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Mitt Romney’s social-media guru does not quantify success in his candidate’s number of Facebook followers, but by their level of activity. Despite a recent Pew report that pegs President Barack Obama as winning the battle for digital audiences, Zac Moffatt, the head of the Romney campaign’s digital operation, says that the Republican candidate is ahead of President Obama in terms of building an engaged and dedicated online following.

The raw numbers lean Obama’s way. He has more than 27 million "likes" on his Facebook page, for example, versus fewer than 5 million for Romney. But according to Moffatt, Romney’s followers are more likely to share information, post, and spread the word about their candidate. He cites June 28, the day of the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act as an example. On that day, he says, the Romney campaign saw activity in the form of comments or sharing from 27 percent of their list of followers, compared to 1.7 percent for Obama. “That’s how I’d define success for us,” Moffatt says. This is a tough sell. Obama’s campaign team is legendary for its online prowess and its data-driven digital outreach. The Obama campaign appears to have raised the bar yet again, with the release of a mobile app that integrates digital outreach with the door-to-door shoe-leather efforts of volunteers, providing canvassers with voter-registration lists, neighborhood maps, campaign talking points, and a fundraising interface.

The hype surrounding mobile payments seems to grow greater by the day. Juniper Research predicted mobile payments will grow four-fold over the next five years to become a $1.3 trillion industry by 2017. As the industry gets its legs, though, it will have to deal with some major challenges regarding consumer privacy. The business models for payment systems will be extremely complex, involving everyone from retailers and transaction companies, marketing agencies, app developers and perhaps the carriers themselves. And because the highly targeted ads are the most lucrative, these systems will accrue an enormous amount of data about their users.

Grocery-store membership programs can track the basic shopping behavior of their users, but mobile payment systems will be able to leverage that kind of information from dozens of retail partners, monitoring not just what users buy but also when and where they shop. And you can bet that some players in the space will try to find ways to combine all that information with data like contact lists and location history – you know, the kind of stuff that many app developers are allegedly gleaning surreptitiously even in these early days of mobile marketing. Additionally, those payment systems will have access to the highly sensitive bank and credit card accounts of their users.

With three months to go until the U.S. presidential elections, political ad spending has already exceeded $500 million, as political candidates rush to target specific messages on tax cuts and healthcare initiatives, according to reports. But the message doesn't always reach the correct voters.

Adiant CEO Ash Nashed believes his company's online ad network Adblade offers a solution to remove the guesswork from targeting political ads, saving parties thousands of dollars. The company has developed a dedicated service to help political marketers target messages to voters for local, state and national elections, reaching more than 200 million monthly unique users in the US. The technology receives and processes real-time feedback and refines messages on the fly. Similar to A/B testing for paid-search ads, the tool allows politicians to pick a specific geographic area to quickly test targeted messages before buying television spots. "Marketers can start at 9 a.m., throw four ads into the system and within an hour or two see which of the four resonates most," says Nashed.

The Chinese press has recently introduced two new model workers active in cybersecurity: Li Congna of the PLA, and the "Legendary Female Cyber Cop," Gao Yuan of the Beijing Public Security Bureau's Cybersecurity Defense Division. The stories of these two women repeat many of the same tropes from campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s, especially those focused on what historian Tina Mai Chen calls "female kind first"--the first woman tractor driver, welder, or train conductor.