You’ve also seen her outstanding articles on Social Media Examiner pretty much since our inception, and she’s also the anchor of Social Media Examiner TV.

She now has a brand-new hot book out called, The New Relationship Marketing: How to Build a Large, Loyal, and Profitable Network Using the Social Web.

Catch the full interview (audio) at the end of this article.

Mike: Your new book is called The New Relationship Marketing, and I want to key in on the word “new.” What’s new about relationship marketing?

Mari: Well, first of all, the phrase relationship marketing was coined way back in the ’80s by a professor, and I have for 10 years—long before Facebook was even on the map—called myself a “relationship marketing specialist.” And I love that term because to me it transcends the medium. It’s all about people doing business with people.

What’s new is the social networking aspect and the fact that business is much more personal now. Everything is out in the open with the advent and popularity of social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

People are being much more open. Consumers are sharing vast amounts of information about themselves online, and as a savvy marketer, you can use that in creative and respectful ways to actually reach out and forge new relationships and deepen existing ones. Marketers can actually use online social technologies to create new relationships with prospects, customers and potential business partners.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

Using information that people are sharing openly and publicly about themselves, a friend of mine has a key contact with whom he really wants to do business. He looks at that person’s Facebook profile and finds out what some of his favorite movies are. Then he does a little bit of research, and he’ll go onto eBay and find a piece of a movie set from that particular person’s favorite movie, for example, and he sends it to him. He told me that he’s gotten so much business from it. It blows people away.

Here’s another quick example of utilizing online social technologies. One time I was flying up to Seattle from San Diego. My flight was at noon and I showed up an hour early. I got to the desk—I was flying Alaska Airlines—and they looked at me and said, “Oh, I’m terribly sorry, Ms. Smith, your flight has been delayed five hours.” I said, “What?! The flight is only three hours long!”

I’m not the type of person to post anything negative or derogatory. I’m not going to complain about a brand publicly like that, but I wanted to express that I wasn’t terribly happy. As it happened, I had forgotten to bring my iPhone charger with me, so I just put a little tweet out @AlaskaAir indicating I forgot my charger and: “Oh, bummer about the five-hour delay.” I didn’t think anything of it.

I go off to a quiet spot in the San Diego Airport and I begin to do some work on my computer. I’ve got Internet. I’m okay. I’m plugged in, I’m wired in—I can always do stuff. Forty-five minutes later, I hear this voice, “Hello there. Excuse me, are you Mari Smith? We have an iPhone charger for you.” I was absolutely gobsmacked!

Alaska Airline’s headquarters are up in Seattle, and their PR department spotted the tweet, called down to San Diego and said, “Hey, there’s this lady…” and they described me. “Look her up. She needs an iPhone charger.”

They really went the extra mile, and to me this is what the new relationship marketing is. You can take publicly available information to build a relationship with a prospect or existing customer. I will now go out of my way to fly Alaska Airlines because of their emphasis on really caring.

It didn’t stop there. They have sent me vouchers in the mail for Internet access on their planes and things like that.

Mike: That’s pretty cool. That reminds me of Peter Shankman from Help a Reporter Out. He recently tweeted Morton’s Steakhouse and said something like, “Landing at Newark Airport in five hours. I’d love a 21-ounce porterhouse.” He was just kidding, but when he got off the airplane and he was going over to the luggage claim, there was a guy in a tuxedo with a bag, and inside the bag was a 21-ounce porterhouse steak. Can you believe that? The guy said, “We got your tweet.”

I would imagine one of the take-home points here is that it doesn’t really matter what kind of business you’re in—on the business side of things, you can be watching for these opportunities to make a difference.

Can you share one or two of the softer skills that you think marketers need to develop in order to try to build relationships with “strangers” via new media?

Mari: The first skill, without a shadow of a doubt, is empathy.

I think there’s still a lot of fear around embracing new media: fear of exposure, fear of it being all-consuming and fear of privacy concerns. But also, there’s the technology fear of knowing what button to press. Those are technical. Those are more hard skills: “When I click ‘send,’ what happens?”

