@Publish

In China, he said, online branded content is "the only thing that makes sense in advertising." 

Sirena Liu, founder and president of Filmworks China, an agency that also specializes in assembling content for brands, doesn't think the branded content in its most recent form will necessarily last forever. "The trend of mini-movies will continue to be popular for a while, but probably not for too long," Liu told brandchannel.

DiIanni said Chinese audiences want stories and "want to engage with content and social media." But he cautioned that "brands need to be flexible and open to new ideas" in content. Too often in his experience, he said, brands do not see the opportunity in some roles offered in content. 

the company found that media plans that included Facebook saw 24 percent more new sales than those that didn't.

Facebook’s head of measurement and insights Brad Smallwood said Aggregate Knowledge’s findings are "pretty consistent with independent studies we run looking at offline transactions." He pointed to one announced in October with Datalogix that indicated campaigns focused on reach saw a 70 percent higher ROI than those aimed at clicks.

Facebook was "very strong" when it came to channels that first encountered a user, Jakubowski said, but was not usually the last channel to see a user before they convert. That last-click attribution, for better or worse, is what helped Google establish a multibillion dollar advertising business. “Where Facebook gets last-touch credit is where it’s the only place on the planet that reached that user,” Jakubowski said. Facebook tends to factor in a couple days or weeks before a user converts, he noted. Smallwood emphasized that marketers shouldn’t look at Facebook in silo but consider an entire media mix and attribute success through multi-touch attribution.

Firefox OS is of the Web, for the Web. There is no such thing as a “native” app to Firefox OS. If an object exists as a web page, it can easily be turned into an app for Firefox OS by essentially turning it into a shortcut for the browser-based operating system to access. Instead of having to develop specifically for mobile platforms like iOS, Android or Windows Phone, the Web is the platform for Firefox OS. 

If you are a developer, you can build an app for Firefox OS by making some small changes to your website. You can then test the app by downloading the Aurora Marketplace onto your Android or using the browser-based Firefox OS Simulator. 

Gone are the days when you could stuff your website with low-quality articles packed with the right keywords or link spam exchanges to boost your Google rankings. Today the game is all about quality--content that’s authentic, informative, and, most of all, attractive to your intended audience. In short, we need to stop thinking about SEO as “search engine optimization” and more as “social engagement optimization,” as Greg Henderson at SEO Desk put it.

The brain notices how you begin and how you end more than what you’re saying in the middle, so you want to make sure that your site (and your content) has an attention-getting open and a close that really makes your case in dramatic fashion.

focus on quick ways to sum up how your product or service can change the customer’s life for the better.

The name, category, vanity URL, and information you share in the “About” section all help people find your business and should be shared on Facebook. If you have a location or a local place Page, update your address to make sure you can appear as a result when someone is searching for a specific location. Focus on attracting the right fans to your Page and on giving your fans a reason to interact with your content on an ongoing basis.

“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”.

Facebook posts are generated by regular people, because of that they are closer to tapping into the basic language capacities of our minds than professionally crafted sentences.  If you use thoughts expressed through microblogs as an example, the natural pattern of human thinking is similar to gossip. The study claims, “The relatively unfiltered and spontaneous production of one person’s mind is just the sort of thing that is readily stored in another’s mind.” Adding that while published text may be beautifully written or carefully edited, it doesn’t resonate as easily with our memory as naturally-generated information. 

Dr. Laura Mickes, a senior research fellow at the University of Warwick and a lead researcher on the project. “I am not sure if microblogging is necessarily changing the way we think," she says via email, "but I do think that the way we microblog taps into the way we have always colloquially communicated with one another.”

I have not created any new way of writing. All I'm doing is writing computer programs that mimic the way people write. Going back to the Elizabethan sonnets, Shakespeare or one of his contemporaries created the 14-line iambic pentameter poem, where the rhyming pattern was 'a-b, a-b, c-d, c-d, e-f, e-f g-g.' G-g being a couplet at the end. By line 9 there has to be a turn in the poem, so there has to be a phrase like 'yet' or 'but.' The first line is typically a question, which acts as a title. All of them are 10 syllables in each line... they have to go in the rhythm of that pattern. If you do an analysis of sonnets, you'll realize that about 10% of sonnets violate those rules. But they do it only in a very particular way. Even that formulation of violation is itself constrained... Once you have all of those rules you then write algorithms that mimic those rules. It's a very different kind of philosophy from artificial intelligence.

The methodologies are extremely old, just like the methodologies of writing haiku poetry are very old. An Elizabethan sonnet is 14 lines - that is a line of code if you think of it that way. The code is constrained. So all genres, no matter what the genres are, are a form of constrained writing.

an example a search for a spicy meal in San Francisco. A search for "restaurants liked by my friends from India" revealed a long list. Narrowing that to "Indian restaurants liked by my friends from India" yielded another list. Then he searched for restaurants in San Francisco liked by Culinary Institute of America graduates.

In cases where Graph Search comes up blank – which is likely to be a frequent occurrence in its infancy – the service defaults to the web search engine Bing, which is run by Google's rival Microsoft.

"I want to invite friends over for Game of Thrones," he said, "but who among my friends likes Games of Thrones? Graph Search tells me."

The number of Facebook's UK users dropped by 600,000 in December, according to data by social media monitoring firm SocialBakers.

Though representing a typical seasonal dip in use over the Christmas period, the UK was the only one of Facebook's 10 busiest territories that saw a seasonal fall, with user numbers dropping 1.86%.