This "Power of words" actually doesn't need any words.

Axel

http://xeesm.com/AxelS

Business investments in social media are on its way to maturity.

The days where social media for business is a "cost of doing business" with no need for an ROI are over. It is no longer acceptable to hire somebody in marketing to "take care of the social media thing", while the rest of the business does business as usual. The fact that social media is not a marketing campaign but a cross functional engagement has also been well adopted. The idea that outsourcing your love to customers to an agency has also been well understood – at least in larger organizations.

Anatomy of a social media strategy

Creating a social media strategy for an organization with 2,000 employees, reporting to 200 managers and 20 executives and together hoping to engage with 800,000 customers is not an easy task.

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When back at the beginning of February I posted about becoming a student again with the Social Media Academy, I thought I was in for a busy time.

I had no idea!

In fact, the course is so full-on, so demanding, that I’m now having to catch up with some things, formerly priorities, that I had to postpone.

During the program and since (while dealing with the catching up challenge!), I have reminded myself of the observation by Brian Solis in his book Engage! that for those of us who want to be leaders in social media (and I would say by extension want our clients to be leaders in the field) there is a cost, which is “that you go back to school for the near future in order to learn and acquire the skills necessary to lead your brand into the future.” (p xii)

I’m not complaining. Far from it. I’m in fact very pleased that we were given so much to study and that it was a serious stretch for me, even though I have been quite actively involved in the field for years now.

The number of data aggregation sites is exploding.

Companies provide free services to aggregate and sell social media data to marketers. This maybe a free business network, a ranking service, games and all kinds of services that look like fun, interesting, important – must haves…

Do you read their privacy policy? I guess most don't. Branch-Out was the first that just astounded me. Many of my network friends invited my to join, obviously not even looking at the almost empty privacy policy that basically stated that there is no privacy.

As of March 16 Facebook changed the way custom pages can be displayed.

Here is what you need to do in order to post a custom page / custom tab. It looks a bit complicated as it is meant to provide a rich application environment and has a lot of overhead for just ading some custom tab. However if you follow these steps you get it done in a few minutes. Feel free to use the Social Media Academy test page to test your tab.

1) Go to the developer section and create the link between a page / content you are hosting somewhere on your own server and the facebook page you like to show it on.

http://www.facebook.com/developers/

Click on "+ setup new app" on the upper right hand side

2) Give your application a name

3) Click on Facebook integration (tabs on the left hand side)
Add a name under "canvas page" for instance : promopage

4) Add the URL where the content resides
For instance if you like to display something from http://socialmedia-academy.com/demo/index.aspx
You will need to add http://socialmedia-academy.com/demo/ (note that you will have to ignore the actual file name)
Call the content file index.aspx (not htm and not html)

5) Scroll down and give the tab a name

6) Add the same URL i.e. http://socialmedia-academy.com/demo/ as the "Tab URL" — And submit

7) Click on "Application Profile Page" and on "add to my page" on the left navigation.

Social media strategy infographic

Companies wanting social media consulting which is both social media savvy and at the same time strongly focused on supporting enterprise objectives can now call on a new global group, Social Business Consulting Group (Sobizco).

Sobizco has been set up by a group of 17 social media strategists from the US, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region. All founding partners and an additional 20 social media consultants practice a unified methodology, as taught by the Social Media Academy. (I posted a few weeks ago about my being a student again, with the Academy.)

The Social Business Consulting Group provides social media audits, strategy development, engagement planning, solution implementation and strategy execution services.

It’s one thing for a small firm to develop and implement a social media strategy, and even on a small scale there can be challenges, such as in terms of skill sets, organizational culture, time management issues, budget and accountability. At the enterprise level the challenges can be much more daunting.

As Sobizco co-founder Axel Schultze says, “Once an executive decides to transform their organization into a more engaging company, attracting more customers through advocacy and user-generated content, those leaders are quickly challenged to develop a strategy that works not only for hundreds of managers and thousands of employees, but also for possibly millions of customers.”

Which is where Axel sees Sobizco coming in, with its unified, business-focused methodology and its global group of consultants.

The group is already working with leading companies, including SAP, EMC, Qwest and Oracle.

More about the Sobizco group and its various social presences at the Sobizco site.

