“RockMelt is fast, secure, and stable because it’s built on Chromium, the open source project behind Google’s Chrome browser. It’s your browser – re-imagined and built for how you use the Web.” “RockMelt keeps track of all your favorite sites for you, alerting you when a new story comes out, a friend posts new pictures, or a new video is available. And when you open a RockMelt feed, the content is already waiting for you. You can Like, comment, reply, retweet, share – all the actions you’ve come to expect from each service you follow.”

Howard Stern anointed himself as the “King of All Media” for his successes outside radio. His television career includes several late night shows, pay-per-views and home video releases. Stern is the author of several books and made a movie from his book Private Parts, a self deprecating comedy starring Stern and his radio show staff as themselves. How does Howard transcend these mediums and continue to keep it real? More importantly, what lessons can we learn from him and his legion of fans for the online world.

What  Howard can teach us all about creating, maintaining and building an online social media presence?

1) Transparency

Love him or hate him, one thing you cannot deny, is  Howard’s  total commitment to transparency with his audience and guests. There are no topics or areas of his life that have not been shared, dissected or poked fun at over the course of his career. Everybody loves a train wreck and though seemingly leading a charmed life, Howard talks openly about everything from having small private parts to the divorce from his first wife.

What has Howard taught us? Consumers are hip to all the marketing jive thrown at them for all these years and frankly they are tired of the propaganda wars. Consumers can see right through bogus advertising claims and hyped messaging. In order to survive and thrive as as brand today, individuals want to know they can depend and believe in what a brand does and says. Creating and maintaining customer expectations through communications and technology are easier than ever. With the use of these tools and platforms, both positive and  negative messages can spread faster and travel farther than ever before. Embracing honesty, transparency and trust factors are more important than ever before in developing a brands online presence.

2) Howard’s audience is his show

Forget all the celebrities that visit and call in to Howard’s radio show as part of his content creation strategy. Consumer generated content and plenty of it comes directly from his audience in all forms. How does Howard create even more content? By letting his audience, all with strong opinions either in agreement or disagreement with Howard or his guests POV, talk on and on with Howard acting as the community manager, moderating and facilitating the discussion to a frothy head.

By sticking to some basic tenants that all good social media marketers use in their posts on social platforms like blogs, Facebook and Twitter, Howard broadcasts hours and hours of content using the following structure. Or as we like to call it in Web 2.o speak, Link Bait

1. Communicate a Benefit

2. Create Controversy or Debate

3. Ask a Question

4. Personalize

5. Big Claims and Promises

6. Humor

Clearly, Howard has the gift of gab but more importantly,  his gift for pushing all the right buttons with his guests and audience is what helps make the show pivotal and controversial. Letting his audience weigh in on everything and anything, all the whilst teasing, taunting and even encouraging them on the fly. A live op ed piece with real-time commentary. My favorite line from Private Parts his movie into why people tune in to his show:

Howard taught us that to be engaging you need to not only put your self out there and forward facing but engage the community and let your friends, fans and followers contribute to the discussion.

3) Make your brand the cause

As the old saying goes in cause marketing, “People don’t join causes, people join people with causes.” Brand marketing is taking on a whole new meaning, simply put, “marketing with meaning.” Howard’s premise has always been his job is to entertain us and he gets paid well for it. By not selling T-shirts or coffee mugs with his name on them, possibly diluting his brand equity, legions of fans are potentially more willing to embrace his causes.

Running for Governor of New York, Howard realized the potential in and having the audience join his cause. In 1994 Stern announced his candidacy for Governor of New York as a Libertarian, challenging Mario Cuomo for re election. After creating some groundswell for his campaign, Stern withdrew his candidacy after unwilling to disclose his finances as required by the Ethics in Government Act. Cuomo was defeated in the gubernatorial election on November 8 by George Pataki, whom Stern backed. Did Stern shift and sway his audiences voting?

Today in the social sphere and specifically with cause marketing, we can see more and more people joining Brands which are in tune with their causes!

In a recent article by Ann Marie Kerwin, she outlines what causes resonate with Millennial and Gen Y’s.  Once you understand what motivates your audience getting them involved, fully circles back to the Brand level of transparency and authenticity. As you can see from the chart, Howard hits upon several of these themes, most notably freedom of speech.

How to Get the Social-Media Generation Behind Your Cause

How To Build Your Brand Using Social Media

Howard has shown us how brands can take their message and their brand and help distribute that message through the  social spectrum in a way that lets Brands connect with their friends, fans and followers in a meaningful interaction.

These are big ideas to embrace and even more difficult to execute both on a strategic and tactical level. But if Howard has taught us nothing, Transparency, Engagement and Marketing with Meaning are all about being genuine.

