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now they’re doing multiple things--it’s not like if you’re on Instagram you’re not on Tumblr. You use Whatsapp for this group, and you use Snapchat for these friends. It’s like a complete mess right now.

The thing that is really different has to do with how your life is configured in relationship to technology versus other opportunities. As an adult, you have the ability to go out and hang out with your friends when you want to. Yeah, work may get in the way; yeah, you might not feel like it; yeah, you might be too busy, but you still have a choice over your time and your schedule in a way that young people do not. Their lives are very heavily configured and structured. Their ability to get together in unstructured time with friends is extremely difficult.

To them Facebook is everyone they ever knew, and Twitter is something they've locked down to just a handful of people they care about--which is often the opposite of how adults use them.

Subjects were asked to report when they could explain why they favored one deck over another. It required about 50 cards before a participant began to change their behavior and favor a certain deck, and about 80 cards before they became aware of why they did it. Rationality is a relatively slow process.

Damasio formulated the landmark somatic marker hypothesis. This model of decision making shows how our decisions often depend upon access to what he calls somatic markers, feelings that are tagged and stored in the body and our unconscious minds. As Damasio states, “It is emotion that allows you to mark things as good, bad, or indifferent literally in the flesh.”

The topline reports skim the surface because we’re asking consumers and ourselves to explain primarily intuitive purchase decisions. Intuition by definition is “something that is known or understood without proof or evidence.” The primacy of rational analysis is reflected in the abysmal failure rates of these tests. Most ideas that pass, go on to fail in market--about 80% of the new products launched in the US.

To which social media brands do consumers feel the most attachment? Facebook ranked number one in a Brand Dependence Social Media Survey conducted by UTA Brand Studio

And we're not talking about "liking," apparently. To clarify, attachment, which is at the core of Brand Dependence research methodology, refers to the degree to which consumers believe a brand is like themselves and the degree to which thoughts and feelings about a brand come to mind,

Facebook was followed by Instagram, then YouTube, Pinterest and Reddit in the February 2014 survey of 2,006 U.S. adults aged 18 and up.

Back in April, the fast feeder was re-launching its Facebook page and in an effort to get a fresh start, offered all of the followers of its previous page a free Big Mac to not join the new page (giving away up to 1,000 Big Macs). The rationale: the brand had low engagement and a lot of fans whose activity consisted of making negative cracks and asking for discounts. In the wake of the stunt, about two-thirds, or 28,000, of its Facebook fans took up the offer, leaving just 8,000 fans on the new page.

Burger King Scandinavia marketing director Sven Hars stands by the decision to prioritize quality over quantity. "This campaign gave us the opportunity to get rid of all the fans that just liked us because of freebies," says Hars. "We stopped focusing on how many likes we had, and put time and resources into finding out what to talk about and how to engage our fans."

Here’s the problem with interactivity: There’s no evidence people actually want it in their stories. No one watches Mad Men or reads Gone Girl yearning for control of the story as it unfolds. Interaction is precisely what most of us don’t want during story time. The more we interact with a story, the more we have to maintain the alertness of the mind operating in the real world. We can’t achieve the dreamy trance that constitutes so much of the joy of story--and the power. And the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Finnegan’s Wake, for all its splendor as a kind of impressionistic word painting, repels readers because of its interactivity. Most critics think that Joyce was trying to get away from what he called “wideawake language” to re-create the chaos of dreaming life. Paradoxically, however, the sheer difficulty of Finnegan’s Wake forces readers to maintain a “wideawake” frame of mind as they attempt to puzzle their way through. They can’t slip into the waking dream of story time.

Story resists reinvention. As the example of Finnegan’s Wake shows, storytelling is not something that can be endlessly rejiggered and reengineered. Story is like a circle. A circle is a circle. The minute you start fussing with the line you create a non-circle. Similarly, story only works inside narrow bounds of possibility. Imagine narrative transportation as this powerful brain capacity that is protected by a lock. The lock can only be opened with a specific combination. For as long as there have been humans, the ways of undoing the lock have been passed down through generations of storytellers. Going back to the earliest forms of oral folktales and moving forward through stage plays, to printed novels, and modern YouTube shorts, the fundamentals of successful storytelling have not changed at all.

