The short: Less than a week after his State of the Union address, which was the most interactive speech ever made by a US president with over 760,000 live tweets, Obama will meet the pressing questions of the nation in a Google+ Hangout. Users can submit either video or text questions to the White House YouTube Channel, and can also elect the ones that the Commander in Chief will answer during his interview on January 30th. Several users with top-voted questions will also be invited to participate in what can be thought as FDR’s famed fireside chat recast for the 21st century.

Why it matters: With all due respect to those lovable Muppets, this will be far and away the biggest endorsement of Google’s social network and its hangout functionality. And, following the President’s foray into Instagram earlier this month, this high-profile Hangout On Air is another example of his strategic, ongoing use of social media to converse with his audience with transparency (to the degree possible) and, more importantly, activate them by providing what they want--a voice that’s heard, a seat by the “fireside” rather than a one-way broadcast. This strategy, of course, translates to brands: whether you call them constituents or customers, when people feel like they are participating and actively shaping something, loyalty is forged.

The short: Google was greeted by a major public outcry when it recently announced a change in its privacy policy. The new “master policy,” which takes effect on March 1, will act as the main governing document for all Google products across the board, from search engine to social network to Android activity.

Why it matters: While many users are afraid of the policy’s implications, fearing the fact that the search giant will be amassing even more of their personal information, Google believes this change will only increase the efficiency and effectiveness of its products. By combining information gathered on users from all of its services, Google will also be able to help guide advertisers so that they can better direct their targeted ads through a more robust understanding of their users’ interests, habits and happenings.

The short: With the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight, the founder of failed startup Plancast offered many pearls of wisdom about how to create the best social products and how to create experiences that compel users to share. He explained how all people are wired to share snippets of themselves, both to cast their lives in a favorable light and to create opportunities to receive validation from peers.

Why it matters: As young a field as social media is, it has been around long enough that there is now a significant body of knowledge that explains how to masterfully think about the social experiences we are creating for our users and customers. With an understanding of why people share, the act of consistently making engaging content and shareable experiences can be transformed from a mystery to a science. And with recent studies demonstrating that social sharing drives more engagement than paid ad placement, brands have every reason to leverage earned media in their marketing and advertising campaigns.

The short: Pinterest, the visual bookmarking platform launched in 2008, has identified the eight brands that demonstrate the site’s best practices: Whole Foods, Martha Stewart, Better Homes and Gardens, Real Simple, West Elm, Bergdorf Goodman, Today and Travel Channel. The Pinterest boards of these brands mix the informational and aspirational by incorporating recipes, items and tips, as well as the behind-the-scenes tastes of their style-makers.

Why it matters: Pinterest is still in its invite-only phase, but Experian Hitwise pegged the site’s traffic in December at 11 million visits per week, almost 40 times the amount from six months before. Given the site’s growing popularity, especially among women ages 25 to 44, it’s no wonder that fashion, food and lifestyle brands have jumped on board. There’s still a wait-list for new brands to create accounts, but with numbers this promising, you can bet that every savvy brand with strong, sharable and visual content will have a Pinterest presence soon.

The short: Google rolled out its social, Google+ optimized search this week. The company’s three new features aim to produce results that better reflect a user’s relationships, interests and needs: Personal Results, which lets users find Google+ content; Profiles in Search, which provides users with the ability to instantly connect with people they want to follow; and People and Pages, which highlights notable people and pages surrounding a topic. “This isn’t the entire Internet, it’s your entire Internet,” said Google’s web search product management director, Jack Menzel, about the biggest change to the search engine in a decade.

Why it matters: Google’s decision to integrate Google+ into its most-used product has long been expected, and demonstrates how integral the social platform is to the company’s plan to deliver seamless, highly personalized user experiences. Similar to the social search options that Facebook added to Bing over a year ago, the new features will only increase in value and relevance as both brands and users create more content (and SEO data) on Google+. The release also hints at the possibility of highly targeted, data-driven ads as well as promoted Google+ accounts--challenging Facebook’s current dominance in social advertising.

The short: Following Twitter’s release of Sponsored Tweets, Facebook has created a new type of paid advertising: the Featured Story. Not to be confused with Facebook’s existing Sponsored Stories, which are displayed in the right margin of the screen and are often ignored, Featured Stories will be displayed in-line with other news stories in a user’s News Feed. Though this will certainly make ads more visible, it’s debatable whether users will get enraged about this encroachment of their social space, which prior to now, has been exclusively comprised of conversations with their friends.