The social web creates a new model for marketing and treats customers not just as consumers, but as self actualized, dynamic human beings with an opinion that matters.  These new customers are engaged and informed, with the ability to easily connect with each other and influence peer decisions.

Online marketing as a catalyst is engendered by a two way conversation. Brands using social media as a vehicle to communicate, need to appreciate and respect the conversation and consumer principles at work.

Search Engine Optimization and Marketing is growing up. In fact, the past several years has seen basic tenants of search, meta tags and DMOZ inclusions, wane in importance as the ability to bridge the gap with search and social has emerged.  According The Social Media Industry report March 2009, social media was viewed as helping the “rise in the search rankings.”

How do you build on page presence and websites with searchers in mind while developing off page strategies and tactics driving traffic to your highest priority content and converting pages.

Good site design and search engine optimization techniques used five years ago still apply and have relevance today on varying levels. Search algorithms are looking at content on the pages, how many folks are coming to the site,  from where and links that go back to your site.

Content Ranking: There is no substitute for good content and yes, content is still king. No matter how you slice it or drive traffic to your content, users must find value when they land on the page, otherwise you are wasting everyone’s time including your own.

The more unique your content the higher value an engine will place on your site and page. Video and conversational elements added to your site will infinitely add to the user experience. User generated content in the form of comments and conversations add dimensionally to your sites value for users and in the eyes of the search engines as well.

Usage Ranking: Once the user lands on your site what else lives there to create moments of engagement and further the user through your sites content. Forums and social communities will further enhance the users ability to engage with your site and create longer lasting sessions and potentially incremental pageviews. Focus on the conversation. This is where SEO and Social meld beautifully. The more comments your blog post receives the more traction you gain. To quote Seth Godin. “to get a remark, you need to be remarkable”

Link Ranking: There are several elements to links and their inherent value.

Here is where social meets search. Check out the new Like button metadata for Facebook

To customize how your site shows up when users share your page with the Like button, you can add meta data to your web pages:

• og:title – The title of your page; if not specified, the title element will be used.
• og:site_name – The name of your web site, e.g., “CNN” or “IMDb”.
• og:image – The URL of the best picture for this page. The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1.

For example if you are creating a page about the movie ‘The Rock’ you would include this meta data:

• <meta property="og:title" content="The Rock"/>
• <meta property="og:site_name" content="IMDb"/>
• <meta property="og:image" content="http://ia.media-imdb.com/rock.jpg"/>

As you can see the sophistication around search and social integration  is becoming increasingly important.

More on search meets social soon. TTFN

Facebook is a social networking that was originally designed for college students, but is now open to anyone 13 years of age or older. Facebook users can create and customize their own profiles with photos, videos, and information about themselves. Friends can browse the profiles of other friends and write messages on their pages.

Each Facebook profile has a “wall,” where friends can post comments. Since the wall is viewable by all the user’s friends, wall postings are basically a public conversation. Therefore, it is usually best not to write personal messages on your friends’ walls. Instead, you can send a person a private message, which will show up in his or her private Inbox, similar to an e-mail message.

Facebook allows each user to set privacy settings, which by default are pretty strict. For example, if you have not added a certain person as a friend, that person will not be able to view your profile. However, you can adjust the privacy settings to allow users within your network (such as your college or the area you live) to view part or all of your profile. You can also create a “limited profile,” which allows you to hide certain parts of your profile from a list of users that you select. If you don’t want certain friends to be able to view your full profile, you can add them to your “limited profile” list.

Another feature of Facebook, which makes it different from MySpace, is the ability to add applications to your profile. Facebook applications are small programs developed specifically for Facebook profiles. Some examples include SuperPoke (which extends Facebook’s “poke” function) and FunWall (which builds on the basic “wall” feature). Other applications are informational, such as news feeds and weather forecasts. There are also hundreds of video game applications that allow users to play small video games, such as Jetman or Tetris within their profiles. Since most game applications save high scores, friends can compete against each other or against millions of other Facebook users.

Facebook provides an easy way for friends to keep in touch and for individuals to have a presence on the Web without needing to build a website. Since Facebook makes it easy to upload pictures and videos, nearly anyone can publish a multimedia profile. Of course, if you are a Facebook member or decide to sign up one day, remember to use discretion in what you publish or what you post on other user’s pages. After all, your information is only as public as you choose to make it!

social media marketing

What is social medial marketing? Social media marketing consists of the attempt to use social media to persuade consumers that one’s company, products and/or services are worthwhile.

