In this time of social media, we have a lot of ways to communicate with each other.

Each one can be considered a level, or a gate, with one requiring more of a person’s time, energy, and focus than another.

Admission to the higher levels of interaction requires that you first prove yourself on one or more of the lower levels.

For example.. I’m a content creator. That means that I have things to do with my time. It means I have things to think about when I’m not actually DOING other things.

Because of this, I’m not going to interrupt my day because YOU feel like talking to me on the phone. It hasn’t happened for years and it will never happen again. I don’t have time for that.

Email

What I tell people to do is email me.

This is because when I *DO* make time for extraneous stuff, I check my email to see if there’s anything worth responding to in it.

That’s your opportunity to contact me.

It’s 100% on my terms, because I couldn’t possibly care any less whether YOUR project gets done or not. I’m concerned with MY projects and MY current clients’ projects.

I never have “nothing” to do. I never reach “inbox zero”. I’m never sitting around waiting.. HOPING for someone to call me on the phone.

If you decide to call anyway, you get the answering machine, which I don’t check, so you’re better off emailing, like I told you. That’s really your only chance.

Some people mistake Facebook and Twitter for email.

Pay attention. All three of them happen to be electronic forms of communication, but “Email me about it” doesn’t mean to PM me on Facebook or to DM me on Twitter.

If you’re not smart enough to figure that out, you’re probably not smart enough to put together a proper business proposal either, so thanks for saving me the time of not having to read your email that you never sent.

Email is not an answering machine.

If you email me with the message “Call me”, you will not receive a call.

If you email me about a business project you’re trying to do, and there are no $,$$$ signs included, you’re going to receive a reply that says “What’s your budget?”, and that’s probably just about ALL it’s going to say.

If your budget’s too low, I can recommend you to someone else that I know that does good work for less money in less time that I would waste brainstorming your project with you and then not being able to work on it because you can’t afford it.

These are the gates I was talking about earlier.

Gates

If you’re not viable on the email level, I’m not going to invest even more of my time, energy, and focus into, say, real-time text chatting with you.

If I’m not going to real-time text chat with you, I’m not going to video chat with you.

If I’m not going to video chat with you, I’m not going to talk to you on the phone.

If I’m not going to talk to you on the phone, I’m not going to meet up with you in person.

A lot of people are stuck in the olden days, back with the horses and buggies and covered wagons, and they want to “get together” to discuss things.

That’s over now, and it’s been over for years.

I’m in contact every single day with people that live hundreds of miles away from me, in different cities, different states, and even different countries.

If you live on the same island I live on (The center of the Universe, Manhattan, New York City!!! >:D) and you can’t figure out how to share ideas with me other than getting together IRL, you’re not up to speed. That’s YOUR problem, not mine.

Unless I’m on the clock, I have zero incentive to stop my entire day’s activities so I can travel somewhere and hang out with you in person to receive the same information that I could have read out of an email.

zero.

On top of that, when you communicate by email, you have DOCUMENTATION of the project and budget parameters so everyone involved can browse the history of the project and you don’t have to rely on he said / she said, or lose good ideas that you chatted about over brews because nobody wrote them down at the time.

Another reason IRL doesn’t work for me is that my time isn’t routinely scheduled. At any point during the day or night, I could be working on a project for a client, working on my own social media projects, mixing music, blogging, having brews with chicks, sleeping, or whatever else, and I’m not going to interrupt my non-routine by having to appear somewhere to discuss something with you for YOUR benefit.

This is why email is the default. I read it when I feel like it, which works for my personal system of doing things. The reason I can do so much in a single day is because I know how my system works and I maximize my efficiency.

When people become viable on the email level, they might be promoted to real-time text chat status, then video chat status, then IRL status.

*might*

Value

At this point in time, I think it’s imperative for people to understand that the playing field has been divided and that if you attempt to communicate in the wrong division, you won’t get your ideas in front of the right people to bring you from concept to reality.

