The brands that actively involve their audiences in the creation of value are best placed to succeed in an ever-more connected world. This eBook from We Are Social presents a series of provocations to help you define your brand’s approach to this connected future, and helps you to start bringing that vision to life today, by building a truly social brand.

Elizabeth Gilbert was once an “unpublished diner waitress,” devastated by rejection letters. And yet, in the wake of the success of ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ she found herself identifying strongly with her former self. With beautiful insight, Gilbert reflects on why success can be as disorienting as failure and offers a simple — though hard — way to carry on, regardless of outcomes.

In our careers and in our work, we can only get a few things right, so we need to choose what we focus on purposefully. More importantly, we need to choose things that are different from our peers. This is our competitive advantage and it is what can propel us to success.

In this 99U talk, Behance co-founder Scott Belsky shares how companies like Apple and Southwest Airlines use this strategy to ensure long term success. But finding your competitive advantage is only step one, the world changes quickly, and just as fast as you find your niche, you should be looking for another one.
“Self-awareness,” says Belsky, “is the only sustainable competitive advantage you can find.”

Pick up a book, magazine or screen, and more than likely you’ll come across some typography designed by Matthew Carter. In this charming talk, the man behind typefaces such as Verdana, Georgia and Bell Centennial (designed just for phone books — remember them?), takes us on a spin through a career focused on the very last pixel of each letter of a font.

We won’t remember the commercial, the logo, or the jingle, but we will always remember how a brand (and in turn, a designer) makes us feel. In this 99U interview, legendary designer Michael Wolff shares lessons from a career spanning over five decades. What separates a good designer from the rest of the pack, says Wolff, is an unlimited amount of empathy. To do this, approach the world through a child’s mind and have an insatiable curiosity. Ask “why” whenever possible.

This report offers a thorough, in-depth review of all the key stats for the Social, Digital and Mobile landscape in China in 2014. Packed with 95 slides covering platform preferences, behavioural usage and economic indicators, the deck presents stand-out infographics that are ready to copy-paste direct into your own presentations and blogs.