The Big 4-0. For most, turning 40 inspires something big.

For Danny Brown, it wasn’t a sports car, Vegas trip or marathon run. He was inspired to set a different challenge for himself—to bring people together and raise money for worthy causes.  And the response was very unexpected…

To celebrate his 40^th, Brown and his wife spent a few days at Niagara Falls. Taking a break at a local café, they noticed an elderly woman come in by herself and order ice cream.

Brown wondered about her story.

After he and his wife headed home, Brown couldn’t stop thinking about the lonely-looking woman in the café—and regretted not talking with her.

“Everyone in social media talks about how we need to connect and open up,” Brown says. “I couldn’t make that connection to the lady we saw in the restaurant. We forget human connections offline. I wanted to make sure that if someone needs help or just a little bit of company, that people are reaching out to them.”

That a-ha moment kicked off a project that has since raised nearly $100,000 to date—reaching countless people.

One Man, No Budget

Brown launched the 12for12k Challenge, an initiative to bring social media communities together to help people offline in 2009. For years, Brown has worked in corporate communications and social media for companies like British Telecom. Currently, he’s the social media strategist for Maritz Canada.

Brown’s challenge takes the power of social media to the nonprofit world. “I know quite a few people offline who do charity work and the struggle is administrative costs,” he says. “I knew social media could offer a wider audience for far less investment.”

The 12for12k Challenge set an ambitious goal: raise $12,000 monthly for 12 months for 12 different charities—with no budget (the only costs were the website and hosting, which Brown paid for out of pocket).

His vision: Solely rely on social media to spread the word and raise donations for a featured charity each month. Then, 100% of donations go to the charity.

When word spread of Brown’s plans, his contacts and their contacts lined up to help. There may not be funds, but ideas, persistence and passion are the currency of social media anyway. In that regard, more than a dozen core 12for12k volunteers made it a “rich” initiative.

Four Cornerstones of the Campaign

Danny Brown launched the 12for12k.org site after an experience left him wondering “just how social we are.”

First, they set ground rules. Each supported nonprofit must operate with no more than 10% administrative costs, be a registered charity, and accept donations via PayPal or credit card.

Social media activity drives people directly to the 12for12k.org website to learn more and donate via ChipIn, a Flash widget that shows a running total of donations. Donations go directly to each nonprofit’s bank account.

About half a dozen volunteers joined Brown in generating updates on 12for12k’s four social media cornerstones of the campaign: blogging, video, a Facebook group and Twitter. More recently, they started a Ning community.

Updates on the Facebook group focus on featured charities, events and fundraising progress. The organization posts videos on YouTube and Viddler to kick off monthly campaigns and highlight related causes, such as homelessness.

Additionally, about 30 blog partners take Brown’s messages to their audiences.

Danny Brown prepares to kick off the 12 Days of Christmas Homeless Push in December.

One Cause Nets $15,500 Via a Tweet-a-Thon

Taking advantage of Twitter’s viral capabilities, the organization created a Twitter avatar “frame” for followers to include on their profile pictures, which encourages their followers to ask about 12for12k.

Last March, 12for12k featured Share our Strength, a national organization working to make sure no child in America grows up hungry. The organization’s “Pledge to End Hunger” campaign, led by MediaSauce and Kompolt, sought pledges online in response to a challenge from Tyson Foods. For each pledge, Tyson would donate 35 pounds of food or 140 servings.

Scott Stratton of Un-Marketing.com volunteered to help 12for12k host a Tweet-a-Thon for Pledge to End Hunger. For each $12 entry, donors were entered into a drawing to win one of about 20 prizes, such as an iPod Touch, Amazon Kindle 2, Flip video camera, gift cards, Nintendo Wii Fit and jewelry. A purchase of 10 entries automatically earned donors a free website review.

With entry fees and raffle prizes, the effort hoped to raise $12,000 in just 12 hours.

Scott Stratton of Un-Marketing.com donated his time and ideas for 12for12k.org’s Tweet-a-Thon for Pledge to End Hunger.

Supporters of 12for12k and Share our Strength, and hundreds of other friends and supporters, Tweeted away all day, from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

The resulting response exceeded Brown’s and Pledge to End Hunger’s expectations. They hit their goal of $12,000 much faster than 12 hours – in just five-and-a-half hours.