But underneath it all, there are also the soft skills. Soft skills are like people skills. People skills have never been more important than now because things can be taken out of context and misconstrued. You can say something in jest and someone takes it seriously, and so forth.

But the empathy part, especially, on Twitter where the messages are limited to 140 characters, it’s really easy to take things out of context. You have to train yourself and build that muscle to read between the lines and read what’s not being said.

Mike: Can you give us an example of a situation you’ve been in or that you’ve heard about where empathy helped build a relationship in a place that it didn’t seem plausible?

Mari: Off the top of my head, an example comes to mind which may be not quite in line with what you’re asking. But one time, somebody decided to put up a big blog post and start a meme with a hashtag. The hashtag was just #Iloveyou. This guy was really imploring people, whether they were a professional or a business or an individual, to just really go with this hashtag #Iloveyou.

For this one girl, it was literally the catalyst she needed to make this profound shift in her life. She read this blog post, she got caught up in the meme, and she really, really felt connected with people when she hadn’t been before.

And she shared that nine years before, her mother had died, and they were on bad terms. Her parting words were rather harsh, and she just kind of got shut down. She closed down her heart and didn’t really want to be friends with people. She saw this meme go by and it made such a profound difference to her that she was able to open up and share more with people.

Let me give you another example on a grander scale. Recently, there have been a lot of hurricanes. Sometimes individuals and brands try to capitalize on a situation for commercial gain, and it ends up being devoid of empathy.

Recently someone had posted an image trying to build up their presence on Facebook. They were saying, “Click ‘Like’ to wish everyone safety during the hurricane.” Well, of course, they got all these likes. It was weird.

Somebody drew it to my attention and said, “What are your thoughts on this, Mari? Don’t you think it would have been better to say something like, ‘Our thoughts and prayers go to anyone affected by the hurricane’?”

Empathy, to me, is like listening between the lines, putting yourself in the other person’s shoes. This girl losing her mom and the “I love you” meme, putting myself in her shoes was like, “Wow, that was really brave of her.” She just put herself out there. She wrote up this big blog post that was completely transparent and it let people in.

To me, a large part of this relationship marketing concept is allowing yourself to be a little bit vulnerable and let people in. They naturally empathize with you, in fact.

Mike: Let’s talk about maybe one other soft skill that you think marketers need to develop.

Mari: I know that this one will resonate with you, Mike. It’s basically giving with no agenda. It’s helping people just because you can if you see a question on Facebook or on Twitter.

We’re talking a lot about online, and really, relationship marketing transcends and goes offline as well, but it’s basically giving with no agenda. It’s helping; it’s building what I call “social equity.”

When you do that, you’re building this grand social capital, and what comes back to you is that someone in that grand scheme will do business with you. It may not be the person that you directly helped initially, but if you keep contributing and giving with full intent of just being a genuine, caring person, that totally comes across.

It’s a fine line. I see people all the time who really genuinely believe that they’re giving with no agenda, but you can feel it. There’s a great line in the book Tribes, by Seth Godin. He says that people can “smell the agenda of a leader.” I think we can smell the agenda of anybody.

Mike: “Give to get” is this thing that so many marketers have been trained to do. “If you give something, you’ll get something in return.” I don’t think that’s a good reason for us to give.

I think when you just give in a genuine way, people know it and it’s an expression of care for them. It is an expression of love for your customers and the end result can be something positive.

I’ll share a brief little story. There was a lady who had to ask for a refund from one of our events. I felt really sad for her situation, and I said, “I’ll give you your money back and you can still attend.” She was blown away by that, and she ended up attending another of my events.

She sends me emails all the time, saying, “You’ve really taken great care of me in the past. You don’t know how much it made a difference to me.” So these kinds of things can be very rewarding.

Mari: For the longest time, my motto has been “Relationships first, business second.” And if you focus on building those quality, really connected, genuine, caring relationships, what happens is the business naturally follows.

But I think people tend to get a little fearful. They think that they have to focus on only the business and hopefully the relationships will follow, but you have to get it the other way around.

