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Design thinking, however, is a slightly murky concept that means different things to different people. At heart, though, it is about fusing the creative and open-ended with the analytical and operational

For us, there are two broad skill sets--strategy and design--with no buffer in between to organize them and tell them how to work together.

a lot of organizations take a slightly patronizing view of design and creative types, assuming they can’t really be expected to understand and manage things like budgets. We assume the opposite--that everyone can and should be a good businessperson.

The good news about hashtags on Facebook, from analytics company Simply Measured, is that 20 percent of posts by Interbrand 100 brands, or the top 100 global brands, are using them. The bad news: Simply Measured saw no “measurable change” in the performance of posts with hashtags and those without.

The longer status updates are, the less engagement typically results, but on the flip side, status updates of 50 characters or fewer did not perform well.

The averages for the top 10 brands are 19.8 million likes and 2.5 posts per day, but “a large variance” exists.

Google on Thursday updated its Gmail service so that you'll never have to click that pesky “Display images below” link again. Gmail will now automatically display images in email, the catch being that Google will host those images on its own servers. Prior to the change, most emailed images would be loaded from third-party servers—often enough, those of marketers.

But by filtering these photos through its own servers, however, Google may have shut out the use of Web bugs or beacons—bits of code that lets an advertiser know that an email has been opened. Marketers use images as beacons because, at least until now, services like Gmail would upload such images from an advertiser’s own web server. Any image can be a beacon, even an invisible one no more than a pixel wide.

the following likely consequences for his audience: Marketers won't be able to tell whether you've opened an email for the second or subsequent time Web bugs won't report reliable geolocations for opened emails, as they'll pick up the IP addresses of Gmail servers, not recipients Countdown clocks sent as animated images won't show the right time if email is opened a second or subsequent time Analytics will only track the first time an email is opened Marketers won't be able to update or change images once they're sent out

A new chart from Flurry, a mobile analytics company, shows that over 86% of the time spent in iOS and Android apps is taking place inside applications. That’s up 6% from just last year.