“Honestly, I was shocked,” said Jeff Wiedner, director of community engagement at Share Our Strength. “I had a feeling that the timing was right for our mission and, since Scott knew so many people, that we’d do pretty well, but I never expected how quickly we reached that $12,000 target.”

When all was said and done, the total reached $15,549 for Share Our Strength, which pushed donations beyond monthly averages for the nonprofit. But the impact extends well beyond the actual donations.

“We got attention from folks like Mashable, Chronicle of Philanthropy and other media,” Wiedner said. “That led to more folks knowing about SOS and our mission, which led to a bump in our online community, which led to greater interactions with our community and building out of other campaigns later with other bloggers. There were some additional corporations that learned about us, too, as our reach grew.”

A total of 477 contributors raised $15,549 for Share Our Strength during a 12-hour Tweet-a-Thon.

4000% Traffic Increase

Brown turns to analytics tools Woopra and Quantcast for detailed measurement of traffic on the 12for12k.org site. With those, he not only knows traffic numbers but where they live, their income level, average spending, ethnicity and gender—letting him tailor content and events to his audience.

In March, the site was “hammered” with a 4000% increase in traffic in a 12-hour period because of the Pledge to End Hunger Tweet-a-Thon.

Yet the most important metrics for 12for12k don’t require fancy measurement tools. In 2009, the initiative fell short of its goal of $12,000 every month. But it still raised $91,275 that all went directly to charities and the people they help.

More importantly, Brown did so without any organizational budget, on the side of his day job.

Well into 2010, he still hasn’t stopped. In fact, the momentum of last year has inspired him to do more. Plus, he’s intent on continuing to support the charities of 2009 as he can with exposure and social media help, if needed.

Year two began by featuring Hope for Haiti, bringing in $8,000 so far from 140 contributors.

Brown wants to expand by enlisting sponsors, hosting more events and focusing on three charities each quarter, rather than one each separate month. This year’s theme, “connect globally, help locally” will encourage people to do more in their own communities.

“A lot of people don’t do anything because they’re just one person,” Brown said. “If you think you can’t help financially, help a local charity in your city understand how to use social media to tell their story. Ask a charity what you can offer them.”

What do you think about this story?  Have you seen any great examples of social media impacting nonprofits in your community? What are they doing well?

“Be yourself.”  It’s one of the rules of social media. If you’re blogging, tweeting or Facebooking for business, be real—or you won’t be followed.

Yet, how do you pull off “authentic” while maintaining the company brand message?

It’s tough enough for a small business. What if you’re #2 on Business Week’s best global brands list, with nearly 400,000 employees across 170 countries?

At IBM, it’s about losing control.

“We don’t have a corporate blog or a corporate Twitter ID because we want the ‘IBMers’ in aggregate to be the corporate blog and the corporate Twitter ID,” says Adam Christensen, social media communications at IBM Corporation.

“We represent our brand online the way it always has been, which is employees first. Our brand is largely shaped by the interactions that they have with customers.”

Thousands of IBMers are the voice of the company. Such an approach might be surprising for #14 on the Fortune 500.

Edgy at 114

At 114 years old, IBM seems to be the Madonna of the corporate world, staying relevant from decade to decade. The first company to build a mainframe computer and help NASA land a man on the moon still holds more patents than any other U.S.-based technology company.

As it turns out, its decentralized social media approach is another milestone in the company’s history—driving unprecedented collaboration and innovation.

IBM lets employees talk—to each other and the public—without intervention. With a culture as diverse and distributed as IBM’s, getting employees to collaborate and share makes good business sense.

“We’re very much a knowledge-based company. It’s really the expertise of the employee that we’re hitting on,” Christensen says.

No Policing

IBM does have social media guidelines. The employee-created guidelines basically state that IBMers are individually responsible for what they create and prohibit releasing proprietary information.

But the document lacks any mention of brand messages or values.

Nor does IBM corporate regulate employee social media activity. Only three people hold social media roles at the corporate level, and oversight isn’t part of their jobs.

