I guess you all rationalized that Social Media projects are typically difficult to close and painful to execute if executives are not well aware of the impact of Social Media to their business. The single biggest problem is that most executives do not speak your language.

Getting your or your client’s executives to understand Social Media has become for many the single biggest obstacle. Even if you have a good story, they may not trust you – but they may trust the Social Media Academy. SMACAD is trusted by executives from ADP, Dell, Salesforcce.com, SAP and many others. Based on our own experience dealing with world class executives, we created this brand new executive program: “Social Media Business Essentials” for executives and top executive consultants http://bit.ly/smacadsmbe $395 incl. certificate Continue Reading →

If you are listening to 1,000 social media practitioner you get 1,000 different ways and ideas how to deal with social media. Typically just tactical ideas, most of them start with how you can use certain tools and a variety of other inputs.

Once you get in touch with more experienced consultants they will tell you stop the experimentation and think strategically. Most will tell you to start with a well defined goal or objective. Continue Reading →

Only people who care stand up and argue, defend, fight or otherwise make their position very clear. Interesting enough – the more disappointing a situation gets, the louder the conversation and the bigger the impact for a brand. An age old saying goes: "The worst thing to be talked about – is not to be talked about". A few companies are actually learning from the show business how this all works.
 

Scandals and disappointments – strategic tools

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Kingdoms ruled the world for the past thousand years. People either lived in one of those kingdoms or were essentially outlaws or gypsies. Those who belonged to any of the kingdoms had to obey their rules or needed to leave to find a new place. That was very hard as you had to leave friends and family behind. When I hear from friends they are in twitter jail or even worst their account were blocked it reminds me on those kingdoms where the king decided the rules and their guard just executed whatever they felt is not right. One of my contacts tried for 3 month to get his Twitter account back and then finally created a new one – without knowing why. I had such a situation 3 years ago. Our Social Media Academy account was erased by Twitter and I had no way of knowing, getting in touch or getting an answer. Continue Reading →

After three years educating applied social media for business we decided to make some important enhancements to our certifications and classes going forward. The adjustments are reflecting  attendee feedback, evolving market requirements and to homogenize graduation terminology.

While we were initially focusing on social media consultants who basically were able to participate full time in the 8 week highly intensive crash course class, we are now getting a significant amount of attendees from corporations who need to go through the program while working in their respective jobs. At the same time we want to prepare attendees for the growing demand in social media strategy work and needed to add more content and intensify group collaboration and project work.

As a result we restructured the program as following:

1) Social Media Basics – An all new class

After 8 years of social media it is obviously much harder to start and become successful than just 2 years ago. This class shall help people who need to learn all the basics and ramifications of social media for business. Attendees learn about the general purpose and objectives using social media for business, opportunities and risks, tools and networks, behavioral aspects, how it can help build a better customer experience, better customer support, better product management, improve marketing and reduce cost across all departments. Attendees learn to setup their own social presence and realize the differences between personal and business use.

* No entrance exam required.
* 4 weeks online lessons and workshops.
* English or German language classes available
* Classes are held 3 times a year or more
* Company specific classes available

2) Certified Social Media Manager – More Knowledge, more practice

This class combines the previous Social Media Manager and large parts of the Social Media Strategist class to reflect current market needs. Requirements to be a Social Media manager have grown significantly in the past year and the new class reflects that demand. The Certified Social Media Manager not only learns to execute a social media strategy but also to be part of the strategy development, be part of a social media audit and support the resource planning and budget process. In addition a Social Media Academy Certified Social Media Manager need to earn the certificate by being part of a complete social media project from strategy creation to program execution, budget planning and resource allocation. A certified social media manager is trained to take a social media strategy in a mid size or larger corporation and executes such a strategy in the most professional way. The new program provides additional know how on social media monitoring and social media crisis handling.

* Entrance exam is required.
* 8 weeks online lessons, collaborative project work and workshops.
* English or German language classes available
* Classes are help three times a year
* Company specific classes available

3) Social Media Strategist – More advanced, more project work

This class is an advanced class, requiring the knowledge and methodologies learned in the Social Media Manager Class and actually being able to create a enterprise level social media strategy. This class has the remaining components of the "old" strategist class including HR, Human Talent Development, creating a social media strategy practice within a consultant organization or an enterprise as well as more intensive workshops with real life projects to be worked on in a collaborative manner. The strategist class also includes advanced lessons on social media analytics, social media crisis management and social media strategy variations in B2B versus B2C. The Social Media Strategist class is now a 6 month education program.

* Social Media Manager certificate or an intensive entrance exam is required.
* 6 month online lessons, extensive project collaboration and workshops.
* English only
* Classes are help once a year

4) Social Media Team Associate – Training the executing work force

Also this is an all new class and addresses the need for businesses who have well educated social media manager or social media strategists and need to train team mates in Product Management, Sales, Support, Marketing or PR. Attendees of this class will be from companies with a defined social media strategy using the SMACAD strategy framework. Attendees learn to develop programs which are defined by the Strategy Hexagon and are based on the Four Quadrant Assessment model as well as the NCP model. Attendees will learn to create social selling initiatives, customer experience improvements, crowd sourcing programs, social marketing initiatives, social media augmented service and support programs to be used in a cross functional social media engagement. It is highly recommended that attendees with no social media background will take the social media basics class before joining the Social Media Team Associate class.

