Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins gave it a name: “When you plant a fertile meme in my mind (a tune, idea, catchphrase, or fashion) you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn’t just a way of talking--the meme for, say, ‘belief in life after death’ is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.”

Encouragingly in the face of so much negative political messaging, positive information found online seemed to be surprisingly persuasive.

An impressive 54% reported finding something positive about the candidate that influenced them to actually vote for the politician. A slightly smaller number of respondents to the study (51%) found information that influenced them into not voting for the candidate in question.

Seeing positive results is thus at least, if not slightly more, important as burying negative information about a politician or launching full-scale attacks on an opponent.

The research firm expects the market to grow from $151.14 billion this year, to $256.44 billion by 2017

“The future for the television is social through integration of social interaction on the television. Broadcasters are developing and enriching social TV integration; they are targeting the tune-in customer, engagement and their loyalty to boost the rating and they are also discovering the social TV challenge,”

Currently Europe grabs the largest slice of social TV market revenue

sending messages at "8am – 10am and 3pm – 4pm can increase their average open rates and CTR by 6%." And that after 24 hours, the average email open rate approaches zero.

“Why say you went to a party on a Friday night when you can say you volunteered at a soup kitchen? Why say you spent the weekend playing Xbox when you can talk about the new art opening at the museum?” said Brent Busboom, an English teacher at Reno High School and Northern Nevada’s 2007 Teacher of the Year. Reno High is one of the best public high schools in Nevada and many of its students go on to top-tier colleges.

Some contents of ideal-self profiles are legitimate. Others, however, are embellished or exaggerated. Students don’t see an ethical problem, Busboom said. It's just "admissions jiu jitsu."

Facebook is still popular enough that a college admissions official will raise a red flag if a kid claims he or she isn’t on Facebook. And the ideal-self profiles come in handy with certain scholarship sponsors, which have started requiring applicants to accept Facebook friend requests as part of the review process.

Subjects in the study, who were between ages 18 and 85, all living in Germany, were given BlackBerry devices and told to let the researchers know every 30 minutes if they felt a desire to drop by their social networks. They were also asked to document other impulses, like smoking, drinking and sleeping, among others, and rate them from “strong” to “irresistible.” The temptation to visit social media platforms was more difficult to resist than the rest, researchers concluded.

Part of the reason for the surprising results, says lead author of the study Wilhem Hofmann, is social media’s high availability. After all, engaging in a tweet or Facebook post doesn’t take much effort — especially when you can do so with the touch of a few buttons.

music and gaming dominate the ranks of popular channels on YouTube, accounting collectively for 45% of the 1,000 most-viewed. Comedy (14%), entertainment (13%), and How-to & Style (7%) round out the top five categories.

Interestingly, nearly a quarter of the 100 original content channels YouTube has funded are in the top 1,000, suggesting that the program is enjoying at least a moderate level of success. In fact, the company just announced that it is investing $200 million more in the project, expanding the number of original channels to 150. One show, Everyday Health’s Recipe Rehab, has been picked up by ABC.

In today’s world of growth hacking and viral marketing, we have taken social to mean acquiring likes and followers so that we can post a photo to Facebook or a quip to Twitter. Most often we forget the forgotten half of being social: intimate conversation. Since we tend to communicate intimately (email, conversations, etc.) much more than we post to Facebook, it’s shocking that most products and brands are missing such a core growth channel to achieve success.

Broadcast conversations are effectively humblebrags that we cleverly disguise into brief snippets of content that make people want to feel more connected to us. These are things like, “the Salvador Dali exhibit at MOMA was INCREDIBLE,” “time to buy Apple stock… the iPhone 5 is amazing!!!!!” and “loving my new outfit!!!!” The everybody-look-at-me nature of these conversations inspires people to either feel connected with that person’s tastes or continuing a desire for future shared experiences.

In a blog post, YouTube also shared some stats on its original programming. According to the company, the top 25 original channels are averaging over a million views weekly, and 800 million viewers are watching 4 billion hours of content every month — up from 3 billion hours earlier this year.

Three out of four workers access social media on the job from their mobile devices at least once a day, and 60% access it multiple times, according to a survey of more than 1,100 employees in North America

But they’re not goofing off, the survey shows. Nearly half said connecting with co-workers was the top reason they used social media at work, followed by connecting with others on a fun social platform and connecting with customers.

Twitter is overwhelmingly the most popular social media site accessed at work for both personal and professional use at 70%, followed by Facebook at 65% and LinkedIn at 51%.

Facebook's practice of scanning messages and counting links as likes isn’t a privacy issue. It's common knowledge that what users do online - even in so-called private messaging - is potentially public. Rather, Facebook's activity raises a credibility issue. It shows that the company is fudging the numbers when it comes to advertising.

“It's not in Facebook's best interest to proactively solve this problem," said Tom Corson-Knowles, an online marketer who consults with small-business owners on ways to promote products on social networks. "Facebook's revenue is directly proportionate to the number of pageviews the site gets, and banning one percent of [pageviews] will cost the company a lot of missed ad impressions."