The economy sucks. Duh. Maybe you’ve lost a client. Or three. Or your enthusiasm for your job. Or your job.

On top of that, tomorrow is New Year’s Eve. It’s the end of another year, a time when we tend to sit back and take stock of where we’ve been and where we’re going … not an easy task these days.

Here’s the good news: It’s never been easy. What’s good about that? Well, simply that the hard work we all have ahead of ourselves has always been hard, so nothing’s really changed all that much … at least not in the sense that there’s hard work ahead.

It’s more an issue of reminding ourselves (and each other) of some evergreen truths that will help us all get through the financial and personal whitewater that lies ahead.

Here are some things I intend to keep in mind in the year ahead:

1. Stay positive. This is crucial. Everything else flows from a positive attitude. Just as a huge part of the economy’s health is derived from consumer confidence, a huge part of your own mental and professional health is derived from your personal confidence. No one wants to work with anyone who has a negative outlook on things. (Do you?)

2. Remember the golden rule. Treat others the way you want to be treated. If you don’t want to be treated like crap, don’t treat others like crap. You’d think that’s a no-brainer, but don’t we all know people in business who treat others like crap?

3. Minimize your intake of bad news. We’re in for a long haul of stories about this company laying off 10% of their workforce and that company closing their doors and this other company filing for chapter 11. Okay, you already know the economy sucks. What are you gonna do about it, wallow in the details? Or are you going to wake up, stay positive and do what you need to do?

4. Another Great Depression? So? Not every industry tanked during the ’30s. The radio industry did very well. So did print media. Films. Advertising. Take a look at this entry over on Google Answers or this article over on iMedia Connection or this blog post from Ravit Lichtenberg and you’ll see why numbers one and three above, in particular, are so important.

5. Stay busy. The more down time you have, the more opportunity you have to sink into a negative frame of mind that will erode your positive frame of mind. To that end …

6. Network. In real estate it’s “location, location, location.” In business it’s “network, network, network.” Put aside an hour a day to catch up with former coworkers, start actual discussions on LinkedIn (they desperately need some), rekindle friendships from years ago, respond to job ads, talk with recruiters and so on. Or, if not an hour, decide to do three things each day that fall into the networking category. It requires discipline, like going to the gym; you may not see immediate results, but you’ll be a lot healthier for it over the long haul.

7. Remember Sturgeon’s Law. The second portion of Sturgeon’s Law, actually, which states that 90 percent of everything is crap. Everything. That includes 90 percent of everyone out there going after the same job or client as you, 90 percent of your competitors in any given industry and so on down the line. Are you in that 90 percent, or are you a 10-percenter?

8. Remember Col. Sanders. You can read his story over here, but here’s the upshot: When he was trying to sell his famous chicken recipe, he was rejected more than 1,000 times before making the sale. Put yourself in his place: Would you give up after 100 rejections? Or 200? Or 500? Or 783? Or 926? I gotta think the over/under for most people on this one is in the double-digits. So: Keep on keepin’ on.

9. Embrace serenity as you cultivate courage and wisdom. Serenity is accepting the things you can’t change, having the courage to change the things you can and cultivating the wisdom to know the difference. Serenity is a good thing.

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.

11. Remember where your real job security lies. It’s not in any company with whom you work … or used to work. The days of working for a large company for 40 years and retiring on your pension are gone. Your job security lies within you: It’s in your willingness to do a great job (not just a good job) no matter what it takes.

Takeaway for marketers: And for everyone else, for that matter. Relax. Take a deep breath. Stay positive. Keep focused. And may the coming year bring you all the health, happiness, serenity, courage, wisdom and success you want and deserve.

LinkedIn Discussions has some real potential. You have professionals over at LinkedIn Groups gathering in numbers large and small, coalescing around issues significant and simplistic, and discussing … well, whatever the members of the group want to discuss.

Therein lies the potential … and the problem. LinkedIn Discussions could be a terrific real-time knowledge resource, a virtual salon where ideas are expressed and discussed, trends noted and dissected, successes and failures shared and analyzed — and more.

But it’s not. I belong to 18 LinkedIn groups and the signal-to-noise ratio is ridiculous. Lack of moderation is a problem: The creator of the group could separate the wheat from the chaff, but usually they don’t.

Here are six things contributing to the Discussions component of LinkedIn Groups being (mostly) a mess:

Too many people looking for free advice. “What’s the best way to market my business both online and off?” Sure, why don’t we take the combined brain power of the 50,000 or so members of this group and apply it to your business issue — since you’re clearly not interested in hiring a VP Marketing … or at least a marketing consultant.