It’s like if someone gives you their telephone number, but doesn’t include the area code. It’s practically worthless, unless you have a general idea of where they live, and you’re willing to call that number in every single area code until you reach the right person.

If someone lives their life on Twitter, you want to “@reply” them. They will always see when people mention them, but depending on the Twitter client they’re using, they might never see DMs (direct messages). Also.. Someone being on Twitter all day and happening to have a Facebook account doesn’t mean they’re monitoring their FB account at all.

Someone having an email address on their website doesn’t mean that they’re monitoring their email more than once a day or once a week, if ever.

Someone having a telephone number on their website doesn’t mean you’ll ever get anything other than an answering machine.

It’s up to YOU, as the person that wants the work done, to figure out the best way to contact the people you want to work with. It’s not up to THEM to make themselves available in whatever medium you’re used to, because if y’all never connect and nothing gets done on your project, YOU lose and THEY don’t.
–
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As some of y’all know, I’ve been focusing on my music thing for around a year now.

I’ve been MAKING and recording music forever, already.. It’s just that with the new tools that are available, I decided I wanted to learn something new and get really good at mixing music.

I’ve done that now. I’m really, REALLY good at mixing. I know exactly what I’m doing. I’m about 1,000 times better at mixing than I was at video editing when I began my professional career by joining Diversion Pictures back in the day.

Actually, I should say “When I began my COMMERCIALLY-PROFESSIONAL career, because I did professional work for individuals and companies before I started doing videos for Diversion that played on MTV, VH1, BET, etc.

So.. Something’s been bothering me for several months now, and I wasn’t able to put my finger on it until today. Until about 20 minutes ago. I had the elements of the understanding, but it hadn’t become a concrete concept for me.

Little Boxes

When I’m on a self-improvement kick, I study incessantly. All I want is to be who I want to be instead of who I am right now. I don’t want to hang out with you. I don’t want to go to that party at the hotel penthouse. I don’t want to meet your foyine homegirl that’s sweating me.

The thing I found funny about studying mixing was that as I moved up the ranks of understanding, where I would recite the answers to questions before going ahead to read the answers because I had already read those same answers in so many other places, I came to a point where I ran into the same situation over and over.

I mentioned this to friends of mine. I would tell them “I’m watching these videos of big-time Mixers (actually, I suppose I called them Mix Engineers at the time, because I didn’t understand the difference until several days ago) and, invariably, instead of talking about mixing, they’re talking about the boxes that they run the signals through. o_O”

At first, I thought it was a fluke.. I thought I was just having bad luck with the videos I clicked on. Then it happened again. Then it happened again. Then it happened again, and it kept on happening until I got the picture that a high percentage of what I was “learning” from those videos was what people’s favorite FX boxes were.

To make another distinction.. Along the way, I found out that there are Recording Engineers and Mix Engineers. Many people are both. Recording Engineers are responsible for getting the information from the instruments into the computer (or onto the tape or whatever you’re going to use to create the final song). Mix Engineers are responsible for taking the elements and making them work together and enhancing them by any means necessary to make the recording sound good.

I immediately knew that I didn’t want to be a Recording Engineer. I’m totally, absolutely, positively, completely disinterested in that process. I don’t care HOW people get the elements recorded. I’m interested in the musical side of Post-Production, which is what I do already for videos.

I also found out that I didn’t want to be a producer. I’m completely disinterested in “making beats” as people call it. With Logic 9 I can make a beat in 5 minutes or less. It’s a complete yawn-fest.

What I like to do, similar to video, is take audio that has already been tracked and make it shine.. according to my personal taste.

The “personal taste” part is what helped me understand this situation today.

Tin Cans & String

So I had this conversation with a homegirl of mine, and I wasn’t able to articulate it to her properly, not because she was looking FOYINE as usual and I didn’t feel like thinking about anything else or because I was several beers down, but because I knew what the problem was TO ME, but I hadn’t intended to tell anyone else about it, and it just happened to come up in conversation.

What I had said to her was something like “It doesn’t matter how good you are at mixing, because at the highest levels, the difference is determined by how many thousands or millions of dollars’ worth of equipment you have available to you”.

