January is the time for fresh starts, new plans and great intentions – a time when we resolve to be our best self and set in motion the tactics to achieve it. A healthy, balanced lifestyle – with a renewed focus to lose weight, get in shape, become trim, sleek, slim and fit – is often at the top of the list.That’s exactly what makes this a busy time of year for Beachbody, a company that started almost 12 years ago, specializing in DVD-home fitness programs featuring online support; fitness gear and supplements. Among the best selling programs are P90X, 10 Minute Trainer, Turbo Jam and Slim in 6; brands which may be familiar through TV infomercials.

Beachbody owner Carl Daikeler recognized early on, the potential of infomercials to sell fitness. When he was just 24-years-old, he helped build the first infomercial network in the US viewed by 50 percent of all TV households in the country. In the mid 1990’s, he helped build an affiliate network of more than 100 radio and TV stations to promote fitness products. Now social media figures into the business plan. He has a blog where he discusses business ideas and customer success stories. It’s one of 4 featured on the website, with fitness advisors and trainers penning the other blogs.

How Fit is the Social Web?

Beachbody, including trainers and several product brands, is active on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. While these are new initiatives, Facebook fans for the P90X brand have reached 30,000. There’s also a blogger outreach program where fitness and mommy bloggers are offered a free fitness program and asked to blog honestly about the experience.

Social Media is part of Beachbody’s strategy to proactively connect with customers and passively to gauge its online reputation. Beachbody monitors mentions and conversations on the social web for most of its product brands. In fact, before it was anybody’s job to listen, a motivated employee was monitoring and took the initiative to alert the Customer Service VP what was being said to enable a response. That employee now has the only job in the company with ‘social media’ in the title! Pierre Abraham is the Social Media Specialist and at that earliest point, he was listening for disgruntled customers. Now he uses Radian6 to sort through and prioritize 26,000 mentions per month (and they’re all positive he says!).

Most mentions are about P90X – a favorite among celebrities like actors Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher; singer Sheryl Crowe and professional athletes including Philadelphia Eagles football kicker David Akers. He started using P90X after a disappointing 2007 season to regain his strength and flexibility. Akers went on to break an NFL record for consecutive field goals in 2009. But that’s not the NFL record that would have earned his charitable Foundation $1Million dollars from Beachbody (the 2008 Beachbody challenge Akers accepted was to break the NFL record of a 64-yard field goal during a game). While that NFL achievement still eludes him, Akers is on his game and has been selected to play in the Pro Bowl January 31^st.

Listening Creates Opportunity:

It’s not just actors and athletes. Beachbody Social Media Specialist Pierre Abraham is always on the look out for influencers, one of the top reasons to listen. Recently the CTO of networking systems giant Cisco, Padmasree Warrior, mentioned on Twitter (@Padmasree) that she suspected Santa would give her P90X for Christmas instead of chocolates! Pierre quickly saw that she has more than a million followers. He jumped at the opportunity to respond with a word of encouragement. She jovially reciprocated the connection @Beachbody creating the opportunity for her 1,377,537 followers to see the P90X brand, experience the personal outreach, hear the message and learn that Beachbody is listening.

The Radian6 platform enables Pierre to track these connections over time and measure the success of word-of-mouth on the web – whether that’s tracking a rise in mentions after launching a new ad campaign, a new product or seeing if a new contest builds attention and excitement. One of the strengths Pierre sites is the ability to save data so he can graph and analyze trends. He also likes the convenience of having one platform to easily track ten brands across the social web instead of using several tools then aggregating results manually.

Social media monitoring is just beginning at Beachbody, but its capability to help inform business strategy has already begun to take shape – and with this company – whether you measure results in 10 minutes or 90-day workouts, 2010 is already shaping up to be a good year!