Seventeen Social Media Academy Alumni and founders decided to take enterprise social media to the next level and founded the Social Business Consulting Group to address the enterprise social media strategy market with a team of close to 80 and locations in the US, EMEA and APAC

The press release was sent out this morning

Social Business Consulting Group (Sobizco) Changes The Way Executives Look At Social Media

Seventeen Social Media Strategists Unite To Form The World’s Largest Social Media Consulting Firm.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Mar 14, 2011 – Palo,Alto, The Social Media Consulting Group (Sobizco), founded by a team of 17 social media strategists from the U.S., Europe, and Asia Pacific, announced the launch of its consulting practice. All founding partners and an additional 20 social media consultants practice a unified methodology, as taught by the Social Media Academy. Different members of this global team have been working together for several years on diverse corporate social media consulting engagements and are now combining their experience to deliver enterprise-level social business consulting services worldwide."

The firm commences operations with a team of approximately 80 consultants, ending today’s social media dilemma where tens of thousands of social media consultants don’t speak “enterprise” and the traditional business consultants don’t speak “social media”.  The Social Business Consulting Group focuses on social media audits, strategy development, engagement planning, solution implementation and strategy execution services. Each founding partner has profound management experience from companies such as BHP, Dell, Franklin Tempelton, Fujitsu, GE, IBM, Oracle, Rockwell, Southwest Airlines, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Synnex, and Western Union.

“Once an executive decides to transform their organization into a more engaging company, attracting more customers through advocacy and user-generated content, those leaders are quickly challenged to develop a strategy that works not only for hundreds of managers and thousands of employees, but also for possibly millions of customers. The Social Media Consulting Group offers a complete series of tried and tested methods, models and frameworks to tackle large and complex projects including the most challenging of situations facing businesses” states co-founder Axel Schultze.

"Social media has provided enormous economic benefits to businesses around the world including growth in market share, reduction in product launch cost, reduction in support costs, increased brand reputation, improved customer experience models, higher ROI on marketing expenditure, along with faster and more precise insights into market trends in B2B as well as B2C situations" explained co-founder Wendy Soucie.

The group is already working with progressive clients including SAP, EMC, Qwest, Oracle, which has necessitated the need for a much larger social media consulting organization that is capable and skilled to tackle global projects.

The firm can be reached via their website and social presences at http://sobizco.com/

News Release in 140 characters

#Sobizco team today announced formation of largest #socialmedia strategy consulting firm with global presence, team of 80 http://sobizco.com/

#Sobizco – world’s largest social media #consulting firm, changing the way executives look @ #socialmedia http://Sobizco.com/

Global #sobizco team helping executives create competitive advantage with #socialmedia. Collaborate with unified methodologies

Executives challenged /w #socialmedia #strategy that works 4 100’s of managers, 1000's of employees and millions of customers. #sobizco.com

About

The Social Business Consulting Group is a global management consulting firm with focus on social media. The firm’s purpose is to help executives create an exceptional competitive advantage by leveraging social media. The strategy consulting focuses on a holistic approach where all market facing departments leverage social media to create a mutually beneficial business relationship with the constituencies of their respective ecosystem.

Social Business Consulting Group is considered a thought leader in applying social media in large corporations. The consultants help business leaders and their teams to make strategic business decision and create measurable economic success.

The Social Business Consulting Group is based in Palo Alto, California. For more information go to http://www.sobizco.com

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“Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.”  Sir Claus Moser

Having done a lot of study, of different subjects and in different learning environments, I have to admit there have been times I’ve thought I’d done enough studying and learning.

But if ever there was an era when continuing education was not a luxury but an imperative, this 21st century surely wins the prize.

And I know from experience that, in this fast-moving world, with such a daily tsunami of information, opinions and general noise about social media as about many other topics, I can benefit professionally and personally by participating in a structured, disciplined learning process.

All of which is by way of saying I’ve just become a student once more, this time with the Social Media Academy, where I have enrolled for the Certified Social Media Strategist program.

I’m doing the Australian version, which started yesterday and I am under the gun to get on with the challenging program of lessons.

The Certified Social Media Strategist class is described by the Academy as follows:

The Strategist Class is the “Core Education Program” of the Social Media Academy, a comprehensive 6 weeks online education program with online workshops covering social media from a holistic point of view. Class includes methods, models and frameworks for social media assessments, strategies and execution plans for all industries.

We’ve already had our introductory webinar and I am excited about the way the course has been structured and the support being provided, not least the custom-built e-learning platform.

Do I need the Certificate?

I really don’t know. I am pretty sure it won’t hurt for clients and prospective clients to know that I have been through a process like this, have had to submit assignments for assessment and have some external validation.

But what attracted me more than the prospect of having another certificate were

• the comprehensiveness of the course
• the strategic conceptual framework (I like good tactics, but I like to know where they fit in the big picture)
• the knowledge, experience and seriousness of purpose of the people running the Social Media Academy
• the quality of graduates whom I know
• the focus on providing guidance on how to help business from small to large corporate
• the inclusion of course material on practice-building

It’s a big time-commitment over a couple of months. I figured out I have to spend a minimum of twelve hours a week and in practice probably a bit more, just to keep up. But I believe it is worth it.

