I’m not smart enough to say what will happen in 2009, but here’s what Pete Blackshaw, Charlene Li and Peter Kim have to say about it. Once I read their posts, I figured I’d go a slightly different path and talk about 9 things I’d like to see happen next year. Here they are:

Brands and businesses that embrace their flaws and work with the community to solve them will outperform their competitors. Plain and simple: actions speak louder than words.

There will be a direct, irrefutable link proven between authenticity – of motive communication, product, experience and actions – and business performance. FYI, we’re working on this, and have some IP that we’ll be releasing early in the New Year that begins to make that case.

Colleges will totally re-think their Marketing, PR & Journalism curriculae to ensure that the students they graduate have the knowledge and skills they need to perform at a competitive level when they enter the workforce. Our goal at Edelman is this: every person in the firm needs to be able to walk the new talk, and we intend to make a big dent in our cultural transformation by ensuring that the hundreds of entry level hires we make every year are smart and passionate about PR 2.0 from their very first day.

Madison Avenue will bail out the news industry. Maybe I’m dreaming here, but advertisers have been underpaying for online audience and overpaying (based on a decades-old metric) for offline audience. Online news sites typically deliver up to 3X the eyeballs of their offline “parents,” yet can currently only command 25% of the rate. That gap will close dramatically in 2009.

Stay tuned... the rest of the list will be published tomorrow.