This week Social Media Explorer gives us the secret ingredient we need in order to stop caring what comes next in social media, what every trend means and how we can ensure that we don’t fall off the bandwagon. The secret is in word-of-mouth marketing – seemingly the only way to ensure success in future marketing. The “Holy Smokes” effect is definitely one worth paying attention to.

Econsultancy’s summary of the the digital marketing year in quotes is most excellent. We’ve seen a lot of developments in 2013 and one of our favourite promises is Marissa Meyer’s of Yahoo on the acquisition of Tumblr. It sounds just like the average Tumblr user sounds – blatantly honest.

And here are the most popular Google queries for 2013, kindly summarized by Econsultancy. The What is…? section is a hilarious one. You got to love what people search for these days. What is YOLO? Seriously – if we hear that acronym one more time…

Without doubt one of the top announcements this week was Facebook’s to have auto-play video ads in the news feed. We really thought we were past this whole auto-play annoyance, but apparently Facebook is jumping on the advertisement bandwagon big time. The only consolation (or so they think) is that the ads will only play as you scroll past them and they will be mute. Really? How long until they start playing in the sidebar in groups, pages and events? Just imagine having 10 tabs open and then sound starts coming out and you don’t know from where (although in fairness that already happens a lot!). Here is the full story from HubSpot.