A colleague of mine, Brad George, and I are working on an academic paper related to entrepreneurship education. Here’s the premise. Those that need entrepreneurship education are nascent entrepreneurs—those thinking about starting a business and going through some of the early motions. However, standard entrepreneurship courses target new business owners—typically not the students sitting in the seats. Nascent entrepreneurs can, of course, progress into new business owners, but we are not paying enough attention to these prospective entrepreneurs. If anything, traditional entrepreneurship education is scaring them away as opposed to unleashing their potential. Why? Blame the business plan.

In our social entrepreneurship series, The World at Work, Mashable interviews the faces behind the startups and projects that are working to make a global impact. These companies provide technological solutions for non-profits, give fledgling startups a place to work and donate to charity every time a song is downloaded. While the companies are diverse, they are all on a mission to change our lives for the better and improve society. Here’s a roundup of featured projects from the last week, including exclusive video interviews with the founders of these innovative startups. To read more and watch the videos, click through to the full story, and follow the series to learn about more breakthrough companies.

When you’re the world’s largest social network you find it difficult to let defeat slow you down. Facebook may be autocratic in the way it deals with its membership base and it may want to own the web and all its content but it is also the place where everyone goes to hangout online with their friends and it just keeps on growing. The curious purchase of Instagram for which Facebook paid a billion makes even less sense now with Facebook rolling out its own version of it, in apparent direct competition, unless of course, we consider the timing. Instagram was purchased just weeks after it was made open to Android users. It provided Facebook with a plan for mobile in its pre-IPO days and it stopped a rival from gaining a surge of new members. Then with the deal yet to be inked it brought out its own app called Camera in effect competing with itself.

You are what you eat, and if you’re eating all the wrong types of food, don’t be surprised if it affects your decision-making or ability to think on your feet at work. According to Psychology Today, complex brain processes are “literally fed by glucose that circulates from gut to brain.” “The human body is undeniably an energy system,” Florida State University psychologist Roy Baumeister told the magazine. “Evolution gave us this new and more complicated way of acting, but it’s expensive in terms of fuel burned. Being our better selves is biologically costly.”

Last year, the free photo-sharing platform Instagram was named App of the year by Apple’s App Store. It’s no surprise then that it’s still picking up speed as a viable and useful marketing tool for businesses choosing to take advantage. But just as internet marketing on social websites and knowing how to protect your search engine reputation go hand in hand, the same is true of protecting your reputation via mobile photo sharing. Using it correctly, and not overwhelming potential customers, or underwhelming them for that matter, is as important with Instagram as it is with any other social media platform. Here we take a look at five brands that have been using the software to shed a unique and interest-piquing light on their products.

Few people have the same definition of “social media.” To some, it is a waste of time or a black hole. Others hear the term and immediately think of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google , and a host of other platforms. That needs to change immediately. The people who “get” social media don’t think about the platform; instead, they think of people and the relationships that can develop there. Social media is not a destination or place to go; it is a way of getting there. The social aspect of social media is the most important vehicle to drive a return on the time invested. If the social aspect of social media is the car, then community management is the steering wheel.

Really solid read if you don’t understand the value of domain names.

In the days before social media and the Internet, it wasn’t as easy to listen in on your customers’ conversations about your company. Nor could you easily encourage people to spread the good word about your business through word-of-mouth. But when you connect with your customers online, you stop speaking to them and start talking with them. And wonderful things begin to happen. Those golden word-of-mouth moments that happen naturally offline at parties or networking events suddenly begin happening online right in front of your eyes on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and review sites. On social networks, word-of-mouth referrals become amplified: the friends, families and networks of your customers see these referrals and might just beat a path to your door. How does it work? I call it the engagement marketing cycle.

Many online publishers run into the same vexing problem when they start email marketing: You know that email subscribers drive traffic and make up the long-term, profitable audience for your brand or business. But only a handful of your site’s visitors are choosing to sign-up. Maybe you’ve just started building your list, or maybe you’ve had that opt-in form on your page for months. No matter how many unique daily visitors you get — or how amazing your service or product is — if they aren’t finding your valued subscriber content, all the likes, tweets, pins, and pluses in the world aren’t going to build that loyal following you need to grow.