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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%.

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.

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.

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.

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

According to the ITU's "facts and figures" publication, mobile penetration rates (pdf) are now about equal to the global population - including an 89% penetration rate in "developing countries," which currently have the highest mobile growth rates.

nearly everyone on the planet has a mobile phone - or will have one soon enough.

"mobile broadband" subscriptions have grown from 278 million in 2007 - when the iPhone was first introduced - to 2.1 billion in 2013 - an annual growth rate of 40%. 

Google’s launch partner for this service is Forbes, but others can implement these recommendations by just adding a single line of code to their mobile sites.

These recommendations, Sternberg told me, are based on social recommendations on the site from your friends on Google+ (only if you are signed in, of course), what the story you just read was about, the story’s author and some of Google’s “secret sauce.”

The new Google+-based recommendations, interestingly, only appear once a reader slides back up on a page. This, Google’s analytics show, is a pretty good indicator that a user has finished reading a post (even if there is still more text left on the page). The recommendation widget then slides up from the bottom and one extra click brings up more relevant items for the page. The other option is to show the widget after a user scrolls past a configurable CSS entity.

Value Exchange Is the content valuable to the end user in some way? Entertainment has value, but so does utility. In either case, you need to understand what your audience values rather than just assuming they have an innate fascination in your brand talking about itself.

People want news they can share around the vending machine at work or via their Twitter handle.

When we see others doing something, we are often more apt to make that same choice ourselves.

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.

Connect to consumers in context. Having great content is not enough. Consider the context in which it will be consumed. Are your consumers looking for quick-hit information on their smartphones, snackable content on Facebook, or in-depth information on your website?  Create visible value. What topics can you credibly provide value on, through information, education, or entertainment? Don't just create it; make it clear where the value is provided. Continuously measure and optimize results. Go beyond tracking data to measuring impact. Tie results like brand lift, content shares, and unaided recognition of the content to metrics that run the business like leads or sales.

Context is more than location. Context is derived from a wealth of signals pulled from environmental, social, emotional, cultural, and economic factors. The current SMS push messaging campaigns, where an offer fires based on a customer's location, is just the beginning. As marketers mature in handling context, they will come to know that Mrs. Smith isn't interested in the store nearest her home, where the area has poor lighting and bad parking, but the one you have in the mall 10 miles further out. Why? Because she can visit your shop, along with six others, in the stress-free mall; leave her infant in the crèche; and pick up her husband from work on the way back. 

Smartphones and wearables are the Trojan horse for bringing this new data to brands, with the new Samsung S4 smartphone having nine built-in sensors, and Google Glass a staggering 13. These devices bring more environmental and emotional real-time data about location, orientation, movement, temperature, humidity, light levels, and other golden cues to help remotely view a moment

two-thirds of consumers would unsubscribe from brands promotions if they thought the messages were too frequent — in the UK, 27% said they would stop using the product completely. It's clear that brands have to respond by understanding context in order to set the appropriate cadence of messaging.

It’s all very well having wearable technology that lets you livestream yourself hang gliding. But if it has all the sex appeal of orthodontic headgear, it’s unlikely to catch on.

Arguably, success in wearable technology hinges on making people look and feel good as much as providing a functional service. Developers might be happy to fork vast sums for the privilege of being a Google Glass owner, but when the product goes to mass market, fashion, or at least some sort of coolness and covetability will be as critical as functionality.