Jacob Morgan and I want to bring our wisdom and know-how to the #e2conf in Boston this spring, but we need your help.

To be clear, there’s really nothing in it for us: I speak at conferences pretty regularly, so I don’t need the exposure, and as far as I can tell, #e2conf doesn’t pay its session speakers, so Jacob and I aren’t looking for a payday. We want to be there because we feel that what we already teach companies behind closed doors is well worth sharing with the enterprise community at large, especially in the context of enterprise business planning. Not being there would be a missed opportunity for the conference, the business community, and everyone in attendance in Boston. We’re here, we’re eager to share this stuff, and this is one of the best ways for us to do so. Unfortunately, we need votes – LOTS of votes -  to make it happen.

You can view and vote for our session Enterprise Social Media: Best Practices in Development, Deployment and Integration here.

Social Media Program Development

Companies looking to get involved in social media need to start somewhere.  The first segment of our session will cover how companies need to look at developing their social media strategies while tying those strategies back to ROI or impact metrics.  We will cover everything from identifying how social media can support existing company initiatives to how new social media initiatives can be created to drive business objectives and impact the bottom line.

Social Media Program Deployment and Integration

Once the strategies are developed, the next steps is to roll them out.  This section will cover everything from how companies need to structure their teams to setting timelines and expectations for a full scale social media roll out.  This is an important topic because strategies are only as effective as their ability to be executed. Anything can look great on paper. Execution is key.

The relevance to #e2conf becomes clear when you consider the complexity of accomplishing this in an enterprise environment: Large companies are divided into a breadth of departments across various geographic locations, which presents layers of obstacles ranging from poor communications and rigid business cultures to imbalances in infrastructure and conflicting objectives across silos.  The biggest Social Media challenge of all in the enterprise space lies in properly integrating it into (and across) an entire company so that it becomes a PART of the way that company does business as opposed to becoming some short-lived external add-on.  Our session will touch on how companies in the enterprise space can (and should) properly integrate social media into existing and new business functions and processes.

Cheers,

Olivier.

Wow. That was fast. 2010 is here already? What happened to 2009?

Oh… I’m sorry, that’s right. 2009 kind of sucked. Most people are glad it’s over. Me, not so. Not that 2009 rocked my world or anything, but I am a bit sad that we couldn’t make it better. Know what I mean?Starting by giving all the people who lost their jobs since H2 2008 their jobs back – or better yet, whole new jobs. Jobs they like even better. That would have been good.

Another way we could have made 2009 better might have been to come together in time of crisis instead of polarizing ourselves around issues that shouldn’t be issues to begin with – Republican vs. Democrat, Conservative vs. Progressive, Social Media vs. Traditional Media, earned attention vs. bought attention…*sigh* Seriously? 10%+ unemployment and we’re debating ideology? Seriously?  So yeah, 2009 could have gone a little smoother for everyone if we had spent more time working TOGETHER instead of against each other, or – as it were – off on our own trying to score our own little slices of pie.

We can do better than this. Much better, in fact.

I’m sad to see 2009 go, not because I liked it that much, but because for all the talking and blogging and tweeting and arguing we managed to do, we didn’t get a whole lot done. The US is still bleeding jobs. Some of my friends have been out of work for over a year. In other words, though most of us managed to pay the bills, 2009 came and went, and we didn’t solve anything. We didn’t take 2009 anywhere.  We just… talked. And tweeted. And waited for things to get better, as if that would happen all on its own: The magic economy restoring itself through… divine intervention. Truth is, 2009 came and went, and we failed to fix much of anything. Not exactly the best way to end a decade now, is it?

When I was training to be a Fusilier Marin, much of the training I was put through was intended to boost individual performance: Obstacle and confidence courses, weapons training, PT, classroom instruction, etc. The basic stuff, essentially. But the real value of the training, especially as an officer, was the portion of it that emphasized teamwork rather than individual performance. And I am not talking about “team building exercises” here. We’re way beyond the “close your eyes and fall backwards so your office mates can catch you” stuff. I’m talking more about getting dropped inside an empty 15ft-deep WWII concrete fuel tank (more like a giant concrete crater with impossibly vertical walls, in case you’re trying to paint yourself a mental image) with 6 guys and no gear with a single mission: Get yourselves out.