Too much traffic whoring. “Here’s a great [article or blog post] I wrote about [insert topic about which 2,749,596 articles and blog posts have already been written] — check it out!” No thanks.

Too many people looking to arbitrarily expand their networks. These people are called LIONs, and I’ve never understood the point of this. “I’m looking to expand my network: Any and all invitations accepted!” Why? Do you really think that having a network of 10,000 or more strangers whom you ignore (or occasionally spam) will be more of a benefit for you than a network of 100 or so people with whom you keep in touch once in a while?

Too much job hunting. “Looking for opportunities in [insert business type and/or geographic region here].” LinkedIn: You need to create a separate place where job seekers can post their employment pleas. Please.

Too many blatant ads. Anyone who uses a discussion forum and doesn’t bother to participate in discussions but instead uses the digital real estate to post an ad touting their company or services is someone with whom I will never do business. Never. Ever.

Too much hyperbole. “The key to survival!” “The path to riches” And so it goes. Hey, I like hyperbole as much as the next guy (Are you kidding? I spent nine years with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey!), but posts like these make what should be a professional forum seem like ads in a ’70s comic book.

Give me questions that need to be answered. Give me ideas that need comment. Give me rants, snark, humor, insight, links to resources I can use and food for thought.

Wait, I know — how about maybe facilitating some actual discussion. Yeah, now there’s an idea.

Takeaway for marketers: If you’re a LinkedIn member, participate in the discussions — please. There’s an occasional needle in the haystack right now, but the forums desperately need a lot more signal to balance out the surfeit of noise.

DECEMBER 18 UPDATE: IT World has posted this article that explores the LIONs phenomenon.

I’m clicking around my LinkedIn groups and checking out the discussions the other day, and I noticed a thread about “article marketing.”

The idea behind article marketing, of course, is to post content on your Web site that help generate search engine traffic, links to your site, authority for your brand and so on. Here’s one of many sites that specializes in articles. Here’s another. And another. The Web is lousy with them: Google returns more than 3.6 million results for “article marketing.”

Anyway, in the course of the discussion someone wrote: “Professional writers generally charge anywhere from $4 to $8 for an article depending on the word count and research involved.”

Yep: That got my gears grinding. Which got me to responding, which gave me today’s post:

As an editorial professional since the Reagan administration, I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, the notion that people are waking up to the idea that quality content matters is a welcome one.

On the other hand, the notion that hack wordsmiths will swoop in and thoughtlessly churn out SEO text as opposed to real articles and content is profoundly troubling.

I’ve written dozens of SEO-optimized articles for a variety of companies over the past year. I’ve written countless magazine articles, press releases, Web pages, email newsletters and more (including about three dozen books) over the past two-and-a-half decades.

The cost of professional copywriting today is in the neighborhood of a dollar a word.

Sorry, [name redacted]: With all due respect, the idea that “professional writers generally charge anywhere from $4 to $8 for an article depending on the word count and research involved” is patently absurd — not to mention deeply insulting to any editorial professional.

Let’s talk about the high end of your fee range, though. How long does it take a real professional to write an article? Let’s assume the article is brief: about 250 words. Let’s further assume it takes 90 minutes to research and write the article. That’s $5.33 per hour. Given that, you’re better off washing dishes or flipping burgers for minimum wage — you’ll get paid almost 23% more for your time.

I’ve seen too many “editorial services” that churn out articles for pennies on the dollar. All of them are pure unadulterated crap.

What’s most disturbing about all this, though, is that (a) too many “marketers” simply don’t care if it’s crap, and (b) too many clients (and members of the general public) are too stupid to know the difference.

Takeaway for marketers: You get what you pay for.

I have an AOL email account I use for almost everything that isn’t related to work. It gets flooded with newsletters and advertising (and spam) pretty quickly.

The account had approximately 1,400 emails in it the other morning. As I was trying to delete enough junk to get below 1,000 (which always feels like something of a major accomplishment), I noticed that for all the talk about “personalization” in online marketing generally and email marketing specifically, a subject line with my name in it was a sure indication that the email could be safely deleted. A few samples:

“Craig Peters: Amazon.com’s Black Friday Deals”

“Craig, You’re Invited…”

“PETERS, someone has sent you a Subway sandwich Gift Card”

I can’t help but think that there are a lot of marketers in a lot of companies thinking, “let’s do all the heavy lifting required to make sure we personalize our emails by using the customer’s name in the subject line.”

