Your “Social Brand” is what people expect to happen when you show up on a social scene. Most people don’t have a social brand at all. Nobody expects them to do anything except drink some alcohol, ramble on about some smalltalk drivel and then go home.

Part of the reason for this is that people are scared to death to talk about what’s really interesting to them. They’re scared of being judged or categorized. They’re scared of being associated with the wrong people or disassociated from the right people. They’re scared that they’re blowing business opportunities by not sticking to blogging about whatever topic makes them money…

Social Brand vs. Business Brand

A while back, Reader “Justin” asked me something to the effect of “Are any of your potential clients turned off by your dating blog?”. That’s an excellent question, which I think gets to the heart of this particular discussion. “Is my business brand adversely affected by my social brand?”.

My initial, instinctive reaction to this question is “How the **** would I know, considering that people that don’t want to talk to you….. don’t TALK to you?” \o/

I mean, IMAGINE someone sending you an email saying “I was going to pay you money to make MY COMPANY look better than it otherwise would have, but since you call chicks ‘chicks’ and not ‘women’, I’ve decided to hire an inferior, slower, unproven editor and maybe my work will get done on time and in a professional manner and maybe it won’t. Good Day.” :D

Other than making a post about that and blasting it all over the modernized world on my blog, My only possible email reply to that is “You are an idiot. Thanks for the laugh.”

First of all.. Other than broadcast television work, my name doesn’t even APPEAR on probably 95% of the work I do. People don’t hire me so they can say I worked on something. They hire me because I’m faster and better.

Second, I do a lot of work through alliances, like Tribe Nine Creative. I enable companies to offer audio & video services outside of their expertise in packages to their clients.

Combining web design, coding and media creates a one-stop shop where people can get their entire site built instead of having to deal with several contractors.

Third.. Which is really “First”, I don’t even WORK with random people. “Potential Clients” are referred to me via word of mouth by people that I’ve already worked for or people who are friends of mine and understand the level of quality I bring to a project. I haven’t carried business cards in years. If someone asks me, I say “I’m a video editor.” and rarely expand any further than that.

You Lose Some.. You Win A Lot More

Having said all that… :D Yes… I can imagine that my business brand has been adversely affected by my social brand. I wouldn’t know anything about this due to the “Say positive things only” nature of the internet. I’ve heard things that people have said about me on the back-channel, but the people I’ve heard about didn’t have any business for me anyway… or, rather.. They don’t have any money to afford the budget, so we weren’t going to be working together REGARDLESS.

But, Yes.. I can imagine that there are several things about my social media presentation that would turn potential clients off to the idea of hiring me for a project. I think we need to look at this from a dating perspective. There are lots of women that are turned off to the idea of dating me because of things they’ve seen or read or that I’ve told them to their faces. What difference does that make until I run out of chicks?

None.

You lose girls off the roster, you get some more. Clients don’t want to work with you for whatever reason, you either stick with your regular clients or make new affiliations with trusted colleagues. Personally, now that Final Cut Pro allows me to send clients real-time video via iChat Theater, I can do supervised edits remotely with any client in any city, town or rural area that has a Mac and a decent internet connection:

I was already doing this via Skype anyway, but the point is that I have access to way more “Potential Clients” than the subset of “Potential Clients who are turned off by my dating blog”. That’s like asking “Do you care that the Jersey Shore girls were only interested in dating Italian guys?”, with the answer being “Hellz Naw” because they’re a subset of girls in New Jersey, an even smaller subset of the girls in the Tri-State Area and a miniscule subset of the girls in the USA. \o/

Social ROI

Having said all THAT….. :D

The benefits I’ve received from my Social Branding have far outweighed (in my estimation, because as I said, the net is heavily skewed towards the positive) whatever business losses my wallet may have suffered because of it. I’ll tell you why…

When I show up somewhere, people have a good idea of what’s about to happen.

A lot of people are going to meet a lot of people and we’re all gonna have a good time. :D

There will probably also be chicks around because I rarely go anywhere without them.

We’ll probably be talking about dating, because as Reader “Michele” asked me, “Don’t you ever get tired of talking about dating?”, the answer is HELLZ NAWWWW!!! >:D

Personally, I’m way more interested in people knowing what I’m about socially so they can decide to get down with the program or leave me the **** alone when they see me IRL. I have no problem with either one. I’m a fan of people because they’re talented and/or I think they’re cool people. Whether they like me or not doesn’t figure into that equation.

