studies suggest, if you're asked to recall a specific piece of information in a text, you'll remember where on the page you were when you read it.

Holding a book grants you a tactile sense of textual topography

consumers looked at native ads 53% more frequently that display ads, and 32% of respondents said they would share a native ad with a family member.

Does that mean those consumers will buy more of the products being advertised? The report claims an 18% lift in purchase intent for native advertising vs. banner ads. Cristina Heise, VP of ad agency gyro Cincinnati, says that ringing up a sale isn't necessarily the purpose of a native ad. "Most of marketing is about repeat exposure and conditioning associating an experience with a brand," she says.

Heise's view, native advertising "goes native" in the sense that it adjusts to its surroundings. That doesn't mean a BuzzFeed ad unit necessarily, though. Heise says a compelling fashion ad in Vogue could be considered native advertising.

One of the most common mistakes made when designing social applications is focusing immediately on rich, heavyweight interactions rather than lightweight ones. All the best social experiences online map closely to how offline social experiences work: offline, people build relationships slowly, one lightweight interaction at a time.

Every now and again we have more heavyweight interactions, such as family dinners, big nights out with friends, birthdays, anniversaries, family vacations and so on. But if we hadn’t built the relationship through many lightweight interactions over time, we’d have no interest in the heavyweight ones. The aggregation of many lightweight interactions is very powerful. It builds deep relationships, and helps people curate parts of their identity.

It takes months and years to build relationships with people, and they all are built on many lightweight interactions over time. And people build relationships with brands in the same way as they build relationships with people: slowly, one interaction at a time. Just as we don’t suddenly become best friends with someone, we don’t suddenly fall in love with a brand – so build products that support lightweight ways for people to interact and show the aggregations of those interactions over time.

Google+ is catching up on a lot of fronts to Facebook, but it's still lagging in one key metric: Time spent.

The average visitor to the social network spent 6 minutes 47 seconds on Google+'s site in March vs. 6 hours, 44 minutes on Facebook.com according to figures Nielsen supplied to Mashable. However, that number is down for Facebook. In March 2012, the average was 7 hours, 9 minutes per person. For Google, the figures are a substantial jump over the 3.3 minutes visitors spent on average on the site in February 2012, according to comScore. The figures do not include traffic via apps.

Nielsen reports that 20 million unique visitors in the U.S. used Google+'s Android and iPhone apps, a 238% rise over March 2012. On desktop, G+'s monthly uniques jumped 63% vs. the year before to 28 million.

Today the brand “voice” takes a front seat, while the hard sell takes a step back, and artfully communicating to your audience is critical in a feed-based advertising landscape that is here to stay.

Don’t Just Sell, Add Value Offer useful content that will earn you credibility with your desired audience

In 2012, content marketing was the leading tactic for 18.9% of marketers worldwide. In 2013, that percentage has grown to 34.8%.

Facebook recently announced that it will be extending Facebook Exchange (FBX) Retargeting into the News Feed, bringing the placement of these targeted ads beyond the network’s right-hand panel

Known as one of the strongest forms of targeting available in digital media, FBX helps marketers reach users on Facebook who have demonstrated interest through browsing behavior. By targeting users in a timely and contextually relevant manner, FBX can effectively drive sales, improve customer engagement, and promote brand awareness.

Ads in the News Feed have historically resulted in some of the strongest metrics compared with other locations.

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.

Why "two-way conversation"? This buzzword-y phrase is a way to distinguish the strategy from the equally buzzword-y phrase "one-way conversation" (sometimes referred to as one-way manipulation), in which a brand dominates the conversation or outputs information without really engaging. Two-way conversation, then, is a strategy that a brand uses to exude a human quality, showing (or pretending to show) that they care about what you have to say. Instead of broadcasting, they're engaging.

If you're speaking with a friend who has nothing valuable to contribute to the conversation, it's not really a successful conversation, is it? The same goes for brands.

In online advertising, some KPIs include click-through rates, brand awareness and engagement

the typical online marketing campaign these days usually has about five KPIs

Until recently, the default metric was the click-through rate (CTR), which gave a clear indication of an ad's engagement. The staggering success of search advertising in the 2000s led to the rise of the CTR

there’s a flaw in the “app for everything” ideology: now every single website these days wants to be an app. This is a bad because… Not everything needs to be an app If every site has an app, app stores will just end up like worse versions of the Internet (poor discovery, gatekeepers, etc.) Apps are high-friction (require more bandwidth, passwords, etc)

Almost 50 percent of engagement – happens in the first 30 minutes of posting, with 80 percent of engagement within the first 180 minutes.

Tumblr blogs tend to lack the glossy, professional, high-minded design of other social networking sites, including the behemoth that is Facebook and the SMS-inspired Twitter. If anything, these teenaged Tumblrs harken back to earlier web days where users built their own pages on AngelFire and Geocities, with atrocious backgrounds, upgraded cursors, and dancing GIF images galore. GIFs, in fact, are so hugely popular on Tumblr that the company even began experimenting with GIF-based ads.

According to Pew Internet’s study from earlier this year, 13 percent of Internet users ages 18-29 use Tumblr, while only 5 percent of those 30-49 do, 3 percent of those 50-64

Demographic data from Quantcast further drives home just how youthful a site Tumblr has become. 21 percent of its audience is under 18, 30 percent is 18 to 24, and 22 percent is 25 to 34

H.G. Wells describing the “world brain” as a  “complete planetary memory for all mankind.”

As a Google engineer told author Nicholas Carr, “We’re not scanning all those books to be read by people. We’re scanning them to be read by our AI.”

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.

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

h. People with a household income of $250,000 and up are more likely to use the Web to stay in touch with friends and family (96 percent) than traditional ways (81 percent), according to the Shullman Luxury and Affluence Monthly Pulse. Email is the most popular Web-based method (favored by 78 percent), followed by texting (65 percent) and Facebook (55 percent), although it’s notable that among those under 35, Facebook is preferred by 69 percent. Business communication is also moving online; 89 percent prefer Web-based options versus 75 percent who use traditional ways, although among the under-35 age group, that figure falls to below 50 perce