Businesses using social media want to sell their products or services of course. But as blatant advertising on social media would, in most cases, alienate their intended audience or even get them kicked out of the particular social community they’re trying to infiltrate, businesses need to use other methods to promote themselves.

To use social media marketing effectively, businesses have to be perceived as members of the social media community, willing to interact with other members.

The main problem with social media marketing from a business perspective is that it can be incredibly time-consuming. Social media marketing campaigns are not one-shot affairs; they need to be nurtured over time. While big businesses such as Dell, Microsoft and HP have been using social media marketing effectively, they have the kinds of marketing budgets that allow them to assign x number of staff to conduct and manage social media marketing campaigns, resources that a lot of small businesses don’t have.

Still, social media marketing is a type of marketing that many small businesses could benefit from, if only to find out more about what their customers are thinking – and saying – about their brand and their products.

Common Misspellings: Socail media marketing, social medea marketing.

One of the star players in Social Media is the “Community Manager”. Responsible for the management and revitalization of communities on a Companies or Causes site.
1 .- Sites embody a community of real people with faces, voices and names. And gradually, they will produce many experiences, the constant generation of experiences that seek to convey the soul of the brand or cause and engage all users.

2 .- The figure of the Community Manager has been highlighted in recent times, especially with the explosion of social networks and their proliferation. The wikipedia defines this figure as the “person in charge of building, growing and managing communities around a brand or cause.” But above all, the community manager is a nexus between the “brand” or “cause”, and the user. In the case of a brand, the person or community team must try to match the target of that brand and transform it into an environment that attracts users. Attempting to meet the objectives of both parties so both are satisfied.

3 .- What are the functions of a Community Manager?

A community manager needs to observe all that is discussed in the previous paragraph and is “down to earth” and turn those functions into everyday tasks. Tasks of many kinds: moderate, dynamic strategies, applications and / or tools, contact the user, social reputation, market research, etc.. But obviously, these tasks depend on many factors: whether it is a brand community or not, whether large or modest, has an impact off-line, objectives, budget, etc.. The more complex the community, managers have more roles and in the case of a trademark is further complicated. All these functions have had to add one more and very important thing to understand the role, what makes a community. Of course, much depends on the brand, its values, its politics, but you must understand that this is a medium that now is being used increasingly by the brands. They have seen communites and social sites potential and want to get into the game, and obviously have to be there to help them have as clear a role as possible, so they also know how to play well together.

4 .- Professionals: Here is the brand itself that acts under their  name. I would give anonymity to the people behind the trademark, but at the same time, allow more than one person take care of things. Staff: it would be a particular employee (or other) of the company or brand, name and surname. There is comcast cares on twitter and then there is eric at comcast.

My opinion is that both models should not be rigid. Depending on the behavior observed or feedback from the user, the intention is to learn from the community and always with them and act accordingly.

5 .- What Social Media tools can you use for a community manger role?

Google Alerts, Tweetbeep, research new pages, applications and trends of the social web. Each day depends on: a new strategy, a new application or a promotion … It would be impossible to list everything.  Regarding the “social media” that you can use, the question is almost what not to use.

6 .- One of the keys to community or social network is to find the “social object”, ie the concept that makes a person decide to enter and be in this community and not in others. The space where real people share the little things that make them happy every day. Create the space where we expect users to share and assume the values of good netizenship.

If you’ve got an experienced social media team, a solid budget and an appetite for innovation, you can create an original online presence that engages your customers or supporters in an entirely new kind of online experience.

No ROI for Social Media? Some examples for you. Now, they re-iterate with this compelling clip with several Social Media ROI examples along with other effective Social Media Strategies. Catchy music is by Bob Sinclair.

Photo by ccgdSocial media optimization (SMO) is an important ingredient within your SEO and SEM campaigns. In the past, social networking sites were not much more than an oddity. Today, many have received enormous ranking authority from top search engines. If you are not leveraging these sites to improve your exposure and communicate with your niche consumer, your search engine positions are vulnerable to your competitors.

The Influence Of Social Media Optimization On Search Marketing

Search marketing has always relied upon exposure in the search engines to drive targeted traffíc. For years, gaining that exposure was based solely upon the development of your site and generating links pointing to your site. Both are still important today. However, social media optimization has shifted the landscape of search marketing.

Google once maintained several disparate search platforms for blogs, videos, news, and similar types of “social” content. Each functioned as a separate search engine with its own set of organic listings.

A few years ago, Google blended the listings from each platform into a system called Universal Search. Bing and Yahoo have since incorporated similar systems. Universal Search is now used as the primary index. That means blogs, videos, and news have been incorporated into the natural listings, pushing many sites off the first page. This is one of the reasons social media optimization has become a critical piece of search.