How the hell do you do that? It’s dark, it’s cold, you’re hungry and sleep-deprived, no one on your team has ever done it before, and you have until dawn to figure it out or you’re all flunking out of the program.

Okay… now what?

Well, I’ll tell you now what: You start working together is what. You’re in a hole (literally) and you have to get yourself out. That’s the problem  – which isn’t unlike the problems that most companies face today. So what do you do? Do you start barking out orders? Do you assert yourself as the “project leader?” Do you build a plan based on ideology? Nope. Not if you want to get out. What you do is start by clarifying the problem as a team, then coming up with ideas – as a team, hen testing the ideas – as a team. Until you figure it out. And that starts by putting your ego aside and admitting to yourself that sometimes, you are more valuable as a sturdy cog than as an inadequate hub.

Playing Rambo (in the military world as in the business world) will get you nowhere fast. Survival and success both come a lot more easily when you rely on a team – a community, even. Sure, sometimes you have to do stuff on your own, but that should be the exception rather than the rule. If one supergenius is worth his/her weight in gold, then surely a team of supergeniuses is unstoppable. Right?

Right.

So the question then is, now what?

It’s 2010. We just wasted most of 2009 arguing over healthcare, Social Media R.O.I., traditional vs. social marketing. Are we going to do the same thing in 2010? Are we going to turn 2010 into 2009 Part 2? Let’s hope not. If that’s your plan, have at it. Me, I have other plans for 2010: I am not interested in being a solo operator. I have no ambition to be the next social media or business strategy or brand management guru. I have absolutely no want to keep doing this on my own. There’s no value in it for me. (As much as I dig the recognition from time to time, I don’t need the ego trip.) None of this is about me. It is 100% about doing things better.

How we bring social media and business together in the real world isn’t through thought leadership alone. It’s through collaboration. Through teamwork. Through PRACTICAL application. You don’t get yourself out of a hole by talking about it. You get it done by actually TRYING things and learning from what works and what doesn’t until you and your team are out of the hole. That’s how it works. There is no other way. Staring up at the ledge won’t help. Barking orders won’t help. Firing your teammates won’t help. Throwing money at the hole won’t help either. Everyone has to pitch in, roll up their sleeves, and do their part. It’s bloody, messy business. Real work is hard work. It’s uncomfortable. It’s scary, even. It can be discouraging at times. But if you work as a team, eventually, you figure out how to get your teammates out, and then help them get you out as well. Everyone does. One of the things I learned about this particular exercise is that teams that can’t get themselves out were simply teams that couldn’t work together. Escaping  (Succeeding) had nothing to do with brains or talent. It was 100% about collaboration.

So instead of putting together a list of resolutions for 2010 (the list would be way too long anyway) let me instead devote myself to this: More collaboration. With you. With him. With her. Some of you might call it “engagement” and that’s fine. I find collaboration more specific: I don’t just want to “engage.” I want to work with you. I want you to work with each other. I want to see everyone working together to get ourselves out of this massive economic hole.

Our objective this year isn’t to write the ultimate white paper or publish a best-selling business book. It isn’t to properly spend the entirety of our marketing budget. It isn’t to be promoted to some cool sounding position at a Fortune 50. It’s simply this: To help create jobs. That’s it. Not to keep your own or upgrade it, but to help create jobs. Sales jobs. Manufacturing jobs. Design jobs. By helping our employers and clients become more successful. By helping them kick ass. By working with each other for each other. To hell with egos and the me me me attitude. We need results. Real results. Measurable results. Not BS.

The economy as a whole may take a while to recover, but nothing says our clients and employers can’t recover WAY ahead of the curve. And by that, I mean in the next six months. Hiring again. Expanding. Redefining their markets from the ground up. Breaking away from their “competitors”.

The keyword in 2010 won’t be “recovery.” It’ll be “landgrab.”

And the secret weapon won’t be mergers and acquisitions. It won’t be a new hot-shot CMO or CEO. It won’t be the next round of startup funding. It won’t even be the next great app (at least not for the majority of you). It will be collaboration. Teamwork. The opposite of bickering. The opposite of everyone doing their own thing in their safe little silo.