“We don’t police. The community’s largely self-regulating, and so there hasn’t really been a need to have someone go about and circuit these boards and blogs,” Christensen said. “Employees sort of do that themselves… And that’s worked wonderfully well.”

17,000 Inside Blogs

IBMers use tools such as Twitter and LinkedIn for external activity, but take advantage of mostly IBM tools inside the company. Internally, 100,000 employees have registered on the blogging platform to rate and comment on posts across 17,000 blogs.

In this vibrant forum, employees exchange ideas, advance conversations and do a little self-promotion of their projects.

An internal wiki serves as a hub of information, drawing well over a million page views every day. Additionally, downloads in the company’s user-generated media library now total 11 million.

An IBM tool called Dogear functions like Delicious, a social bookmarking site. Blue Twit mimics Twitter. A tool called SocialBlue acts like Facebook, helping employees stay connected with former colleagues and get to know new ones.

Like Facebook, the 53,000 or so SocialBlue members share photos and status updates. In IBM’s widely dispersed environment, family photos mimic cubicle-decor and dialogue mimics water-cooler interaction.

Thousands of Voices

Run an online search for “IBM blog” and you’ll find countless IBMers posting publicly on everything from service-oriented architecture to sales to parenthood. If you want to blog at IBM, you simply start.

IBM lists all of its blogs in a simple directory sorted by the name of the blogger.

They share thoughts, ideas, presentations, photos, videos, you name it. In 2006, the IBM mainframe blog hit the big time for posting a series of videos on YouTube that linked back to the blog. The Art of the Sale mockumentaries, in The Office style, lightheartedly poke fun at IBM and corporate sales in general.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSqXKp-00hM

Additionally, an estimated 200,000 employees are on LinkedIn, with another 50,000 former employees in alum networks on LinkedIn and Facebook.

The Wisdom of Crowds

Christensen ties IBM’s social media explosion to company “jams.” In 2003, IBM conducted its first jam, not unlike a band jam, bringing employees together in an online forum for three straight days.

“It was a big, online collaborative experiment,” Christensen said. “The first 8 to 10 hours, it was very negative. Over the next 12 hours, the conversation completely changed to being very constructive. By the way, there was no intervention by corporate to say, ‘Hey guys, let’s be more constructive.’ It was completely employee-led.”

“We realized we could trust employees to engage. Employees realized, ‘if we’re within reason, we’re going to be trusted’.”

A couple of months later, IBM opened blogging platforms inside the company.

IBM now includes much bigger and more diverse crowds—as many as 500,000 people in some cases. An innovation jam in 2006 brought together employees—and friends, family and clients—to discuss more than 50 research projects within the company.

From there, they voted on the 10 best, which became incubator businesses that IBM funded with $100 million, all based on “crowd” discussion.

Smarter Planet

A few incubator businesses—intelligent utility systems, smarter transportation systems and electronic health records—were the start of what is now a major IBM movement, Smarter Planet. The initiative puts IBM computing power and problem-solving toward issues like rush-hour traffic or natural disaster response.

It really began as a grassroots movement among employees.

“There are communities that, long before IBM started talking about it, had already congregated online and were talking about these areas. We are very focused on understanding where those communities are and how we can appropriately play with them.”

Christensen himself is one of several authors on the public “Building a Smarter Planet” blog, which highlights ideas and initiatives on the topic, not just within IBM.

Here is a screen shot of the Building a Smarter Planet Blog.

But all the public IBM Smarter Planet discourse is not just about amassing IBMers. Sometimes Smarter Planet projects—which can impact millions—need public support.

“There are communities that are passionate about this, and maybe we can help to amplify some of their voices and really make some of this just happen,” Christensen says. “So social media plays a big role in it.”

The Payoff

IBM invests in creating its own social media tools. But it’s earning that back by monetizing some of those as part of the IBM product portfolio. The other part of the investment equation—employees’ time—doesn’t seem to be a concern, according to Christensen.

That’s because collaboration and knowledge make IBM what it is. And that’s a company with $12.3 billion in earnings on more than $100 billion in revenue with a 44.1% gross profit margin in 2008.

Christensen says to date there’s not an effort to tag a return on investment to its social media efforts.