Another factor that has influenced search marketing is the increased ranking authority given to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and similar sites. These too, have quickly gained control of a significant amount of search territory.

Social media optimization preserves your current natural listings while helping you to gain even more search exposure. By using blogs, videos, and social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, you can capture a greater number of organic positions.

Your Social Media Optimization Campaign: Rules of Engagement

There are several rules of engagement for launching and executing a social media optimisation campaign. If you ignore them, your SMO efforts will be far less effective than otherwise.
Top Positions in the Web’s Largest Article Directory

First, you should do everything possible to encourage your audience to link to your site. Integrating a blog is valuable because your content can be updated over time, attracting loyal readers. Encourage readers to bookmark, tag and “Tweet” your blog posts by installing a button plug-in.

Second, link liberally as a resource for your visitors. Social media optimization is dependent on assisting others achieve what they’re trying to do. Once you engage your audience, help them find the resources they need by linking to them. Eventually, your site will become regarded as a resource hub, which will help you attract inbound links. That’s a vital component of SEO.

Third, you must be able to identify your market. Social media optimization relies upon the connections you establish with niche communities. You need to properly target them in order to engage them and generate content. This is true whether you’re engaging them through YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, or your blog.

Fourth, integrate tracking tools to measure and monitor the success of your social media optimization campaign. Track mentions of your site and company. Watch your site’s progress in the natural listings for your main keywords. Generate linking reports showing inbound links pointing to your domain and specific pages. Tracking your metrics is crucial in order to determine whether your SMO campaign is effective.

SEO Social Media Optimization Explained

Each of the elements of a social media optimization campaign that we have described thus far dovetail seamlessly with SEO. The ongoing content creation, tagging and bookmarking, attracting inbound links by being a resource for your audience – these are essential for pushing your website higher in the search engines’ listings. SEO social media optimization leverages a new set of tools to accomplish the same goal as SEO: more exposure for your site on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The challenge is knowing how to use those tools effectively.

The days of launching a basic SEO campaign within a competitive space and watching your site rise in the search engines’ results are long gone. SEO has become far more complex than it was a few short years ago. This is why many companies have made the decision to hire an SEO consultant. Social media optimization has transformed SEO from a relatively straightforward strategy into a complicated science. Having an experienced hand at the wheel helps to navigate the uncertain terrain.

If you want to boost your exposure in the search engines’ listings, consider social media optimization a priority.

With all but just a few exceptions  I find “social media gurus” to be nothing more than “social media blowhards” If you doubt it read this weeks Business Week article on Social Media Snake Oil Salesmen

Photo by Pipe What is “social media”? The phrase, which appears in Wikipedia is the umbrella term that defines activities integrating technology, social interaction and the construction of words,  images and other rich media.

Although I believe this definition is somewhat fair, “Social Media” uses consensus swarming to generate content and link information in a collaborative manner as collective intelligence.

What we understand as Social Media, we are shown in different ways as Forums, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, Online Communities, Social Networks, Photos, Videos, etc..

The point is, that the rise of the term emerges from naturally derived concepts such as Social Media Optimization (SMO) which is the process of optimizing individuals or companies to distribute content quickly and successfully through the sites for social participation. The acceptance or otherwise of such content, with the content generated by users themselves form Online Reputation.

The other concept is derived from Social Media Marketing (SMM) that must be understood as a form of marketing that seeks its objectives through participation in social participation sites through unique content, attractive and useful, but not necessarily shocking. Such content items may be from a blog, even a simple video on youtube. We must not confuse it with viral marketing campaigns, but both come very close and look at very similar goals.

The issue is that the term Social Media, we use every day and is now in full effect as we see in the chart Google Trends does not yet have a definitive translation into ROI until recently.

There are lots of proposals for Social Media Campaigns, Media Collaborative Marketing, Online Media and Social Participation, but little is heard which clearly defines what the customer wants to see for return on investment and can be measured until now.

Overdrive Interactive has created a social media dashboard, tracking SEO, PPC and Social Media using a proprietary process clearly defining actions and reactions down to the lead level. On the dashboard clients are able to learn what programs and initiatives work and costs per customer acquisition associated with those processes. Download the social media map.

Lead development and online lead generation are no longer a guessing game, fraught with false promises and expectations. Using Overdrive Interactive’s tools and services customers both B2C and B2B are now able to track online marketing programs ROI successfully.

2009 Best Use of Social Media
Project: Harley-Davidson 2010 Motorcycles Mosaic
Agency/Creator: Overdrive Interactive for Harley-Davidson