Mashable reports. So does Wired. And Marketing Pilgrim. Among others. Expect to see a slew of “10 Ways Businesses Can Harness The Power of the New Twitter to Drive Staggering Profits” blog posts any moment now.

If you haven’t received a video message from Santa, yet, don’t worry: You probably will before too long. Portable North Pole is well done, and my guess is that it will wind up being this year’s holiday meme, ala elf bowling.

Over on Social Media Today, Jay Osterholm posts, “Social Media: A Must-Have for Small Business Owners” that includes a pretty interesting infographic detailing some of the ways small businesses are using social media.

But let’s be clear: Social media for small business owners doesn’t mean setting up a Facebook page and waiting for the dollars to come rushing in. In fact, for some small businesses having a Facebook page may be entirely the wrong focus.

Osterholm has it exactly right when he says, “Social media marketing can do remarkable things for your small businesses, but only if it is properly implemented and maintained.”

Takeaway for marketers: Step one on the path to proper implementation is to find someone with significant social media experience whose first statement isn’t “I know just what your business needs,” it’s “I want to know how customers and potential customers interact with your business currently, and what the strongest and most successful offline dynamics are that fuel business growth.”

I was going to post something today about the lessons learned from the stupidity of how the staff of Kansas Governor Sam Brownback mishandled one teen’s tweet to 65 followers, but Spin Sucks says it all quite well, and throws in a good story about a Utah mayor.

Remember when Google Wave was being touted as The Next Big Thing? (Here’s Mashable’s complete guide to what you missed.) Remember when everyone was explaining why it wasn’t?

Well, Google recently announced that 2012 is when Wave will officially be “sunsetting.” Here’s the email they sent those few of us who had signed up for the service:

Dear Wavers,

More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is turned off on April 30, 2012.

For more details, please see our help center.

Yours sincerely,

The Wave Team