Social media, content marketing, mobile and real-time – these have been the mega trends of the past few years.

What we’ve been seen and experiencing as consumers and as professionals in terms of technological development is simply amazing. We can’t live without our smartphones, tablets or other devices such as kindles. We seem to be in a symbiotic relationship with them, where our devices have become extensions to our bodies – without them, we can’t function. Just look around the next time you’re in the city, at the airport or especially in public transport – everyone is gazing at their devices. I promise you, you’ll be shocked at the scene, just put your phone away and look around!

Here are some staggering statistics to convince of the magnitute of technological adoption:

It only took a decade for new technology to completely disrupt businesses, markets and entire industries. With the emergence of social media organisations had to adapt to a much faster rate of continuous change in how society interacts, communicates, receives and finds information. Furthermore, the rapid embracement of smartphones and tablets with internet access anytime, anywhere has brought another challenge for brands as they are now required to act 24/7. Social, digital and mobile have changed our personal and professional lives to a massive extent. It’s an exciting era, isn’t it? According to a new report by We Are Social the near future is going to be even more so.

Just last week, agency We Are Social published their Global Digital Statistics for 2014. It’s an interesting read and I thought you’d find it useful too (whether out of curiosity or to help you plan your social media activities for the year), so I decided to share some of the report’s highlights.

The 180+ pages report is especially valuable for global campaigns as it covers key statistics, data and behavioural indicators for every country on Earth and presents in-depth analysis for 24 of the world's largest economies, including for example Germany, the UK, the USA, Australia, Brazil and China.

Contributed Post

Over the years, social media marketing has become one of the largest advertising markets in the world. Marketing expert Heidi Cohen reports that over 90% of Inc. 500 companies use at least one form of social media platform. Even more telling, 62% of those say that social media is at least somewhat necessary to their growth.

The growing trend towards social media and the sheer depth of communication it allows between brands and consumers hasn’t escaped the eye of the online gaming industry. Numerous bingo sites have tried to leverage the power of social media, but only a few have survived to this day. Cashcade’s Foxy Bingo is one such brand creating marketing that “goes beyond just a sales pitch”.

The other day I came across a blog post by a fellow Bulgarian blogger delving into a pretty crazy idea – a magazine without advertisements. Sounds rather unrealistic, right? Well, you’d be a surprised! Such a magazine does exists, and it’s even on sale on Craigslist for the price of $4,447,847.53! Read on while I explain why such a dizzying number.

Designer Joseph G. Davies started a personal project he named Ad-Blocked Vogue, where he literally “blocked” all ads in the September issue of the US Vogue. He cut out all the pages with advertisements in the magazine and those he couldn’t cut, he blanked over with a fat marker. The result: out of the 902 total pages, 280 were full-pages ads and 45 double-page spreads. The image below says it all…

Lately I’ve come across quite a few clever and interactive campaigns. The one that I am going to show you today is yet another example of how brands are increasingly trying to engage their audiences not only in the communications process, but also to involve them in other business operations - remember Nordstrom’s merchandising strategy to drive sales through showcasing the most popular Pinterest items in their physical stores and so to bring the online experience offline? In terms of engaging the online community Tesco have recently done something similar. However, this time it touches on another popular subject - not fashion, but alcohol.

The UK supermarket chain is going to launch in October the so called social wine that was created and designed entirely by the supermarket’s social media community. As Ad Age notes, wine’s reputation as a social drink has been taken literally by Tesco.

What I particularly like about Tesco’s project