That collaboration piece, that’s where I’m putting my money in 2010. The consulting and teaching, it will be less and less solo. Expect to see me collaborate more with client project teams, with subject matter experts, with product vendors, with service providers, with peers and friends and colleagues. I can only do so much on my own.

Before I start sharing the 2010 roadmap with you guys, I wanted to at least take a day or two to emerge from my annual Christmas Holidays hibernation and get back to answering emails and voice mails, and of course wish you all a fantastic new year. (A whole new one, mind you. Not just a repeat of 2009.)

So please accept this virtual hug, handshake or kiss on the cheek, and let’s vow to make 2010 everything 2009 wasn’t, even if for many of you, 2009 was a pretty decent year.

Cheers to you all, and let’s crank this one up to 12. (11’s already been done.)

Next up this week:

The LikeMinds 2010 Summit

Chess Media Group

The Marketing in 2010 e-book

Red Chair strategic and operational training for the C-suite.

Time to bring this post back for a second round.

This post is the continuation of a discussion started on Marketing Profs’ LinkedIn group on July 7th. (If you don’t yet subscribe to the group, consider becoming a part of it.)

Today’s video is actually two videos in one:

The first half (Part 6 of our Social Media ROI series) deals with defining ROI once and for all.

The second half (Part 7 of our Social Media ROI series) starts touching on the “how” of calculating the ROI of Social Media by outlining the investment-action-reaction-impact-return narrative.

If the video doesn’t load for you, you can go watch it here.

Let me start today’s post with a confession: Like many people in the business world, I have abused the term “ROI” from time to time. Yes, I admit it, even I have used “ROI” as a relative term on a number of occasions in the past. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.

Here are some examples of what I am talking about:

• Q: What’s the ROI of adding 100 miles to my weekly cycling training?
• A: Faster race times.

• Q: What’s the ROI of writing better blog posts?
• A: More traffic on my blog.

It’s easy to do, especially since sometimes, what you invest into something isn’t necessarily $$$. Perhaps you invested sweat. Perhaps you invested time. Perhaps you invested emotions. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that when the currency is variable, how you measure the “I” in ROI becomes variable as well. For lack of a better term, you start to refer to any kind of positive outcome as “ROI” even when you shouldn’t. It’s an easy habit to fall into, and if you aren’t careful, your definition of ROI can begin to get a little fuzzy. So I get it: I understand why this is confusing to so many folks, especially when it gets thrown into the world of Social Media.

But I’ve also spent enough time with executives (on the client side) to know that when THEY talk about ROI, the currency is NOT relative. In business terms, the currency implied in any ROI question or discussion is cold hard cash. Period.

Marketing professionals need to understand this: If the investment (the “I”) is $$$, then the return also has to be $$$. It can’t be eyeballs or impressions or clickthroughs. You have to tie your results to a $ amount. Anything short of that, and you’re not proving your value to your boss or client.

It isn’t to say that eyeballs, impressions and clickthroughs aren’t important. They are. But they’re one link (of the action-reaction-outcome narrative) shy of ROI. (They don’t tie the investment to the actual return.)

The best way to explain that narrative is this way:

$ Investment by company –> Action –> Reaction –> Non-financial impact –> Financial impact $

As explained above in the video, the relationship between a company’s investment and the return on that investment pretty much looks like this:

What happens between the investment and the financial impact (the return on that investment) is VERY important. And we’ll talk about the importance of monitoring and measuring it in order to tie the investment to the associated financial impact (and ROI) in future posts. But for now, I want to focus on the fact that eyeballs, impressions, positive WOM and social mention, even click-throughs and net new visits to websites do not constitute relevant currency when we are talking about ROI. Social media is no different here than any other business endeavor in this regard.

Impressions, eyeballs, net new visitors, etc. are forms of non-financial impact. In order to determine ROI, you have to take them to the next step: How they affect financial impact. THEN and only then can you tie the original investment to the return (financial impact/outcome).

