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At the very least, Facebook’s decision to move beyond treating all “likes” as equal has introduced a new sense of instability. Publishers are beginning to regard Facebook less as a system to be figured out, or gamed, than an ever-changing mystery. A strong ally, until it isn’t. “We went up for one of their summit things a few weeks ago and we got the sense they didn’t even really know how this massive beast they have actually works,” one staffer at a major magazine told BuzzFeed of News Feed’s influence. “And that they can make or break entire companies.”

Apple's infamous 30% subscription revenue cut prompted the Financial Times to abandon its iOS apps and instead focus on developing a cross-platform Web app written in HTML5. 

Evidently, the native-app approach is not working for readers, either - at least, not as well as the Web. FT has seen an increase in readership and paid subscriptions since going the HTML5 route, Grimshaw said. 

Native apps do offer potential advantages in terms of the reader's experience. They can be more immersive and lack some of the design limitations of the Web. Still, in far too many cases, apps created by publishers end up being little more than digital reproductions of the print product with a few bells and whistles tacked on. 

From the reader's standpoint, it makes sense that the Web would be a popular option for tablet reading. After all, there's much more content there, and it's intricately linked together. A digital magazine can offer a refreshing escape from the anarchy of the Web, but it's only a matter of time before readers find it necessary to return to a browser. 

The most popular reasons for sequential device usage include web browsing (81 percent), shopping online (67 percent), managing finances (46 percent) and planning a trip (43 percent). Eighty-one percent of sequential online shopping is spontaneous, which Google credits to the widespread availability of smartphones.

98 percent of sequential screeners move between devices in the same day to complete a task

Seventy-seven percent of the time, TV viewers have another device plugged in — with smartphones (49 percent) and PCs/laptops (34 percent) the most popular.

The study also found search to be a critical connector between devices used sequentially. Consumers use search to pick up on a second device where they left off on the first 63 percet of the time they are conducting multi-device search, 61 percent of the time they are browsing the Internet using multiple devices, 51 percent of the time they are shopping online via multiple screens, and 43 percent of the time they are using more than one device to watch online video.

Google advises digital marketers to allow customers to save their progress between devices, as well as use tactics like keyword parity (maintaining the same keywords across different publishers and the three primary match type silos of broad, phrase and exact) to ensure that they can be found easily via search when that customer moves to the next device.

80 percent of searches that happen on smartphones are spur-of-the-moment, and 44 percent of these spontaneous searches are goal-oriented. And more than half (52 percent) of PC/laptop searches are spontaneous, with 43 percent goal-oriented

The report notes that traditional ‘one-way’ marketing techniques like banner ads are clearly ineffective in a landscape of “perpetually connected consumers”. Web users are tuning out this old school type of marketing or failing to notice it in the first place or forgetting they ever saw it — which may also partially explain why personal recommendations from people they know well are so much more trusted. With so many sources of information to filter, better the devil you know and all that.

The survey also indicates there is still considerable trust in natural search engine results, and also in consumer written reviews, such as Amazon’s user reviews — which were both ranked around 3x more trusted than social marketing.

Publishers will be able to manage the recommendations widget from their Google+ publisher accounts. From there, they can decide when exactly the widget should appear and manage a list of pages where the widget shouldn’t appear, as well as a list of pages that should never appear in recommendations.

A 2012 study by ROI Research found that when users engage with friends on social media sites, it's the pictures they took that are enjoyed the most. Forty-four percent of respondents are more likely to engage with brands if they post pictures than any other media

Search engines now rank content based on social conversations and sharing, not just websites alone.

Marketers are already confronting the implications of a more shadowy Internet, specifically the phenomenon known as DarkSocial and DarkSearch.

In the near-term, brands will have to confront a potentially darker Internet, as the roadblocks to data-driven marketing thrown up by DarkSocial, DarkSearch and an emerging DarkNet increase. There will be real consequences, including in investments in marketing, if it becomes more difficult to quantify customer engagement.

cloud services like Google and Apple are proactively stripping referral data out when sending users to third party sites via search. These DarkSearch visitors, like their DarkSocial counterparts, also end up in the “direct referral” bucket of analytics reporting, indistinguishable from the geography-less visitors who typed your domain name directly into their browsers to visit your site.

“DarkSocial,” estimates that 69% of the publication’s social traffic is dark--meaning users who access content by clicking on a link emailed or IMed to them. Marketers don’t know where these users came from or what exactly drove them to their website.

In the longer-term, we may see a nascent e-commerce system more familiar to science fiction fans (and current users of services like Silk Road, the online illegal drug marketplace). Imagine a future Amazon.com-like e-commerce site where all profiles are anonymous, all payments utilize crypto-currencies, and all deliveries of physical goods use inexpensive, multi-hop services that conceal the ultimate end delivery address behind anonymous dropboxes.

Corporate websites perhaps have a key reputational role to play in the marketing mix, supplementing and underpining social media marketing spending — by providing reassurance of a brand’s professionalism where a Facebook page can provide evidence of user engagement/approval (or otherwise).

The results indicate that corporate websites still have a key role to play when it comes to marketing a company’s offerings, despite the big role also played by social media. It’s also notable that mobile marketing is still relatively low down the priorities list, with an aggregated percentage of 24%. It’s still far better than the poor unloved (and doubtless rarely updated) company blog, though, with just 6%.

The survey asked respondents to rank different marketing activities first, second and third in importance, collating all three preferences to get the overall percentage. On first place preference, corporate websites came out joint top with online advertising, cited by 18% apiece as the most important activity. Social media slumped in importance on this measure — cited by just six per cent of respondents as the most important activity (and second only to the company blog):

The top priorities for increased budgets in 2013 are commerce experiences, social and mobile marketing, and content creation and management

All of us writers at ReadWriteWeb participate in varying degrees on Twitter too. We post and repost links to our stories and that of our colleagues, and many people follow us as a result. All well and good. But wouldn't it be better if someone else posts a link to our stories on their Twitter account? Doesn't that link carry more weight than just our own flogging of our content? Yes.

you have to constantly feed your discussions and other sites with content, with recommendations, and spend time to make sure that you are part of the ongoing conversations online. It certainly is easier to just put up a piece of content on your own website, press publish, and walk away. But it is more satisfying once you get your OPM network working for you.