It’s not a pandemic yet but you wouldn’t know it from the exponentially growing number of tweets about swine flu and #swineflu and H1N1. Like many others, I dislike the term "viral" marketing. But there’s an eery aptness to the term this week. This is real time and big time. This is proof of concept for the power and nimbleness of social media - especially Twitter - as a communications strategy. Ambient awareness ("What are you doing right

Update: Yesterday’s BlogWell conference in New York was a huge success. You can read a stream of Tweets about #blogwell. And a great recap on a Squidoo page that parses the event via tweets about the different speakers. One of the highlights was a live performance by comedy duo and Internetainers Rhett and Link. Hilarious. Two Wal-Mart executives sitting near the stage stood up and cheered at the end of their Wal-Mart song.

If you're over 40 (or 50), you may think a new book titled Me 2.0 and written by 20-something Dan Schawbel is not for you. Think again. Especially if you're a baby boomer, over 50 and heading into the home stretch of what you hope will be a creative retirement. Dan is young but he's super savvy about a phenomenon called personal branding. The phrase was first used over a decade ago by management guru Tom Peters. If the words set your teeth on