2009 was a very different year, wasn’t it? For everyone associated with investing. Personally, we’ll remember it as the first year that we had a view into the everyday life of financial advisors, thanks to Twitter. We think it’s sharpened our understanding of what advisors need and hence the value we bring to our clients.

As we review our direct tweets from the year, we see lots of dialogue with our fave advisors and the people we consider as part of the financial advisor support system. We’re also reminded of our interactions with advisors who have since stopped tweeting or have deleted their accounts altogether. We wish them well and look forward to re-connecting in 2010.

But as the days dwindle down to a precious two, we call your attention to three advisors whose tweets we’ve been following all year and who are included on AdvisorTweets.com. The advisors stand out to us both because we can see what they’re doing and because what they’re doing strikes us as pretty innovative. While their accomplishments are familiar to those in the Twitter stream, we thought we’d note them here for those outside the Twitter echo chamber.

We wrote about @RussThornton on our RockTheBoatMarketing.com blog in April. Russ founded the FinancialAdvisor Forum which offers advisors true networking. We show it to clients when we fear they’re on t`he verge of over-investing in their advisor content sites–if advisors are going to network, they’re likelier to network on Russ’ site.

Russ is a bit of a technology geek, which we mean as a compliment. We’ve shared notes with him off and on this year and were sorry when he said he was leaving Twitter in the fall. He’s back on Twitter now and offering a free five-part email course that offers to show investors “how to take control of your wealth management.” A couple of advisors have tweeted their approval.

Carl Richards’ (@BehaviorGap) work on his own BehaviorGap.com site and syndicated on MorningstarAdvior.com set the tone early in the year with his sketches and writing that seek to reveal and understand investor motivation. As you’ll note in his bio, he describes himself as the Founder of the Secret Society of REAL Financial Planners, a group he made up this year.

We commented on Carl’s rock star status in our ebook (5 Friction-less Ways Investment Management Marketers Can Take Part in Social Media) in May, and we continually show the Behavior Gap work to our clients within asset management companies. There’s an economy (and a directness) to its messages that many mutual fund/ETF marketing communications lack.

Carl is on Financial Planning’s list of Movers and Shakers of the year.

Good Financial Cents, the blog of Jeff Rose, CFP (@jeffrosecfp) yesterday published a rich list of the top 135-plus 2009 personal finance posts as selected by the bloggers that wrote them. From my perspective as a former journalist and publisher, the work involved in coordinating the collection alone was impressive. What it shows, as we’ve seen all year as his work has been syndicated, is that this financial planner has serious content marketing chops, including search engine optimization savvy.

There’s still so much room for advisors to innovate and interact in new ways online. These three don’t cover the waterfront, by any means. (And if you have additional names to add, please comment below.)

Here’s to the new year and what it brings as advisors elevate their art of communicating their value online!