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Social media, or at least its widespread use, may be relatively new, but certain human behaviors are not. For example, David Aaker, blogging at the Harvard Business Review, points to a study by Ernest Dichter from 1966 on word-of-mouth persuasion.

The report had three key findings, all of which are relevant to social business today.

So you've set up your small business's Facebook Page. You've even optimized it for search engines. The "likes" are just pouring in. What's next?

If you haven't already, you might try taking Facebook's social advertising offerings for a spin. The ability to target ads to people based on very specific criteria and cap your ad spend at a daily amount of your choosing makes for a very cost-effective way to reach consumers, especially for smaller operations.

Oracle announced today that it will acquire FatWire. Financial details were not disclosed. FatWire bills itself as customer experience management company and provides tools for content management, community forums, analytics, digital asset management, etc. It sounds very much like what Adobe is doing with its Digital Enterprise Platform (formerly LiveCycle), which was announced yesterday.

According to the announcement, Oracle wants to use this technology to help its customers create unified customer experiences across channels - including those ever important new channels like mobile and social.

As Facebook approaches the 700 million user mark, it's easy to take for granted that pretty much everybody you know is a member of the social networking behemoth's site.

Although the total number of Facebook users continues to climb, many people simply don't want to have a profile on the site, whether because of concerns over privacy, information overload or their marriage-crippling Farmville addiction.

A new way of managing your enterprise network is now available from Enterasys called Isaac. It is a social media interface for its NetSight network monitoring system. It was announced today and will be available next month, and is free until the end of the year and then $9,995 afterwards. It works with Salesforce's Chatter, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook and eventually will work with other vendors' network monitoring equipment. Isaac is special software that runs on the Enterasys monitoring hardware as a separate module.

In the United States and Western Europe, the Internet is ubiquitous. Or, at least it seems that way. But, did you know that New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, South Korea and Japan all have higher rates of Internet penetration than the U.S.?

That is what an infographic from public relations and research company Edelman tells us about Internet usage in the Asia-Pacific region. New Zealand is the most digitally connected country in the Pacific Rim with an 85.4% Internet penetration rate. No wonder our founder, Richard MacManus, hails from there. Check out the rest of the infographic after the jump.

The New York Times is breaking up with the bot that automatically tweets every article that goes up on the newspaper's website. Instead, New York Times content will be curated by a team of social media editors who are much more interactive and collaborative online, @replying users and retweeting interesting non-New York Times content.

An interesting question emerges on how people, companies and publishers should be using the social space to build their brands, especially those focused on content. A Twitter bot is simple and it gets all the links to your content into the open, more or less like a 140-character RSS reader. Mobile applications like Flipboard and Zite use those Twitter streams to populate their feeds so there is incentive to just let a bot get all of the content out in one place. Is there a perfect mix between bot and human that works best in social media?

Big Tech is fighting Big Government in California over a proposed privacy bill that would limit the amount of information that companies can share about their users. A coalition of tech companies including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Match.com, Twitter and others sent a letter to the California Senate May 16 opposing the bill, saying it is unnecessary and would be detrimental to the tech industry and thus to California's economy.

Proposed by Sen. Ellen Corbett, the bill would force social networks to institute default settings upon registration of what users share on the services. Users can opt to share more information than the default, which would only list the users' city of residence. Tech companies are fighting on the basis that the bill is Draconian and unintuitive and that, as an industry, technology can do better than the California legislature.

The Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management is working with IBM on a new course that will provide students with hands-on analytics education. Students will work with real big data sets from companies and learn to use professional analytics tools that are in demand today. IBM Business Analytics posted a YouTube video about the course.

"It's more than statistics," says Sharon Oster, dean of the Yale School of Management. "When you have a plethora of data it means you have to think a little more strategically upfront about what you do with the data."

A new contest sponsored by OPEN, American Express's small business division, is offering five small businesses a $20,000 check $2,500 in Facebook ad credits and a trip to the social networking giant's Palo Alto headquarters to learn more about social marketing.

The "Big Break for Small Businesses" contest is open to the owners of U.S.-based small businesses with $10 million in annual revenue or less.