I know that bringing “media” measurement into the ROI equation is tempting , especially for folks with agency or media measurement backgrounds. That’s what the model has been for PR, Advertising and other marketing-specific firms for decades. And again media measurement is vital here, but when it comes to calculating ROI, that type of measurement is a lot like calculating a crop’s yield by estimating how many of X number of planted seeds will germinate come harvest time. It doesn’t work that way. You have to roll up your sleeves come harvest time *and physically count what the actual yield is. You actually have to do the work. ROI isn’t about potential. It’s about actual performance.

(*Luckily there is no seasonal constraint like a “harvest” in the business world, so ROI measurement – like most performance measurement – can be continuous.)

In order to adequately determine ROI, you must first understand how all the pieces fit. You have to see the entire equation, from start to finish. There is an order to how things happen, how, and why. You have to see how A leads to B leads to C in order to understand how an investment turns into a success or a failure, and to what degree. You also have to understand that the value of a pair of eyeballs, of an impression, is subjective until that pair of eyeballs actually does something. Then the body attached to that pair of eyeballs becomes one of three things: A browser, an influencer or a transacting customer. The first two don’t actualize a financial impact (yet). The third does. That’s where we want to focus when dealing with ROI.

Though we can infer and assign an estimated $ value to browsers and influencers, these values are subjective at best , usually measured in hindsight, and subject to change at any moment for any reason. So their value still falls into the category of non-actualized potential for now. (We will look at the financial impact of influencers in an upcoming post. No worries.) For the purpose of ROI calculation, however, you want to work with cold hard numbers. Not estimates, not potential, not yet-to-happen transactions, but “actualized dollars.” Real revenue from actual sales. Financial returns you can take to the bank and tie step by step through the above chain back to the initial investment.

(Incidentally, financial impact (ROI) manifests itself either as increased revenue or cost savings. Sometimes, ROI is revenue-neutral but cut costs internally. The model I just described above applies ti revenue-generated ROI.)

All of this to say that we have to be VERY careful not to a) mistake non-financial impact with ROI, and b) not to try and redefine “ROI” when dealing with business execs. (They won’t buy into “Return on Influence” or “Return on Interest” for very long, and anyone using these terms runs the risk of losing credibility with pragmatic decision makers in the C-suite.) Social Media is fun, but this is not a game. If a client doesn’t ask about ROI, great! Awesome. They probably get how Social Media is going to help them build relationships with customers and improve everything about their business. So to them, ROI is implied. It’s understood. It isn’t something they are going to worry about anytime soon. But when a client DOES ask about ROI, you have to a) understand what they are asking, and b) know how to adequately answer their questions and put measurement systems in place that will suit their needs and particular culture.

I hope this was helpful. Next, we’ll talk about the importance of timelines in the ROI determination process. (The next piece of the puzzle.)

By the way, if the video didn’t load properly for you or if you are accessing this post from a mobile device, you can go watch the video here (thanks Viddler).

Building a Social Media program is about more than presence, community management and engagement. And in spite of what some “experts” may have told you, it certainly is about more than having a Facebook page, a twitter account and some videos on YouTube.

The reality of the thing is that it takes more than that to plug social media into your business. Much more. That intern managing your tweets right now doesn’t have the experience or the skills yet. That PR superstar you just hired out of LA or New York or Boston can do some good, but no matter how hard they try, they take your social media program so far. Just like your customer service manager and your CMO and your Director of Digital Media. No matter how smart they are, they only have some of the pieces of that puzzle… and so much time to try and figure out the rest. (Not exactly a master plan, is it.)

Truly plugging Social Media into an organization – into the enterprise, even – is a complex endeavor. It isn’t purely a marketing function, nor is it purely a customer service function or a community management function or a business intelligence function. There are lots of moving parts to this, some strategic, others operational. Some analytical, others tactical: HR and Legal need to be brought up to speed on several levels (especially now that the FTC has released its guidelines for blogging and social media use), the C-suite needs to clearly understand both the opportunities and the risks associated with Social Media in order to make appropriate decisions regarding the future of their companies. Vice Presidents, directors and managers need to understand how applying certain Social Media strategies and tactics to their existing activities could yield solid results in the quarters to come. And on and on and on.