What I’ve found.. Again, due to the egregiously-positive skew of feedback to what’s posted on the internet, is that the guys & gals that read my blog get laughs out of it, entertainment, food for thought and discussion topics with their SOs or their friends. To ME.. That’s worth infinitely more than a few thousand dollars that a potential client doesn’t want to pay me that I’m going to get from someone else anyway. :D

If I weren’t going to get pIZaid, REGARDLESS?.. Yes.. It would be more of a consideration. I’d still blog one way or another because the great opportunity we have with the internet is to meet people who think & feel the same way, whom we would never have met if we would have had to go somewhere IRL in order to make their acquaintance. We get to learn about each other asynchronously so that by the time we meet f2f, we’re either Pro or Anti each other and we have good reasons why we feel the way we do.

That’s just a building block, however, because physically spending time with someone can give you a radically different understanding of who they are as a person and what they’re really about.

Use It or Lose It

Blogging has allowed me to say whatever I want to whomever cares to listen. I’d much rather utilize that blessing by sharing a small percentage of what I think about dating and what I do socially than write some stiff, boring business blog, hoping to entice someone to put some money in my pocket.

On top of that, because I’m an interesting person and not a business drone, I literally have THOUSANDS of people that I’m in contact with via social media and could reach out to if I ran out of regular clients and decided to secure some new ones. The Social begets The Business.. Not the other way around.

Is it IMPORTANT to have a Social Brand?.. Not at all. In fact, if you’re the type of person that doesn’t ENJOY being sociable, you’re better off being in Networking Mode every time you go somewhere. Glad-Hand people and smalltalk them to death with minutiae.. That is, if you elect to go to social functions at all. It’s better for people to think NOTHING about you socially if your job is your life and socializing will make people less interested in doing business with you because it’s obvious to them that you don’t care about them at all other than to try to make a buck.

Do you have a Social Brand? O_o .. If so, what is it? What do people expect to happen when they meet you IRL? Are your dating or business careers being helped or hindered by your social presence?

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I dropped my e-Stalking series in 2008.

At the time, I was talking about asynchronously getting to know someone by reading their blog posts, listening to their podcasts, watching their videos & live streams and coming to your own conclusion about who they are, what they’re like and what they like to do without them ever knowing that you exist.

e-Stalking makes perfect sense because people tend to share what they care about online to the degree that they’re willing to be judged by what they wrote. Trust Me.. You can learn way more about someone in 20 minutes of consuming their media than you can during 20 minutes of banter with them and three other people standing around at an IRL social function.

I’ve personally been amazed by and appreciative of the number of people that have complimented me on my dating, social media or video blogging. Some of the experiences I’ve had with this which stand out to me to this very day are with my Bre P., Tim S., Jessica V., Corinne & Meg, and my own cousin whom I had no idea read blogs at all, much less mine. I can’t explain the personally-world-changing feelings that I’ve received from those particular genuine, heartfelt interactions/reactions to something I do because I like to do it and because I WANT to do it. Thanks again, to all the readers, whether you’re lurkers or regulars like Fishingrod, Frank, Steve, C-Jay, etc.

Fast Forward two years to present-day 2010 and e-Stalking has evolved from being strictly online to also being offline (f2f, IRL) thanks to location-based services (LBS).

A LBS allows you to inform people where you are at a particular time, usually via GPS location from your cell phone. This is only slightly different from Twittering where you are or having someone else Twitter that they’re hanging out with you because there’s currently no location confirmation on Twitter. You can say you’re at Tavern On The Green (in Manhattan) when you’re actually in The Bronx. The LBS marks down what was said, who said it, where they were when they said it and how long ago they were in that location. Obviously, you can see the delectable stalkability in these apps. >:D

Practical Applications

Other than working for clients, just about everything I do is on the fly. It’s rare that I know what I’ll be doing two hours from now because I never know what I want to do until I want to do it. I use LBS primarily to make exit decisions. If I know I’m leaving location A and heading for location B, I’ll check to see if anyone I want to catch up with IRL is in the area I’m leaving. This worked out for me just last week as a matter of fact, because I found out that Scott B., whom I’ve known of online for ages already was currently in a crowded party I was about to leave. Thanks to the LBS, I got to introduce myself to him IRL before bouncing to the next spot.

Another time was rather interesting because a female friend of mine “checked in” to a restaurant that was close to a spot I was leaving, so I passed by to say “Hi”. I actually walked by her because I was looking for a group and then on my way back out of the restaurant, I saw she was sitting at a small table with a dude… YIKES!!! :O .. A DATE!!! :D

So I tried to sneak out past them, but didn’t make it. She asked me to sit down with them, so (sorry dude! :D) I sat for about 3 1/2 minutes, which felt like 20 minutes so as not to dis her invitation but not to trample his date at the same time. Ain’t Goin’ Out. Like. That! ;)

BTW.. I do this all the time.. Not trample on guy’s dates, but check my surroundings for people I want to catch up with, so if you don’t like it, go ahead and delete me now. thxkbai :D

foursquare.com/BillCammack
gowalla.com/users/BillCammack

The time that prompted me to write this post happened a bunch of months ago, though I’m just getting around to writing about it now. Damien B. & Owen S. had checked in to Lily’s Bar/Restaurant at Roger Smith Hotel, which happened to be located between my current points A & B, and “shouted” (announced via text message on the LBS) a tweetup.

