Previously Nadia Thompson had put together a short guide to LinkedIn for small businesses and independent consultants which has been very popular and we thought it would be useful to re-publish it here. As an added-bonus also included is a similar guide to Facebook for the same audience!

I am pleased to announce the development of a unique Business Social Media Impact Forecasting Simulator which provides a simple but scientific approach to developing clear and credible forecasts of the impact including financial benefits of social media campaigns before they are undertaken.

RepKnight is an exciting Belfast-based software start-up in the reputation monitoring, crowd-sourced news and public opinion space. Even though they have only been going 12 months and without any external funding they are already in profit and fast becoming the "go-to" company for major private and public enterprises who need high volume real-time social media tracking.

I have been looking for way to monitor and track all my websites/blogs plus all my social media accounts (linkedIN, Twitter etc) from a single dashboard. I figured this would be pretty easy - a thing that most people would want to do! Not so - despite the abundance of great social media tools I found it surprisingly difficult to find one which met all my requirements.

I have been amazed at how many people have asked me for a really simple and very short guide to LinkedIN for small businesses and independent consultants. So here it is:

These days lots of businesses are trying to use social media to enhance their online presence. Unfortunately only a minority are really succeeding. Many of these are businesses that are highly digital or naturally global. However many businesses do not fit this model and are working in local markets with non-digital services/products. Can "normal enterprises" exploit social media too or does it only really benefit the global digital elite?

#1 The Social Media Healthcheck Reference Card
#2 The Seven Secrets of High Performing Teams (AudioCast)
#3 Leading collaborative business networks - 10 rules

Get all 3 here!

Interesting post on the idashboard blog which shows up how mass sentiment expressed through social media such as twitter can be automatically extracted into data visualization software and the results displayed in almost real-time. The number of applications for this type of social media dashboarding must be huge in both business and civic engagement

I am delighted to give bioteams.com readers a heads-up that I am launching www.youbidfast.com showing how any organization or even individual can turbo-charge their business development and marketing results by exploiting the latest best-in-class (and TOTALLY FREE) software in areas such as blogging, social media, CRM and web monitoring. Please check it out and let me know what you think!

One of the biggest challenges for any Enterprise today is Social Media Optimisation, defined as "a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites." The Social Media Optimization Simulator Game lets you instantly 'what-if' the effects of different social media activities (blogging, tweeting etc) on your enterprise.

David Wilcox (Social Reporter) chats with me (Ken Thompson (Bioteams)) on his video phone about how best to engage people, and whether you could "sell" them social media (knowing you can't really).