Allison Banko looks at how how a management company supporting other businesses developed trust with its online audience through content. The campaign took years to mature, but when it finally did, the five-step process led to a 130% increase in newsletter subscribers in the first year, and 70% in the second. Read the article here.

Yahoo said Tuesday it has appointed Ned Brody as senior vice president and head of the Americas, effective immediately. Brody becomes responsible for Yahoo's advertising business in North and South America, reporting to COO Henrique De Castro. Brody brings more than 25 years of experience leading businesses in the United States, Europe and Asia. Most recently, he held the position of AOL Networks CEO, which included global video, mobile and programmatic advertising businesses. He also served as global chief revenue officer of AOL, responsible for the company's advertising businesses.

With all the free food at Google, snacking patterns have become important to analyze. Cecilia Kang tells us about "Project M&M," a special ops force of behavioral science PhDs" who "conducted surveys of snacking patterns, collected data on the proximity of M&M bins to any given employee, consulted academic papers on food psychology, and launched an experiment." It's just one more corner of the office complex that Google analyzes with data. Kang doesn't say whether this analysis costs Google. When the chocolates were hidden in opaque containers, but the company displayed dried figs, pistachios and other healthful snacks in glass …

ABC News has turned Google Co-founder Sergey Brin's spit from his wife of six years into a "sex scandal," noting that the billionaire is dating a woman employee 14 years younger. The report turns toward Google's own code of conduct to make these allegations. "If the woman doesn't report to him, he may not be breaking any official rules," the video reports, but it does bring up accusations of favoritism.

This roundup of search stats highlights topics from mobile search to social signals and rankings to paid-search and mobile click-through rates. For example, a report from Searchmetrics based on analysis of 10,000 search terms from Google U.K. using the first three pages of results shows that Web sites ranking in the top positions on Google typically have a large number of social signals. Google+ has the biggest impact.