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Earlier this month, Facebook unveiled a new metric for evaluating advertising campaigns on Facebook, called "cost per action" (CPA). Now, advertisers can pay not just for impressions or click-throughs, but for specific actions they want consumers to perform once they've seen an ad — including becoming a fan of a Page. For example, an advertiser could specify it is willing to pay $2.00 for a "Like" — that is, for a new fan on its company or product Page — and only pay when the Page gets a new fan. Other actions include Offer claims and clicks on links to third-party sites.

a fan is worth an average of $174 to a company. But as the chart below shows, the value of a fan can differ widely across companies:

"Marketers should define the value of a fan based on how it impacts the key criteria that determines the success or failure of their business," says Kalehoff. Specifically, marketers should measure the spending habits of fans versus non-fans, to see if fans are more likely to make a purchase, make purchases at great amounts and/or purchase repeatedly. Advocacy — the probability of a customer recommending a product to others, and the probability of that recommendation to affect sales — is another key metric. Another area that is more difficult to measure is brand affinity — that is, the emotional draw that a customer feels towards a brand because of the relationship that develops between brands and fans over Facebook. If positive brand affinity tends to be a powerful sales indicator on other channels, it may be worth cultivating on Facebook, too.

With contextual search, it's no longer enough to get your business or product listed on the first Web page of results. On a mobile device, as well as in push situations, SEO is really effective only if you can push your results into the top position, or at least into the first few lines.

Wearable devices like Google Glass and the rumored iWatch could put even more pressure on search results. We don't yet know what their interfaces will look like, but it seems safe to assume that there may be even less real estate available to display search results.

This is one reason why the search engines are working so hard to deliver knowledge rather than just Web page links in their results. Google and Bing both now feature "knowledge boxes" that try to encapsulate the pertinent information about a topic in one glance. This "knowledgization" of search results is conducive to mobile search because it parses data into easily displayed and digestible chunks - essential for the smaller screen.

people who claimed their “usual” workweeks were longer than 75 hours were off, on average, by about 25 hours. You can guess in which direction. Those who claimed that a “usual” workweek was 65–74 hours were off by close to 20 hours. Those claiming a 55–64-hour workweek were still about 10 hours north of the truth. Subtracting these errors, you can see that most people top out at fewer than 60 work hours per week.

We live in a competitive world, and boasting about the number of hours we work has become a way to demonstrate how devoted we are to our jobs.

social TV lab: “Our team and Bluefin Labs (which Twitter purchased earlier this year) will come together, put mutual skin in game, and create a social TV lab that we think will give our clients unprecedented real-time data on how consumers are watching, buying and the conversations that amplify brand messages."

“the idea that the digital marketplace is moving from ad exchange and targeting and re-targeting to, while still including those things, much more toward creating real-time content and experiences.”

SMV sees Twitter not as a media silo in itself but a platform that extends across paid, owned, and earned media. "If you think the future of marketing is convergence and amplification of big moments over time, as we do, then Twitter becomes one of the essential channels you have to evaluate in any marketing plan.”

Within each contact, you also now have an expanded relationship view that integrates all of the interactions you’ve had with a particular person over the different networks that have been integrated, along with any reminders that you have set yourself to connect in the future. This is a pretty nifty feature in that it doesn’t require manual updates for past events; instead it automatically aggregates whatever has happened already into a timeline of events

mobile is its fastest-growing consumer service at the moment, with 27% of its 155 million monthly users visiting LinkedIn via mobile apps (up from just 8% two years ago); and weekly mobile page views jumping 250% year-over-year.

“Most brands have fallen into the trap of using Twitter for push marketing: broadcasting messages and expecting to influence customers with little to no listening or community building,” says Nestivity founder and president Henry Min.

“This view of Twitter as a one-way communication tool severely limits quality interactions between brands and their customers. It is a short-sighted use of an inherently interactive communication channel,”

When it comes to follower counts, a high number doesn’t necessarily mean an engaged audience. While all of the 25 most engaged Twitter accounts had over a million followers, so did the bottom 70% of the same.

a false tweet from a trusted news organization sent the US stock market into freefall.The 143-point fall in the Dow Jones industrial average came after hackers sent a message from the Twitter feed of the Associated Press, saying the White House had been hit by two explosions and that Barack Obama was injured.

The market recovered within a few minutes of the misunderstanding, but the incident left traders catching their breath and speculating once more about their vulnerability to breaking news in the age of social media.

There were also concerns over what many suggested was the lurking menace of trading algorithms that scan the news and trade quickly, causing "flash crashes".

