A friend of mine recently commented that they never quite understand what I do for a living, but it always seems cool.  I couldn’t agree more.

Whether it be building batting cages and selling corporate ticket packages in minor league baseball, writing press releases and guiding customers on the top of a ski resort, working for a future Senator and selling the idea of audio and video on the internet, assisting professional athletes and their families raise money for charities, aiding venture backed startups with Go-To-Market campaigns, or most recently, helping guide a social media and community management agency go from 2 to 35 employees, the two common threads have always been challenge and fun.

So July 2010 marks the start of the next great adventure – social3i Consulting.  Xavier Jimenez and I will team up for the 3rd time now, taking what we’ve learned from our last few years working with the largest social media team in the region, and reshaping it to a more focused, strategic, and consultative presence that can work for exemplary brands, where size doesn’t matter.  

Our old colleagues at SCG continue do fantastic work in the realm of community management, and we wish them continued success as they drive forward.  But the focus of social3i will be different.  We’re going to be doing more classic strategic consulting, and lots of team building, training and development.  Rather than execute long-term tactics and serving the role of outsourced engagement and analytics, we’re going to use a data driven approach to deliver Insight, Ideas and Influence (hence, the 3i) to clients tasked with building their own in house programs.  We believe our past experience building these types of teams and our history of working with some of the largest technology brands, positions us well to solve huge social marketing problems for brands that we’re excited to help out.  Plus, we’re going to be able to join forces with some folks down in the Bay Area who I’ve been hoping to work with for years.  It’s too early to talk about now, but it will add a neat new angle to typical marketing analysis.

Like every new venture, I’m sure we’ll have our share of hiccups and bugs along the way.  But it’s an exciting time and I hope you’ll come find us and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.  We’ll look like a bunch of clowns if we only have 4 followers, so if you read this blog, consider following social3i in these social channels the tax you need to pay for all the free content you’ve gotten over the years 🙂

Thanks again to the SCG team for what has been a fun couple of years.  But I’m not sure I could ask for a more exciting way to open up the 2nd half of 2010 than launching social3i.