Have we all had this moment? You wake up at some god-awful moment in the middle of the night, like 3:48 a.m., and your finger hurts, and you decide in an instant that it’s bone cancer. You will not see your children grow up, you can’t remember if you paid the most recent premium for your life insurance, and you wonder how your oldest is ever going to learn his multiplication tables without you.

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Welcome to another round-up of the financial news we’re keeping an eye on this week. In addition to a few deals happening here and there – including AIG’s announcement that it will sell its ALICO business to MetLife, and Royal Dutch Shell and PetroChina offering to buy Arrow Energy of Australia – here’s what we’ll be watching (in addition to all of the best- and worst-dressed recaps from the Oscars):

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Every social media campaign comes with a unique set of objectives, goals, tactics and related metrics, but increasing brand or product awareness is almost always a top priority.

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As I write this post, there are over 280 people who claim to be “thought leaders” in their Twitter biography. It’s certainly a popular label, but I’m pretty certain they haven’t all earned the title.

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March is starting on a high note, with sunny skies in New York City and the second edition of Our Two Cents provided by Bliss PR’s Financial Services Practice Group. This week, the news highlights focus on the markets, insurance and banking.

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Commercial real estate social media is a wild frontier – and its pioneers are saddled with heavy wagons weighed down with members of an industry consistently slow to adopt new technologies. This makes for a slow trip over the social media Rockies for commercial real estate social media pioneers – people like Leopardo’s Todd Andrlik, Retail Traffic editor David Bodamer and commercial real estate deal junkie and publisher Jay Rickey.

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No question about it, the marketing of professional services can be a frustrating way to earn a living. This holds true whether you’re an employee of a professional firm or a “hired gun.” Common complaints are (a) egomaniacal clients, (b) unreasonable expectations that often flow from “a.” and (c) a paucity of solid content.

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Over the past several months, we’ve received great feedback on our weekly news summaries, including a few suggestions on how these posts can be more helpful to our readers. We’ve taken this feedback to heart, and have decided to change our “weekly news roundup” feature to focus on major stories breaking in the financial services industry. Moving forward, Our Two Cents will be authored by members of BlissPR’s Financial Services Practice Group.

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In between watching the Olympics this weekend (was it just me, or was the sportscaster announcing the men’s Nordic Combined REALLY excited?), I finally got to play around with Google Buzz,Google’s newest foray into the social media world. Briefly, Google Buzz “socializes” Gmail by allowing Gmail users to “follow” people they know, update their status and comment on others’ status.

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The Internet has greatly improved the availability of all sorts of information and advice, including an abundance of personal finance resources. That’s the good news.

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