“I think if you’d ask any senior executive at IBM, ‘How important is it for our employees to be smarter?‘, inherently they understand that these tools can play in helping with that,” Christensen said. “I don’t see myself rarely or ever having that hard conversation on the value of engaging employees in these spaces.”

What do you think about IBM’s social media program? What level of control have you found most effective for your company’s social media efforts? What are your favorite crowd-sourcing tools?  Leave a comment below.

When it comes to social media, it takes a lot to impress Amy Korin.

Her resume includes digital strategy for global companies like Procter & Gamble, General Motors, Sun Microsystems and Zappos.

But her local Domino’s Pizza joint left her “completely shocked.”

On a rainy Sunday night, her Domino’s Pizza order took an hour to arrive and then was the wrong pizza. She turned to Twitter to vent: “hardly any room for human error, but still a mistake.”

What followed went way beyond the mea culpa tweet increasingly more common in business today.

Ramon DeLeon, managing partner of seven Chicago-area Domino’s stores, saw the tweet and contacted her immediately.

The correct pizza was already on its way. But “he insisted that he would make it up to me, and WOW me.  He certainly did just that!” Korin says.

“The only way to put out a social media fire is with social media water,” says DeLeon.

The next morning, Korin found a new tweet from @Ramon_DeLeon: “@interactiveAmy we will make it up to you” with a link to a video apology from DeLeon and his store manager.

Korin in turn shared it with friends, family and contacts across her social networks. “Pandora’s pizza box had been opened,” she said.

To further wow her, DeLeon provided pizza for 350 people at the Chicago Social Media Club, an organization DeLeon was initially unaware that Korin was involved in.

“Ramon successfully kept my business, and his professionalism, timeliness and attention to every customer is what keeps me coming back for more,” says Korin, founder of interactiveAmy.com Social Media Consultancy.

To date, the video apology has been embedded more than 87,000 times (the number of times the video’s HTML code has been pasted in online). A Google blog search brings it up on countless blogs in dozens of languages.

It’s just one example of how self-proclaimed “pizza guy” DeLeon has built his business in a competitive pizza city like Chicago.

“Using the tools of social media, I’ve been able to put Domino’s pizza on the social media radar map in Chicago,” says DeLeon.

It’s 1 am Monday, Get Selling

When the Domino’s sales week ends each Sunday night, no matter how good the week before was, DeLeon can’t stand a register that reads $0.

“There are people awake at 1 or 2 am and they’re not eating my pizza!” says DeLeon. “I start thinking of hospitals, police departments, fire departments, gas stations, maintenance people in high-rises—all these people who are in the middle of their day right now.”

That’s the mindset that took DeLeon from a pizza delivery guy at age 19 to a seven-franchise managing partner today. From the start, he’s exceeded not only Domino’s expectations but customers’ expectations as well.

In 1998, DeLeon offered customers online ordering seven years before Domino’s corporate. To maintain a personal connection, he began communicating with customers via pager and AOL Instant Messenger in 1994.

Today, his arsenal of electronics on hand has grown to two web-enabled cell phones, a digital camera, a Flip video camera and spare batteries. Back at the office, DeLeon sits in front of four giant computer screens monitoring social media activity—perhaps a micro version of NASA central command.

With tools like Monitter, TweetLater (now SocialOomph), TweetDeck and instant messaging, he waits, watches and responds as fast as possible to keep customers happy, proving “You’re never alone with Ramon DeLeon!”

He Creates It

DeLeon has proven to be incredibly adept at creating content that people want to share. How? By instigating memorable customer experiences.

“With every single delivery or order, we are part of someone’s life. No matter how redundant the process is, the end result is not the same,” he says.

When Chicago resident Theresa Carter tweeted happily about her Domino’s order, DeLeon sent her a video thanks straight from London, where he was speaking to a group of Domino’s franchise partners.

“When I saw that thank-you video from Ramon—from London—I was blown away!” says Carter, president of The Local Tourist. “Now when I want pizza, I automatically think of calling one of his stores and feel guilty if I go somewhere else!”

Carter then made her own video thanking DeLeon for the pizza, proving that he gets big reactions by going beyond.

