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The people who use your product or service: The voice of the customer is the most influential of all. Provide loyal consumers with an opportunity to get involved by sharing their stories. Identify digital influencers that fit your brand aesthetic and explore partnership opportunities. This approach is heavily evident in the fashion industry, where brands routinely work with fashion bloggers on everything from Twitter chats to advertising campaigns.

The people who support you: Why not collaborate on content development with partners or vendors? By working together, budgets become more manageable and both parties can benefit from the potential PR story. By working together, you can deliver deeper impact and cast a wider net. 

With more brands developing more and more content, we will naturally reach a point of over-saturation where only the very best stories will make an impact. As such, it is absolutely crucial to begin to refine and optimize current content marketing practices. Also, with the line blurring between marketing or brand managers and content developers, it’s worth noting that those best suited for positions in content marketing have a rare combination of business and marketing acumen, digital savvy, as well as journalism, public relations, film, and even creative writing. For those with this mega-mix, employment opportunities abound.

Humans, like the mice in Skinner’s box, crave predictability and struggle to find patterns, even when none exist. Variability is the brain’s cognitive nemesis and our minds make deduction of cause and effect a priority over other functions like self-control and moderation.

Recent neuroscience has revealed that our dopamine system works not to provide us with rewards for our efforts, but to keep us searching by inducing a semi-stressful response we call desire.

Email, for example, is addictive because it provides all three reward types at random intervals. First, we have a social obligation to answer our emails (the tribe). We are also conditioned to know that an email may tell us information about a potential business opportunity (the hunt). And finally, our email seems to call for us to complete the task of removing the unopened item notification in a sort of challenge to gain control over it (the self). Interestingly, these motivations go away as soon as we’ve actually opened all our emails and the mystery disappears. We’re addicted to checking email while there is still variability of reward and once that’s gone, emails languish in our inboxes.

We’re meant to be part of a tribe so our brains seek out rewards that make us feel accepted, important, attractive, and included.

But as sociable as we are, our individual need for sustenance is even more crucial. The need to acquire physical things, such as food and supplies, is part of the brain’s operating system and we clearly wouldn’t have survived the millennia without this impulse. But where we once hunted for food, today we hunt for deals and information. The same compulsion that kept us searching for food coerces us to open emails from Groupon and Appsumo. New shopping startups make the hunt for products entertaining by introducing variability to what the user may find next. Pinterest and Wanelo keep users searching with an endless supply of eye candy, a trove of dopamine flooding desirables. To see an example of how the hunt for information engages users, look no further then the right side of this page. There, you will find a listing of popular posts. Using intriguing images and short, attention-grabbing text, the list is a variable reward mechanism designed to keep you hunting for your next discovery.

We also seek mastery of the world around us. Game mechanics, found everywhere from Zynga games to business productivity apps like to-do lists, provide a variable rewards system built around our need to control, dominate, and complete challenges. Slaying new messages in your inbox stimulates neurons similar to those stimulated by playing StarCraft.

Variable rewards come in three types and involve the persistent pursuit of: rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt, and rewards of the self.

As B.F. Skinner discovered over 50 years ago, variable rewards are a powerful inducement to creating compulsions.

the feature offers developers unique opportunities to reach users who have taken specific in-app actions, including in their competitor’s apps. It also gives brands ways to segment and target their fans by the actions they take on their page or a competitor’s page.

Action spec targeting is also interesting in that advertisers can define a “negative action spec,” meaning users who have not taken a particular action. For example, a developer could reach users who have played a game, but not made an in-app purchase in the last 10 days. Advertisers can also reach friends of users who have taken a particular action.

The story with marketing and young people is the story with marketing and adults. When people are looking for information, they're much more open to advertising than when they're trying to hang out with their friends and you're getting in their way. Branding and being recognized as a brand is a lot about being an authentic participant in those spaces. Young people are totally aware of when a company is making a YouTube video just to sell to them. They're not dumb, they totally get this. The thing is, it's funny when they're on YouTube and seeking it out, it's not funny when it's getting in the way of talking with their friends.

What's interesting is that as a lot of young people are running away from their parents into a variety of apps, they're also running away from marketers. That will be an interesting battleground in the next couple of years, because that creates monetization issues for the app creators.

Google Now gets the balance nearly perfect. Google Now anticipates my information needs based on where I'm going, what I have on my calendar, the time of day, etc. It's genius

Sergey Brin has stated that "We want Google to be the third half of your brain."

With Glass, Google has taken a step too far toward pushing information on its users rather than letting them control the flow of information. 

Our social feeds will continue to be under siege by the world of inane crap. Truly great content and masterful storytelling will be the only thing that breaks through the morass. The best brands and agencies will focus on this.

Share-worthy content will become the Holy Grail.

There are no experts in this business, and we find that everyone can use a digital brush-up, including clients. If you want to sell innovation, everyone needs to know how to evaluate and measure it. Creating the right conditions for innovation is essential. And you don't just do it once. It has to be done regularly.