Frankly, if you haven’t worked in the enterprise space, if you haven’t spent years closely working with sales managers, marketing managers, customer service managers, product managers, engineering managers, HR managers, if you haven’t spent years reporting directly to a CEO or at least a Senior VP – in other words, if you haven’t had real experience building programs within enterprise space companies and managing brands hands-on, working across silos, even with all the blogging and tweeting experience in the world, I don’t see how you can hope to know how to build, integrate, manage and measure a 360 social media program for a company. And certainly not in the enterprise space.

It takes a very unique background and skill-set to be able to deliver this kind of thing, and very few people can actually blend 1. a deep understanding of the social media space, 2. real enterprise-class program development and management experience, and 3. 360 brand management experience, from product ideation and development all the way to end-of-life-cycle marketing communications.

People who know how to do this in the US, I can count on the fingers of one hand. There aren’t many of us yet. And given the need for companies to understand how to properly plug social media into their business (and start enjoying positive results fast), that’s a big problem.

If my “fingers of one hand” remark seems like an exaggeration, go back in time just a few months and ask every social media “consultant” or “expert” in your address book to briefly shed some light on a few random (and simple) components of a Social Media program… like how to tie R.O.I. measurement into Social Media activities, or how to structure an enterprise-wide Twitter presence. Until those few of us who know how to do this came along and spelled it out for them, it seems that the vast majority of these “experts” didn’t have a clue. Scary, considering these types of things are among the most simple components of any social media program’s structure.

To address that problem, I am partnering with a pretty solid group of experienced marketing and PR directors, Director-level social media practitioners, management consultants, business managers and other experts to bring businesses exactly this kind of knowledge in 2010, not just in a consulting format but in a training format as well. The training specifically is what I want to bring up here today because it’s the most accessible of the two – both from cost -effectiveness and timeframe perspectives. This video should help explain what we’ve been working on:

As the video explains, we’ll soon have a website, a full schedule of cities (and countries) where our full-day trainings will take place throughout 2010, along with a ton of valuable information you’ll want to check out.

Perhaps the most important component of the training program will be the content of the program itself: Essentially a social media program development, integration, management and measurement playbook. As attendees, whether you decide to take copious notes (which I suggest you do) or simply watch the presentation decks over and over again, you will essentially walk away with everything you need to build a social media program for your organizations (or your clients’ organizations for that matter).

Pretty solid, right?

As mentioned in my previous post, the plan is to launch Red Chair trainings ahead of schedule in London on December 4th instead of waiting for 2010 as originally planned. It’s a little short notice for a lot of businesses in the London area (not a whole lot of time for decision-makers to a) find out about it and b) make plans to attend), so we’ll play the schedule by ear. If we can fill up the training by then, great. If not, we’ll go back to the original schedule to give the London business community time to fit it into their calendar. No big deal. One thing I should mention about the December 4th event, however: The group discounts are insanely good. Take advantage of them now if you can. (I doubt the group discounts will be as good in 2010.)

If you want the December 4th event to happen, make sure you sign up asap. Beg your boss, call a friend, invite a client or two, whatever works. Definitely take advantage of the 1+1, 1+2 and other discounts. Click here to sign up now, or click on the image below.

Update: After receiving numerous requests for Red Chair London to be held in early 2010 instead of December 2009, we  have decided to move the event to a date that will accommodate everyone. Thanks a lot for your feedback. You guys rock. I look forward to an even bigger Red Chair event in London just in a few months.

The current state of conversations in regards to Social Media and Business

Okay, look. I don’t mean to step on anyone’s toes here, but how many times do business managers hungry for real Social Media know-how have to suffer through another “Social Media is what’s next” presentation before someone actually decides to help them answer real questions and solve real problems?

Yes. We get it already. Social Media is the future of now. It’s the answer to all of your old-school marketing problems. The holy grail of business growth. It’s all about people and conversations and relationships, don’t you know. Okay, fine. So now let’s get on with it: How the hell does a company actually put Social Media into play?

Before I go on, if your answer includes any of the following words, I may have to reach across the internets and smack you upside the head: FaceBook, Twitter, Blog, YouTube. (No, no, no and no.) Let’s take a giant step backwards here, because if your idea of developing a Social Media program for a company of any size essentially consists of creating a series of embassies on the most popular social platforms on the web, you haven’t just put the cart ahead of the horse, you’ve pretty much squashed it like a bug.

