Digital Bits & Bytes

Examples tell you more than theory ever could, we’ve rounded up 50 different resources for you to get into and help improve your business.

Covering everything from Facebook to Pinterest to email marketing, you’ll find useful case studies for you to take inspiration from, regardless of which platform you use.

A report by UK market research firm Trendstream updated its Global Web Index this week which showed how well Google‘s strategy is working in terms of getting users engaged in its social networks. According to GWI, Google+ is now the second largest social network in terms of active users and YouTube, included for the first time in its index is now third.

The report estimatesFacebook‘s active users in December 2012 at 693 million, compared to 343 million for Google+. The post does not break out the number of YouTube active users, but from the chart it appears to be approximately 280 million.

The brand expands on its "Time to Be Brave" philosophy by calculating roughly how much time each of its fans has in which to be brave.

 

If you knew the extent of your projected longevity, it would probably change the way you lived your life. In the brand’s latest campaign, Diesel is counting on it.

Building on its "Time to Be Brave" marketing framework, Diesel is urging its fans to be more conscientious about that time in which to be brave with its Days to Live website.

 

 Disney’s MagicBands are a great idea. They’re RFID wristbands that are at the heart of a collection of services Disney is dubbing MyMagic+. It’s all part of an estimated $1 billion makeover for the parks, aimed at making the experience of being at Disney a bit more magical.

At the same time, MagicBands enable a deeper level of data collection for Disney. They’ll be able to track someone through the entire park--to see their kingdom as a complex interaction model--finding trends in preferences and habits that can no doubt be monetized. Do people who meet Cinderella buy more princess apparel? Do those who eat the cheese fries for lunch go back to the hotel to take naps?

This is a map of every person counted by the 2010 US and 2011 Canadian censuses. The map has 341,817,095 dots - one for each person.

After unveiling its Kinect-like gesture control system for PCs in mid-2012, Leap Motion is a promising product that's not available to buy just yet, but that's set to change this year.

This morning, Leap Motion announced a new partnership with Asus, which will see it bundle its motion control technology with select notebooks and desktops shipping later this year, including the All-in-One PCs and high-end notebooks.

How do you define engagement? Engagement symbolizes the touches that occur in various moments of truth. Touch points open and close whether a customer stands on the stage of awareness, consideration, purchase, or post purchase.

 

It is in those moments that engagement, regardless of source or shape, affects the next steps and impressions of customers. These moments of truth are not limited to any one channel. 

Have you ever heard of a concept called sharecropping?

 

We have a great bookstore in my town — the kind of place you picture in your mind when you think of a great independent bookshop.

It’s perfect for browsing, with lots of comfy chairs to relax in. The books are displayed enticingly. There’s a little coffee shop so you can relax with an espresso.

 

They get your favorite writers to come in for readings, so there’s always a sense of event and excitement. They do everything right, and they’ve always had plenty of customers. But they still closed their doors last year.

You don't necessarily need teams of hotshot coders and scientists to bring your big idea to life. Consider licensing already-existing technology instead.

 

The perennial powerhouses such as MIT, Northwestern, and the University of California system are expert at generating licensing deals and launching startups, so they’re always attractive partners. Just don’t stop there.

 

A growing number of U.S. universities have become much more business-friendly. Universities not traditionally known as hotbeds of innovation-;Nebraska and Utah for example-;are taking commercialization much more seriously, welcoming deals and creating opportunities for savvy partners.

So wait, why paper, again? "Our teammates design apps every day, and we’ve tried most of the prototyping solutions out there, but they all seemed too complicated for us," says Leo Lin, a designer at Woomoo Inc., the Taiwanese studio that created POP.

"With paper you can iterate faster than any other tools. One day, one of our founders looked at these sketchpads and thought, 'It’s good to have paper prototypes, but they are very difficult to present or share, why don’t we make an app to solve this?' That was when everything started to make sense: Just draw on paper, take pictures, and make it interactive."

Social video trends can teach Super Bowl advertisers five things: the need to create content worth sharing, build bottom-up brand engagement, optimize content, embrace mobile and tablet campaigns, and measure before and after the big game.

Lifeway Foods, a company that sells a 2,000-year-old beverage, proves that you don't need to have a fresh new product to shine on social media.

what happens every 60 seconds ... from app downloads, questions asked to Skype calls and music [INFOGRAPHIC]

There's no question that landing pages -- and the lead-capture forms that come with them -- are two of the most important elements of lead generation.

Without them, marketers would be much more limited in their ability to convert website visitors into leads -- and generate reconversion's, too. That's because landing pages enable us to direct site visitors to better targeted pages that have the ability to capture leads at a much higher rate than forms on other web pages.