Why it matters: The social ads space is getting increasingly competitive, and all of the largest players are making increasingly bold moves as they attempt to out perform one another. Clearly Facebook’s goal is to improve upon its below average advertising click-through-rate (about half the industry standard at 0.05%), but more so than ever, Facebook is risking the trust of its users. As suggested by HubSpot, your brand may want to wait until the dust has settled before buying any Featured Stories paid media.

The short: Lewis DVorkin, Chief Product Officer of Forbes Media, shares the story behind a recent viral success on the company's blog. He explains that Forbes' new content strategy - hiring more content creators, producing more text-heavy content, and cutting back on link-bait photo galleries - has paid off with lasting traffic growth and greater sharing all across the social web. And Forbes accomplished this without bowing to the page view. What’s the post that did so well? A text-only article about the fall of Best Buy spanning five pages that included the author's personal experiences at the store, market statistics, and a lot of competitive analysis all rolled into one.

Why it matters: People are reading again. More likely, they never stopped, but too many brands and media sites weren't giving them information good enough to consider or want to share. Content drives activity, but good content drives more activity. Photo galleries aren't useless, but they'll give you little else beyond a page view. The more consumers have to read, the more they're willing to share, comment, and connect with a brand. Consider the success of sites like Mashable, which posts nonstop, knowing that the information and easy-to-digest format of the posts make it perfect for sharing. Page views still have cachet, and photo galleries are a quick-and-dirty way to drive them, but authentic, informative copy is what will really impact social sharing and long-term traffic gains.

The short: The music industry has continued its dramatic shift from the record store to the web with persistent innovation in the field of social music. As music becomes more readily available on the web, it is also becoming more sharable thanks to services such as Spotify, Turntable.fm, Pandora and Google Music.

Why it matters: eMarketer reports that 53% of consumers choose to purchase their music online. When combined with the fact that CDs are continuing their decade-long decline in sales, the music industry is being forced to shift from the physical to the digital world. This shift could not come at a more opportune time for brands, as the ability to integrate sharing has become integral for successful digital and social campaigns. This move proves once again that a brand’s ability to integrate sharable content and campaigns is one of the best ways to engage its fans and followers.

The short: After facing some initial legal issues, Facebook finally rolled out the highly anticipated Timeline at the end of 2011. This innovation, combined with the Open Graph and Ticker, has paved the way for new methods by which brands can interact with users through apps and pages.

Why it matters: Recognizing the importance of the “like”, Facebook is combining its use of the Timeline, Ticker and Open Graph to allow for even more sharing and social activity. Brands can now design apps that let their users document actions ranging from “listen” to “watch”, allowing for constant broadcasting of every social move. If executed correctly, these innovations will provide the opportunity for brands to further engage and activate their followers in more ways than ever. Expect the launch of some of these applications in the beginning of the year.

The short: Each month comScore releases a mobile subscriber report which shows how many US residents over 13 have mobile phones, and of those, who has smartphones. For all of 2011, mobile phone penetration has been steady at 92% of the population, while smartphone adoption rates have climbed from 28% to 41% with a steady addition of about 2.7M new users a month. Should this pace be maintained, as it likely will, smartphone adoption rates will break 50% right around mid-summer of 2012.

Why it matters: With all technologies, adoption can be described with a standard bell curve, known as the innovation adoption lifecycle. As the second 50% of users (known as the late majority and laggards) start using a new technology, it is officially considered mainstream. With a majority of Americans walking around with smartphones in their pockets, mobile browsing, mobile shopping, mobile payments, and more will have gone from fantasy to reality, ushering in a new wave of social applications and experiences.

The short: Google has decided to throw its hat into the social media game with its new network: Google Plus. Closely integrated with Google’s pre-existing search, mail and chat functions, Google Plus hopes to keep the early momentum it gained in 2011 and take the field of social media by storm by providing a stronger overall experience for all kinds of users.

Why it matters: With total control over a brand’s ability to search optimize, Google is expected to increase the role of the “+1” in its algorithm in the near future. As these features begin to play a bigger part in a Google search, a Google Plus page may become essential for a brand to develop a strong web presence. Furthermore, the added features of “circles”, page integration and “hangouts” all present new opportunities for brands looking to build an innovative social campaign.

The short: When it comes to social media community management, influence matters. As more brands measure influence to help decide with whom to engage or to whom to offer a promotion, startups like Klout are gaining widespread popularity and even copycat services like Kred are getting noticed. Independent of how much brands benefit from influence-tracking services, some users have been up in arms, choosing to opt-out and go to great lengths to block their public social media accounts from influence analysis.

