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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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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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 business of wealth management marketing is evolving – specifically, we are beginning to blog, tweet and link. Think your clients are not in the social media demographic? Think again. Bessemer Trust, the Wall Street Journal and more clients than you might imagine are already engaged in social media.

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Over the past year, content marketing and thought leadership have become popular catch-phrases. Try typing “#content marketing” into a Twitter Search and see how many results you get; this past Friday, the topic generated nearly 50 tweets in the span of an hour.

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Ok, we get it. The media landscape is changing. So much so that the Twitter handle @themediaisdying has almost 22,000 followers and has tweeted over 3,500 updates since the account launched on November 18, 2008. While “dying” might be a bit of a dramatization, the media is without a doubt evolving – and doing so at warp speed. So why do public relations professionals continue to pitch the media as if it was circa 2002? Good question – and kudos to the Publicity Club of New York for more tactfully addressing this very question.

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