That’s clearly an incorrect statement, but it’s all I had at the time. Of course, she beat the **** out of my concept by saying “blah blah my friend whomever blah blah great music producer blah blah doesn’t matter the equipment blah blah blah”, which was fine, because I was busy checking her out and drinking my beer.

Yes.. I realize that there are some people that “Got It” and some people that “Don’t”. There are some people that can make a great recording by beating on a table and rapping. There are some people that make fantastic live recordings with an acoustic guitar and an harmonica. There are some people that don’t even OWN computers that manage to create great mixes. There are even people that make up their mixes live on the spot. My hat’s off to all of them.

The fact remains that the equipment you have access to determines how much you’re able to manipulate the sounds that end up going onto a song.

I ran into this issue a couple of years ago, when I did a tutorial video about editing in Final Cut pro.

YouTube Link => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHh1tAA-UFE

When we released that video, I went to the Indy Mogul Forum to interact with the community members and ask if they had any questions.

Interestingly enough, several of the comments were along the lines of “Who cares about Final Cut Pro tutorials when we can’t afford Macs? :/”. This made sense, being that the show’s premise is filmmaking on a low-ass budget. However.. What I had to say was applicable to ANY nonlinear video editing software package, including iMovie and Windows Movie Maker, either of which come absolutely free with your operating system when you buy ANY computer.

I understood and empathized with their points. What use is it to say to someone “You can do what I can do if you buy this particular computer and then you buy this particular software and then you have the time to use it excessively and get really good with it”?

This is how I felt watching these videos, even though, granted, I was watching product endorsement videos, not “How To Mix” tutorial videos, because that’s what companies want to allocate their budgets towards.

I’m watching this stuff, going “That’s very nice and all that you ran a cable to a box and then turned a knob on that box and you liked how the kick drum sounded, but HOW IN THE **** is that information useful to anyone that can’t afford to kick in $3,000 for the ******* BOX and then another $275,000 for the ******* CONSOLE you’re sitting in front of?” :D

Make It Happen!

So I was understanding that once you get to a certain level, your progress (towards what?) is impeded unless you become affiliated with a studio that already took out the business loans to afford all these toys…

Meanwhile, I had the good fortune of rubbing elbows with several DIY musicians. And I *DO* mean DO. IT. YOUR*SELF*!!!

What I got from them was that they were/are focused on their craft. No funding, whatsoever. No particular training in creating music. *ABSOLUTELY* no training in creating videos.. Yet, they were still makin’ it happen, because that’s what they want their lives to be. They want to entertain. They want to get their message out to the world. They want to express themselves.

Because of a music video project, I ended up meeting one of these DIY musicians, Yannie Falcon:

YouTube Link => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUeBfwmWaO8

Now.. I don’t understand just about one single word of that song, but I love it! :D

I know that “Mio” means mine, but I have no idea what a “Tiro” could possibly be. haha I don’t care what a Tiro is, either. It was just a weird situation, meeting her and chatting with her about her music. She and I do similar things, but in a totally different way. Meanwhile.. I’ve been studying for a year while she’s been writing, singing and performing her own handycam or flipcamera or whatever amateur-ass videos she makes, and she’s DOING. HER. THING. and getting her message out to whomever feels like listening to it. :D

Granted, I’ve been dropping music tutorial videos this whole time, but it’s not the same thing AT ALL. I recognized as I reflected upon my conversations with Yannie that I wasn’t exactly on the proper path for myself, but I still couldn’t figure out what the issue was.

Since I mentioned her, here’s another song she wrote and performed that I filmed and edited the video for:

YouTube Link => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7vUJymfUyE

On Our Way To Nowhere…

So now I’m thinking that I’m striving for “excellence” in a craft that depends on resources in order to advance, while other people are doing the absolute best they can with little-to-no resources whatsoever… There was something incredibly WRONG with this picture. :D

So today, I’m watching more videos of professional mixers, and the interviewee is asked a question about sound in popular music.

