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

It’s too easy to fall into the trap of, "I don’t have time to write a full-fledged blog post so I’ll put it off til later." Twitter, with its 140-character limit, beckons seductively as the shorthand for blogging. So I thought I’d put up some pics I took over the weekend, three days BEFORE the cherry blossoms are due to peak here in DC. All by way of saying that the best approach to blogging is to do it. Don’t always wait until the thought is

Yet another business reason to use Twitter is staring you in the face (in case you're not convinced). I can't physically attend the terrific Government 2.0 BarCamp taking place today in DC. No matter... I can peruse microblogging updates from dozens of attendees by plugging in #gov20camp to Twitter Search. Even better, I can subscribe to the RSS news feed for the event and view pics uploaded to Flickr and tagged gov20camp.

These aren't any ol' cupcakes. They're at Baked & Wired in Georgetown. And they've been declared the best in the nation by The Atlantic. Andrew Wilson, HHS's social media celeb, is our special guest. He'll tell us about crowdsourcing the new HHS Center for New Media, as well as using social media as a crisis communications strategy for the Peanut Butter recall. Full disclosure: I'm producing this social media event series with several local