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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.

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“If you’re designing a website and not thinking about the user experience on mobile and tablets, you’re going to disappoint a lot of users,” he warns. Designer Tom Muller thinks big brands getting on board will lead to agencies “increasingly using responsive design as a major selling point, persuading clients to future-proof digital marketing communications”. When doing so, Clearleft founder Andy Budd believes we’ll see an end to retrofitting RWD into existing products: “Instead, RWD will be a key element for a company’s mobile strategy, baked in from the start.” Because of this, Budd predicts standalone mobile-optimised sites and native apps will go into decline: “This will reduce the number of mobile apps that are website clones, and force companies to design unique mobile experiences targeted towards specific customers and behaviours.”

During 2012, the average site size crept over a megabyte, which designer/developer Mat Marquis describes as “pretty gross”, but he reckons there’s a trend towards “leaner, faster, more efficient websites” – and hopes it sticks. He adds: “Loosing a gigantic website onto the web isn’t much different from building a site that requires browser ‘X’: it’s putting the onus on users, for our own sakes.”

Designer and writer Stephanie Rieger reckons that although people now know “web design isn’t print,” they’ve “forgotten it’s actually software, and performance is therefore a critical UX factor”.

According to a new poll of U.S. marketers conducted by Gartner, corporate websites are ranked as the top digital activity for marketing “success” — beating marketing on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Social media marketing, however, ranked as the next most important activity, equal in importance to online advertising.

The survey, conducted in November and December of 2012, polled a relatively small sample of 250+ marketers from U.S.-based companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue

Design, development and maintenance of the corporate website was cited by 45% of survey respondents as contributing to marketing success, with marketing on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter cited by 43%. Digital/online advertising was also cited by 43%

Justin Pearse recently wrote a nice article on the state of digital content. He argues that content needs to be thoughtful, meaningful and well executed for it to be effective – it should be less about the brand, and more about the audience.

While his argument is absolutely correct, it pivots on the idea that engagement often begins and ends with a piece of content. The reality is that the failure of content marketing is in the belief that content exists in a vacuum.If you create a piece of content and don't support it, you're probably going to be disappointed. In other words, if we define experience as the beginning-to-end engagement with a brand, then content is simply part of the spectrum.

Digital content needs to be supported by great user experience (UX), solid digital strategy, attentive channel management and smart technology. To reiterate – it must be part of a system.

Rando only launched in March but the anti-social photo-sharing app that deliberately eschews the standard social network clutter of likes and comments and connections – simply letting users share random photos with random strangers and get random snaps in return — has blasted past five million photo shares after a little over two months in the wild. It is now averaging around 200,000 shares per day, says its creator ustwo.

For half that time Rando was iOS only, with its Android app not launching til April. Platform spread aside, the huge point here is that Rando has ditched all the self-congratulatory, endorphin-boosting hooks that apparently keep people tethered to their social networks. Yet managed to grow regardless. As Rando’s tagline pithily put it: ‘You have no friends’. The photos you share here will never be liked, never be favourited, and if they are shared outside Rando to other social networks, a feature Rando most definitely does not enable within its app, you likely won’t ever know anything about it. It’s a very rare digital social blackhole — but one that’s proving surprisingly popular (and all without any embedded social shares to grow virally), even while it’s refreshingly ego-free

factor in the rumblings about teens’ declining interest in traditional social networks and Rando could be something of a canary in the social networking coalmine, picking up subtle traces of Facebook fatigue, and identifying a growing appetite among mobile owners at least to take back some control and reintroduce a little private space by slamming shut those social doors. The rise of mobile messaging apps is another key trend to factor in here, apps which put private communication first, and social comms as a secondary add on. Certain age groups’ attention is arguably increasingly shifting to these more contained communications mediums — channels which offer both private and public comms within the one app, as Facebook does, but which aren’t centrally focused on publicly broadcast personal content. Rather they put the intimacy of one-to-one messaging at their core. Some, like China’s WeChat, even include serendipitous discovery features that are similar to Rando — like its Drift Bottle stranger messaging feature. 

