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.

Are you a mover and a shaker? Legendary in your own mind? Or, like the Kardashian sisters, have your legions of friends, fans and followers willing, able and ready to act upon your every brand recommendation in a social post.

Does your VIP card get you everything you want at the airport lounge or should you as a digital debutante, be afforded an ever increasing list of services and products based on your potential to influence your follower  base?

Klout announced recently, Facebook information will now be factored in with your Twitter account data revealing your overall influence as a measurement of influence and your ability to create a desired action by others online.

The premise of the score is based on and  takes into account metrics such as retweets, follower counts, list memberships and unique mentions to calculate everything from who influences you to your “true reach”, another Klout metric.

How Klout and their platform partners via apps will leverage your influence remains to be seen but clearly now is the time to gain and create influence on social platforms both as individual and as a company.

Who Doesn’t Want To Be Viewed As Important

The old adage, it’s more important to be nice, than it is to be important, will always hold true. More than just being the loudest voice or someone with celebrity status your ability as an individual to move the masses as brands try and tap into your social realm will garner more and more sponsored relationships between high value social individuals and companies.

Who wouldn’t want to be the first kid on the block with the newest shiniest widget or gadget from a company that knows you will potentially laud praise and adulation on their latest and greatest offerings?

Twitter paid sponsorships have existed for a while with a couple of companies showing varied success. I signed up for an account with one of these companies months ago and even though I have a reasonable Twitter following have never earned dime one for a sponsored tweet, indicating the threshold for inclusion to be pretty high, as Guy Kawasaki earns about $7 per sponsored tweet with over a quarter million followers.

Bottom line is folks with influence should and will try to benefit financially from their relationships they have created.  There is a delicate balance of maintaining status and influence combined with hawking a companies wares in an individuals conversations, while not generating follower burnout.

Social media and social product mentions/links is way different than Tiger Woods wearing a red golf shirt with a Nike logo on the shoulder as a brand endorsement and product placement.

Creating desired behaviour and actions. Pay me on a scale based off  my reach influence when someone clicks on a sponsored link I have placed in a tweet, status update or blog post.

Membership Has It’s Rewards

Klout data has already been used to offer online influencers perks, including free Virgin America flights and free tickets to events. Seanward put together a song and Youtube video “I dont’ represent anyone’s brand well, and now I’ve gotta pay for my flight like everyone else.”

In the following video entitled “Talkin’ Social Media Blues” Sean looks and disects the social media landscape with a humourous bent and Klouts  role in social media maven creation.

Frankly, I want perks! I appreciate it when my patronage is recognized at certain bars and a three second pour turns into a five. Disney has a whole concierge setup to let families move to the front of the line on certain rides based on their paying for the service but also their membership usage. If by checking in on FourSquare, my Mayorial status gets me a discount on a Latte, all the better for me. Not to get all Marsh, Marsha, Marsha on you, but seriously, I really do appreciate recognition and value discounts based on my previous purchases.

Leveraging the check in. Coupons at the point of sale on my mobile for instant redemption rock!! Better yet, find me an open table at my favorite restaurant when I show up without a reservation, I am the Mayor after all.

Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk

More than just spewing on and on about a brand or product once or twice, linking corporate and Reward Strategies for high performance influencers is a new direct marketing initiative. Companies should recognize my life time value as a customer and reward me accordingly as measured by my online activity and brand engagement as I turn people on to a companies brands from the following metrics.

• Product Mentions

True story, Shaun in our office talked about Pop Chips for a couple of weeks last month on twitter before they teamed up with Klout. Every couple of days in the afternoon  he would go on and on about it being his favorite new snack. So, a couple of weekends ago I found myself at Costco with the kids at the free sample station and low and behold there was Pop Chips. We tried them, but more importantly, we liked them and bought them. Two bags by the way, as the kids really liked them!! Now all Shaun tweets about is Pop Chips to support his habit.Thanks Shaun for the great snack recommendation. Someone at Pop Chips should send Shaun a free box or two becuase I know he has now turned on 40+ people in our office to the delightful snack and I cannot look at his tweet stream anymore lol  With 650 followers on twitter Shaun has a ways to go with catching up to Guy Kawasaki but Shaun has influenced Overdriver‘s more than Guy regarding Pop Chip consumption.

• Location Check-ins and behaviour generated content

Hi, I am at ……. How many times have you seen that on a tweet stream or now with Facebook places?

