Twitter has posted to its blog this time-lapsed video of the world celebrating the arrival of the New Year last weekend. The occasion marked a new record in Tweets-per-second, set yet again by the Japanese, the new Twitter-mad nation, with 6,939 TPS wishing friends and followers a fond “Akemashite omedetou gozaimasu” (“Happy New Year!”).

We had our doubts it could be done, but it appears this year’s e-Christmas shopping tally of $32.6 billion was not just a record, but it exceeded very ambitious pre-season expectations as well.

That’s the hard-to-ignore conclusion we draw from the latest online holiday sales figures, which shows a big surge late last week from shoppers cashing in on a “free shipping” gambit rolled out this year by 1,500 retailers.

That’s the conclusion we draw from the latest Burson-Marsteller research into how companies are adapting to the mobile web. Despite the explosion in smart phone usage and the innovative mobile apps that are transforming industry sectors, many of the world’s largest companies are sitting on the sidelines.

Ah, if it were only that easy. In truth, companies are still playing lip service to the practice of “social co-creation,” or using social media to tap your customer base for innovative ideas, new research has found.

Shoppers in the U.S. have set an impressive five single-day online sales records this Christmas season as total sales through Dec. 10 ticks upward to just under $22 billion, a 12% year-on-year increase. Good, but not great. At this rate, online retailers will not reach the ambitious $32 billion e-Christmas sales forecast set earlier this year.

Why $495 billion? That’s the all-time high for global ad revenues reached waaaay back in 2008 just before the full effect of the financial meltdown hit. It’s now projected that we will return to that plateau at some point in 2012, a new rosier-than-expected projection from ZenithOptimedia says.

How much budget are the most pioneering firms allocating to social media? According to a new survey of corporate communications and marketing specialists, anywhere from 5-15% of the “overall external communications budgets” is being earmarked for social. It’s better than the sums we saw just two years ago, but how exactly is that supposed to cover costs on a year-round “holistic” communications strategy?

Last week we reported Christmas 2010 was shaping up to be a tale of two seasons for retailers, with online vendors doing better than forecasted while their offline counterparts were falling flat. New data though shows a worrying new indication: even online is slipping now.

It goes by a few different names: “branded content,” “branded publishing,” and, more recently, “social media branded content.” What is it? It’s company-produced content – not just blog posts and Twitter updates, but long-form narratives, games, video and crowdsourced initiatives, to name a few – that pulls in the public. New studies say it could be the biggest marketing and corporate communications trend of 2011.