Planet Abell

I'm moderating a Social Media Week panel tomorrow called " Making the Brand: Social Media for the Long Haul " and I'm trolling for questions. The panelists are: Gary Vaynerchuk, Host of WineLibrary.TV Ian Schafer, Founder/CEO of interactive marketing agency Deep Focus AdWeek digital editor and "notorious twitterer" Brian Morrissey Check out the link for details. And, anybody have an questions you want put to this braintrust?

Mad Men is one of my favorite shows, so much so that I don't even trust it to the perfect television nanny that is TiVo. The series is an iPhone obsession I treat myself to for my Metro North commute, which runs parallel to the Ossining-to-Grand Central Terminal route Don Draper take when he bothers to go home (which isn't often, as it happens). I don't need to explain the obsession to people in the know. But I have some personal reasons, too: It takes place at a time in my native New York City that was a Golden Age, during the afterglow of World War II when the Greatest Generation was giving way to a bunch of Boomers who would shepard this nation to a period of great prosperity and fairness. It was the Boomers who decided that Gays were not "perverts" -- as described by one Mad Man -- and who changed the world just enough so that a black man who's greatest realistic aspiration might have been to operate an elevator at Sterling Cooper could now imagine bec...