Let me be as clear as I can be about this: Having a Facebook fan page, a twitter account, a YouTube channel and a blog aren’t forward thinking. This is the default position now. The absolute minimum. If you aren’t already here, you’ve already shown that your business is grossly out of touch with the rest of the world (and dare I say, your market?). And by default, so are you. You’ve fallen behind. And if your company does proudly display those little social badges, if indeed you do have a presence on Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube and the blogosphere, congratulations: You’re doing the same thing everyone else is, which is to say that you are merely here.

Having a Social Media presence nowadays is merely the equivalent of what being listed in the yellow pages meant ten years ago. It simply isn’t enough to be there. And if you believe it is, you have seriously underestimated the situation.

Don’t get me wrong: The vast majority of business managers and C-suite executives still need to be shown that Social Media isn’t just a silly fad. That it is a legitimate business discipline worthy of not only investment but special attention. And perhaps most importantly, that by not understanding that Social Media fits in their business toolkit, they will begin to lose increasingly large chunks of market share (among other things) to their smarter, more strategically-minded competitors as early as H1 of 2010. These are realities and facts that still need to be conveyed to decision-makers in the business world. No question.

But the message has already reached a good number of them. So now what? You’ve convinced them to focus on Social Media, but aside from “get on facebook, twitter, youtube and blogs and start engaging,” you haven’t really given them a whole lot to go on. For the benefit of those folks, why don’t we switch gears and meet them where they want us to: In the real and complex world of “how the hell do we actually build this in our own organization?”

Let’s inject a little structure and order into the Social Media for business discussion:

First, let’s get a couple of things straight about the nature of Social Media when it comes to operations (yes, actually “doing” instead of just talking about how great it is):

1. The idea that Social Media professionals are one-size-fits-all needs to disappear. Understand that despite what you may have been told, Social Media practitioners aren’t all community managers and engagement aficionados. Some are data analysts and others are business strategists, while some specialize in operational management, market research, marketing communications or any number of commonly found business functions. Yes, that’s right: Social Media practitioners probably aren’t social media experts at all. They’re simply professionals who use social media because they understand its value to their job and organization.

The topic of incorporating social media know-how into existing organizational roles (rather than creating new layers of superfluous social media expertise to piggy-back on existing functions)  is one that we will revisit often in the coming months.

So the lesson here is that if your organization seems to a) suffer from a knowledge gap when it comes to Social Media, and b) filling that gap with dozens, if not hundreds of new employees seems daunting, don’t fret: Focus on training and development first and foremost. Don’t worry about trying to hire a bunch of unemployed marketeers with “social media” roles strategically added to their resumes in the last 18 months. That will get you nowhere fast. There’s a better way. (More on that in a minute.)

2. Effective, sustainable, scalable social media programs all have a basic underlying framework (hinted at by the X-Box Live avatars assembled in the image above.) At its simplest, you are looking at four major building blocks and operational elements:

• Social Media program development (a strategy-heavy function)
• Social Media program integration (almost exclusively an ops piece, especially in the enterprise space)
• Social Media program management (the broadest of the three, basically dealing with the execution of the program itself. Some examples of management functions are listed in the image above.)
• Social Media program measurement (an analytical function which requires little explanation given the amount of time I have already devoted to explaining FRY, ROI, and non-financial impact).

When you start actually building the structure of a Social Media program, especially for a large/enterprise space organization, things get complex fast.  But let’s learn how to walk before we start running marathons, okay? Not everyone here is ready to graduate from “isn’t social media just another marketing channel?” so we’ll move slowly out of respect for them.

First things first: Recognizing that in order to build a proper Social Media program within an organization, you must first start with the understanding that these four core elements need to be present in order for things to work properly. Just having a Social Media director and an engagement team won’t cut it. All you’re likely to end up with is a decent management piece with perhaps some light strategy,  completely accidental integration thanks to an IT guy or two, and some made-up measurement based on whatever metrics seem to be popular on the Twitternets that week. Sorry but that’s not good enough.

If a half-assed DIY-style Social Media program appeals to you, your boss and your customers, by all means, have fun with that. But if you are the type of manager or business leader with even an ounce of vision,  professionalism (and sense of self-preservation), you already know that winging it isn’t really going to produce the results you are expected to deliver.

