Toni Morrison once said that “People will not remember what you say, but they will always remember how you made them feel.” Jeremy Epstein adds, “…and now they can tell all their friends how you made them feel - very, very quickly.”

Certainly, the rise of social media has made our world seem more immediate. Waiting for someone to tell us something through email is so, well, last year. The sharing of information happens in real time now, through sites like Twitter, Facebook or MySpace, through RSS blog feeds and community. We get information via the Web and on our phones, through posts, text messages, and text-to-voice technologies.

The speed that we employ to take in information also contributes to the speed with which we make up our minds about people, events, and ideas. Skim a blog and decide if their philosophy fits yours. Visit a social networking page and determine whether the person should be your “friend”. Visit a Twitter page and decide if you should click Follow.

How do you manage your personal brand in this time of instant decisions? We may not know how all the pieces fit together, but Jeremy Epstein does. In fact, he addresses the issue head on, in his Igniting the Revolution blog, in a post called What you can expect from my twitterfeed.

Epstein talks more about this topic in his presentation, Marketing Survival Strategies for the Attention(less) Economy, at Web Content 2009.