular contact with her father in Gaza. Searching for #gaza on Twitter reveals many more.

As events halfway around the world unfold, it’s worth pausing to consider how incredibly networked we are today. To say that the flow of digital information is instantaneous has become a tired cliche, but spend a few minutes (you don’t even need to take as many as 22) and it’s genuinely mind-boggling how much information one can gather.

It’s equally mind-boggling how we’re starting to take this astonishing level of information access for granted. We shouldn’t. Ever.