I’m hoping to share here on the blog some insights and realizations as I go along. Some of those may well be somewhat embarrassing.  I am quite prepared to find – and actually hope I will find – that there are a number of things I do in social media which I could do a lot better, and things I’m not doing that I should be doing, and so on.

And while I mightn’t need the certificate, I quite like the idea of having it!

If you are interested in knowing more about the Social Media Academy’s courses, they offer a free orientation session, with varying times to accommodate people around the globe in different time zones.

In my previous post on building a community site using the WordPress plugin BuddyPress, I reported that having spent quite a lot of time checking out how BuddyPress worked and what others thought of it, I found the actual installation quite straightforward.

My problems started when I wanted to make the site private.

Not being a programmer, discussion threads on the topic, like this one, made my head spin.

As far as I could figure out from my research, the basic BuddyPress site is designed to be public, with the option to have private groups within the site.

But it looked also as if there might be a plugin to adjust that framework.

Obvious as it may be to some, but hadn’t been to me and something I wish I had understood at the outset, there are plugins for BuddyPress, which is as I say itself a WordPress plugins – plugins for the plugin. And at least one of those BuddyPress plugins is designed to make the site private.

The BuddyPress Private Community plugin seemed to offer what I wanted. The catch was that when I activated it the site became private, sure enough, but so private that when people responded to my invitations to join the site they could not see the registration page.

While I was figuring all this out, I was losing momentum with getting the site functioning.

My solution was to:

• accept that the overall community site would be public
• ditch (i.e. de-activate) the private community plugin,
• set up a group on the BuddyPress site and
• make the group private.

Setting up the group was easy enough, it appeared, but in terms of what I wanted it was not an immediately straightforward process, as I had to choose between a couple of different settings, with various privacy rules for each.

To create a group, you first click on the Groups tab in the navigation bar, then on the Create Group button alongside the Groups Directory heading.

The are four steps to creating a group, as shown by the navigation tabs displayed: Details, Settings, Avatar, Invite Members.

The first step is easy: just provide a group name and some details.

Then the fun starts. Under Settings you need to decide which of the Privacy options to implement.

The Privacy options, with their respective rules, are – Public, Private and Hidden:

Public group

• Any site member can join this group.
• This group will be listed in the groups directory and in search results.
• Group content and activity will be visible to any site member.

Private group

• Only users who request membership and are accepted can join the group.
• This group will be listed in the groups directory and in search results.
• Group content and activity will only be visible to members of the group.

Hidden group

• Only users who are invited can join the group.
• This group will not be listed in the groups directory or search results.
• Group content and activity will only be visible to members of the group.

I toyed with choosing the Hidden option, but on reflection that looked as if it would be actually count-productive. My main aim was to provide participants in the webinars with a space to discuss ideas and developments without having those more publicly available, and to get access to resources I and others might choose to share just within the group and not more widely. And for openness, it was not as if the webinars were secret. In fact, anyone who wanted to sign up for the Roadmap webinar series would thereby qualify to be invited to join the group.

So Private it was – and is.

Invitations

The default for BuddyPress is that admins can invite friends to join. I installed the Invite Anyone plugin which provides more options, including having a checkbox with a general invitation to join the site, so that you can at the same time invite the person (or not) time to join your specific group (or groups).

Some people seem to have been able to join without a problem. Others have found the process a bit confusing. So I made a short video to provide a step by step guide to responding to one of those invitations.

Other plugins

There seems to be no end of plugins for BuddyPress. I’m using a few.

BP Group Documents provides a document space in each group – invaluable for my purposes

SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam – I read somewhere that membership sites can get bombarded with spammy signups, so this seemed like good insurance.

Invite Anyone – as mentioned above (it provides a range of options – I have it set fairly restrictively).

A Note on the Header Banner

For the moment I have left in place the default banner header on the Social Media Roadmap site. The BuddyPress Default theme I’m using comes with a very user-friendly Custom Header page, where I can either customize the default banner or upload another of my own creation (or commissioning).

Summing up

Although I had a bit of a learning curve, for now at least I’m happy with the decision to use BuddyPress as my community site platform. It’s fundamentally easy to install, once you have figured it out – and probably much easier for anyone technically savvier than I (which would not be hard to find). The fact that I can have a private group – or several – within the site is particularly attractive.

I am interested to hear of others’ experiences with BuddyPress. And of course clues to make it all work even better: that said, even what  a lot of my friends would probably regard as some basic code-tweaking will probably be a turn-off for me.