His contagious enthusiasm comes through in 64 creative videos on Viddler.com (under DPZRAMON):

• Telling customers about Cyber Monday deals, offering coupon codes
• Getting MC Hammer’s autograph as a thank-you for a blogger
• Documenting his trips around the world to speak about social media
• Presenting a giant dummy check to a guest pizza maker, and trying to deposit it in an ATM

He posts photos of special offers on TweetPhoto and Flickr, which encourages even more sales.

They Share It

If DeLeon can get customers to share their positive experiences with others, “even if it’s just with your cat,” then he’s succeeded.

To that end, he makes it easy to share experiences online. After ordering using the online pizza builder, customers can click on a Facebook link, which populates their own Facebook status with details of their pizza order.

Or customers waiting for orders at DeLeon’s stores can take a snapshot in front of a “Photo Op” poster featuring breadsticks and all of DeLeon’s social media handles. He finds customers post those pics on Facebook and Twitter right then, creating even more impressions of Domino’s.

11″ x 17″ pizza box fliers highlight DeLeon’s Twitter wall

The pizzas on his menu even have Twitter hash tags to encourage customers to share what they order.

He uses prime ad space—the top of pizza boxes—to showcase what he calls his “Twitter Wall.” An 11″ x 17″ flier lists the top customer tweets mentioning his stores.

“I try to promote customers as much as I can,” DeLeon says. “If I keep my customers in business, then my customers keep me in business.”

A customer poses in front of Ramon’s “Photo Op” poster

Customers Do Facebook for Him

One of DeLeon’s stores serves Northwestern University and its 15,000-plus students. Yet surprisingly, DeLeon does not have a Facebook fan page. In the days when only .edu emails could get accounts, he was desperate for one.

“I even thought about enrolling to get a Facebook acount,” he admits.

Fortunately, he didn’t need to. He learned a Northwestern student had started her own Domino’s group, “Dominos Is Better than Papa Johns.”

“I try not to come across as advertising, but as word of mouth,” he says.

To give students something to talk about, he started taking photos of every campus event where Domino’s was involved, including images of students holding coupon signs.

He posted them, with a Domino’s logo on each bottom corner, on his www.nudominos.com website. Students would download the unprotected photos of themselves and then share them on Facebook.

Today, students take their own shots and post them, and often tag the pizza box with DeLeon’s individual Facebook ID.

By connecting with students, DeLeon invests in relationships that he hopes will continue as students move into the workforce.

He also reaches out to the administrators of Facebook groups to offer special discounts. In response, all those group members experience Domino’s and post their own comments.

Create Addicts and Advocates

With sales and social media success, DeLeon now speaks to Domino’s franchise owners all over the world—drawing the first-ever standing ovation from a British Domino’s group. Dozens of blogs have featured him and he’s a top draw at social media conferences, where he rubs elbows with Starbucks corporate and social media celebs like Gary Vaynerchuk.

But he insists he isn’t doing anything truly different than 20 years ago as a pizza delivery driver. It’s still about creating unexpected customer experiences.

“Social media is just modern tools to do something very basic in business,” he says.

“I want people to get addicted to the experience of Domino’s. If they go somewhere else, I want them to feel a void in their body. ‘It’s good but it’s not the same.’”

How can you use social media to do the unexpected for customers? What creative ways can you use video to wow them? Please comment below.

Imagine marveling at Peru’s Machu Picchu ruins, and a guy nearby asks if you’ll take his picture. But it’s not just him; he’s proudly holding a paper cutout of a smiling tomato.

What, exactly, inspired this traveler to carry a cartoon tomato to one of the wonders of the world?

In a word, fun.

He’s just one of nearly 140 people who vacationed with the tomato, named “Sweetie.” These fans of the restaurant Souplantation, or Sweet Tomatoes in some markets, were enthusiastically participating in the chain’s latest social media promotion, “Where’s Sweetie?”

Each month, a new, creative Facebook and Twitter campaign inspires customers to do something equally interactive, from constructing faces out of salad to photographing their best lemon pucker faces.

“There is definitely an element of fun that’s really required,” explained Crosby Noricks, social media strategist at Red Door Interactive , the firm that coordinates the company’s social media activity. “A campaign itself doesn’t need to be supremely complex, and oftentimes it’s better to do something that requires just a guess at a number or a quick photo snap.”