Are you and a freind at the same place at the same time? Before bumping into each other would have been considered kismat. Now with Facebook places and 4sq your chanced meeting is no longer subject to only chance encounters. Points systems and customer retention programs based on Return visitors, frequency, recency, conversion rate, revenue distribution, new and return visitors distribution is a great set of KPI’s and tactic to grow returning and loyal site visitors. Clearly the more someone visits a location in a given time frame and makes purchases the more valued and desirable the user. Reward accordingly!!

Behavioural segmentation divides customers into groups based on the way they respond to, use or know of a product. Finding the influencers and rewarding those influencers of your product accordingly is about benefit segmentation. Benefit segmentation is all about the velvet rope and requires marketers to understand and find the main benefits customers look for in a product or service. In some instances price points or free stuff will be a consideration for the user and in other instance moving to the head of the line is the golden ticket.

#Chirp highlights

• 100,000 applications now registered with Twitter.
• Promoted Tweets – Twitter monetization model built around paying for tweet promotion in search. Dick Costolo introduced the new concept of  ”Resonance,”  a cost model based on  ways companies interact with followers. Dick says twitter will measure “hashtags, clicks on hastags, retweets, retweets by power users” and other metrics. The resonance score will be measured in real time and will be the metric  the algorithms decide which  promoted tweets to display. Promoted tweets that resonate with users will remain in search results, while tweets that don’t resonate with users will disappear.
• Meta Data and Annotations:   Starting next quarter hash tags will be toast [maybe]. A “Machine-parseable, lightweight client-side API that extends Twitter” will be introduced. What’s cool about this functionality, you will be able to annotate and add  meta-data to tweets that comes into the stream. Twitter will let you attach metadata to tweets, and then pull that data back out of Twitter later. Types of data are being left to developers to decide but you will surely see location based information passed and parsed in the meta-data. “Annotations are specified for a tweet when the tweet is created. When submitting a POST to /statuses/update, you’ll include an “annotations” parameter with your annotations. We’re thinking we’ll provide two mechanisms for specifying what a tweet’s annotations are: 1. JSON 2. form encoded parameters”
• Managing larger work-flows in bigger teams of individual companies. Similar to Co-Tweet, Twitter recongnizes the workflow issues involved with managing more than one account and effectively distributing the work load over many individuals.
• Places of Interest – instead of listing coordinates of tweets, Twitter will associate them with the name of the specific location

• URL Shortener – Twitter will be launching their own URL shortener.
• @Anywhere, which allows partners to more easily embed Twitter into their Websites. Hovercards, Connect, Sign-In, and the Tweetbox. The Tweetbox is where tweets themselves are displayed, it’s like a short Twitter feed. The goal is to bring widget interface functionality with seleected tweets and users about specific topics, on those websites. AdAge, Amazon, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, Disqus, eBay, Foursquare, Gawker, Google, Gowalla, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Hunch, Mashable, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, WSJ.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube, will be using these new tools Twitter states on their blog.

• Twitter Archive – The US Library of Congress will be the official archive for tweets.
• User Streams:   Power of real-time streams relevant to users.  No more rate limits, polling, managing data.  Includes social graph, direct messages and ReTweets and favorites.  Adding linkage and threads between one tweet to the other.  Like Twit Toaster did when visualizing threaded discussions & of course location. “Streaming API feature that we’re calling User Streams — real-time updates of all data needed to update a desktop application display. The grand vision has applications, eventually,
  hitting the REST API for startup back-fill, then transitioning to Streaming for nearly all subsequent reads. Streaming will revolutionize the user’s desktop experience — rate limits and latency will practically be eliminated. We’ll also be able to provide new event types and data that are currently impractical on REST. We hope that you can stop managing rate
  limits and use this new data to create an entirely new user experience. On our end, we hope to reduce costs and increase site reliability.”
• Twitter Media – launched a new portal for journalist and media focused on case studies for using the service
• Google, unveiled two new Twitter tools Wednesday, one called “Friend Follow” that searches for likely candidates to follow on Twitter, and a second called “Replay” that allows users to look back in time at what people were saying about a particular topic at a particular time on Twitter.
• Developer central: in a move to placate developers after their recent purchase of  Atebits, the company behind the popular Tweetie client for Mac, Twitter announced their new developers site, dev.twitter.com

Promoted Tweets on Twitter(2) from Twitter Tweets on Vimeo.

Twitter is testing a new home page that features more real time or what they are calling “dynamic content”. After nearly nine months since the last homepage redo, Twitter introduces real time search, “algorithmically-selected” top tweet trends and suggested tweeps to follow.

“All of our recent changes embrace the notion that Twitter is not just for status updates anymore,” Twitter designer Doug Bowman wrote in a blog post. “It’s a network where information is exchanged and consumed at a rapid clip every second of the day.”