"There’s you, the person, and you have your full identity in yourself," he says. "But you know contextually when to wear certain things. You might wear one thing to a funeral, you might wear one thing for a Saturday night. You understand those contexts. And those never change your identity, so to speak, but they do start to communicate some kind of intent. And that’s what we’re trying to figure out right now. How do you create some kind of contextual mirror to create intent."

"Monolithic solutions are a necessity of yesterday, because of the permanence and cost of communication," Hendrix wrote in his opening remarks for the project. "Now we’re in an ephemeral and affordable age, and mass distribution at low cost is possible thanks to the digital revolution."

"The digital revolution let us make more complex identity systems, but what’s the point?," he says. "At some point, you start asking, 'why do I need 10,000 configurations of a mark? What’s it really saying to me?"

Facebook's new commitment to "mobile first" design

Now that nearly half of Facebook's users are accessing the network from their mobile phones every day — and soon, more than half will — Facebook is beginning to prioritize that experience first.

The popular interactive-image platform officially hit Facebook on Tuesday morning. That means posts there now let fans interact with content embedded "inside" an image — other photos, video or text blocks, for example — without leaving Facebook Timeline.

Back in November, ThingLink made its debut on Twitter. Since then, the platform's reps say brands have "commonly seen" more than five times as much engagement on Twitter posts using ThingLink images. So if the results are any indication, it's set to become a useful tool on Facebook now, as well.

"We think that the industry had been focused in the wrong area, which was making a decision between Twitter and TV," said Adam Bain, Twitter's president of global revenue. "That's not what we believe. Twitter is a bridge." The deal, structured as a partnership, comes as people increasingly visit social networking sites and use mobile devices while watching television. A recent Nielsen study confirmed a strong correlation between increases in Twitter volume and TV ratings.

This is the future. It's convergence."

While the spending marketers commit to Twitter remain a fraction of the $205bn they spend on television globally, budgets are shifting quickly. Twitter's global ad revenues are expected to almost double this year, reaching $582.8m in 2013 up from $288.3m in 2012, according to eMarketer

brands are averaging lower subscriber counts on YouTube — 35,000 — compared to an average 200,000 Twitter followers.

Just 7.4% of videos from the top brands are repurposed TV commercials.

certain categories get more subscribers than others. In particular, tech is a popular category and travel is not

now brands can serve up ads to users based on the content they're actually tweeting.

keyword-based advertising

advertisers can buy specific keywords to target certain users. "For example: let’s say a user tweets about enjoying the latest album from their favorite band, and it so happens that band is due to play a concert at a local venue," Malhotra explained. "That venue could now run a geotargeted campaign using keywords for that band with a tweet containing a link to buy the tickets. That way, the user who tweeted about the new album may soon see that Promoted Tweet in their timeline letting them know tickets are for sale in their area."

Big data isn’t just a function of better data-tracking technology; it simply wouldn’t exist without the ever-expanding catalyst that is big content.

marketing content refers to any artifact with which a consumer interacts that relates to a brand. Content gets “big” via its amplification, iteration and dissemination across multiple channels, devices and platforms. When content “jumps the tracks” and is no longer controlled solely by the brand, but can be summoned and even manipulated on demand by consumers themselves, then it’s “big."

Based on a 2012 survey by Content Wise, marketers increased their total spending on content development by 45% from 2005 to 2012, when the percentage of marketers’ budgets allocated to content creation increased from 31% to 39%

Flat design has spread its levelling influence all over the tech industry and its interfaces in recent years

The music-listening part is only really worthwhile to those of us who pay for premium Spotify or Rdio accounts. Otherwise, we're going to continue to use those services' apps for the majority of your listening.

the "Me" and "Suggested" tabs of the app are of limited value if you don't follow a lot of musicians on Twitter. Indeed, using Twitter follows as a barometer for one's music taste is a curious choice. Sometimes musicians have worthwhile Twitter accounts, sometimes not.

Unlike the Facebook "like", the Twitter "follow" is not an explicit statement saying "I enjoy listening to this band." Instead, it's saying, "I think this band, whose music I happen to enjoy, might have interesting things to say, so I'm listening."

Companies currently spend 8.4% of their marketing budgets on social media, and that’s expected to grow to 21.6% in the next five years.

Pinterest has a higher concentration of people who are in a ‘buy’ state of mind, while Facebook users are more interested in interacting with friends - and brands. (According to Paul Adams, Facebook’s global head of brand design, Facebook’s strength is relationship-building, noting that many lightweight interactions over time can help promote brands.)

Pinterest traffic spent 60% more than did traffic coming from Facebook. Pinterest traffic converted to a sale 22% more than Facebook. Facebook traffic bounced 90% of the time, compared to 75% for Pinterest. Facebook users viewed an average of 1.6 pages. Pinterest users saw an average of 2.9 pages – an 81% difference.