Anindya Ghose, Heinz Riehl Chair Professor of Business at New York University’s Stern School of Business, is one of the pioneering explorers of the intersection of mobile and marketing. In his new book, Tap, he collects his findings and weaves them together into a set of nine forces that marketers can wield to drive sales via mobile technologies.

Efforts by advertisers to attract attention are not new. What’s different with the web, author Tim Wu says, is the extent to which individuals are willing to open their lives to advertisers and trade away their time and private information for having the world at their fingertips. This creates unprecedented opportunities for manipulation.

In a Q&A, Carlos Dominguez, president and COO of social media management company Sprinklr, notes that while marketing is about getting people to want to talk to a company, customer service is about interacting with someone who is already invested in the brand. His goal: get companies to blend those tasks in “ways that are radically different.”

The Holy Grail of modern online marketing is video content that “goes viral.” So how does it happen? New research shows that engagement with online video content depends less on what the video shows than how the video shows it. A study of viewer reactions to online videos suggests that the key is to juxtapose content elements in incongruous combinations or to create original or exaggerated content that makes an emotional connection with the viewer — to create emotionally surprising videos.

Brands are extremely interested in finding out what people are talking about on Twitter and Facebook — what’s known in the industry as “chatter data.” This is a kind of real-time knowledge that Facebook, for one, has the ability to capture — and share. Blake Chandlee, vice president of global partnerships at Facebook, says that Facebook is working with brands such as Procter & Gamble and Unilever to help them understand their consumers through this detailed social data.

When Nestlé UK invited customers to vote for a new chocolate bar flavor, the company’s target customers participated in droves. By leveraging social media for the Kit Kat brand, the company was able to build positive word of mouth through consumers who became brand advocates; increase sales; and generate a higher return on investment. The process followed a four-step framework that any company can use to extract valuable information from the vast amount of data generated by social media.

Mondelez International’s brands include some well-recognized names, including Oreo, Ritz, and Cadbury. Yet as Mondelez’s vice president of global media and consumer engagement Bonin Bough explains, even a powerhouse like Oreo must work to engage its customers — and in the modern era, that means using social media. In his interview with David Kiron, Bough describes the company’s innovative methods for expanding its reach.

ComScore is among the world’s biggest data purveyors — the digital measurement and analytics company has collected about 14 petabytes of online data from around the globe. But it has to execute on all that data internally in order to be successful externally. This is where a lot of organizations stumble. A recent report by MIT Sloan’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) details how comScore organizes its assets to capture value from big data.

It’s been a difficult decade for any company that’s been in the recorded music business. But at Universal Music, the company is using external partnerships, technology, new platforms and “democratized data” to surmount challenges in one of the first industries to go digital. Universal’s Rob Wells explains how he and his colleagues have dealt with massive change and how they take advantage of new opportunities to put the company at the forefront of the industry landscape.

Nestlé is taking digital vitamins, using a leadership and social media training program called the Digital Acceleration Team to spread knowledge of how to operate brands across different mediums. Pete Blackshaw, global digital marketing chief at Nestlé, talks about the benefits of spreading digital vitamins, discusses adaptive marketing. and acknowledges the ongoing “torture tests” social media presents for companies.

BMW is pursuing consumer-to-consumer marketing using microvideo on mobile phones. The company wants to see if mobile social media can help boost sales. Wolfgang Breyer, head of international advertising, online communications and social media at BMW, says the company wants to see how mobile sharing compares to PC-based sharing, and whether microvideo offers an effective format for consumers. BMW is planning a pilot this fall.

Although a company’s social site can do well for branding, loyalty and customer word of mouth, new research from Forrester shows that social sites are not currently creating direct sales.

Yes, recommendations from friends are effective at creating viral campaigns. But research by Sinan Aral and Dylan Walker shows that automated messages are surprisingly effective, too.

The Internet marketplace allows companies to produce and sell a far wider range of products than ever before. This profoundly changes both consumer behavior and business strategy.