Twitter plans to monitor and “continually try to new ideas that help users more easily discover who and what they can find on Twitter.”

From the twitter blog

“All of our recent changes embrace the notion that Twitter is not just for status updates anymore. It’s a network where information is exchanged and consumed at a rapid clip every second of the day. With so much being shared, we know that there’s something of value for everyone. People who internalize the value of Twitter understand the power of this simple medium. But it hasn’t been easy to make that value transparent or obvious for curious folks coming to Twitter for the first time.”

Twitters micro-blogging format continues to gain traction in the social media sphere!

Product Warnings

• “Do not use in shower.” – On a hair dryer.
• “Do not use while sleeping.” – On a hair dryer.
• “Caution: Hot beverages are hot!” – On a coffee cup.
• “Do not use for drying pets.” – In the manual for a microwave oven.

Check out the 6th warning in the pic

Like so many other useful product warnings, not tweeting in the middle of evacuating a building during  fires is a good idea!

Here are a ten good ideas on how TO use twitter:

1) Find folks you know and follow them

2) Find folks with similar interests and follow them

3) Find companies you like and follow them

4) Create lists for yourself on areas of interest and other tweeps to follow

5) Use an interface/app like tweetdeck, twhirl or nambu for a better user experience

6) Integrate twitter with your blog

7) Tweet 120 characters and leave room for others to retweet you
Keep it real and engage, don’t broadcast nonsense

9) Help folks out and create value for them and yourself

10) Go to a tweetup and meet folks IRL, merge real life with your online life

Hashtags can be indexed and displayed in your group tweets by first following @hashtags. The service will follow you back automatically.

Second step is to get familiar with hashtag commands, so that you only broadcast a message out to the people you want to receive it, those being the members of your hashtag group.

* Follow #tag – (example: follow #tcot) – lets you follow all updates tagged with #tcot. 

* Follow username#tag – subscribe to all updates from a certain person that are sent to a group. (Example: Follow jeffselig#tcot will give you every post by Jeff sent to the #tcot group)

* #tag message – Send a message or question to the group. (Example: #tcot Anyone know a great software program to organize tweets?)

* #tag !message – Send a message only to people who are subscribed to updates from #tag. (Example: #twitip !How many tcot users post to twitter daily?) 

* Leave #tag – Unsubscribe from the group. If your friends are subscribed to this group as well, you’ll still get messages from them that include updates for the group. (Example: leave #food will unsubscribe you from the Food group, but you’ll still get messages from your best friend and fabulous cook Jenny whenever she sends a message to #food).

* Remove #tag Unsubscribe from the group and from friend messages that include this tag. So if Jenny posts a recipe to #food and you’ve typed Remove #food in your Twitter status bar, you won’t see that recipe even if Jenny is on your followers list.

No sooner had we gotten used to the idea of “Universal Search” and every detail needed to understand what would go into dominating the search engine results pages with images, videos and text, than Google releases “Real-time Search”.

The question is how real time is the returns and how flawed are the results. The lack of Google’s ability to show real-time results was a weakness that many people felt hurt them in development. With the release of Universal Search so many interesting features were added to Google Suggest and Google Quick Scroll enabling Google’s search capabilities to save users time and enhance the user experience.

Real-time Google Search is available in English only for some people, but Google believes that by the first quarter of 2010 could be implemented in other languages. Some of the pages that will work with this new system will be Facebook, Twitter and MySpace sites that are updated every minute. For now if you want to see Real Time in action, I recommend choosing any of the terms found in Google Trends. Only for some specific terms will you see results, massive searches at a given time, so if you want to see it in action, I recommend choosing any of the terms in Google Trends.

Not Just Google but Bing too:
Both Bing and Google have agreements with Twitter to take every tweet (post or message) and analyze each with its own technology to deliver relevant results to searchers. There were already some partial solutions like Twitter Search Results for Google via GreaseMonkey, but this new real-time is certainly a step beyond.

We see that Bing has completely separated search Twitter, trying not to affect results pages (SERPs) for your main browser. While search engines can be added to Twitter as an input to the characterization of the sites that are part of their index, they do not plan to add sound to your results pages with tweets. Therefore we must see real-time searching as a new type of search, and existing (News, Blogs, images, etc), which is sorted by relevancy.

Social information is important and needed for business and individuals alike. Google’s new interest in blended results beyond Universal search is problematic on several dimensions. The sleek and streamlined results, Google used to serve, now look like a hodge podge of information. Gone are their austere results views, no longer conforming to the most relevant and best results credo. Add sponsored results which are now even more wonky given the addition of images in paid search and the results pages looks terrible.