When it comes to the fundamentals of story, there is not now--and never will be--anything new under the sun.

If you still want to work in the tech world but are reconsidering coding, designer Nick Marsh suggests doing something coders find useful. Brilliant as great developers are, there are plenty of things that they hate doing or are just no good at. Coding requires a level of focus bordering on tunnel vision, and if there’s one thing developers hate, it’s distractions. For a coder “distractions” mean dealing with business people, management, customers or, in fact, anyone outside the engineering team. If you want to get popular with developers, spare them from some of these interactions, which they often see as a shocking waste of their time. A great product manager, for example, is as crucial to success as a competent coder. It doesn’t matter how clear the code is, if nobody wants the product. Translate the language of the developers into that of the users and vice versa. Promote the product. All makers of creative work want their work to be used. Marsh concludes that it’s much more important to understand coders than to understand code

brands invest $44 billion in content every year.

The modern-day marketer balances left- and right-brain thinking. They use SEO and technology as an enabler and distributor, using content marketing creativity to build holistic content and SEO programs that result in measurable business outcomes.

SEO and content strategies need to be aligned for optimal marketing performance, yet the costs and time associated with training and development can negatively impact productivity, scale and revenue. This catch 22 makes it difficult to achieve such levels of collaboration, and divergence remains.

Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger responded to Oreo’s campaign in a recent article in Wired: “ . . . is this going to sell more Oreos at the end of the day? Hard to tell. [But] it definitely makes the brand seem like a more clever, more interesting, sharp brand. So in terms of brand equity, this is as effective, if not more effective, than just showing another Super Bowl ad.”

Brands cannot succeed in the social media space without building it into their strategy. However, without a solid strategy that transforms real­-time moments into insight­-deriving conversations, these moments are purely noise. Extending these moments into response­-driven conversations can build meaningful consumer relationships that result in increased value and opportunity.

o português José Fernando Freire de Sousa, que lidera o grupo de trabalho sobre indústrias criativas

Há dois anos a trabalhar na Comissão Europeia e a seguir a preparação do Livro, através da unidade de Políticas Culturais, José Amaral Costa

Os ingleses foram dos primeiros a ter um plano estratégico nacional de apoio às indústrias criativas e culturais. É o próprio primeiro-ministro Gordon Brown o coordenador desse plano,

For Adobe Creative Suite® 4 and 5 components: Find Kuler panels in Photoshop®, Illustrator®, InDesign®, Fireworks®, and Adobe Flash® Professional software by choosing Window > Extensions > Kuler.

Q: I saved kuler themes with the CS4 kuler panel, using the Save Theme button. How do I move them to my CS5 applications? A: When you install CS5, there will be a one-time migration of CS4 themes saved in this way, to CS5. Beyond that CS4 applications will not see new themes saved using CS5, and vice versa.

The parallax style has excited web developers and inspired any number of hype lists. It's also triggered a backlash among critics who feel its bells-and-whistles approach detracts from actual content. Pitchfork creative director Michael Renaud recently told the Atlantic Wire he expects people to "tire" of the trend within a year or two.

the parallax site was only superior in one sense--fun. None of the other survey measures indicated a significant difference in user experience between the two sites. Parallax didn't even edge the standard site in questions about visual appeal (although participants did think it looked slightly more "professional"). Frederick also discovered one critical disadvantage of parallax: test participants who suffered from motion sickness found the style disorienting.

Sobering as this first careful study of parallax might be to web designers, Frederick still believes it's a fad with a future. He cautions developers to think more carefully about the context in which parallax is applied. Text-heavy sites that employ parallax scrolling seem more likely to disorient users, he says. Sites that emphasize visual elements--images, infographics, or data visualizations, in particular--are probably a better fit for the style.