What do Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Dropbox and Skype have in common? Except for being ridiculously successful, they all enjoyed a strong viral effect that helped accelerate their growth.

How did they do that? Here’s the thing; most people assume that these companies grew by pure word of mouth. Well, that’s only half of the story. The other half is that they deliberately built viral features into their products that helped spread the word.

Let me explain.

Non-traditional resumes, while unique and eye-catching, may limit a job applicant’s chances of landing his or her dream job.

Many companies, especially large corporations, use applicant tracking systems (ATS) to automatically parse through submitted resumes in search of keywords that indicate desired skills and experience.

When dealing with an ATS, a text-based resume with clear headers is the best way to go. That way, the software can parse through your resume accurately, picking out all of the juicy details the hiring manager is seeking (i.e. “brand manager,” “Harvard,” “marketing”).

Emoticons no longer have to be anonymous smiley faces representing simple emotions. Facebook Chat now lets you use the profile picture of any user, official Page, or event on the service as an emoticon. That means you can make one out of your best friend, Chuck Norris, Justin Bieber, Barack Obama or anyone else. This opens up a whole new way to express complex emotions. Here’s how to do it:

Consumers and marketers have vastly different perceptions of and expectations about Facebook likes, which presents a problem for marketers who are slow to move, but an opportunity for those who pounce on it.

That’s based on a survey of more than 1,300 consumers and 132 senior marketers, conducted by Lithium and the Chief Marketing Officer Council.

The top three reasons why marketers believe consumers like their Facebook pages were:

Over the course of 2011, we witnessed social media and location-based services really take off for small businesses — the mom and pop shops of the world continued to get more digital and more mobile.

As this year wraps up, we look back at the technological advancements that small businesses have benefited from and predict how those technologies will affect entrepreneurs in 2012.

We spoke with a number of small businesses to get their thoughts on how the market will continue to adapt to changing technologies as we move into the new year.

Most people have yet to publish their timelines, since the feature only became available across the site last Thursday and Facebook has a seven-day grace periodfor people to choose what to put on the advanced profile before it publishes for the entire world to see.

I wonder whether the grace period effectively extends the testing of this advanced profile, since Facebook can respond to feedback from the less-technologically inclined types who have just begun to tinker with the timeline over the past week. Even techie types continue to find things that might resemble bugs as much as features.

We’re all learning about how best to use timelineright now, so it’s probably a good thing that brand pages haven’t migrated to this new layout yet.

While we do know that Facebook is working on upgrading brand pages, no dates have been given for anything new and it’s unknown what the changes will be. Most likely individual users’ experiences with timeline will dictate whether the social network will extend the format to pages.

Meanwhile, timeline profiles have other implications for brands on Facebook.

Keyboards and mice may seem like clunky artifacts of the past within the next five years, pushed aside in favor of the ultimate user interface: the human mind.

That’s according to IBM, which just published its “5 in 5″ forecast: a prediction about five innovations that will fundamentally change our world within the next five years. The most head-turning prediction: we’ll be able to use the power of our minds to operate machines.

This isn’t telepathy, so those hoping to get a real-time stream of thoughts from an individual had best look to shows like Heroes or Bablylon 5. What IBM envisions is using a simple brain-machine interface (BMI) that can detect different kinds of brainwaves and tell a computer to respond a certain way.

Fans of the sci-fi film Minority Report will no doubt recall the autonomous insect-like searcher robots deployed to find Tom Cruise’s character mid-way through the flick. While not as elegant (or sinister) as its film counterparts, the Asterisk robot being developed by the Arai Robotics Lab at Osaka University in Japan does an excellent job of resembling a big, mechanical bug with some interesting skills. After over six years of development, this unusual “limb-mechanism” robot now boasts an impressive array of functions that may soon find it performing vital tasks in numerous areas of society, including search and rescue and building maintenance.

Whitney Parker is vice president for user experience at Brazen Careerist, where she co-hosts a bootcamp on how to create and implement a social media strategy.

It’s no secret that jobs in social media are becoming more prevalent in nearly every industry nationwide and even globally. A quick search on Indeed returns nearly 30,000 openings in the United States alone.

But what might not be obvious is what, exactly, young professionals should do to position themselves for these emerging roles. And no, it’s not enough just to have a Facebook Page.

Before timeline went live, it was actually possible to undo an upgrade to this advanced profile: Uninstalling the Developer application from your Facebook account would remove the timeline. But now all of this has changed.

A spokesperson for Facebook explained in an email to us:

Once you click “Get Timeline,” you will have seven days to review everything that appears on your timeline before anyone else can see it.

If you choose, you can publish your timeline right away. If you decide to wait, your timeline will go live automatically after seven days. Your timeline will replace your profile.

By now we’ve all become waryof posts like this one on Facebook: “Costco is currently giving away $100.00 gift cards to all Facebook users!’

Alas, as of this writing, a bogus Costco gift card scam was live on Facebook.

We have no doubt that the social network’s immune system will detect the web address that the latest posts include and add the URLs to the security databases.

Just when you think Facebook has blocked every possible link to a particular scam meme, it returns with another web address. Southwest Airlines isn’t giving away 973 pairs of free tickets on the social network, and by now most people have learned that promises to that effect only lead to malware and spam.

Google+ may be less than a year old, but New York Times bestselling author Chris Brogan is ready to crown it a game changer. His latest book, which will publish next week, is called Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything.

“Everything?,” we asked Brogan. He assured us, rather indignantly, that he hasn’t made a mistake with his book’s title.

Google+ has an obvious advantage in search results, presents unique opportunities for brands and is backed by deep pockets, he argues. And all of these factors make it a social media platform that will stick around in a big way.