I’m in awe of the tens of thousands of games and widgets that are now part of Apple’s App Store.

This touch-screen ecosystem doesn’t net big bucks for most developers. Many apps are free; most sell for under $10. But the fact that more than 10 million miniature applications – with quirky names like Midomi and ShoZu — have been downloaded thus far means that it can add up quickly.

The phenomenon is not limited to the consumer space. Salesforce.com has been encouraging developers to post their zany inventions in its AppExchange so there’s more stickiness with subscribers, some of whom might be tempted to leave for a cheaper software-as-a-service sales automation tool.

What has been less apparent, both in the B2C and B2B marketplaces, is a burgeoning service industry surrounding many of these large software innovations or online communities.

Just as Joseph Jaffe and his pals created the agency Crayon a few years back to monetize the frenzy around those setting up communities and businesses in Second Life, a number of PR pros and marketers are specializing in Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Few argue that experimentation and innovation are not vital to keeping brands relevant in today’s business world, so there is strong demand for a helping hand to prevent potentially highly visible online missteps.

The one category of service business we’ve seen and heard about the most is monitoring and gisting services. Corporations and agencies gladly pay services like Techrigy and Radian6 to learn what is being said about them and competitors online. (see Dan Schwabel’s list of players here.)

But monitoring alone does not give companies a voice in the conversation. That’s where England’s Twit4Hire.com, Australia’s Twitter Agency and similar outsourced service models pop up, along with Twitter practices inside traditional PR firms and ad agencies.

It remains to be seen whether this model will scale. Just as there are dangers of not being on Twitter, it is equally risky to task third parties with the upkeep of a brand – especially in an environment where authenticity and trust are such precious attributes.

Another service model that is flourishing, at least on Facebook, guarantees at least a million views of videos to audiences that can be targeted by age, gender and other demographics. Involver.com appears to be the Typhoid Mary of viral video.

While most of the world is in a recession, the stimulus package for risk-taking service providers is just a mouse click away.

Slap a logo on your forehead and practice your elevator pitch.

That message is the shocking reality that hordes of freshly terminated workers are receiving as they show up for their orientation sessions at outplacement firms.

Those executives fortunate enough to have received a company-paid stint at one of these “career management” clinics are finding that having a typo-free resume and knowing how to search Monster.com may not spell success in a market where it is estimated that 9,000 jobs are being lost every day.

The issue of how to repackage a demoralized and shell-shocked job candidate is just now gathering steam. Goldman Sachs economist Ed McKelvey said February 12 that 9 percent unemployment will be a reality before the fourth quarter, and that the jobless rate will be in the double digits in 2010.

The unfortunate reality is that many victims of this cross-industry economic morass are simply handed their final paycheck and told they are finished. Those rewarded with outplacement services at least have an opportunity to commiserate with others suffering the same plight.

In the first 15 minutes of the “buckle your seatbelt” orientation webinar at the Manhattan office of Drake Beam Morris, www.dbm.com, the newly jobless were told about a training session for those who would like to take advantage of their career setback to retire, and another track for entrepreneurs on starting a business.

Those whose stomachs were settled enough to throw themselves back into the workaday world were strongly encouraged to think of themselves as a product in need of packaging, marketing and a sales strategy.

The experienced PR and advertising people in the DBM conference room started shifting uncomfortably in their chairs and fiddling with their Blackberries when they heard marketing expertise was needed. Clearly, they were wrestling with internal demons — like whether to thrust their hands into the air, like Arnold Horshack on Welcome Back Kotter, and offer to craft a multimillion-dollar proposal for people who might be eating dinner at a soup kitchen.

It’s too bad the marketers did not offer some tips for job hunting in a Web 2.0 world. Other than one DBM webinar encouraging the use of LinkedIn, there was zero counseling on the DIY tools being used to make candidates highly visible and desirable to employers.

Short of hiring BBDO Worldwide to build a campaign around you, there are some pretty basic and inexpensive/free steps that I have been sharing with job seekers who are keen to be known as thought leaders in their industry while hunting their next position. Put less emphasis on Latin CV, curriculum vitae, and more on the new reality, candidate visibility .

Rather than chastising executives not to wear jeans, modern career counselors ought to be recommending to execs that they consider burning their ties and becoming Web 2.0 savvy. The candidate who reads the blogs and the Twitter and Facebook feeds of people in their field are going to be vastly smarter than others who rely on stale corporate websites, Hoover’s profiles or boilerplate paragraphs in press releases. For those who don’t know how or why to use Twitter, I’ve been recommending Commoncraft’s excellent video, Twitter in Plain English.

Another wonderful thing about new media is that audiences are more nano-targeted than ever before. Gone are the days when there are blogs and TV shows that simply talk about cooking. Now we’re into low-sodium pescetarian cooking. This specialization means that virtually everyone who is out of work can locate the group talking about there area of expertise and join the conversation. Among the easiest tools for this is http://www.blogsearch.google.com

Those whose insights represent original thinking, and who are comfortable being on stage, might want to go one step further and offer themselves up to the media, organizers of industry conferences and analysts. In the pre-Internet days, barriers to entry for new experts were very high. You needed an expensive PR person to get your name and credentials in front of the assignment editors and other gatekeepers. Not anymore. In the same way Craigslist has made it easy to find a Yiddish-speaking masseuse in Rhode Island, services like PR Newswire’s ProfNet can connect you with reporters who are looking for quotable sources on all kinds of topics. You can see a segment of ProfNet’s media queries via Twitter and can complete an “expert profile” so you are included in a database searched by members of the media. Both services are free. If you want the complete feed of ProfNet’s 150+ daily reporter queries, there is a subscription fee. (Disclosure: I used to be president of PR Newswire and still do some consulting for the organization.) Another service, supported by sponsors rather than subscription fees, features requests for speakers and interviewees, yet some of those requesting experts are far from established, respected venues. Whenever responding to a request for help, do some research on the publication, show or individual that might end up interviewing you, and do some prep work so you can easily stay on point and convey no more than one or two key messages.

None of the above suggestions will earn you immediate income.  But they’ll keep your mind in the game and may unearth some job opportunities that have not yet appeared on Ladders.com or Monster.  There are a couple of organizations that will pay experts for their domain knowledge, but these firms are quite selective of who they add to their so-called councils.

The biggest such operation, Gerson Lehrman, makes its money from hedge fund managers and corporations willing to pay a middleman to arrange access to professionals willing to share their expertise. Job seekers participating in these interviews should make sure they don’t pass along any information that’s the property of their former employer.  A wrong step here could jeopardize a former employee’s severance agreement or, worse, get someone into hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission if insider information is disclosed.

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