When I rolled in, both guys said “hi” to me and one of them asked me who I was there to meet up with. I replied “You”, which caused them to look puzzled. :D We then got into a discussion about stalking and how people don’t understand the potential safety issues of announcing where you are and/or what you’re doing. Of course, this is 2000x more important for females, since they tend to have more fans/stalkers than males as well of this false sense of security they’ve derived from believing that everyone subscribes to “Men should never hit women”.

Who’s Paying Attention?

I currently have 189 Gowalla contacts and 381 Foursquare contacts, mostly overlapping, so let’s say that when I check in somewhere, I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see one or more out of ~450 people show up to the same location. That’s slightly exaggerated because lots of my contacts are currently in other states or countries and can’t just roll up wherever I happen to be. Even if we take that number down to 100 people, that’s STILL a lot to consider every time you use a LBS.

On top of your personal followers, there are the people that follow friends of yours that you’re hanging out with. You might not check in, but if your friend checks in and “shouts” that they’re with *you*, you’re spotted. If they Twitter and @reply you, you’re spotted. If they twitpic, yfrog, Ustream, Qik, Livestream or Bambuser you, you’re spotted. Same thing goes to a degree with Loopt, Latitude & Brightkite.

Also, let’s not forget that a lot of people push each status update to several other sites, so when they shout you out on Twitter, it goes to their Facebook and Friendfeed and Buzz and everywhere else on the planet where they feel people are paying attention to them.. So while you THINK you’re secluded somewhere having private drinks, you’re really sitting out in the open, electronically…. virtually…

There are two obvious ways around this.. 1) Don’t add anybody on LBS that you wouldn’t want to come see you if you checked in somewhere, and 2) don’t check in. If you’re serious about your privacy for a hangout, make sure everyone knows ahead of time that it’s a NOBLOG blackout. Everybody goes electronically off the grid until it’s over or everyone elects to make it a public event. Depending on the situation, you might want to call a total media blackout (no mentions, no pictures, no video), because we all know that if nobody blogs it, it never happened. ;)

I finally got around to writing this because I read an article by Melissa Jun Rowley about stalkerism that she and acquaintances of hers have been victimized by. You should definitely check her post out if you want to hear some weird ish. Personally, I don’t take calls on MY OWN PHONE, so I’m damned sure not taking calls on restaurant & gym phones, but I guess that’s how some people roll. \o/

Fools Rush In

The bottom line is that every time someone comes up with new technology, people rush out to utilize it. When I’m new to a service or app, I immediately look for the people that have 10x or 100x the followers I have on it to see how they’re using it and what traps they’re falling in. I add that to my own in-the-trenches research and decide what I’m going to do.

Unfortunately, most people just aren’t into the nitty-gritty of how this stuff works for AND against you and they’re very happy to tell people “I’m eating a sandwich on 34th and 2nd” and then “I’m watching a movie on 42nd and 8th” all day long, for what reason I have no clue. Granted.. *MOST* of us aren’t popular enough that just because we said we were going somewhere, someone invites themselves to come hang out with us. Trust & Believe that it happens, it’s happened TO ME, and I have witnesses from all the way back in 2008, before LBS were even AVAILABLE, to 2010.

If you’re not willing to have someone show up at a party or event you’re attending, take evasive measures, (including telling your friends not to say you’re there) or eject from LBS entirely. Melissa mentions Personal Brand Promotion and Brand Loyalty as reasons to check in, but you can shout out events and show your support without even being there, like “MashBash is happening @ Roger Smith Hotel tonight!!!”. There’s no benefit to posting “I am currently at MashBash in RSH in the penthouse in the room to the left after you exit the elevators around the corner next to the snacks”.

It’s 2010 now. A lot of people that you know and hang out with are celebrities, whether they or you know it or not or whether you like it or not. Everybody that outputs Social Media is building communities of fans & detractors that face off against each other on the back-channel over something you said or did. You don’t have to be a movie star to get stalked. You don’t even have to do anything that YOU think is extraordinary. It’s all about what your Fans think is extraordinary about you and makes them gravitate towards you.