Mike: So how do you manage it all?

Mari: I usually see that social presence has two primary components and they both start with “C”—there’s “content” and there’s “connection.”

The content part is somewhat easy to systematize, even to outsource and delegate. Create a content calendar so you can decide ahead of time what you’re going to post on your various social profiles. You can have someone on your team who helps with that and goes out and looks for content to curate.

You can use pre-scheduling platforms. I’m a huge fan of HootSuite. I use it every single day for Twitter in particular. There are these studies out there where people are talking about, “You should be tweeting 20 times a day for optimal results,” and that’s pretty much almost once an hour, day and night. I think that’s far too much.

The thing is consistency. Less is more. At the end of the day, you want to be the voice that’s remembered, not just heard. So you send three to five really helpful, useful resources in quality posts, something profound—an inspirational quote or whatever it might be—both consistently and daily, which you can do with the scheduling.

Use rigorous time management, using a stopwatch if you have to or having a friend call you, if you find you do get drawn in and consumed. I struggle with this one on a regular basis, but I manage somehow to do it.

The content can be planned and scheduled. What ends up happening in the “connection” aspect—even if you don’t get around to replying to everything out there that people are saying to you or about you—if you reply to as much as you can, you will give the appearance of somebody who is conversational, connected and caring.

That’s what’s happened to me, in fact. Some people will say that about me. “Mari doesn’t get around to 100% of her @replies on any given day, but we know that she does her best to try to get to them all.” And people feel valued.

Mike: You talked about how you can schedule things, and I think you alluded earlier to the fact that it’s helpful to have people who can help you. In your book, you talk about the importance of developing a support team. Can you briefly explain why this is important and why people should do something like this?

Mari: Even if you’re a sole proprietor or solopreneur, at some level, you’ve got people supporting you. I really challenge people to think bigger, to dream bigger. If you have a talent or gift to bring to the world, if you surround yourself with really, really competent people, this will free you up to do more of what you’re good at.

I think that when you have terrific team members, that really can augment what you’re providing out there. It can help you have stellar customer service.

There’s a saying around hiring: “Hire slow, fire fast.”

I talk a lot in the book about values, and I use Zappos as an example. Tony Hsieh has 10 core values for the company. Out of that emerges this culture. I think that any company—I don’t care what size you are, small, medium or large—when you embody a really powerful value-driven culture, that comes out. It automatically permeates all your social interactions. Zappos really empowers their hundreds of staff to be discerning on their social profiles.

I think at any given time, you should know who’s on your team and what kind of stuff they’re putting out there. Are they representing you well? You don’t want to look like a broken-down store with half-baked profiles out there.

Mike: In your book, you talk about different circles of relationships with people. You talk about intimates, your friends, your key contacts, your acquaintances and the community at large. I want you to identify which of these groups are the ones we should focus on when it comes to relationship marketing.

Mari: Absolutely key contacts. It’s not always about the numbers. It’s not to go and just jam up your Rolodex with every top influencer and key contact that you can. If you get three to five stellar contacts who are aligned with your values and they’re willing to create a win-win venture, alliance or strategic partnership, that can be extremely lucrative for both parties.

In addition, you can expand beyond that three to five to have maybe 15 to 20 key contacts from whom you can easily call in favors. These would be people who would have a large following on any of the different social networks.

They might have a large email base and things like that, and they would support you in a heartbeat. If you message them directly and ask them if they could retweet something for you, absolutely, of course they would do it for you. They would want to be part of something that you’re part of.

So really look to see whom you can add to that key contacts circle and really nurture them using some of these relationship-building techniques we’re talking about.

Mike: This is kind of a crazy question, but I know it’s the one everybody wants me to ask: “How do I become the center of influence in my network?” I ask this carefully because I know that sometimes being the center of influence has pros and cons. But I think really where I’m going with this question is: how can I be someone important and perceived to be important to those within my network?

Mari: In essence, I really like to treat everyone as equals. I will interact with someone exactly the same whether they have 10 followers or 10,000 followers or a million followers. It’s all people to me, and I just like to treat everyone as equals.