The creative approach has paid off. In just eight short months, the company’s social media recipe has netted nearly 30,000 Facebook fans and 8,500+ Twitter followers – along with social media-driven revenue.

In one month, the restaurant’s tomato mascot, Sweetie, saw more of the world than most people see in a lifetime!

Open Your Wall

Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes, owned by San Diego’s Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp., runs 112 company-owned restaurants in 15 states. It’s known for its fresh, made-from-scratch foods: produce and salads, soups, pastas, freshly baked breads and muffins, frozen yogurt, and more.

Fueled by increasing awareness about healthy eating, the restaurant chain adds about half a dozen new locations each year. Regulars include everyone from babies to their great-grandparents.

Launched this past spring, Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes’ social media presence includes a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account. It serves two goals: To get fans more involved with the brand and to learn more about what customers want.

“Our primary goals all along have been to increase engagement and get loyal customers excited and participating with us, not only in promotions but helping make decisions for the company with feedback about new locations,” said Brandon Zelasko, who serves as business manager for the Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp. account at Red Door Interactive.

Initially, the fan and follower bases expanded by customer word-of-mouth, or rather word-of-status updates. One fan would post a funny picture related to a promotion, which would inspire their friends to join the Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes fan club.

More recently, the company started offline promotion of its Facebook and Twitter presence using in-restaurant signs and table cards.

Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes doesn’t merely broadcast information to the audience, but truly interacts. On Twitter, they follow more people than follow them, and frequently retweet followers’ comments.

The same goes on Facebook where the company does what most do not. “We let people write on our wall, unlike other brands that hide that,” Noricks said.

Yet, comments are largely positive. Take a quick look at Facebook or Twitter and you’ll find lots of unsolicited love letters to the restaurant:

• “I’m so thankful for Sweet Tomatoes!!!”
• “My daughter introduced me to Sweet Tomatoes….love at first visit….”
• “When I eat at Sweet Tomatoes here in Tucson it feels like I’m at home with family”
• “The soup is outta this world”

For the occasional not-so-positive comment, fans such as those above defend the restaurant, “carrying on the conversation for us,” Noricks said.

Fans Show Their Pucker Faces

But what really keeps fans and followers connected are creative monthly promotions like “Where’s Sweetie?” Each promotion ties into what’s happening at the restaurant, where the menu changes each month:

A young customer displays his best pucker face for April’s lemon promotion.

• Show your Pucker Face – In April, when lemons were the focus, the promotion brought in a 400% increase in Facebook fans and pics of lemon-inspired facial contortions.
• Guess How Many Strawberries – For strawberry month in May, customers were asked to guess the number of strawberries in a jar or basket twice on Twitter and twice on Facebook, with the latter generating more than 700 fan comments each time.
• Celebrate Salad – July’s campaign got customers’ creative juices going with dozens of salad works of art.
• Where’s Sweetie? – In September, Sweetie saw the Mona Lisa, Machu Picchu, Venice, and the Galapagos Islands, as well as hiked Mexico City’s Pyramid of the Sun, water skiied, rode a roller coaster, snorkeled and swam with giant turtles – all documented on the restaurant’s Facebook pages.
• What Are You Thankful For? – In November, customers submitted their thankful thoughts, pictures and videos on the Facebook page.

Customers rolled up their sleeves and got creative for “Celebrate Salad” and then posted their art on Facebook.

For promotions, all participants are entered into a drawing for items such as Visa gift cards and free meal passes, or fans vote on winners. The restaurant and its agency quickly learned that customers prefer to pick winners themselves.

Throughout the month, Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes keeps fans/followers thinking with smaller quizzes and questions about their favorite restaurant items, what’s their “salad personality,” or even their best childhood memories.

Regular followers also know that they’ll be rewarded with coupons offered exclusively to Facebook and Twitter customers – a major draw.

3-5 Hours/Week on Social Media Management

Depending on the promotion, Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes staff and the account team at Red Door Interactive spend about 3-5 hours every week watching and engaging with customers on social media.

On an average day, they post about 5 times on Facebook and see about 65 customer comments. On Twitter, they might tweet once a day and then respond to followers “@” comments about a dozen times.

Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes and its agency have made it a priority to be aware of comments and Twitter replies, and respond as quickly as possible – a task that both the restaurant marketing staff and agency share.