I know it sounds stupid and perhaps self-centered, but if you’re heavily involved in Social Media, it’s really in your best interest to Act As If you’re a celebrity, certainly not meaning being snobbish towards people, but certainly meaning taking the same precautions someone that *YOU* think is famous or interesting would take to attempt to ensure their own privacy and safety.

Remember… “Fan” is short for Fanatic.

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Let me tell you how Social Media works…

There are two layers. There’s the online layer and then the offline layer.

The online layer is where we all say whatever we want about ourselves and expect people to take our word for it. The offline layer is where you have to PUT UP OR SHUT UP. You’re either the same person IRL (In Real Life) that you claim to be online or you’re not.

If you ARE the same person, your “Cred” (credit, props, believability) increases. Street Cred, Social Cred.. Whatever Cred you built online, your reputation will become infinitely more valid if you walk the walk instead of just talking the talk.

If you ARE NOT the same person, your Cred will DISAPPEAR. Beleedat. Gone! :D Nobody’s going to believe anything you have to say after your IRL presentation disproves who you made yourself out to be online.

Who Are You, Really?

It’s now the year 2010. Everybody that you know has their own online networks. Everybody that you know has an opinion about you, good, bad or neutral. Everybody that you know has EXPRESSED THAT OPINION about you to their friends. Being that we tend to all have the same friends in this space, all you need is for the word to come around from several people before the rumors about you are accepted as proven fact.

For example.. The other night, I was hanging out with Halley, Rahul, Kripa & Tarun for St. Patrick’s day (which was an EVENT on its own, but we won’t get into that, haha).

During the evening, my blog came up in conversation. I’m always caught off guard when someone mentions that they read the messages in bottles that I float out onto the internet.

I’m not exactly surprised, being that I’ve averaged 264 “uniques” per day for the last full year (An “unique” being a visit to a website from a distinct IP address, most likely indicating that a different person came to the site for each address so you can gauge how many people are accessing your content), but being that there’s no telling who’s reading if they don’t leave a comment, I have to assume that everybody I know or NOBODY I KNOW is reading this. :D

The point is that everyone I spent time with last night got a decent idea of what it’s like to hang out with me, albeit under overly-loud, overly-crowded circumstances due to St. Patty’s. The time we’ve spent together IRL is going to flavor their experience if they read something I write. The online and offline are going to be weighed against each other and my authenticity will be determined by each individual.

What happens after that is that information hits the back-channel.

As much interaction as we have in public on the internet, much more goes on behind the scenes. Back-Channel information is also considered more authentic because people are free to say what they really think without fear of public backlash. That guy Bill is an alcoholic. That guy Bill is a womanizer. That guy Bill wouldn’t hesitate to punch you in your face. That guy Bill is a gentleman. That guy Bill won’t ever leave you laying around drunk in a pile of garbage at the end of the night…

Whatever it is, people trade stories about you, and if you’re someone like me, who has 413 Facebook Friends in common with Chris and 349 FB Friends in common with Sarah and 347 FB Friends in common with Dina, there is LOTS OF INFORMATION floating around on the back-channel defining how people perceive you and act towards you that you never even find out about. Fortunately for me, I’m an empath, so I can actually FEEL when someone’s acting differently towards me compared to what I’m used to from them. Most people can’t do this, so they’re pretty much oblivious to how their offline shenanigans are affecting their online reputation.

Reputation vs. Reality

Before I get to my point.. Another advantage that I have is that I live in New York City, the center of the universe. :)

Everybody comes here sooner or later.

I’ve hung out with people from Texas, The UK, Hawaii, Japan, California, The Netherlands, Ireland, Israel…

There are A LOT OF PEOPLE that know what it’s like to have a f2f IRL chat with me and I really doubt any of them would give you an extremely different opinion of who I appear to be. That’s because I’m not acting. I’m trying my best to deliver via text what I actually think about or do. Much is lost in translation, but I’m attempting to express “The Real”.

Most people don’t have the same opportunity to meet so many people unless they go to a festival or conference such as South by Southwest® (SXSW®). That means they don’t get much practice at interacting with people IRL that they’ve built relationships with online. I would compare it to going straight to a professional sports playoff situation without having played any of the regular season. There’s a great opportunity for brand advancement and an even greater opportunity for brand destruction.

Your online presence is a virtual representation of yourself, like Second Life or The Sims. Before people meet you, they’re likely to assume that the way you are online is the way you are IRL. There’s no reason not to, because all they know about you is what they’ve read. Once they meet you, they will come away with the impression that you’re outputting authentic content that expresses who you are as a person or that you’re AN ACTOR. If you’re determined to be an actor, your media will be perceived as AN ACT. You’re writing a character, like Don Quixote or Jason Bourne.