In a 2013 survey by Econsultancy, 55% of marketers globally are planning on increasing their digital marketing budgets this year, with 39% of them planning on reallocating existing budgets toward digital channels.

This is a permanent shift, not a passing trend. Products and services must deliver value while telling engaging stories through a multitude of digital devices and within a network of multiple brands, services, and platforms.

Marketing and product teams need to work more closely. Copywriting and story teams must collaborate with user experience teams.

kids are building a personal brand from an early age. Their digital footprint will have an impact on their future. Where they end up getting admitted to college, getting a job, and more. Social media will help connect them with like-minded individuals, including mentors, that share similar interests and aspirations that can help them achieve their long-term goals.

Facebook has a minimum age restriction of 13 years old to create an account. But according to Consumer Reports, last year 78% of parents helped create their children’s Facebook pages and 7.5 million users are under the age of 13 and lied about the age associated with the account.

After getting into a discussion with the third graders, we learned that several of them had abandoned their Facebook accounts because that’s where their parents were. They knew that the adult powers that be are a hop, skip, and a click away from monitoring the kid’s accounts on Facebook. The third-grade solution was to hop from Facebook to Instagram (which, ironically, Facebook also owns). In some cases, kids said they created new, rogue Facebook accounts where they connected with their friends and used their old ones as a decoy for parental supervision.

Unruly Media's research reveals that branded Vines (see Doritos example below) are shared four times as often as branded Internet videos. What's more, Unruly found that five Vines are shared every second on Twitter—so the non-advertising world apparently digs the six-second videos, too.

4 percent of the top 100 shared Vines were made by brands. Comparatively, according to the New York-based firm, only 1 percent of Top 100 viral online videos were the work of brands.

Vines are tweeted more during the weekend than all of the weekdays combined. Also, between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m ET is when Vine activity peaks.

BuzzSpice found that 72 percent of the pages it studied exhibited what it called “manic-depression behavior,” not posting content in a consistent manner, but adding posts in flurries, then going silent for more than two weeks, in some cases.

Pages that do not stay in constant touch with their fans get decreasing score on the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm, lose visibility, and eventually disappear from their fans’ News Feeds.

its faults (battery life, tends to cause headaches, etc.)

By constantly presenting Glass wearers with information, or the opportunity to get information, Google manages to over-deliver on its mission statement at a time when we actually rely on Google to filter out noise, rather than fill our lives with more noise.

the secret to Google's business model is to embrace the abundance of the Internet's information overload but then remove the detritus and give me only what I want, when I want it, and serve up context-relevant advertising.

In 2009, a Facebook account holder Liked, on average, 4.5 Pages. In just four years, this number increased to an average of 40 Pages! Not only that, but brands have been expanding their use of social media in their marketing campaigns, raising the number of Facebook posts that they make from an average of five times per month to 36. This means that in 2009, Facebook users only had to keep up with a manageable 23 updates per month, whereas they are currently bombarded with around 1 440 updates per month!

Some countries Like even more Pages than the 40 Page average, making them even harder to penetrate. The US takes the lead, Liking a whopping 70 Pages! The UK and France are tied, with their Facebook users Liking 48 Pages, on average. Mexican Facebook users follow closely, Liking an average of 41 Pages.

Our figures show that FMCG brands in the US may find it especially difficult to reach their fans, as this industry has the most Liked Pages.

a Facebook post receives half of its reach within 30 minutes

Smartphone owners tend to reach for their phones around meal times and 86 percent of mobile internet users report using their device while watching TV

Weekends and weekdays, between 5:00-8:00pm, aren’t necessarily the optimal time to post because of newsfeed competition. During these hours, you’re likely to compete with your fans’ hundreds of friends and the other brands they follow.

you need writers and team members who can think strategically about the content that will resonate most with your audience.

Search for people asking questions about your keyword or phrase on Twitter.

“Content curation is not about collecting links or being an information packrat, it is more about putting them into a context with organization, annotation and presentation.  Content curators provide a customized, vetted selection of the best and most relevant resources on a very specific topic or theme.”