His answer was essentially that what he does is a business, and that business depends on people buying what he creates. Their buying what he creates depends on his being able to provide them with the sound they’re looking for. The sound they’re looking for is dictated by the sound of the records they’re currently buying…

I suddenly completely ******* realized what my ‘problem’ is with this system.

There’s an amount of learning that you can do that empowers you to make people’s records better than they could make them on their own. The next level up, which I didn’t realize I was looking at, is where you make records sound THE. WAY. OTHER. PEOPLE. EXPECT. THEM. TO. SOUND.

This is the missing link. :) I’m sitting there going “The kick drum sounded fine before you ran it through the box. It sounds almost exactly the same AFTER you ran it through the box. What was the point of your running it through the box? :/”

Now I know what the point is of running it through the box. You want your sound to match what people are currently addicted to so you can make sales, because music, just like television, is a BUSINESS.

I was peering into a world that’s beyond my personal interest. I don’t give a flying **** about making a song sound like pop music or anything else for that matter.

Prepare For Liftoff…

This is what I recognized while talking with Yannie and other DIY musicians over the last couple of months… Would they LIKE to be recording in multi-million dollar studios?.. Sure. Can they afford that?.. Nope. Are they good enough to record in studios?.. I think so. Is *not* recording in a high-budget studio stopping them from being the stars they are?.. Nope. >:D

So.. While I will always be learning, because artistic endeavors always involve on-the-job training, the core of my studies are officially concluded, as of this very ******* second.

I’m now moving from the “Learning” phase to the “Doing” phase. I already know everything I need to know to make music that *I* like.

I dropped a collab remix with MrFresh 9 days ago, even though it seems like it was several weeks ago:

I’m Walkin’ (MrFresh:::BillCammack Regroove) by mrfresh

That project was on-point. We both use Logic, so he sent me the scratch .mp3 of what he was working on, I sent him some ideas back, he finalized the core of the remix and I finished it up.

I didn’t realize it last week, but I’ve already arrived where I want to be. If someone wants to make something commercial out of a project I’m working on, I’ll send them the Logic file or a stack of .WAV or .AIFF files and they can have a field day connecting a series of boxes to it and making it sound the way that people that still listen to the radio expect it to sound so someone might spend money on it.

I totally love, respect and admire what these people do, but it’s not for me. :)

They can keep the Chris Brown sound… The Kid is going Ramones, Iron Maiden & early Metallica. \m/ ^_^ \m/

It sounds like what it sounds like. It is what it is. You get what I give you.

**** making hit records! >:D
–
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YouTube link => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-Yl72HaImg

Bill Cammack demonstrates how to make a beat using Apple’s “Logic 9″ Digital Audio Workstation (DAW)

Available Formats: SD Quicktime (.m4v)

Questions or Discussion?.. Leave comments below, or visit http://facebook.com/ReelSolid.TV

–
Connect with Bill via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Email Subscription, RSS Feed

Related Posts

• Mix Engineering 101
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Here are the notes to my “Mix Engineering 101″ video:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mix_engineer => A mix engineer, also referred to as “mixing engineer”, is a person who, once all instruments, voices, and sounds, etc., have been recorded, creates what is called the final version (also known as “final mix” or “mixdown”) of a song, hence the term “mix engineer”.

He or she ‘blends’ or ‘mixes’ the elements of the recorded piece together, to achieve a good balance of the instrumental and vocal volume, as well their frequency contents, while also deciding other properties such as pan positioning, effects, and so on.

YouTube Link => http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxrL8qpTeXE

Drums

The drums come from Logic’s “Ultrabeat” drum machine that comes stock with Logic 9.. In fact, everything that I use in this video comes stock with Logic Express (I don’t need Logic Pro because I already own Final Cut Studio, which includes Soundtrack Pro).