My concern stems from sources of information used and information available for use. So much of what happens in this world takes place in extranets and behind forum walls that truly influence our everyday lives that search engines have no access or insight into. So how real is real time search?

Most importantly they sent back a note acknowleding my tweet and expressing their appreciation for my suggestion.

Even better, they thought it was such a good suggestions they immeadiately ran it up the flagpole to the engineering and product development group.

In the end this company now continues to hold my admiration for the product and the company as a whole.

Saying thank you costs a company nothing. Customer feedback that can make your product or service even better?

Priceless.

The other day on twitter I mentioned a dramatic change in the way the New York Times was creating their content and the start of a new in linking strategy for them.

Wikipedia does have an incredible internal linking structure. And now it appears as if the NYT is going to try and become the Encyclopedia Britannica of all news, events and world atlas in development.

How sites link to their own content internally tells the search engines more about what matters most to the site. In this case we are talking text links. No image links, No Javascript Links, No Image Map Links – Only keyword focused embedded text links to other content and relative  items.

WikiPedia links internally to it’s own  pages, every time a word or phrase with it’s own page is referenced. All pages every time  site-wide for Wikipedia. If a topic has a page anywhere on WikiPedia, the page links from any use of that word or phrase back to that page about that word or phrase.

Check out the  screen shot on the left of a NYT’s article from July 24 2009, notice there is only one link in the first 300 words of the article.  The article  itself has many opportunities for more links but the only one showing takes you to, wait for it, the exact same page?

Is this an automated process by the NYT’s to create an internal linking structure that has proven to be an awesome strategy for wikipedia?

Now lets look at an article screen shot on the right from November  10th 2009.

The topics are relatively the same and the keywords in many cases are similar.  But notice the amount of links to other NYT articles has literally quintupled!!

Clearly someone over there has gotten on the SEO bandwagon in a serious way. I am predicting the intra site linking strategy will prove to be a major ranking success for the New York Times.

Newspapers that use “Related Stories” pages are doing a good job at creating usability and maintaining topical relevance.

So what are the big takeaways from the NYT’s new strategy? have they learned from the likes of wikipedia?

1) Create content rich definition pages that explain your products, service or creates reference pages clearly

2) Wikipedia’s success comes from people knowing what to expect when they click on the site –The NYT links are becoming highly relevant and will continue to refine over time.

Watch for the NYT’s to improve their landing pages to align users expectations based on what they read in the search engine results and the actual content of their site.

3) Use intra-site links, instead of navigation. Wikipedia uses an intensive intra-site linking strategy where a new page is “linked to (with the key term in the anchor text) from one (usually more) other Wikipedia pages.”  This is where the NYT totally gets it right!

4) Make more — and more — content. Text, images, audio and video. In this instance we are referring to

5) Don’t be afraid to edit your site, especially if you are creating new intra-links, you are rewarded for updating content, so go for it.

6) Create an authority page that attracts links, needless to say the NYT is a high authority site.

7) Whenever you add a new page, skim through the rest of your content to look for ways, even creative ways, those other topics relate to your new page

Sitemap Links, make sure you site has one, everyone one is familiar and agrees with this basic tenant of a site map

Do you tweet from the web or from an application like tweetdeck or seesmic? Did you know the API limits are separate from Per Hour Tweet & Daily Follow limits as are the API calls limits you see in tweetdeck, “Remaining API for account XYZ 150/150 Resets 20 minutes”

Tweetdeck users might have noticed their hourly API call limit has been increased from 100 to 150 per hour as of July 2009.

The Twitter API is made up of two parts. There is the REST API and Search API. The Twitter REST API methods allow developers to access core Twitter data. This includes update timelines, status data, and user information. The Search API methods give developers methods to interact with Twitter Search and trends data.

Methods to retrieve data from the Twitter API require a GET request.  Methods that submit, change, or destroy data require a POST.  A DELETE request is also accepted for methods that destroy data. API Methods that require a particular HTTP method will return an error if you do not make your request with the correct method. HTTP Response Codes are meaningful.

So what can you do to avoid the “rate limit exceeded” message and what can you do if you get it? Unfortunately not very much. This is a Twitter enforced limitation rather than a TweetDeck one but I would suggest the following to reduce the risk:

• Operate with one twitter application at a time. Make sure the other apps are closed
• Don’t over use the refresh button – that burns 3 calls per click (All Tweets, Replies & DMs)
• Lower the total % in the settings window, twitter API tab to around 50-60% – you’ll get less updates but you’ll use less API calls too.
• If you exceed the rate limit, check your reset time shown in the top right corner of TweetDeck. You can still post messages, butt won’t see any @ or DM responses