With Red Door as the company’s creative agency for more than 5 years, the social media strategy and management were a logical next step, and one that’s worked well. “We know almost as much about the brand as they do in-house,” Zelasko said.

Exclusive Coupons Drive Sales

Through in-store signage and viral momentum on social media sites, the chain adds about 1,800 new Facebook fans and up to 1,000 Twitter followers each month. Individual campaigns boost numbers quickly.

All this isn’t just fun and games; it does monetize the business. Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes knows that a growing online fan base pays off in sales. Used strategically, a coupon announced before lunch encourages customers to visit that day.

“We see really good return rates for our Facebook- and Twitter-only coupons. They definitely drive higher sales,” said Tracy Marks, public relations coordinator for Garden Fresh Restaurant Corp. “It’s a short-term coupon to inspire action.”

And fans have been genuinely thankful for those coupons – as evidenced by numerous thank-you wall posts and Tweets.

Not as quantifiable, but equally valuable, are menu or new location suggestions, which the restaurant seriously considers.

Marks points out that social media has not replaced any of the company’s traditional marketing or reduced its marketing budget – some customers still look for newspaper coupons. However, it has boosted revenue.

For now, those results and increasing fans/followers provide the justification for continued momentum. The next step for the company includes starting a blog.

“We’re providing consistent, fun value and responding to people,” Noricks said. “That shows that we’re accessible and available and here for the long haul.”

How have you used fun and creativity to engage your social media audience? What are your thoughts about the ideas presented here?

It was a classic business beginning. Two friends, some margaritas, and maybe a little cocktail napkin scribbling.

In 2004, Steven Cox sat down with a fellow musician after a gig. Cox’s friend and his wife were expecting their first baby and hoping to buy a house. But as a musician and private instructor, he struggled with making ends meet.

“Playing music doesn’t necessarily pay all the bills, unless you have a really big contract or gig,” Cox says. “My friend was hanging flyers in drugstores and music stores but still not finding enough students.”

Cox, once a full-time musician, worked a day job in IT and management consulting at the time. When he suggested his friend go online to connect with aspiring musicians, the friend confessed, “I’m a musician. I don’t know anything about that.”

With that, Cox began orchestrating TakeLessons.com.

Today, TakeLessons is America’s leading music and voice lessons company—a position reached largely through social media marketing.

He Built It, They Came

TakeLessons.com provides singing and music lessons in over 2,800 U.S. cities. Students register online for local, private, face-to-face lessons with a TakeLessons Certified Instructor™ after finding each other via a Match.com-style approach.

And like a dating website, TakeLessons.com takes some of the risk out of those in-person meetings.

“It can be difficult in music services to find reputable, trustworthy teachers, especially when you’re inviting someone into your home to spend time with your kids,” says Cox, CEO and founder. “Our customers turn to TakeLessons.com for our rigorous teacher hiring standards, and our online tools are second to none.”

To that end, TakeLessons.com only hires the best out there—just 4 to 5 percent of all teacher applicants.

TakeLessons.com must build awareness among two audiences: potential students (and their parents in some cases) and prospective teachers. With a background in fostering online communities—Cox formerly worked in strategy for a college social networking site—the CEO recognized the value of “getting people together to yak about stuff.”

In 2005, TakeLessons.com gave its audience just that, an online forum. The site not only allowed students and teachers to communicate with TakeLessons.com, but also each other—showing the power of online community.

“Teachers were sharing lesson plans and ideas,” Cox said. “Through the forum, they got quality guidance from each other.”

“So You Wanna Learn How to Play Guitar”

Since then, TakeLessons.com’s social media marketing has taken off. The company’s tightly integrated strategy now includes blogging, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

“We want people to consume the content and ideas in the form they want, when they want it,” Cox said.

TakeLessons.com blogs a few times every week on everything from conquering stage fright to recipes for vocal health to to “So You Wanna Learn How to Play Guitar.”

“So You Wanna Learn How to Play Guitar.”

Yet the team only spends two to three hours per week total creating, posting and responding to comments. Their secret? Guest bloggers.

“We’ve got a whole university’s worth of qualified instructors,” Cox said.