And there are probably a lot of other marketers thinking, “yeah, that’s a great idea, people will really think that we’re thinking about them.”

And the results are the sort of subject lines you see above.

But is that worthwhile personalization? That Amazon subject line above is a great example: It might as well say, “Occupant: Amazon.com’s Black Friday Deals.”

Of course Amazon is probably A/B testing more subject lines than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.

Still, when the presence of “personalization” in the subject line is a clear indication that the email is junk, there’s a disconnect somewhere, don’t you think?

Is it really “personalization” when all you’re doing is plugging my first or last name into the same spot as everyone else’s first or last name? Shouldn’t “personalization” mean something more than that? Wouldn’t Amazon be better off with a call to action like “Check out Amazon.com’s Great Black Friday Deals” instead of some sort of bogus attempt to pretend they know me?

They don’t know me, they know how to pull my name out of a database and plug it into a hole in the subject line.

Think of it this way: When your closest friends and business associates send you an email, how often do they use your first or last name in the subject line?

In the online marketing world, conversational typically trumps corporate. This bit of conversation, though, feels like bumping into the loudmouth insurance agent at the party who, drink in one hand, throws his arm around your shoulder and with aggressive faux-friendliness says far too loudly, “Craig, my friend! How the hell are ya?”

No one needs “personalization” like that.

Takeaway for marketers: Slapping a name from a database into a subject line isn’t personalization.

You’ve probably heard the story about Abraham Biggs, the 19-year-old Florida boy who committed suicide in front of a Web cam the other day. You can read his suicide note here.

It’s a tragic and terrible story on pretty much every level, but it’s one that provides some insight into this communications medium that so many people are still trying to comprehend.

Insight number one, I think, is the degree to which someone will take their private life public online, and the willingness with which kids today (not to suggest this is a phenomenon limited to kids, but we’re talking about a teenager here) make everything public. This article in New York magazine last year did a good job of examining this phenomenon.

Countless Internet users are celebrating virtually every moment of their lives by cataloging it online. Given the infinite celebrations memorialized digitally every day, should it really come as a surprise that there are those who are documenting their personal tragedies, too?

For all the talk about us losing our privacy in the 21st century, we often forget that a huge component of that privacy loss is voluntary.

Insight number two is the degree to which someone will mock or ignore someone else’s tragedy.

There’s a lot of black humor and trash talking online. There’s also a lot of posing and pretending online. Put the two together and it doesn’t take a great leap of understanding to see how someone might post a mocking comment about something horrible … something that deep down they may think isn’t really happening anyway.

Which is in no way to excuse those who cheered on Abraham’s actions. Idiots abound, online and off. The image of someone on the ledge of a building and someone in the crowd below yelling “Jump!” is something of a cultural cliche. What we see in this case is the digital equivalent of that.

We’re also seeing the digital equivalent of the bystander effect, famously seen in the case of Kitty Genovese and expressed by Phil Ochs in the song, Outside Of A Small Circle of Friends.

But there’s more to see in this case, and some of it is encouraging. Ultimately, the police showed up because those who were viewing the online broadcast took Abraham’s words seriously and contacted the authorities

Insight number three doesn’t exist yet, but it lives somewhere at the point of discussion that I think deserves to be explored because of this case: When is it appropriate for the online community to react? What is the responsibility of members of an online community when one of their own announces the intent to do harm to himself … or herself … or someone else?

Biggs had announced his intentions of committing suicide on a bodybuilding site. Clearly, albeit in 20-20 hindsight, a cry for help. I suppose those who participate in that forum are doing a lot of soul-searching right now. Had they contacted authorities just a few hours earlier, might Abraham Biggs be alive today?

Meanwhile, conversations about this incident abound — from comments on stories posted at the Los Angeles Times to Huffington Post to The Inquisitr to dozens of others. Plenty of stupid comments will be made in those discussions, which will have their fair share of misplaced anger and ignorance.

If anything positive is to come of this situation, though, perhaps it’s that everyone who participates in online communities understands a little better that among the pixels and Web pages and databases and routers and DSL connections — that there are actual flesh-and-blood human beings on the other side of that computer screen.

Maybe this is insight number three: If you’re interacting with someone typing on a keyboard 1,000 miles away, that person ought to be treated with the same deference and respect and humanity as if you were both in the same room.