Instead of outputting the drums to one stereo track, I sent each individual element (Kick, Snare, Hat) to its own mono track so I could put effects on each one separately. If you don’t do it that way, when you add bass (low frequency information) to the kick drum, you’re also adding bass to the low end of the snare, which is a waste of bandwidth, changes the sound of your snare, and makes it tougher for your kick to occupy its own individual space in the mix.

Guitars

Guitars are double-tracked, meaning that I played the same line twice and panned each instance to the left or right.

What this does is it gives each side a slightly distinct flavor instead of seeming like a mono track that was copied and split.

Another thing you can do to make each side distinct is to put different amounts of delay on each one, giving it more of a stereo effect.

Another thing you can do is EQ (equalize) them differently so that one is brighter than the other, and people can clearly tell them apart.

Another thing you can do to create distinction, which I didn’t do in this video, is use different Pedalboard settings for each track. I could have used different stomp boxes or I could have used the same boxes with different values for the parameters.

Some musicians like to quad-track their guitars, actually. This would involve playing the same line four times, panning two instances to the right and two to the left, potentially at 100% and 80% to either side, and probably using two different amp/cabinet setups, creating a “wall of sound”.

Vocals

I used two tracks of vocals in this video, although I had eight (8). They’re both very slightly panned off-center (+/- 3) so there’s some separation between them and also because if I choose to widen the stereo field, they’ll become more distinct while still supporting each other.

I also sent each track to “bus 4″, which feeds my harmony tracks, which are panned hard left (100%) and hard right. Each track is delayed separately and pitch shifted in different directions (+9 cents on one side, and -9 cents on the other side). When you blend these in at a volume slightly lower than your lead vocal track, it gives a wider effect which makes it tougher for the other elements in your song that go straight down the middle (bass, snare, kick drum) to mask/block your vocal from being heard.

My two vocal tracks and my two harmony tracks both feed my Sub Voc, or vocal submix stereo track. The Sub Voc feeds my stereo output channel. There are at least three reasons to use a vocal submix. 1) You can automate your volume for all of your vocals at the same time with one fader, instead of having to automate each track individually. 2) You can put an effect on this one track instead of putting the same effect on all of your vocal tracks, saving time and CPU usage. 3) If your vocals don’t seem to sit right in the mix, you can put a compressor on your “everything except vocals” track (in the video, “Sub Inst”) and set your sidechain to listen to your Voc Sub track and duck the entire rest of the program every time there’s information on your vocal channel.

Reverb & Output

Reverb is something you may or may not want to use. What it does is emulate an acoustic environment, like a room or a stadium. The goal is to make each element seem like they were playing in the same space. Depending on the effect you’re going for with your song, that might be a good idea and it might not.

The way I have it set up in this video is that both my Sub Inst and Sub Voc are sending information to my Reverb channel. The amount that I send from each submix determines how loud each element is in the reverb (basically, the echo you would hear if you were listening to a band, live, in a large room).

Your “Output” track indicates the volume level that’s finally being heard. You don’t want that track to be too loud, or else you’ll hear unpleasant and unplanned distortion, that will make your song sound horrible (or unplayable), so you want to put a limiter on that track.

What the limiter does for you is restrict all output to a defined level. In the video, we don’t want the volume going higher than 0 dB (decibels), so the limiter is set for -.7 dB or something. This is where you get your loudness from (5m 45s into the video). Once you restrict all audio from going over a limit, you can increase the input level so the song itself gets louder, but it never distorts… The thing you have to watch out for, though, is crushing your sound and destroying its dynamic range. You don’t want every part of the song to be just as loud as every other part. This is dealt with by watching something I didn’t include in the video, which is RMS level vs. Peak level. If your RMS and Peak are almost the same, you’re pretty much screwed. While you want your Peak levels to be barely below 0 dB, you want your RMS to ride around -10 dB.

Mixing

From there, it’s a pretty straightforward mix.

