Have you ever seen your favourite celebrity talking about a product on social media? These endorsements (名人代言) might not be random, but are actually seen as a vital part of the marketing process. Human desire for status and making friends, combined with our need to belong to a group, makes us easy to be “socially influenced”. Companies often use that desire to have a similar lifestyle to a celebrity to sell or launch a product. So, what do these endorsements actually do?

Firstly, they can be used to build brand awareness. A social media influencer should have a strong understanding of the platform they operate on, and therefore can create engaging content that not only sticks to the brand image, but sparks their followers' interests in a product they might never have seen before.

Secondly, influencers can improve a company or product's relationship with their customer base. According to a report on customer loyalty, 77% of buyers have been brand loyal for more than ten years. This is also true of 60% of millennials. A popular celebrity can target key customers and talk or blog about a product, which can create an instant and lasting bond with the consumer.

Lasty, influencers can improve customer buying habits with seemingly “fair opinions”. We are more likely to respond to “peer recommendation” than traditional ads, meaning the fact we see an influencer as a “friend” can make us less likely to be sceptical about what we are seeing.

So, next time you see a celebrity talking about a product, you might want to consider this could be a carefully crafted marketing strategy designed to target your core needs. If you find yourself perusing a product you've seen on social media, you may well have been influenced.

When almost everyone has a mobile phone, why are more than half of Australian homes still paying for a landline（座机）?

These days you'd be hard pressed to find anyone in Australia over the age of 15 who doesn't own a mobile phone. In fact, plenty of younger kids have one in their pocket. Practically everyone can make and receive calls anywhere, anytime.

Still, 55 percent of Australians have a landline phone at home and only just over a quarter （29%） rely only on their smartphones, according to a survey（调查）. Of those Australians who still have a landline, a third concede that it's not really necessary and they're keeping it as a security blanket-19 percent say they never use it while a further 13 percent keep it in case of emergencies. I think my home falls into that category.

More than half of Australian homes are still choosing to stick with their home phone. Age is naturally a factor（因素）-only 58 percent of Generation Ys still use landlines now and then, compared to 84 percent of Baby Boomers who've perhaps had the same home number for 50 years. Age isn't the only factor; I'd say it's also to do with the makeup of your household.

Generation Xers with young families, like my wife and I, can still find it convenient to have a home phone rather than provide a mobile phone for every family member. That said, to be honest, the only people who ever ring our home phone are our Baby Boomers parents, to the point where we play a game and guess who is calling before we pick up the phone （using Caller ID would take the fun out of it）.

How attached are you to your landline? How long until they go the way of gas street lamps and morning milk deliveries?

There are many differences between happy people and unhappy people. 【小题1】? Read the following list of things that happy people do differently from unhappy people and you will know the answer.

Well, I can tell you for sure that those people who are really happy, fear less and love a lot more. They see each moment, each challenge, each person as an opportunity to discover more about themselves and the world around them. 【小题2】.

Happy people understand that you can’t really change a situation. But they can feel better by understanding that there might be a reason for it. When something unpleasant happens to them, they ask themselves questions like: What can I learn from this? 【小题3】? They always seem to be pleasant and hopeful no matter what happens to them. They do the things they do because of the meaning it brings into their lives and because they get a sense of purpose by doing so.

They understand that “Doing what you love is the most important for living a full life”. They care more about living a life full of meaning rather than, what in our modern society we would call, living a successful life. 【小题4】, because they choose to focus on doing the things they love the most.

【小题5】. They make sure that their actions bring meaning and happiness in the lives of many. They look for ways to give and to share the best of themselves with the world and to make other people happy.