This post is provided by our partner the Future Foundation, the leading consumer futures business.

To say that the future of social media belongs to the mobile will come as no surprise to most. But it is unusual to find such a significant area of opportunity gift-wrapped in inevitability; after all, there is no retro in mobile communications – the upgrade cycle is built into pay monthly contracts. OFCOM’s Communications Market Overview report last year announced that 74% of handsets sold as part of pay monthly contracts were smartphones and, each time we get to the end of our contract, we inevitably move up to the next generation of handset. This endless sequence of upgrades is driving the increased use of the mobile internet too – at the end of last year, nVision Research told us that 27% of the UK population were using the mobile web at least once a month. By 2015 this will increase to 53% and will top 70% among the under-35s. Read More »

PepsiCo brand Gatorade is taking its social media strategy very seriously indeed – so much so that it has built a mission control centre replete with screens beaming out brightly-coloured visualisations of what people are saying about it on the likes of Twitter. Read More »