Then also in regard to influence, I think we have it in our brains and perceptions that you need a massive audience to be an influencer. Ultimately, we all influence. In some way, shape or form, we have an environment around us filled with people whom we influence.

Essentially, you earn trust—and this will be music to your ears, Mike—by becoming a top-quality content provider. People realize they can come to you. They know you’re like a breath of fresh air because when they’re looking for a certain answer, they’re coming to you. You can do that even through curating other people’s content and having this attitude—as we’ve been saying throughout our chat here today—of being someone who’s kind, inclusive and generous.

And it’s also that you’re focused. I see a lot of people who are very scattered. They’re an expert in this one day and an expert in that tomorrow. But if you’re really focused, which I like to say stands for “follow one course until successful,” and you become this really kind person who’s consistently focused and providing great content, people are just naturally drawn to you.

Also, it’s expressing an opinion about the content that you’re sharing, not just necessarily retweeting everybody, but actually saying what it means to you.

Mike: This has been really spectacular stuff, Mari. I’m going to now ask you a question that might be difficult for you to answer. If there was such a thing as a “Mari reset button”—if you had to start all over from scratch and you didn’t have all the stuff that you have today except for the knowledge that you’ve gained, what would you do differently?

Mari: You know, I would absolutely think way, way bigger. If I was even to reset maybe 10 years ago, I would take far bigger risks, and I would step it up. I would live a life in alignment with my truth, my dream in my heart, my vision, my power and my light far sooner.

It took me a long time to get to the point that I’m at now. I joke about being an “overnight success” 10 years in the making.

Mike: That’s pretty quick by a lot of standards.

Mari: That’s true.

Mike: Well, you’ve done a really spectacular job. I’m very excited about your new book. And the new book, once again, is called The New Relationship Marketing: How to Build a Large, Loyal, and Profitable Network Using the Social Web.

Mari, where can people learn more about you and your book?

Mari: My main website is www.MariSmith.com, but I do want to direct everyone to the book site, which is www.RelationshipMarketingBook.com.

Mike: Mari, I really appreciate your time today and I wish you the best with the new book.

Mari: Thank you. It’s been a delight.

Listen to our complete extended interview below to hear more about Mari’s nine-step program for building a loyal network.

Click here to download MP3.

What did you think of Mari’s step-by-step plan? Leave your comments in the box below.

You’ll discover the steps needed to build your own brand equity with social media, along with some great tips for both the self-employed and people who work for large companies.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• Why you need to carve out your position and brand equity
• How to start branding yourself on social media if you don’t have any brand equity online
• Why you need to use your name on social media
• How to brand yourself on your Facebook business page
• How Mari brands herself and what she does to craft the brand she represents

Connect with Mari on Twitter @MariSmith, on her Facebook page and check out her blog.

What do you do to build your brand equity?  How has your branding helped you? Please leave your comments below.

All the content you create, all the following you build, each of these is designed to create and foster more intimate relationships with people, in some cases, people you might not have met any other way.

What’s interesting is social media is changing the foundation of the ways we relate.  This article will examine how social media is changing our interpersonal psychology and what you can do about it.

Why Should You Care?

This has important implications for business because business, after all, is comprised of interpersonal relationships.

If you’re connecting with your clients and customers through social media, you want to be aware of how various changes in our interpersonal psychology might directly impact your client relationships.

On another level, too, it’s important to be aware of how your social media participation may be impacting you, as this will have implications for the decisions you make and the choices you adopt for your business.

Social media is changing our relationship styles in several important ways. First, it’s allowing us to connect with more people more rapidly. Second, it’s easy to overestimate the level of intimacy of our online relationships.

Third, it makes us more susceptible to a sort of social media contagion effect, which means you may possibly start adopting behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs from those within our social network. Fourth, social media facilitates comparing ourselves with others, which may have positive or negative effects.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into each of these…

#1: Allows You to Connect with More People

As we look at the first trend, we note that social media enables us to connect with many more people, from all walks of life, than we might normally meet in a normal work-week.

