New research carried out by the guys at MICROS has revealed that last year saw an impressive 50.2% of UK digital retailers respond to direct tweets from curious social media users, a 3.2% increase on 2012 and 37.9% increase on 2011. The Multi-channel Retail Delivery Report 2014 also revealed that four out of ten customer service emails were answered on the same day of enquiry in 2013, a massive jump from the 12% answered in 2012, as companies begin to increasingly recognise the benefits of fine-tuning their digital customer service protocol.

The Audit Bureau for Circulation (ABC) has released the first ever combined print and digital figures for UK consumer magazines in 2013, based on the average number of sales for a digital edition of each issue. The IPC Media title What's On TV ranked highest with a combined total circulation of 1,051,129, of which 1,571 were digital editions. Slimming World Magazine placed second with a combined circulation of 458,517 with 7,739 digital editions, while Glamour magazine placed third with a combined total of just over 415,000, supported by 4,778 digital editions.

News UK, owner of the Sun, the Times and Sunday Times, is hiring a "privacy adviser" two years after the hacking scandal threatened to engulf the company. It has advertised the post in the legal pages of the Times on Thursday and says the advisor will "be required to provide expert advice and assistance to all parts of News UK's business areas."

Take a look at this awesome infographic from the guys at Reach Local, which analyses the seven most popular types of social media users and offer tips on how you can work with them to help enhance digital engagement.

Guardian News and Media (GNM) has officially launched its new branded content Guardian Labs service - with a seven-figure Unilever deal. The company revealed plans in March last year to relaunch its Brand Partnership business in order to meet advertiser demand for more bespoke branded content.

Bauer Media has launched a native advertising competition on the back ofthe launch of its new digital media brand, The Debrief. The publisher is inviting the submission of "the best native advertising idea in the UK" and the winning entry will have their campaign executed for free on the site, a prize worth GBP50,000 of advertising.

How much illegal streaming and downloading is going on in the European Union? A report on film-watching habits released last week by the European Commission suggests that it's quite a lot. 4,608 people ages 4 to 50 from 10 European countries were surveyed. Nearly all - 97 percent - say they watch movies at least occasionally. 68 percent of them say they download or stream movies for free, and about half of that group (34 percent of respondents overall) do so weekly.

The European Union will not force automobile owners and manufacturers to use connected car systems, as the U.S. has recently said it will do, according to the office of digital agenda chief Neelie Kroes. But those that do use them will need to stick to agreed specifications. On Wednesday Kroes and the European standards organizations CEN and ETSI announced that they had agreed on basic standards for what they call Cooperative Intelligence Transport Systems.

The French beauty giant has claimed that content marketing will be a central tenet for its aim of reaching one billion new customers by 2020. L'Oreal already has a strong history with content marketing; utilising its approaches long before the term that is now so common had even been invented, alexandregravel.ca notes. These included radio shows broadcast back in the late 1940s which ended up garnering around 50,000 listeners.

The European Union wants more power over the the Internet, after revelations of widespread U.S. surveillance activities have caused what it calls a "loss of confidence" in the global network's current structure. The Wall Street Journal says The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, will propose the adoption of "concrete and actionable steps" to globalise essential Web functions.