I recently presented at an Enterprise Company forum on the topic of - Social Media Culture to support Business Development activity.

The most interesting part was the interactive Q&A session with the audience. Thought it might be useful to list out some of the most popular questions and answers to help support your own social media activity.

LinkedIn is sometimes treated like the neglected child of social media. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube get way more attention. But with more than 150+ million users in over 200 countries, LinkedIn is the most popular social network for professionals.

LinkedIn offers a ton of useful tools and features for freelancers, small business owners, and creative professionals, not just those interested in finding a corporate job. Therefore, to help to capitalise and master LinkedIn here's a list of tips that you may have overlooked.

In my previous blog 'Jumping on the Social Media Bandwagon' I discussed how companies should outline social media objectives prior to managing or maintaining a social media strategy. Given that each company has different requirements, I wanted to offer some guidance about the four main areas that I highly recommend be considered when resourcing and supporting social media initiatives in order to build your pipeline and close revenue. 

LinkedIn has over 2 million companies on its network, so they've just launched a new LinkedIn Follow Company button that can be added to your website.

Time and time again, I meet clients who are sceptical about the effectiveness of Social Media(SM) for their business. They either say that SM is for businesses that sell direct to the consumer marketplace (B2C) or they’ve fallen into the trap of putting links to social tools on their website which have proven fruitless in terms of inbound enquiries. If anything it has just added another administrative overhead.

Following on from Facebook and privacy issues, our friends at LinkedIn have introduced the default setting of Manage Social Advertising setting as “ON” by default. This means that your names and photos can be used for 3^rd party advertising.

Like me, if you don’t want to participate then here are some quick steps to change this setting.

1. Sign into LinkedIn, and click on your name, then choose “Settings“.
2. Now click on “Account” (bottom left).
3. In the box to the right click on “Manage Social Advertising” .
4. This opens a new window – now remove the tick from the box next to “LinkedIn may use my name, photo in social advertising”.

Based on the last few days of riots in London, social media as a medium has come under attack for being used to coordinate violence.

It's just a matter of time for the government to consider the level of accountability social media vendors (FaceBook, BlackBerry, RIM, Twitter) play in the flow of information. It will be interesting to see whether or not Social Media vendors will be forced to stop or hinder communication that leads to this type of violence in the future.

For the purpose of this article I'm concentrating on the positive element of how Twitter was used to unite communities of London, helping to end the senseless violence and reclaim their city.