We can connect with the CEO of a Fortune 500 company on LinkedIn.  We can meet others who enjoy our love of punk music or we can share recipes for Thursday night’s dinner with people we’ve never met before.

The business case for developing such a broad social network is found in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, who studied how people have historically gained social currency (he called it social capital).  One way they did this was by having large networks that were loosely organized and not particularly intimate. This finding has been supported in many industries, which demonstrates that those who attain top leadership positions tend to have broad social networks.

With this increase in number of connections and frequency of contact, you’ll also see that you have access to many more ideas and resources than ever before. You can crowdsource the best information to solve our particular business issues. Research shows that, generally speaking, more opinions create a better result.

Given the informal nature of social media, it’s easy to approach someone you’d like to meet, and this can be done more easily and fluidly. It’s easier to extend your sphere of influence and enlarge it to include people you’d like to meet, or would like to know better. This means that influence will beget more influence.

#2: Makes it Easy to Overestimate Levels of Intimacy

While these aspects are positive and useful to us in our businesses, we also need to be aware of the downsides of social media, at least as far as our social relationships go.

One big mistake is that it’s easy to confuse digital intimacy for true intimacy.

We can become so seduced by the ease of connecting with others online that we begin to think that these relationships are more intense, more committed and more complete than they really are. We run the risk of alienating the people who populate our daily lives in pursuit of intimacy with our online friends. We each have only so much intimacy to go around, and we need to make sure we’re investing it for our own maximal benefit.

In business, this means you need to make certain that you’re investing in the right balance of online and offline relationships for your personal and professional success.

#3: You’re More Susceptible to the Social Media Contagion Effect

Another downside of social media relationships is that we’re potentially subject to emotional contagion effects, as illustrated in research by John Cacioppo, a researcher at the University of Chicago. His studies show that loneliness is transmitted via social networks.

Cacioppo’s findings suggest that if a direct connection of yours is lonely, you are 52% more likely to be lonely. If the connection is a friend of a friend, 25% more lonely. If the connection is 3 degrees out (a friend of a friend of a friend), it’s 15%.

While this research looked at offline social networks, it may have some implications for online social networking as well.

If someone in your online social network is angry, lonely, or hostile, and takes it out on you, you’re more likely to ‘transmit’ this mood yourself. This means that even though you may never have met this person or interacted with them in real life, their “bad behavior” can still influence yours.

As you become increasingly networked and involved with each other, it’s going to be more crucial to monitor your own influences and reactions.  We might be more prone to social media moodiness, depending on whom we’re spending time with and paying attention to within our social networks.

You’ve probably also seen that sometimes normal courtesy and politeness—aspects we would utilize in our face-to-face interactions—are sometimes reduced (or missing altogether) in the online space. I’ve personally noted people interacting in mean and critical ways that, I imagine, they would find more difficult to do in real life. This is a problem, because any kind of negativity and bad manners has the possibility to multiply a thousandfold.

As a business owner, this is important for several reasons.

First, if you’re rude or critical, this can negatively damage your brand and how people view you. This may determine who chooses to work with you and how your business is perceived, which can impact your profitability.

Second, given that even ‘private’ online conversations are not really private, something you say off the cuff can have lasting negative impact, in even unintended ways. What started out as a thoughtless remark can spread quickly to your detriment.

#4: Comparing Yourself with Others

Another downside of our social media relationships can be that our successes feel diminished and our failures amplified.

With the inrush of so much information about how other people are living their lives, or conducting their businesses, it’s easy to feel that we can’t compete. We might also feel some pressure to demonstrate a certain persona, as we know that people are always watching us. It can feel like we’ve traded a real-life rat race for an online one.

How to Benefit from Social Media

So given these factors, what strategies can you use to make sure you’re benefiting from your social media relationships instead of being dragged down?

