Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success is a solid, relevant, timely, and easy-to-read book about personal branding. It is targeted at young adults, but people of different ages in the following 3 groups might enjoy it: 

1. Anyone who is confused or clueless about today’s internet
2. Anyone interested in bettering themselves in the ‘workplace’
3. Anyone interested in learning more about social media and marketing

I personally believe that most young adults should already know much of what makes up this book, but since that is not the case, I’m glad that someone from my generation actually got a book published on the topic. The book is well-organized and it has a lot of insightful and practical information.

Many older people would probably greatly benefit from this book, but unfortunately, some of them will not take it very seriously. The fact that the author is young might make him seem less than credible to someone who has ‘paid his dues’ and often buys self-help books at FedEx Kinko’s. Such a person might not know what to make of Wordpress, podcasts, or Twitter. On the other hand, to a 25 year-old tech-geek with a marketing degree, such as myself, Dan seems approachable, tech-savvy, and normal.

And as the Miami Herald put it, Dan’s youth gives him a “competitive edge“. 

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The last 6-12 months have been quite interesting. The credit crisis hit harder than most people expected and we now find ourselves in an unapologetic downturn. On the upside, social media (or social web) has exploded everywhere and it is now officially mindblasting.

From Facebook co-founders working for former presidential nominees, to Twitter love on Today, Colbert Report, Oprah, Super News! and Ellen, social media and anything and everything related to it has become quite the serious matter.

Celebrities have become bigger celebrities (Shaq, the real one, is now appreciated much more for his tweets than for his free throws). Congress is getting super duper good at least at something. Universities are offering social media degrees. Companies and brands are now rushing to create profiles, viral videos and YouTube apologies, blogs, forums (Verizon’s Community Forums), podcasts, plugins, iPhone apps, browser toolbars, RSS feeds, creative forms of crowdsourcing, wikis, Second life empty islands, volunteer networks (V2V + Starbucks), Adobe Air applications, entire web sites (skittles anyone?),  and ad campaigns (Burger King Whopper Sacrifice)…

The list goes on and on. And ALL of this around the idea that social media / web / interweb is the secret to generating meaningful and desperately needed cost-effective buzz.

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