Bill Cammack

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On Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 3:02 pm, I made a post about a client who didn’t pay me the money he owed me. Here is the Recent Visitor Map for just that one article, ~38 hours later (approximately a day and a half):

Click here to view 1048 x 857 image

This is Social Media in Action. “Reach” is now determined by how much time and effort you’re willing to put in to maintain your internet presence.

When it comes to determining “Reach”, the days of “who lives next to that person?” are OVER. The days of “Is he a radio personality or performer or some other type of celebrity?” are *OVER*. Connections are made and maintained virtually.

People are aligning themselves by values, aptitude & beliefs now, instead of by local territory and “Accident of Birth”. The “lines” are being re-drawn as people get to sample other people’s mentalities through reading their blogs, listening to their podcasts, watching their videos and selecting to find out more about people they feel in-tune with.

Jeff Pulver called it his “Social Media Living Room”. He was absolutely right. The people that you know live wherever they live, but we all come together, in various locations… virtual locations.

Sometimes, we meet up IRL, like @ PodCamps or BarCamps or SXSW or TweetUps or meetup.com or Gary’s Guide events. In the meantime, in between time, we’re reading each other’s blogs and communicating with other through social media sites like Twitter, Ning, Facebook, MySpace, etc etc etc.

Here’s an example. One day, a crane fell down in Manhattan, NYC, New York, USA and crushed a couple of buildings and killed a few people. I found out about that on Twitter, because of someone that doesn’t even LIVE in NYC. Twitter beat the local news, beat phone calls, beat EVERYTHING, because as soon as one person found out about it and posted, everyone on their followers list was notified and “ReTweeted” (RT) so that everyone on THEIR followers list could find out as well. Depending on how quickly you set your polling, you could be informed THIRD-HAND in about three minutes. :D

Similarly, a bridge fell down in Minnesota or something. Local NYC news would NEEEEEEVER have covered that, and if so, it would have been way late and way disinterested, such as “look what happened to those people way over there…. in other news…”. I found out about that way before local coverage because of Twitter. There were people that I follow who were directly affected by it and sent the information out. People that I follow went to the scene and filmed the event.

This is why integrity is the order of the day. You’d rather have people spread around the world… literally… that you’re a stand-up person and that you do the right thing, whether that’s business-wise or socially. If you’re the type of person that likes to stiff people on invoices… Trust & Believe, it gets around. If you’re the type of guy that likes to say the same rap lines to several chicks that all know each other….. Trust & Believe, it gets around. If you’re the type of female that hooks up with a new guy every other week, and they all know each other… Trust & Believe, it gets around.

Don’t feel all spiffy because nobody tells you the real deal to your face. The Back-Channel is alive and thriving. Don’t think that Australia doesn’t know what happened in NYC. Don’t think that NYC doesn’t know what happened in Minnesota. Think that you need to carry yourself with integrity & CLASS, because you never know who’s paying attention to your shenanigans and putting you ON BLAST to the entire universe.

~Bill Cammack, January 03, 2009

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