When it comes to acquiring and keeping satisfied customers, smart entrepreneurs must understand what’s going on inside their customers mind’s. Just as we saw how neuroeconomics can be used for smarter pricing tactics, small business owners can benefit from insightful research in behavioral psychology to increase sales and provide exceptional customer service.

Today, you’re going to see some research that reveals how marketers and ecommerce entrepreneurs can use implicit egotism, social constructs, and appeals to social inclusion to create stronger brand engagement, keep customers happy, and increase their bottom line.

via How to Engineer Increased Sales & Happy Customers With Behavioral Psychology.

Which category does your organization’s Web presence fall into? Over- or under-managed? When it comes to the Web, few organizations have found the Goldilocks zone. Their online activities are either under-managed with minimal policies and procedures, or dogged by bureaucracy and internal politics.

Those that fall into the former category are vulnerable to legal threats, internal disputes and knee-jerk management where the website lurches from one crisis to the next. Those in the latter are crippled by indecision and fail to respond to the fast-changing nature of the Web.

via An Organizational Structure That Supports Your Digital Presence | Smashing Magazine.

You see, while the sharing of news stories on social media has boomed in recent years, I often find myself wanting to share just one part of an article. For instance, if I see a quote I like, I’d like to share that to my Twitter account. Or if I see an image within an article, I sometimes want to share just that picture to my Pinterest page. Sometimes I want to share just the video embedded in a news story, not the news story itself.That’s why my prediction for 2013 is the rise of “microcontent sharing”.

via Big Idea 2013: Unbundling Media | LinkedIn.

When it comes to reading long form, the web can be an ugly, distracting place. It’s the reason why services like Instapaper and Pocket (née Read It Later) exist: to strip content of its context — noisy site designs, advertisements, and other unnecessary elements. But perhaps we’re moving into a new era where more of the web is clean and readable. Maybe the future of web publications will be beautiful enough that the reading experience is more enjoyable in its natural habitat.

via The future of the feature: Breaking out of templates to build customized reading experiences » Nieman Journalism Lab.

Social media now accounts for 18% of time spent online, according to a new infographic.

Since 2006, the amount of time that the average person spent on social-networking sites has more than doubled, from 2.7 hours to 6.9 hours per month. More people are using social media, as well. While only 24% of Americans had a single social-media profile in 2008, 56% of Americans do now.

Between the different social media sites, Facebook is, unsurprisingly, king. The average Facebook user spends almost seven hours each month on the site — that’s well ahead of Tumblr and Pinterest, which tie for second place for most time spent. The average visitor to Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ spends less than half an hour on the site per month.

via This Is How Much Time You Spend on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr.

Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, has just published her latest huge deck of amazingly useful data, the “2012 Internet Trends Year-End Update.”

Meeker is delivering her report to a group of Students at Stanford University, and Kleiner Perkins is live-tweeting the presentation on Twitter at @kpcb.

This is an update to a report Meeker delivered in May 2012, and it’s got a ton of new information.

via Mary Meeker releases stunning data on the state of the Internet | VentureBeat.

Yet few products these days can succeed without their online community, and the insight you can gain from interacting with that community is unparalleled, despite the pain. But to take advantage of that learning, you have to avoid the absolutely one and only cardinal sin of community management: not listening.

via Cardinal Sin of Community Management | LinkedIn.

2012 saw more social effort and engagement than ever by non-profits, and the following infographic from MDG Advertising provides a handy overview. Based on statistics from a number of non-profit advocacy groups, it reflects a world of newfound potential for rallying people online for social good.

via How Non-Profits Relied on Social Media in 2012 [INFOGRAPHIC].

http://www.ted.com TEDTalks shares the best ideas from the TED Conference with the world, for free: trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses, all giving the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. We post a fresh TEDTalk eve…

via Secrets of Social Media – YouTube.

Social media isn’t all community, collaboration, and cohesion. It has a dark side too. It’s a perfect tool for tracking people and conducting surveillance as well as spreading propaganda, and it’s wide open to all comers, no matter what their purposes.

via Call It Antisocial Media: Even Twitter Has a Dark Side – Robert Plant – Harvard Business Review.