1. Limit the time you spend on social networks. If you’re using social media primarily for business, make sure you’re getting a return on your time investment. I, for instance, have set times in the day to update my status and take part in the conversation. Then I close the browser and do other things. While it’s sometimes tempting to keep checking my online accounts, I know that if I do this too often, other parts of my business will suffer.
2. Monitor your own emotions and reactions. If you find yourself getting really aggravated, angry or distressed, and you don’t know why, back away from the computer. Go for a walk, or connect with someone in your offline life. This can help give you a perspective on your emotions and reactions.
3. Take care not to compare yourself too often to others. As the saying goes, ‘There will always be people greater than you, and people lesser than you.’ It’s all too easy to get caught up in vicarious experiencing of other people’s lives at the expense of experiencing your own.
4. Set goals or guidelines for your business relationships. Have a clear strategy or plan for why you’re cultivating various people in your networks. Remember that more can be good, but too much rarely is.
5. Maintain a balance between your online and offline life. We need to connect with people face to face, not just by email, phone, or social sites. Cultivate a real-life network of contacts as well.

How has social media impacted you?  Let me know your thoughts and ideas in the box below.

Image sourced from:

http://customersrock.net/2008/09/21/using-social-media-for-customer-loyalty-part-1/

Unfortunately, trust is on the decline.   The percentage of people who view their friends as credible sources of information about a brand has fallen from 45% in 2008 to 25% in 2010, according to Edelman’s 2010 Trust Barometer study.

That’s an alarming statistic for marketers wanting to tap into the power of word of mouth through social media marketing.  This article will provide three simple steps you can take to ethically market with social media.

What’s The Problem

Some marketers have cited this decline in credibility as a result of “friends” becoming defined more loosely because of social media. Sure, we’re Facebook friends with someone and we’re Twitter followers of someone, but are we really friends with them? Do we trust the word of mouth recommendations of people we’re Facebook friends with and Twitter followers of?

It’s become a common tactic for marketers to send influential social media types free products, hoping they endorse the brand/product on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and anywhere else online.

Perhaps consumers have become skeptical from seeing one too many upbeat tweets and blog posts from someone they’ve friended sharing their love for a brand or product.

The Solution

Consumer skepticism of endorsements in social media can be reversed when marketers diligently and deliberately follow these three actions:

1. It’s vital for marketers to ask the online influentials they’ve pitched to disclose when they’ve received product samples or any other incentive.
2. It’s also vital for marketers to disclose their relationship with people they’ve targeted to spark word of mouth online.
3. Honesty of the relationship between a business and a person is non-negotiable. It’s best to disclose relationships early and often in all social media venues.

On blogs, disclosure is easy. Bloggers simply need to clearly mention somewhere in a post that they were approached to write about a company’s product or service. Such a line could read, “I received [product name] from [company name] and here’s my opinion…”

On Twitter and Facebook, disclosure isn’t as easy due to space limitations. Using special hashtags is one way to disclose relationships. For example, #samp is being used by influential twitterers to denote when they’ve received a free sample from a company. Another disclosure tool gaining popularity is one of the six Twitter-friendly disclosure statements from cmp.ly. (For detailed guidance on disclosure in social media, read the Word of Mouth Marketing Association’s Guide to Social Media Disclosure.)

#1: Demand Disclosure

"Full disclosure assures consumers that testimonials are truthful and trustworthy." Paul Rand

Honesty of opinion is vital. As marketers, we can only provide online influentials with information and encourage them to tell others. What they tell others is up to the individual and not the marketer.

The instant marketers begin trying to manipulate what people say online, we lose. We lose by allowing word of mouth to lose its place as the most credible form of marketing.

#2: Encourage Honesty

"...the reason word of mouth is so effective is that it is understood to be authentic." Robert Weissman

It’s the responsibility of marketers to ensure disclosure happens. As marketers, we must educate and inform the online influentials we work about the importance of disclosing relationships.

Furthermore, we must monitor compliance and if disclosure doesn’t occur, marketers must take appropriate action. Such action may range from re-educating online influentials about disclosure needs to no longer working with influentials who show a pattern of not disclosing relationships.

#3: Monitor Compliance

"Checking to see if one of our influencers posted proper disclosure is easy. We know who we reached out." John Bell

What are your thoughts? How can word of mouth remain credible in social media marketing?

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.”