As London descended into chaos last night, social media became the focus for following the riots’ latest developments.

As the drought situation in the Horn of Africa escalates, humanitarian agencies are desperate for financial aid. They’ve got the social media tools, but are they using them effectively?

Ethics, values, commitment, the virtue of knowing when to talk and when to listen – if it is anybody who knows the importance of the principles of proper communication it is nuns. They could teach us all a thing or two about proper social media engagement too, the subject of this post.

That’s the big conclusion drawn from the 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer, the details of which were revealed yesterday at the WEF forum in Davos. And where do our friends and peers rank? They are losing ground. Fast.

The new online ad spend figures are out from IAB UK this morning revealing a recession-busting 10 percent year-on-year rise. More impressively, the online ad spend is nearly one-quarter of the total UK advertising market. Yep, £1 out of every £4 spent on advertising in the UK is now spent online with only one direction to go: UP.

Our editorial and social media training partner, Custom Communication, has gone back through six years of social media and compiled a visual narrative of company misadventures with bloggers, tweeter and other social media voices.

In this week’s insightful guest analysis, Headshift director Lee Bryant argues that social business design may yet succeed in making IT departments relevant and useful within companies.

If Facebook is ever to pull off an IPO it needs to show investors it hasn’t yet hit a wall in terms of user growth. Even with the magic 500 million users announcement looming, Facebook founder …

Budgets are tight for conference attendees this year and so event planners have to build plenty of pre-event buzz to get their confab noticed. Jay Baer outlines a fascinating strategy using social media tools to get people talking about your event even before they walk in the door.

Each week we’ll be on the look out for the best social media in action presentations so that we can share with you and create an easy to find directory for Social Media Influence readers …