1. Compress the kick drum to make it “smash”.
2. Equalize the kick to take out frequencies you don’t wan to use.
3. Compress & EQ the snare, mix it to a level that you like with the kick.
4. Bring in the hi-hat, EQ it, match it to the kick & snare.
5. Bring in the DI (direct input) of the guitar tracks.
6. Use Pedalboard to make it sound grungy, mix in with the drums.
7. Bring in vocals, add pitch correction, add harmony send/return tracks.
8. Add compression & EQ to “Sub Inst”.
9. Add compression & EQ to “Sub Voc”.
10. Send Sub Voc & Sub Inst to Reverb.
11. EQ Reverb track to remove bass frequencies.
12. Add limiter to Output channel to increase loudness.
13. Adjust individual elements that have been exaggerated by adding loudness.
14. Check to see how each section works with other sections.
15. Listen to the entire mix.

If you have questions, comments or would like to see an individual tutorial video on any of the sections I outlined here, leave me a comment below or on my Facebook page.
–
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Related Posts

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I had a conversation a few days ago with a friend who asked me what I thought about blogging / podcasting / creating video content, specifically as it pertains to viewership and even more specifically as it pertains to NUMBERS of viewers for content we post to the internet.

There’s a lot of talk amongst the social media set about numbers and views and influence and what makes content “worth” creating.

Unfortunately, all that talk about numbers assumes that people are equals, when we most clearly are not. o_O

Authorities & Audiences

Let’s say, for instance, that you have 100 Facebook Friends and they’re all people that you’ve grown up with or met IRL (in real life) that share no particular concentration in any industry. Let’s also say that *I* have 2,434 Facebook Friends and you and I happen not to share very many mutual friends… Logically, if I post something, it’s more likely to receive responses, hits, views, whatever, because my listening audience is immensely larger than yours.

Let’s take that same scenario and change how you created and cultivated your audience of 100 FB Friends… Let’s say that you were an expert in a particular field and the people you reached out to and also accepted FB friend invites from were all involved in or interested in your chosen profession. Let’s say you had conversations with this specialized audience and they recognized you as an authority.. Someone who was known to have interesting, important & relevant things to say and similarly useful links to share.

NOW.. If you and I post about the same information at the same time, except it happens to be along the lines that you and your friends normally kick it about, my larger population is trumped by your way smaller one because your readers are PASSIONATE about your content and mine are not.

On top of that.. All this numbers-talk only takes into account first-tier connections. If my Twitter fanbase is 10 people, except one of those 10 people following me has 60,000 followers, I might not directly have a large audience, but someone following me might. Similarly.. If I have 10 and one of my ten followers has 10 and one of her ten followers has 10 and one of his ten followers has 1,000,000… You get the picture, so there’s no actual telling who’s going to receive wider distribution when they output content.

So.. Unless your ability to pay rent depends on how many readers/viewers you have, don’t worry about it. The number is entirely irrelevant unless you can make money by serving ads to those people. You might ask yourself what the point is of creating content if there aren’t going to be very many people watching…

Content For Whom?

First of all, you want to create content FOR YOURSELF.

Back in the day, when I was trying to decide what I wanted to blog about, my friend Penelope Trunk told me (paraphrasing) “You should blog about what you’re passionate about… or else you’re going to stop doing it”. That had to be THE most important thing I’ve ever heard about blogging and it’s absolutely true. I’m writing this post right this very second because I FEEL LIKE IT, and for no other reason. I’m enjoying thinking about it. I’m enjoying writing it. I’m going to enjoy posting it and receiving feedback about it. :D

Second, you want to create content for your Passionate Viewers.

Again, back in the day… I was discussing the creation and production of web shows with my friend Drew Olanoff and he told me his opinions about views vs viewERs. Basically, my experience up until that point had been with the technical side of creating videos and I had had little-to-no interaction with end-users, viewers that weren’t my personal friends, and certainly not entire communities of people who interact with each other based on a common love of or respect for a show.

Paraphrasing Drew’s point.. He felt that it was better to focus on your small amount of Passionate Viewers than to attempt to cater to a potentially way larger number of people that might drop by your show, watch an episode or two and bounce.