Matt Damon isn’t Jason Bourne IRL. When you watch his movies, you don’t go “Man… Matt Damon could kick someone’s ass! :D”. Similarly, if your IRL presentation isn’t congruent with the content you post online, people probably won’t mention it in public blog posts or comments, but on the back-channel, the word spreads rapidly that you’re FULL OF ****! :D Everything you carefully built by typing words online that you never intended to back up in person is going to be undermined when you go to a conference and people meet the real you. Believe me.. It’s too late for trickery. The time for snake oil sales is OVER. Whether people tell you to your face or not, your smoke & mirrors aren’t fooling those of us that actually know what time it is and your reputation for mediocrity, tomfoolery or just plain WACKNESS is getting around.

So here are some tips for those of you that are doing it wrong and undermining your own brand with lameness:

Stop Name-Dropping

If you go to a conference where you’re glad-handing with hundreds of people, stop Twittering about ONLY the ******* CELEBRITIES you met or people who you’re trying to suck up to. If you pose for 80 pictures with “The People” on your camera and then only upload the ones where you’re with stars, YOU SUCK! If every time you post something to Facebook, it’s an advertisement for yourself, your clients, or someone whose **** you’re riding, you look like exactly what you are.. A SHILL, and everybody knows it and nobody likes it.

On top of that, you’re actually doing your clients a disservice. I automatically ignore all media from shills because I know they’re trying to push something. If you think you’re getting your clients exposure by being a walking advertisement, you’re wrong. You’re getting them IGNORED, because they aligned themselves with YOU, and you’ve proven that you don’t give a flying **** about people other than using them for “eyeballs” or “hits”.

I don’t give a damn when your next concert is if the last time I heard from you it was to advertise your previous concert. I don’t give a damn that your client is doing a live stream when the last live stream you produced was STRAIGHT GARBAGE, technically AND content-wise. I don’t give a damn that you were standing next to some bigwig at a party and shouted them out on Twitter when they don’t even mention that you were there at all. If I cared about that, I’d read TMZ, not your lame, obvious, redundant, non-progressive blog or twitter posts.

Pay Attention IRL

If you go to a tweetup, DO NOT spend the entire time on your ******* laptop. :/ Act as if you have a life other than being online or just stay your ass at home. This goes *TRIPLE* if you happen to be the ******* GUEST. OF. HONOR. of the tweetup. If people are showing up to a location to meet *YOU*, make ******* SURE that you spend as much time as humanly possible interacting with them. Handle your online business BEFORE or AFTER the meetup. At least act as if you give a damn about people who pay attention to you that aren’t stars that you can try to get props for by Twittering their names all over creation.

I guarantee you that it’s “The Little People” that have more props on the back-channel than the celebrities do. You know why?… hahaha Because there are MORE LITTLE PEOPLE THAN CELEBRITIES! :D .. Think about that.

When you name-drop about a celebrity, who do you think RTs your post and sends it to Facebook or wherever? Other Celebrities?… Nope!.. It’s The Little People. Meanwhile, what the commoners are SAYING is that you’re a JERK and you’re nothing like you present yourself to be online. The next time you pull the same stunt, the word goes out again, and again and again until people accept rumor as fact that you’re an actor and what you say online is as valid as “Fake Steve Jobs”.

Also.. I’m not saying to pay attention to commoners because it’s good public relations. I’m saying that the respect or disrespect that you show your audience IRL is way more important than writing something on the internet. I met this chick one time that’s very talented and I’m a fan of hers, but when I introduced myself to her, she didn’t even say what her name was. That was lame enough as-is, but she’s a performer. It’s her *JOB* to put her name out in public so people come to her shows and buy her media. I was like “How lame is this chick that she’s not even pubbing herself when a commoner (s far as SHE knows) walks up to her and says ‘Hello’?”. As talented as she is, her IRL presentation SUCKED and I immediately became an un-fan. Not of her media, but way more importantly, of her as a person.

Brand Yourself Consistently

It’s kind of funny to me when people ask me why I have so much Google Juice for Bill and for Cammack. It’s really very simple.

Everything I do has my name on it.

It’s completely astounding to me that these so-called Social Media Experts EPICALLY FAIL at branding themselves consistently, which is probably the MOST BASIC thing they should be doing. Anybody you see branding themselves as BillCammack and TheBillCammack and TheRealBillCammack and BillC and BCammack and BConline and TwitterBill and BlipTVCammack and SocialBill and BillYahoo and YoutuBill IS. A. *******. IDIOT! Dead up, they’re IDIOTS! :D

Select ONE NAME and stick to it. Select ONE AVATAR and stick to it. Select ONE GRAVATAR and stick to it. Don’t make people guess who wrote something or guess how to find you when the next major platform is launched. Make sure you have a Google Profile so your name shows up under a basic Google search, even if you don’t have any props for your actual blog or site.