* Entrance exam is required.
* 4 weeks online lessons and workshops.
* English or German language classes available
* Classes are help twice a year
* Company specific classes available

5) Social Business Master – The new leadership program

This class is currently in preparation and will be available starting in Fall 2012. The SBM program will take 2 Years / 4 semester including all aspects of social media for business. The goal is to educate future business executives to lead an organization strategically into the social business era including more effective go to market strategies, more successful sales engagements, market integrated product planning and development, customer integrated support strategies, partner integrated social media engagements and more. The SBM will learn to apply methods, models and frameworks in strategy development as well as hands on exercises to know what it takes to create and execute the measures leading to a successful engagement.

* Entrance Exam is required
* 24 month online lessons, project work and workshops plus 4 class room days.
* English only
* Classes starting once a year in Fall

The most significant change in the market compared to 2008, when we started with the Social Media Academy is the level of engagement in the social web as well as the evolving behavior. The number of users has grown from roughly 200 Million to over 1 Billion. Twitter has grown from a few hundred thousand to over 200 Million. Tools like Quora, Foursquare, Google+ didn't exist or were barely known. Other tools made way to newer more innovative products. The demarcation between personal and business presences have become very blurry or resolved completely. Executives learned about the significance in cost reduction and increase in customer satisfaction and the "elite networking technique" became a commodity.

This is no easy task. Once you look under the hood what you need – you will have a hard time to find one. There is currently one capable social media strategist for approximately 1,000 open positions.

The Social Media Director should be able to do the following:

1) Making a thorough assessment

Hopefully using some proven audit or assessment methods

Coming back with a well structured report

Being able to make a good social media swot analysis from the findings

2) Creating a social media strategy

Having the ability and comprehension to go cross departmental with it

Knowing about the impact of social media on the sales team and how to leverage social engagement techniques to generate better customer relationships

Understanding the impact of social media on product management and how to leverage it for product requirements gathering, alleviating product design risk before it goes to production and leveraging the helping hand of early adopters in the product launch phase

Realizing the enormous impact on the support team and how service can leverage social media to improve service quality, customer experience level and advocacy

Haven a similar understanding of how social media improves HR, logistics, procurement and obviously marketing.

3) Strategy Alignment

Responsibility to bring the social media strategy in perfect alignment with the overall corporate strategy and possibly coach the executive team to make necessary alignments in the corporate strategy.

4) Overseeing the social engagement plans from the various departments

As such the Social Media Director has to be able to easily connect across department levels and support all department in their respective engagement which all has to serve the overall social media and business strategy.

Each of the departments will want and need to do their own programs to improve customer advocacy and drive public engagement. The social media director will be very busy to support all the departments with a cohesive engagement plan development.

5) Strategy Execution

Managing the executing of the social media strategy and ensuring that a clearly defined goal will be achieved at the decided point in time.

Now – there are some cute job descriptions out there where the social media director is also the one who does the "tweeting, blogging and commenting" all in one person. And the rest of the team does business as usual? That will obviously be a big failure.

What are you 'gonna do' – if you can't get the people?

Don't make a compromise and hire some mediocre social media people who may do their best – but that is still not the best for your company. Take your own team through a thorough education. They may take a bit longer to understand all the social media permutations and effects – but they know your business, your customers, your company culture and so much more that a social media super star has to learn if they join your organization. 

You may want to join our online business briefing Thursday this week

Axel

http://xeesm.com/AxelS

For the past two years we were focused on the social media strategist education. We actually coined the term Social Media Strategist about two years ago when it was clear to us that social media in corporations is a strategic engagement. We were fortunate enough to have attendees from world class companies including 3M, ADP, Dell, EMC, Oracle, Qwest, Salesforce.com, SAP and many others.

Consequently the demand for social media managers is rapidly growing. Companies who now have a social media strategy in place need managers and social media helpdesk teams to actually execute the strategy. And in that position, there is more to know than just how to tweet or how to build a fan page.

New Social Media Manager Certrification

As a result of that we put together a three week Social Media Manager training with certification.

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Social media is great for 20 somethings, social media is a marketing responsibility and earth is a disk.

OK the older generation with managers above 40, have quite a challenge to get their arms around social media. But the business starters, college kids are not so much better off just because they are young, learn faster and are more agile. After reviewing the two years of Social Media education engagement I noticed that successful social media managers and successful social media consultants are between 35 and 50. I also noticed that none of the social media rock stars is less than 30. More so I noticed that high impact social media engagements – outside the fancy campaigns – but the ones who seriously improved customer experience, drove consumer engagement, helped to reduce cost or increase revenue were almost all driven, managed and executed by senior people.

This is NOT the end of your career – but you need to turn your assets into a new advantage!

Social media has an interesting surprise in store for the more established generation.

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There are approximately 14,000 open social media jobs, most being the social media director, who's initial task would be helping the company to define a social media strategy. While this is a great development, I'd like to ask the question: "Is this really the best way?"

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