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If online search results are slowed by even a fraction of a second, people search less – a 400ms delay leads to a 0.44% drop in search volume. And impatience isn’t just limited to search, as four out of five online users will keeping on clicking away if a video stalls while loading.

Bangkok street life is buzzing and appears somewhat chaotic with myriad food and market stalls open pretty much 24/7, while counterfeit – and well-made – branded goods abound, and smartphones and iPads are almost de rigueur among youth. Plus. everyone is on Whatsapp. And social gaming was a big trend here in back in early- 2010.

Thai youth is clearly as heavily into the latest tech as its counterparts in Asian and Western societies, says Sabine Stork*.

Brands experienced in social marketing are moving beyond growing social presence and reach, shifting to active social media management for increased lead generation and sales, according to the State of Social Media Marketing report from Awareness.

Millennials’ comfort-level with the Internet and tech might makes the digital medium an ideal platform for reaching them, but they are generally more difficult to persuade via advertising than their older counterparts, amplifying the importance of creative and messaging optimisation in advertising to this segment, says comScore in its Next Generation Strategies For Advertising To Millennials study.

McDonald’s has pulled a US promoted tweets campaign on Twitter after consumers used the brand’s #McDStories and #MeetTheFarmers hashatgs to slate the company over food quality, employee working conditions and animal rights – a subject McDonald’s managed to get into a debate with on Twitter with pressure group PETA.

Schweppes aims to keep in step with Facebook. When the social network changed the profile page at end-2010, the drinks brand came up with the Schweppes Profile app to help users customise their profiles, and over 100,000 people ended up using that application.

Twitter’s brand pages will alter social experiences for audiences on the microblog, according to Ogilvy PR. For one thing, they help build a seamless user experience from the Net to mobile to draw fans away from third-party platforms like HootSuite where Twitter has less control over on-platform paid executions. By maintaining consistency, Twitter has made its channel more valuable through preserving its users on its direct platform, Ogilvy PR says.

Twitter’s new brand pages, which will enable partners of the microblogging site to customise their channels, will give brands more control over the presence on the platform, says WPP. As well as giving pages their own look and feel, brands can now choose to keep a tweet at the top of their feed as opposed to the top post automatically being the most recent.