At the time, I didn’t understand why that would be, but I was willing to consider the theory. I eventually agreed entirely when my own shows & blogs gained an expanded audience and I got to experience the differences between the groups firsthand.

My stats have pretty consistently looked like this for the past few years.

93% Passers-By and 7% Regulars… Except the Regulars make up 17% of my visits.

I would certainly rather keep my current percentage of Regulars than increase my numbers of Passers-By at the expense of some of my Passionate Readers/Viewers.

While it would be nice to keep the current Regulars and convert some of the Passers-By into still more Regulars, I like to think about blogging relative to real life instead of relative to other, immensely more popular blogs.

Subscribers, Commenters, Lurkers & Passers-By

I currently have 118 people who subscribe to BillCammack.com by email. If you think about that… When was the last time that you gathered 118 people somewhere so they could listen to something you said? o_O … Probably “Never”, because I know that’s the answer for me.

So, each one of y’all 118 people, I appreciate you for tuning in. :) Thank You, and I try to keep things interesting around here. ;)

My actual subscriber number currently reads 244, because they add in people who subscribe via RSS and receive my blog articles in their feed readers. I’m sure a number of those are “bots” (robots, automated computer processes), but for those of y’all that are real people, Thanks for subscribing! :D

Even amongst subscribers, you have Lurkers, who read the articles but don’t comment directly on my blog. That doesn’t mean they aren’t sharing my posts with other people and discussing my ideas on other social networking sites & forums. I’m happy about that as well, because I don’t blog so people can come to my site. I blog because I feel like it and if someone else gets something out of it, that’s icing on the cake. If someone finds what I write to be entertaining, educational or useful, even better! :D

Then, You have the behind-the-scenes commenters.. The people that strike up conversations with me about my content when we run into each other at parties. The people that email or DM me to let me know what’s going on with them or that they enjoyed a particular post. It’s always gratifying to hear that someone got something out of an article I didn’t even have to write. It’s like when I happen to walk down a street or get into a particular subway car and tourists ask me for directions. I just happened to be there to point them in the right direction, and that’s always a good feeling.

The top level is the online commenters! :D .. I shouted out many of them 10 months ago in my last post of 2009: billcammack.com/2009/12/31/world-in-my-eyes-happy-new-year.

It’s the commenters that make my blog a community instead of a bunch of speeches by Bill Cammack. Lots of times, readers get more out of what the commenters share than what I initially posted!… I learn stuff from them also and I’m open to changing directions if someone has a convincing argument that things are actually different than I currently believe them to be.

So.. Thanks again, commenters! :D .. We almost have another full year together under our belts! :D

How Many Do You Need?

The way I see it, from my personal experience with online communities between 2006 and 2010, the only people you should be concerned with if you’re thinking about starting a blog or podcast or web series are 1) YOURSELF, and 2) the people who are genuinely interested in what you’re talking about and are willing to read, listen, watch and maybe even join in the conversation.

If that’s 100,000 people?… Fine… However, it’s ALSO fine if it’s 10 people.. five of whom are related to you. :)

If you feel like you NEED a bunch of people to consistently watch your show and click on your advertisements or else you’re not going to be able to MAKE your show, you have the wrong business model. Do it cheaper. Use fewer graphics. Spend fewer hours creating it. Edit it less. Use a webcam instead of a video camera. Output once a week instead of once a day. Output once a month instead of once a week. If you have something you want to express, just figure out how to do it within your budget & time constraints and make it happen!

In fact.. Sometimes, I’ll write an entire blog post or make a video just so ONE PERSON can see it (or maybe a specific, small set of people). In those cases, if 1,000 people watch the video and the person/people I made it for didn’t, I wasn’t successful in communicating my expression to them.

OTOH.. If 10 people watch a video and I know that the three people I made it for saw it?… Mission Accomplished! :D

Related Posts

• Email. Not Facebook. Not Twitter. Not Phone. Not IRL…
• Famous For Nothing [Fame, Part 3]
• How To Make A Blog Post
• Time, Part 07: “Subcontracting”
• Freedom of Consequences