So I’m at a party and some sort of casual conversation is going on.

There’s a break in the flow, and after a few seconds of silence, this woman says:

“I love my Magic Bullet! :D”

Now.. I live in New York City, where there are entirely too many women and not enough men here to, um…… service the needs of our entire female population.

Because of this disparity (and lots of other reasons), it’s rather typical that in a conversation here between grown-ass-women, they’re going to discuss, recommend and review….. um….. BOBs.

Who is Bob?

BOB (or B.O.B.) stands for Battery-Operated Boyfriend.

If you hear one gal saying she’s going to get in bed with “Bob” tonight, and her homegirls start giggling as if they know what she’s talking about, she’s most likely not referring to an actual guy.. She’s talking about her vibrator.

This item pictured to the left of these words is in fact a Magic Bullet Mini Waterproof Vibrator.

According to Amazon.com, it’s currently unavailable.

Go Figure! o_O

Of course, there are like a million of these devices, including the Remote Control Butterfly Vibrator and the Jersey Shore-esque, blinged-out Girl’s Best Friend Diamond Butterfly Vibrator.

So, Anyway.. This gal says she loves her Magic Bullet, and there isn’t much reaction from the group. I’m sipping my drink and waiting for any of the other women to chime in with a YAY or NAY regarding the effectiveness of that particular BOB and perhaps a personal review or a suggestion of an item that they prefer and recommend, when she adds:

“I use it to make milkshakes! :D”

o_O

So now, I’m looking around for someone ELSE that finds this comment rather strange. I can’t find anyone.

I realize that people are really into this Politically Correct thing, where they force themselves not to react to something they find incredibly odd, so as not to make that person feel “judged”, but I was immediately curious about what she felt the benefits were to making a milkshake with a vibrator.

Nice Branding :/

Come to find out.. “Magic Bullet” is also the name of a blender.

A homegirl of mine googled this right quick on her iPhone to show me, after I had exclaimed “ummmm… WHAT? o_O” and a couple of chicks looked at me like they knew what *I* was thinking we were discussing and the dudes in the convo were entirely oblivious.

Let this be a Social Media lesson to you.

If you’re tasked with coming up with the name of a product, application or website, check around first to see if there are any automatic associations people make with your selected brand name.
–
Connect with Bill via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Email Subscription, RSS Feed

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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 wrote a bunch of articles about branding a bunch of months ago. I recently started thinking about branding again now that Dave & I have been brainstorming projects over @ TribeNineCreative.com.

My position towards the middle of 2009 was that I had several personal brands, none of which are equal in popularity based on number of hits to my sites and the frequency that each brand would come up in IRL conversations. At the time, I wasn’t sure why, for instance, my “socializing” brand was so much stronger than my “video editing” brand. Pretty much the LAST thing I started advertising about myself, chronologically, became what I was most known for by people I had never met before.

People love to toss around the term “Organic” these days when it comes to Social Media. I checked out about eight different articles and received about eight different ideas of what “Organic Marketing” or “Organic Social Media” or “Organic Branding” is. According to Webster’s, the closest definition of “Organic” that might possibly be relevant to any of this is “Developing in the manner of a living plant or animal”. This is why I decided to call this particular article:

Organic Branding

Back in the day, when I was trying to decide what I was going to blog about, I asked Penelope Trunk (far right in the pic) for her opinion and she told me something pivotally important, which was essentially “Blog about what you WANT to blog about and not about what you think is going to be popular or lucrative”.

This turned out to be INCREDIBLY GOOD ADVICE!!! :D and I kept it in mind as I started writing about things I THOUGHT I was interested in, but it turned out that I wasn’t. For instance, I was going to do a blog about my favorite television shows, like 24, Prison Break, eventually Sons Of Anarchy and now Jersey Shore, but paying attention to how I *FELT* about writing a blog about that, I realized I completely wasn’t interested enough to make a blog about that topic sustainable.

