The Social Media Academy is an education and research institute providing education for business professionals from all industries on how to best apply social media to their respective businesses. The main emphasis is to help business managers and consultants to get a comprehensive education on Social Media, including strategy development, planning, execution, tools, resources ways to report and analyze development and success and help understand the evolutionary changes in our society. As part of the educational development, the Social Media Academy conducts research exploring the ongoing changes in the field and supports the continuous learning process as well as monitor ongoing changes in the field.

The main course is the institute’s leadership class which focuses on how to plan, implement and engage with social media in all business areas including marketing, sales, product development, service & support, logistics, administration and engineering.

The Social Media Academy is based in Palo Alto, California. All classes are held online to allow location independent education.

• - How will businesses compete for mind share by 2012
• - Understanding the socio economic landscape of social media
• - Creating and crafting a social Media strategy
• - The changing face of marketing & PR in the Social Media age
• - The new sales organization (from behavior to execution)
• - Social media in logistics and procurement departments
• - Product development, co-creation and the new integrated world of support
• - Evolution from “Human Resources” to “Human Talent Management”
• - Social Media team building, organizational structures, reporting lines
• - Brand development through market reflection
• - The social media presence, tools and places & spaces
• - Reporting and analytics. Asking the right questions
• - Building a sustainable social media culture & presence
• - Methodologies for Social media assessments and vulnerability analysis
• - Leadership

The Social Media Academy education provides methodologies and concepts to strategically engage in social media creating a better customer experience and a mutually profitable relationship between customer and producers.

The new enterprise is a company well aligned with their customers, partners and it’s market. Alignment in this context means understanding and appreciating the time and energy customers and prospects spend to find their optimal solution through engagement in the so called social web.

One of the most remarkable changes in human history.
About 5,000 years ago for the first time mankind evolved into a society unparalleled to any evolution of the previous millions of years. Cities were built, trade was created and business developed like never before. About 200 years ago mankind went through yet another dramatic change bigger and faster than any change before: Industrialization. Technology came into our everyday lives, transportation of goods and people around the world was all of a sudden possible. Financial wealth of an average worker was as great as a kings rich just several hundred years ago. We doubled average live expectancy and cut work load in half. We created technology that couldn’t be envisioned in the most remote fictions. In just 200 years we changed the face of earth.

While our evolution was gravitating around technology and tools, our current evolutionary shift is no longer exclusively focused on our technological abilities but enters a remarkable change in social interaction and relationship evolution. Humans are social – ever were and most likely ever be. But this change – very similar to the industrial revolution – empowers us to improve and accelerate our social skills by an order of magnitude. Similar to the handicrafts some hundred years ago who didn’t believe in machines, social media worker connect with hundreds or thousands of people around the globe, while the previous generation only deals and trusts the 20 or 50 they believe they know.

The vision of the academy
The social shift, the change in behavior, and the behavioral change that is driven by other motives then financial incentives or industrial work pressure is a new opportunity for our nation and our society. The vision of the Social Media Academy is to help make this new ability available to everyone and help those who are engaged to help others to grow with it. In the spirit of the emerging online and social interaction model the academy is using and teaching those techniques and methods at its core. As such the academy’s faculty is not employed by the academy but practice oriented experts that have been involved, experienced and using the media since it’s inception. And while the market and the evolution is still developing so will the academy and its faculty. But students joining the academy early will have the advantage of being and hopefully remaining one of the leaders and thought leaders of this remarkable global evolution.

Our Purpose
The purpose of the Social Media Academy is educating to leverage the opportunities social media brings to our ever changing society – both as business to build a better business experience for their respective markets and consumers to improve ways to articulate and community needs and ideas for better products and better services. As a result we want to help create new career opportunities and help build a better business world.

General Admission Rules & Terms

Terms and fees
All fees are stated in the respective programs. Payments need to be made online in order to get a seat and confirmation for the selected program. The Social Media Academy reserves the right to cancel any training any time. In case of said cancelation, the Academy refunds the attendee 100% of the training fee. Attendees may cancel training with full refund minus transaction cost 45 days prior to the training begin. The Social Media Academy will refund 50% of the paid fees for cancelations with at least 10 days notice prior to the effective start date of the training. In case a student is not able to complete a class or cannot attend all sessions, the student may attend the missed classes in one of the future classes at no additional cost. The legal entity for all transactions is the Social Media Academy, LLC, USA.

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Why certification?
Certification Details

Social Media Jobs
in TwitterJobSearch

Methodologies
Methods, models and frameworks

Press Release Apr/6
Enterprise Social Media Research – “The Mindshare Report”

Press Release Jan/19
Social Media Academy to boost business education

Axel Schultze, Founder of the Social Media Academy: Throughout history, companies and people failed to adopt new technologies while others raised to the top and took over market leadership. Most of the technologies where not very obvious at the time. But today’s 300 Million participants in social media should force the question: What are we doing?

Having connections in a social network, posting news on blogs, writing on somebody’s wall, posting some pictures or videos, twittering some thoughts, and participating in several of the thousands of social media sites is only the beginning. Rightfully companies ask: How do we maintain our brand? How do we reach the people that are relevant to us and how can we become relevant to them?

The Social Media Academy is leading that path with globally available online education, leveraging the methods and tools it teaches and help students and businesses to enter new careers and thrive, independent of an economic situation.

Social Media Academy
228 Hamilton Ave.
Palo Alto, CA 94301
(650) 384 0057

Info at socialmedia-academy.com

You find the faculty and students in our online community

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