@Publish

there is still no reliable way to measure the return on investment. Analytics companies are getting better at tracking whether engaged fans eventually make a purchase decision, but brands are still, by-and-large, forced to look at the number of clicks a brand page feeds to its website.

The report said the focus on click-through rates of display ads and brand pages on Facebook downplays the impact that has on a user's friends and followers.

“The idea behind amplification is that Fans who are reached with brand messages can also serve as a conduit for brand exposure to Friends within their respective social networks,” the report said. “Because the average Facebook Fan has hundreds of Friends, each person has the ability to potentially reach dozens of Friends with earned impressions through their engagement with brand messages.”

“While this research adds weight to the importance of social media, it also brings an important questions to the forefront – are the elevated spend levels among Fans and Friends of Fans the result of the messaging or a predisposition among these segments?

In other words, am I spending more at Best Buy because my friends like it, or because I hang out with people who are into tech gadgets? Am I 38% more likely to get coffee at Starbucks in the next four weeks because I saw a friend liked the brand on Facebook, or am I 38% more likely to get coffee at Starbucks because I run with people who like Starbucks - whether or not they choose to publicly declare so on Facebook?

Most likely, it’s a combination of both, as well as other factors including traditional advertising and proximity. In my case, I end up drinking more Starbucks than I’d like because it’s the only passable coffee shop within walking distance to my house. It’s a decision that I feel better about, perhaps because so many of my friends implicitly endorse Starbucks by liking the company on Facebook.

"The process of involvement in the United Nations has one unfortunate property: that it politicizes everything," Cerf told Walden. "All the considerations that are made, whether it's in the ITU or elsewhere, are taken and colored by national interests. As a long-standing participant in the Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Engineering Task Force, where we check our guns at the door, and we have technical discussions about how best to improve the operation of the Internet, to color that with other national disputes which are not relevant to the technology, is a very dangerous precedent. That's one of the reasons I worry so much about the ITU's intervention in this space."

Be a focused sentence. Not a convoluted paragraph. Can your readers describe you in one short sentence?

Narratives are powerful leadership tools. People remember stories more readily than they remember numbers, and stories motivate action. Recent research showed that levels of charitable donations rise when donors are given statistical evidence of a problem, such as children living in poverty, but levels of giving rise even higher when donors read a story about one poor child.

Stories should be evidence-based, meeting a plausibility test. They should be principle-based, with enduring truths embedded in them that won't shift on a whim. They should permit action that is open-ended, creating not-yet-imagined possibilities.

The study had professional marketers evaluate 400 Facebook ads against six traditional criteria for advertising creative: Whether the ad has a focal point, how strong its brand link is (ie: how easy it was to identify who the advertiser was), how well the tone of the ad fits with the brand's personality, how noticeable the ad is, how effective it is at getting its point across, and whether there is a "reward" for reading it (ie: Did it make you feel good? Did you learn something?).

The study found that the ads that performed best were the ones that also did the best job of hewing to advertising fundamentals, especially focal point, brand link, and tone. The most important criteria, says Bruich, was that the ad needed to have some kind of reward.

What excites me tremendously these days is the connectivity and the mobility that the future world will have, which we are already seeing emerge through smartphones. I have the power of thousands of computers in my pocket - because when I type a query [into a handset] it really takes thousands of computers to answer that query.

Today’s students face a job market that increasingly clamors for real technology skills, not just the ability to post party pictures on Facebook.

Tetlock's conclusion: when seeking accuracy of predictions, it is better to turn to those like "Berlin's prototypical fox, those who know many little things, draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradictions." Ideological reliance on a single perspective appears detrimental to one's ability to successfully navigate vague or poorly-defined situations (which are more prevalent today than ever before).

In today's uncertain environment, breadth of perspective trumps depth of knowledge.

The time has come to acknowledge expertise as overvalued. There is no question that expertise and hedgehog logic are appropriate in certain domains (i.e. hard sciences), but they certainly appear less fitting for domains plagued with uncertainty, ambiguity, and poorly-defined dynamics (i.e. social sciences, business, etc.).