In 2009, TakeLessons.com began turning to its expert pool of teachers for content. At once, the company gives its instructors valuable exposure while saving time for the in-house staff, which simply edits posts and populates them with keywords.

A Blog-Twitter Duet

Quarter-over-quarter, blog traffic continues to increase, largely due to search engine hits and a Twitter snowball effect. TakeLessons.com micro-blogs on Twitter one to two times every day, directing followers to the blog.

Tracking traffic patterns, TakeLessons.com knows that blogging and tweeting continuously increase traffic back to the TakeLessons.com blog. The company’s approximately 650 Twitter followers share with their own followers via retweets.

Yet TakeLessons.com takes a more casual approach to Twitter than many.

“We decided to let Twitter build organically and let true followers become followers, so we don’t follow others to get them to follow us,” Cox said. “We’re trying another way by just writing what’s relevant to people.”

Feel-Good Video

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS96nQHOW-E

TakeLessons.com lends itself perfectly to YouTube, the web’s third largest search engine. If you search for TakeLessons.com on the site, you’ll find inspiring, feel-good clips of student recitals, mini guitar lessons and teacher introductions.

For just $150 for a high-def Flip camera and a little bit of time, the company has generated tens of thousands of views that include the TakeLessons.com logo or name, generating valuable brand exposure and website traffic.

Most often, the company shoots video of “Show What You Know” recitals, where students of all ages play publicly for the first time. Each clip kicks off with a screen of the TakeLessons.com logo.

The company racked up some of its biggest views—nearly 50,000—with a video response to a current event. When a musician whose guitar was broken on a United Airlines flight spoke out via a music video (”United Breaks Guitars”), Cox responded with a video. He offered to lend his own Taylor guitar to the musician, and indicated the company had switched a recent flight from United to Southwest in solidarity.

Not everyone agreed with Cox, but he chalks it up to the nature of social media.

“You’ve got to learn to let things slide off your back if you’re going to be transparent and use this medium to get your message out,” he said.

Six Months, 1,000 Fans

Last but not least in TakeLessons.com’s four-pronged approach: Facebook, with nearly 1,200 fans. Popularity on Facebook exceeded initial expectations. Instead of reaching 1,000 fans in one year, they did it in just six months.

While staff does post links to its free “Teach the Teacher” web seminars, mostly the company encourages fans to share their own news and interact with each other. Fans post notes about their own upcoming gigs, arrange in-person meet-ups, find concert venues, or connect to play gigs together.

Here, TakeLessons.com gets back to its roots of community building. Teachers interact and encourage each other separate from the company.

Automating Customers’ Status Updates

In a smart move, TakeLessons.com automates Twitter and Facebook updates for its customers. When students sign up on the company’s website, they are asked about their goals. From then, they can keep up with their goals—maybe the five songs they want to learn—on the TakeLessons.com website.

TakeLessons.com then asks whether students want to install the company’s API applications for Facebook and Twitter. If so, they are asked what type of information they want to automatically post on those sites.

They can choose to automatically post each week that they’ve had a lesson, after the scheduled lesson takes place. Or, they might be asked if they want to post that they’ve met a certain percent of their goals.

“We try to talk less about us and more about them,” Cox said. “We’re not out pounding our chests, which we find works better in social media.”

The Payoff

In total, Cox estimates that TakeLessons.com spends no more than about six hours every week on social media marketing activities. From there, the various online communities create a viral effect.

“It’s growing beyond us having to physically manage everything,” Cox said. “We’ve become the conduit.”

For that six hours, and virtually no direct costs, TakeLessons.com sees impressive results:

• 39 percent decrease in cost per acquisition year-over-year
• 30 percent increase in teacher applications since a year ago
• Nearly 10 percent of website traffic from social media
• Sales directly attributed to specific Twitter and Facebook posts
• Speaking invitations
• Connections with several Fortune 100 companies
• Joint venture opportunities with two companies

However, Cox values the intangible benefits just as much, namely fostering trust and relationships with customers.

“We don’t want to hide behind a corporate image,” he said. “We want people to say, ‘Wow, there are people behind this idea and this company.’ This aligns with our core values and everything we do. People are getting to know who we are so they’re comfortable making a decision.”