The alternative is to try and do it right: Actually building an effective and sustainable social media program within your organization by integrating social media (embedding it, even) into every department and business function – and doing so with purpose.

That’s all fine and good, but what if you need help? (No worries. I have you covered.):

So where can you turn for help? Unfortunately, that can sometimes be hard to tell. On the one hand, you have the thousands of self-appointed Social Media “gurus” selling everything from rehashed presentation decks and derivative white papers to stale webinars about essentially nothing. (Thanks for charging me $650 for information I could have gotten for free just by reading Mashable for twenty minutes a week. Great.) And don’t even get me started on the hacks who shamelessly steal my work and that of others and try to pass it off as their own. (We know who you are. You aren’t fooling anybody.)

So how do you tell the good ones from the frauds? Experience. Luck. Savvy. In fairness, you could actually get lucky and find one who knows how to do this (with enough money and enough time, who knows,) but the odds aren’t in your favor.

You could also keep hoping that the operational knowledge you seek will emerge from the various social media conferences you keep attending. And to some extent, yes, over time, you will pick up enough nuggets to become dangerous. No question. But it could take a while. Industry conferences have their value, but real operational training isn’t usually on the menu.

And of course, you could partner with a reputable consulting firm whose team of of experts will guide you every step of the way, from choosing the right measurement tools to the way you should develop engagement strategies. If you ‘re ready for that, have found a partner you know you can work with and have the budget for it, it’s go time. But not everyone is ready or able to go that route quite yet.

A fourth option is to let those of us who know how to do this teach you how without asking you to break the bank or further burden your schedule. We aren’t talking about “boot camps” here. (The idea isn’t to throw as much information at you as we can in a few hours and see how much of it you can retain.) By the same token, you don’t want a training programs to be so light that you walk away from it with solid theoretical knowledge but no practical knowledge. There isn’t a whole lot of value to training if you can’t actually put that training to good use.  And to be honest, there’s only so much ground you can cover even with a full day of training. So a group of us put our heads together over the last few months and decided to create something to fill that gap for you and do it right. (Which is to say, do it exceptionally well.) The objective is then to blend training and consulting in a way that makes sense for everyone.

Enter the Red Chair Group:

There will be plenty of time for me to get into what the Red Chair Group is, who will be involved and what types of services we’ll offer in the coming weeks. For now, all I can tell you is that our official launch is scheduled for December of 2009, that our primary objective will be to provide expert level assistance to businesses in need of strategic and operational program management, and that geographically speaking, we will cover a lot of ground. (I haven’t been this excited about a project/venture in a very long time, so it’s pretty hard for me to keep from spilling the beans.)

To that end, one of the first things the Red Chair Group will be launching is a series of executive training programs specifically designed to teach C-suite execs, business managers and agency directors how to develop, integrate, manage and measure social media programs (what we have been talking about in this post). These trainings will be carefully structured day-long events held in major cities around the world. We are currently in talks with partners in 20 key cities to bring Red Chair events to your doorstep.

(I forgot to mention: The whole idea is to bring these training events to you so you don’t have to come to us. This is yet another way we thought we could keep your budget as intact as possible.)

Cities already being added to the 2010 schedule:

• Chicago
• San Francisco
• New York
• Seattle
• Atlanta
• Boston
• Portland
• Philadelphia
• Paris
• Houston
• Sydney
• Hong Kong
• Charlotte
• Orlando
• Toronto
• Brussels
• Tokyo

(If you want us to add your city to the list, let me know. We’ll chat.)

I look forward to sharing more about how the Red Chair Group’s plans to help companies of all sizes operationalize social media. I am usually a pretty quiet guy (no, really), but I have to admit that I am having a hard time containing my excitement about this: To know that businesses are finally going to be able to cut through the social media noise and BS in part thanks to Red Chair makes me feel pretty good.

2010 is definitely going to be a fun year.

Cheers.

PS: Let’s give credit where credit is due. Special thanks to Kristi Colvin and Doug Cone for the amazing work they are already doing on the Red Chair Group’s branding and website. You guys are already producing outstanding work.