Stop Padding Your Stats

Originally (and I wasn’t down with Twitter when it first started, but I believe my account is three years old now), the number of people following you on Twitter meant something because there was no reason for people to follow people whose opinions they didn’t care about.

Once it became a status symbol to have more Twitter followers than someone else, people started padding their stats. They way they did this was to follow anybody that wrote anything on the general timeline. We all knew who was doing this because they were pretty much following twice the number of people that were following them, or to put it another way, for every two RANDOM PEOPLE that they followed, one person was following them back.

This is how some people got high numbers of Twitter followers and came to be regarded as influential when they really aren’t. The evidence of this is when they do a call to action and their tens of thousands of “followers” only yield fewer than 100 visitors to their live stream or fewer than 10 comments on their blog post.

What these people didn’t count on was that they would eventually be judged by PASSIONATE followers instead of RANDOM followers. They didn’t expect that Twitter was going to create lists based on relevance to a particular industry or topic. They didn’t realize that adding a bunch of randoms was going to make them look like what they were… People thad added a bunch of people JUST to entice those people to add them back.

Eventually, Twitter caught on to this and shuttered that behavior. Unfortunately, the next big thing was the Twitter Suggested User List (SUL), which lots of people rode to fame and glory, ending up with hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers because everyone who created a new account after that was offered to auto-follow everyone on that list with the click of one button.

The reason y’all need to stop this is because you look dumber instead of smarter having all these “followers” that you can’t convert into anything useful for yourself or your clients. You would be way better off building relationships online or offline with people and adding them because you actually want to hear what they have to say and because you feel that their opinions are valuable to you.

Having said that.. There are lots of people with high follower counts who DIDN’T pad their stats and instead followed BACK everyone that already followed them. Again, these people were obvious because their follower/following ratio remained 1:1 while you could watch the padders stay WAAAAAAAY ahead of their followER count with their followING count while they were building their “community”.

Put Up or Shut Up

It’s not impressive to be able to utilize new technology. It’s impressive to utilize new technology WELL. Nobody cares if you can broadcast via Ustream or Qix live from your smartphone if you’re a boring person and the place you happen to be is as boring as you are. The ROI to your client isn’t in knowing that they CAN use new technology but rather in finding out WHEN and HOW they should use it. The more you upload GARBAGE to your YouTube, Ustream, Vimeo, & Blip accounts, the more clueless you make yourself look.

On top of that, you’re not providing actual ROI to your clients. You’re providing them something to go OOH and AAH about so that they waste their money hiring you to do NOTHING for them because you SUCK at Social Media. Instead of merely showing them that the tools exist, show them what they can do with the tools, why they should use them and when and how they SHOULDN’T use them. Show them with concrete examples of your skillz, which should exist somewhere on your site being that you’re a Social Media Expert, right?

If you’re offering web design services to your clients, your websites had BETTER be pretty good-looking, right? O_o If you’re offering video editing services, you should have examples of videos that you’ve edited, right? If you’re supposed to be on-air-talent, you should have samples of shows that you were on, right?

Trust & Believe that you’re not slick. You’re not fooling anybody that actually knows about Social Media with your lack of content to back up your lofty claims. You’re not fooling anybody with your lack of original ideas, regurgitation, retweets, name-dropping and overall poor emulation of a Social Media Guru.

The way this industry works is that people smile in your face and then talk behind your back. What they’re saying behind your back is their honest impression of you. If your IRL presentation is the same as who you claim to be online, you’re golden. If it isn’t congruent, one of these days (or many of these days) you’re going to miss out on a major opportunity because the person you have the opportunity to pitch to TODAY already heard about your incompetence and/or treachery on the back-channel YESTERDAY.

My suggestion is that you stick to what you actually do well and leave the rest of Social Media to the professionals. If you’re not savvy enough to figure out what you don’t do well enough to charge clients for and guarantee a generous ROI, hire an ACTUAL Social Media Expert to tell you who you are and who you aren’t.

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Let’s say you have something that you do well. One thing. Just one. Next thing you know, you find out about Social Media and all the good things that are now available for everyone to take part in. Before you jump in the pool, consider that you might not be able to swim. Don’t get in over your head with Social Media, because the effect is going to be *YOU* looking unprofessional, AND broadcasting that YOURSELF to the entire world.