Why it matters: Because it is so important for brands to prove the ROI of social media campaigns, influence apps are going to remain an important tool for community managers. Even if Klout or Kred go under, other companies and products will spring up to take their place and continue to provide this much needed service to brands. No matter who ends up on top, privacy issues will need to be addressed to ensure that users have a choice in whether or not their accounts get analyzed. An opportunity also exists for brands to create high-quality and high-value promotions which reframe services like Klout as desirable and user-friendly.

The short: Two of the fastest growing, most interesting social media tools this year have been Instagram and Tumblr. Instagram has been a major disruptor in the photo-sharing world, despite the fact that Facebook, Flickr, and others have been sharing photos for years. And Tumblr has been spreading like wild fire while getting more minutes of web users’ time than Wordpress, Blogger, and other free publishing platforms. What’s the secret? Both services let users create and share image-rich content with minimal effort.

Why it matters: Innovation Fatigue affects us all, and with so many start ups and new social media platforms popping up each month, it’s getting harder and harder for a new product to get any traction. What Instagram and Tumblr proved is that users will flock to your product in droves if you create what they want: rich experiences that are extremely easy to use. For Instagram, the key decision was to make sharing the default behavior within an image app, and for Tumblr, it was to reinvent the blog post to be less about writing unique content and more about sharing images and reblogging the content of others. The success of Instagram and Tumblr is a reminder that there is room for disruptive innovation even in the most saturated markets.

The short: 2011 saw the year of many new consumer sites with one thing in common: beautifully designed user interfaces with simple, one-click actions. Pinterest, an online "pinboard" app, surpassed 421 million pageviews in October of 2011 and has caught on with the crowds of mommy bloggers, Etsy store owners and designers. Fab.com, a site for daily design inspirations and up to 70% off sales, saw more than $1.1 million in sales during this year's Black Friday to Cyber Monday season.

Why it matters: Simplicity is winning. Sites and interfaces are becoming major reasons for user engagement and many new applications are realizing this, as design and rebranding continue to pull away clutter and focus on large photos and better UX design. Path, Twitter, YouTube and Google’s apps all had a major design refresh at the end of 2011 with the hopes of making it easier for their loyal users to engage, while attracting new users to the product. Look to 2012 as the year when the trend of good design extends from the niche market of consumer goods to nearly all brand pages and mobile applications.

The short: 2011 saw an uptick of brands and developers leveraging years worth of public user data to create engaging online apps and stories. Intel's “Museum of Me” and the buzz generating "Take This Lollipop" were two ideas that took advantage of your personal and public Facebook photos, "check ins" and friend data, turning them into a visually creative story. These have lead to many brands discussing how they could do something similar and what to do with all of the data they have collected.

Why it matters: Consumers like to see their data and, through this data, see themselves. For the past few years we've tweeted, "Liked" and "checked in" to multiple places, authorizing others to collect this data with little knowledge of what will actually be done with it. Now brands are increasingly gathering insights from this information and are seeing an opportunity to help consumers visualize their own online identities, and even celebrate them, with enticing apps and rich experiences. Not only can you expect to see many more integrations like these, but you should also consider ways for your own brand to leverage the user data collected from your existing apps, sites, and services.

The short: Already the largest video-sharing site in the world with over three billion views per day, YouTube rounded out 2011, as so many do, by figuratively saying: “out with the old, in with the new.” In this case, it's out with stumbling upon random videos and in with a brand new homepage redesign, or “fresh coat of digital paint,” that provides users with a cleaner, more streamlined layout and highlights content from subscribed channels in a playlist.

Why it matters: This represents YouTube's bid to better direct viewers toward branded or professional videos and underscores the fact that “YouTube doesn't want to be like a TV network; it wants to be TV,” as the New York Times opined. In addition to 100+ channels featuring premium original content, YouTube made a recent deal with Disney to rent titles, supplementing existing partnerships with Sony Pictures, Warner Bros and Universal Pictures. Now YouTube is poised to redefine what content we consume online and how we consume it in 2012, especially as Google+ ramps up with its ability to share seamlessly.

The short: It's no surprise that the accessibility and always-improving quality of camera phones—along with platforms to quickly share what's produced—has forever altered the landscape of citizen journalism; news is no longer the cordoned-off domain of a few. Indeed, toward the end of November, CNN fired 12 of its photojournalists after it concluding that user- generated images could replace the professional in terms of speed and, more importantly, cost.

Why it matters: Crowd-sourcing public content is a growing trend for companies, as social media has made it easy to discover and source content for brands of all sizes, and it will continue in 2012 as sharing tools and technologies are improved or introduced. And while we’ve just started to see brands do this in interesting ways, like Club Monaco’s recent Get Inspired competition, the question for companies, rather than consumers, will be: how much is quality content worth?