Andy Carvin, Senior Strategist at NPR, posted a thanks of sorts on NPR’s website, celebrating the milestone of 1,000,000 fans on the NPR Facebook Fan Page. How did they do it?

Many clients of mine wonder how one can get so popular. The key, as I’ve always believed, is real work. Real work in the form of activity, news and consistent updates with fresh, meaningful, relevant and/or humorous content.

Not long ago, I launched a brand new website for a client. Exactly five days later, the client was wondering why they weren’t on the top of a Google search. Here’s the first reason: aside from myself and the four other people at the table meeting, no one else was aware of the site’s existence. (I’m merely a web designer, not a publicist. I’m not even an SEO expert or a social network expert by any means. But I do observe, and on my Facebook and Twitter feeds, I notice who is busy and who isn’t.)

It would be wonderful if we could just launch our website or open our Facebook account and instantly become the prom queen on the internet. “I’m here. Come to me,” appears to be a popular mode of thinking. Unless one can afford to hire a publicist or an internet gimmick guru to “pump the numbers,” the trick to honest and lasting web visibility for a website or on social networks is good, old-fashioned, sleeves-rolled-up work by at least one real person consistently generating new content. There is no auto-pilot. If you want to be a successful web presence, you quite frankly have to earn it.

Many industry folks like Kathy Griffin or Joan Rivers have assistants working hard with updates to their Twitter, Facebook, website, etc., which is great. Whether it’s an assistant or the real person, the point is that someone is doing it. As I said… it’s work. There is no fast and easy trick.

I myself don’t have a million followers, friends or fans, but I have an active number of users in my stable and I worked hard to earn every one of them. I put forth an effort to create updates, write posts (sometimes meaningful, sometimes not… guilty), share ideas and media on a daily basis. Consistency is key.

Below is an interesting excerpt from Andy Carvin’s post on the NPR website:

Why the sudden jump in members? There are probably several factors at play. In early June, our overnight colleagues at Morning Edition began posting updates while the rest of us were asleep. These posts likely caught the attention of a whole new crowd of Facebook users – as well as their friends, since any time they’d comment, like or share one of our overnight stories, it would appear in their Facebook feeds. And since we’re consistent about posting 8-10 stories the rest of each weekday, it creates lots of opportunities for new users to be exposed to our stories when their friends engage our content. Meanwhile, it’s also possible that the Facebook algorithm for placing our stories on users’ homepages has been working in our favor as we’ve grown in size.

There it is. An outfit as big as NPR having an effective presence on Facebook… not by wishing it or claiming a blind entitlement to it or being lazy. No. They did it by hard work around the clock.

No one can be at this all day, and we need to have a life outside the web. But at the end of the day, truly effective and successful websites and social networking are successful because there is a real live human being behind the machine, consistently creating real and (hopefully) meaningful content every day.