Let’s say you’re a football player. Let’s say you have lots of IRL fans and it seems like a good idea to you to start utilizing sites/apps like Twitter, Ustream, Qik, Youtube, Livestream, BlogTV, Tinychat, Tokbox, Facebook, MySpace, etc etc to increase your numbers of “followers” and increase your international visibility. To a degree, this will work for you. If you overdo it, you won’t be able to spend the required amount of time to maintain your position in any or potentially ALL of your endeavors. If you don’t maintain your positions properly, people are going to start recognizing you for SUCKING at Social Media more than they recognize you for playing football.

Of course, this is infinitely worse if you’re supposed to be a Social Media Expert (SME). Do. Not. Get. Caught. Slippin’. in your Social Media if you want someone to pay YOU to handle THEIR SM for them.

Website

Your website is your home base. It either speaks to your ability to create and maintain a site, your vision in what you think makes up an attractive site (since this is supposed to represent YOU), or your ability to reach out to people that know what they’re doing and have them code sites for you. If you have none of these skills and your site looks like GARBAGE, nobody’s going to want to hire you to make a site for them, or do anything for them, actually. If you’re not an SME, but a football player, you MIGHT get some credit, being that you’re not supposed to know how to create your own website anyway. You’re supposed to know how to catch a football and run towards YOUR end zone. However, you still won’t get away with it because you supposedly made enough money during your career to hire someone to make you a decent site.

If you have comments, answer them. People aren’t commenting for their health. They’re attempting to communicate with you. Show them the courtesy of acknowledging that you read what they wrote, appreciate them and thought about their comments. If you don’t have time to do that, hire someone to admin your site. If you can’t do either, you might want to shut off comments entirely.

Don’t let people spam your site either, or else it’ll look like you “live” in a run-down tenement building.

Twitter

If you’re already a celebrity, you might get over with “I just ate a sandwich” as your Twitter posts. For the most part, nobody cares. Make sure you come up with relevant and current comments to share, or your list of followers is going to be mainly spammers who only followed you hoping that you’d follow them back.

Make sure you monitor your @replies and respond when you can, unless you want to be known as a broadcaster and not part of the actual conversation. The people who claim to follow tens of thousands of people are LIARS because you can’t get that many updates in any of the Twitter apps. They’re MISSING more updates in each refresh than they’re getting. If you’re not paying attention to your @replies either, you’re a tool on this app and people will figure this out relatively quickly.

Stop. Dropping. Names. Nobody cares who you know. Unless you have something CURRENT and RELEVANT to say about someone, save it. “I saw Omar Epps at the supermarket” is a waste of everybody’s time. If you have a link to a preview of something he acted in, let’s have it, and thanks.

Stop acting like your number of followers translates to anything at all. When you can get 80%, 50% or even 20% of your so-called followers to respond to one of your calls to action, THEN you’ll have something impressive. If you have 10,000 followers and you routinely do live streams where 15 people show up while you’re twittering it every 5 minutes, you’re making yourself look worse, not better. Focus on how well your network disseminates information that you send them, NOT how many people clicked “follow” and then never paid attention to you ever again.

Facebook

Do not make yourself Instant Pariah by hawking your wares 24/7 on Facebook. Do not send people messages every day about your new album that’s coming out. Do not invite people to your group over and over if they’ve declined to join. Do not keep begging people to check out your links or donate to your cause. This is what YOUR stream is for, on YOUR Facebook page. If people are interested in what you’re offering, they will see it on their home page and click on it. They might even visit your page or your group ON THEIR OWN! :O Be careful not to shill away your social capital.

The more you beg people to check out your content, the LESS it looks like ANYBODY’S checking out your content. Capisce? Make it easy for people to subscribe to your pages so they can OPT-IN to getting your updates instead of clicking delete every time they see your name in their inbox because they already know what you’re going to say, because it was the same thing you said yesterday and the day before…

Live Streaming

Do NOT live stream stuff that nobody cares about. Are you at the Football Hall of Fame? People want to see that. Are you walking to the store to buy a beer? Nobody cares.

‘Matter of fact, even IF you’re at the Football Hall of Fame… If you’re walking around doing nothing interesting or you have no skillz at verbally hosting a show, save it. Film everything you can all day and see if you can make an interesting video out of it for airing at a later date. Just because something’s LIVE doesn’t make it COOL *OR* GOOD. If you want to be known as the clown that live-streamed an event from the nosebleed seats where the performers looked like Lego blocks and you couldn’t even tell who they were and the camera was shaking around because you didn’t bring a tripod.. Go right ahead. I guarantee you it will detract from your brand’s props way more than it’ll add.

If you’re going to have co-hosts, make sure they know what they’re talking about. Don’t bring people on the screen just so you can drop names, because what’s going to get around is that they didn’t know that whomever was so boring and not worth watching ever again. Make sure you have an agenda and a topic. Most people aren’t any good at talking about stuff on the fly, so make sure they know what they’re coming to talk about and your viewers know what they’re coming to see.

