Over the past couple of weeks Axel Schultze has turned a lot of heads here at Social Media Today and at our Oracle supported site, The Customer Collective. His ability to get your undivided attention is why we've selected him as our blogger of the week. like "Death of a sales man 2009" give fair warning to sales and marketing professionals who are content to train and sell their way through the slump with traditional techniques.

With Axel it's the Do-Train, not the Cluetrain and he's not afraid to get in your face to remind you.of that. Because he ruffled some feathers Axel became the target of a flame war. Then some community members took a closer look at his bona fides and started to come around...

Axel was lurking from way above the tree line. He has been involved with computer hardware and software development since leaving the University of Stuttgart with a degree in electrical engineering in 1975. Europe Manager for Rockwell; then CEO of C2000, the largest distributor of computer products in Europe that posted annual sales of $5 billion on his watch and a bevy of sucessful startups. His first exposure to the internet was in 1995, when some of his engineers at C2000 built and marketed a web server. So what makes Axel blog?

"I blog not because I'm a blogger, but to keep my network up to date on what I'm doing and thinking," Axel says. And at the core of that network are friends like, inter alia, Konstantin Guerke, the co-founder of LinkedIn. And ueber Alltop Guy Kawasaki. "If a CEO like me has 5,000 personal contacts and roughly 200,000 customer contacts, it's really difficult touch everybody in person each week. So I blog."

Making a big splash in our pool was the right thing to do when you're rolling out a new product called Social Media Academy, a venture to help educate and train experts that can help the companies engage in social media.

"We decided to contribute to the industry by building a good educational foundation to develop social media experts the market will require in ten years time." Axel says.

The academy is part of his latest passion, Xeequa, a venture that provides an online business networking platform, helping businesses to better connect and measure the value of their networks and social media. Axel is also chairman of the SAAS (software as a service) committee at the SIIA, (software industry and information association). He's helping put down the foundation that will enable social media to be around for future generatons and that's the right thing to do.