Text Chatting

Similar to live streaming.. If you’re going to host a text chat, have a topic. If you create a topic, stick to it. Do. NOT. use “bait & switch” to get people to show up to your chats. Do not promise them one thing and then talk about something totally different when they arrive. The back-channel is alive and well and you will be talked about like a dog. People will know that you’re trying to game the system and cheat people into becoming viewers while duping potential clients that you can actually draw a crowd.

Make sure you can moderate your chat. Make sure you can kick people and ban them if necessary. It’s your party and everyone there is your guest. Act accordingly and regulate. If you have no skillz at being on video and moderating a live chat simultaneously, hire someone else to sit in and moderate your chat from a remote location.

If you run out of topics, shut the chat down. Don’t just sit there like DUHHHHH and turn what would have been a nice, short event into a long, boring event. Learn to recognize when the action peaks, plateaus and then starts falling off. Quit while you’re ahead. This is also why it’s good to set time limits on your chats. You can go longer if it’s still good, but when you hit that time limit, nobody can complain that you took your toys and went home.

Oh……. And if you can’t spell, stick to video.

~Bill Cammack

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Everything you do in public adds to or subtracts from your cred, and is compiled in your virtual resume. Which resume are you building, and what do you hope to get out of that?

Bill Cammack – Channeling What Women Want

When I got started, three years ago, in 2006, My idea was to make a site that started out as my making my own videos but would expand to a group of people collaborating to make videos for the site. This is why I was initially branding ReelSolid.TV instead of BillCammack.com.

Pretty much immediately, I started getting recognition for my videos, except *I* wasn’t getting recognition for my videos. People knew that ReelSolid.TV was producing them, but nobody knew who ReelSolid.TV was.

Once I understood that, I had a choice. I was either going to continue publicizing the group (which was only me anyway), or I was going to start publicizing MYSELF. I chose to publicize myself because the group is merely an umbrella.. a catch-all. Let’s say that ReelSolid.TV is defense and BillCammack.com is offense. ReelSolid is more saying “I’m not necessarily the one that created this, though it’s my site”. BillCammack is saying “I did this. Add it to my resume”.

2 1/2 years later (I think I branded ReelSolid.TV for 6 months before changing over), I’m satisfied with my results. I’m currently top-10 out of 395 million entries for “Bill” and top-10 out of 396 thousand Google entries for “Cammack”. That works for me, because anything that I do these days, people are like “Oh.. That’s the same guy that did this, this and that”. In fairness, I’m a freelancer, so it’s actually in my best business interest for people to recognize my name as well as my best personal interest. I like to “Stand or Fall” on my own merit.

Nicknames

Other people like to brand nicknames. Two that come to mind offhand are PurpleCar and Pistachio. Thanks to Social Media, this is a viable option. You can use a nickname and associate that name with a consistent avatar across SM sites and people will become accustomed to addressing you by your nickname. Also, by tagging your media with your nickname, people will be able to find your work or writing on Google just as easily as your “Government Name”.

The only problem here is the same problem I had with ReelSolid.TV. Unless you intend on continuously utilizing your nickname to do business or blogging or whatever you do, you’re probably better off using something that will come along with you into your new projects or genres. Granted, nicknames are less of an issue than something specifically saying TV, because if you want to go into music, you can be PurpleCar Records or Pistachio International.

An upside of nicknames is that they’re catchy and unique, at least within your niche, and therefore way more easily remembered and shared with others. I’m sure there are tons of Lauras that do the same thing, but only one Pistachio. There are lots of Christines, but only one PurpleCar. There are tons of Bills, but only one ReelSolid.TV

Company Names

Other people’s approach to the internet is to ONLY open their mouths to say something about their company or the company they work for. You’re basically the mouthpiece or the “face” of that company. That’s beautiful for the company, but once you leave that company, there’s going to be no trace that you ever existed on the internet.

That’s exactly what some people want, so that works for them. Other people leave a company after a couple of years and think they’ve developed such a fine reputation amongst the people they’ve interacted with on the net, only to find out that outside of the context of “He/She works for Company X”, nobody recognizes you at all, and you basically have to start from scratch.

I think the question really comes down to what you’re trying to build on the net. Do you want people to know who YOU are and what YOU’VE done? or are you only on the internet for business purposes? What will it mean to you three years from now when nothing’s published under your Government Name and everything you wrote comes up under your former job’s name? OTOH.. What will it mean to you down the line if people know your name, but didn’t learn enough about your company in the meantime to make it a household name and as successful and recognized as it could possibly have been?

So… What do *you* brand, and why?

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
 

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