I was also interested in video on the internet and compression and which hosts to use, etc, but eventually I learned enough about that and talking about that became a chore as well. What never became a chore and probably never will is my dating blog. :D I’ve written hundreds of posts between 2006 and 2010, have about six halfway-written posts waiting to be finished & published, started compiling my first of several eBooks and I have a bunch of concepts that I’ve been thinking about that I didn’t bother to type out yet. It’s virtually an endless stream of content.

True to what Penelope told me, the only thing that’s made my blog sustainable is that it NATURALLY occurs to me to think about these topics, write about them and discuss them with my readers. That, according to Webster’s definition, is what I feel “Organic Branding” actually is. I think it’s whatever you’re naturally compelled to express. I think it’s what people get if they read between your lines. It’s what you don’t necessarily mean to say, but you say it anyway.. without actually saying it. :D

Brand Hierarchy

This is how my personal brand hierarchy got built without my understanding what I was building. I thought that by putting links in my sidebar (which aren’t there anymore) to my resume that people who came to my site looking for other stuff would look at it and realize what I do business-wise. Six months into hanging out with friends IRL on a regular basis, I was hearing “I didn’t know you were a video editor! :O”. That’s because people don’t come to my site looking for information about ME. They come here looking for whatever the topic was that they clicked through on from google or Facebook or Tumblr or Twitter or their feed reader or wherever I happened to have distributed my content.

As I turned my focus to “What am I broadcasting?”, that’s where my concept of Organic Branding became clear to me. Whatever it was that I *THOUGHT* I was expressing, all people were getting is that I like women and I like alcoholic beverages. :D I don’t talk about video editing when I’m hanging out, except with Flo, because she’s an editor also and we often have parallel experiences and I get a lot out of “Talking Shop” with her. Since I’m a freelancer and I don’t work with random people, I’m not inclined to bring up video editing at parties because I don’t go there to network, I go there to socialize.

So, similar to how my dating blog rose to the top of my content output, the brand that I was organically expressing rose to the top as well. I didn’t set out to become a “Connector”, but I am. I DID set out to advertise myself as a video editor, but I stopped. I didn’t set out to become a dating blogger or author, but that’s what’s happening. I think that if more focused more on what they were REALLY interested in, they’d be happier, way more prolific and way more prominent within their chosen topic.

Politickin’, Beggin’ & Shillin’

I’ve personally been affected by other people’s Organic Branding. There are certain things you can count on people for, all the time. There are topics that they just LOVE and can’t get enough of.

Some people like my friends Charles & Dan LOOOOOOVE politics. Politics, Politics, Politics, all day and all night. Doesn’t matter WHERE the politics are going on.. Foreign countries… Alabama… Doesn’t matter.. As long as there’s something to debate, they’re both IN THERE for hours and hours and hours with gleeful smiles on their faces because they’re talking about POLITICS!!! :D

Other people have become shills for their companies. They’ve handed over every vehicle they own for personal expression to try to get people to buy something from their current employer. Their videos are about business. Their Twitter and Facebook posts are about business. They respond to status updates that could possibly get them more business. Their Organic Branding is “I don’t really care about you OR myself.. I just want to bring in business so I can keep my job as Social Media Director or whatever and get some money”.

I’m not going to knock their hustle, but let’s see what they have to talk about when they stop working for that company. O_o I’ll bet you never hear another PEEP about whatever products or services they were hawking to you all day and all night as soon as they’re no longer getting PAID to tell you about them.

Then you have the people that every time they open their mouths, you have to hear about their favorite social cause or how they got out their CSI kit and searched every nook and cranny of the internet for their daily post about racism or sexism or whatever kind of ism rules their minds and lives. It’s like watching a television channel that only shows commercials.

Eventually, in all the cases I mentioned, you absorb that individual’s Organic Brand and you begin to naturally filter them based on what you feel like or don’t feel like hearing about at that particular time. If the company shill sends out an email or posts somewhere that they’re throwing a party, you never get that communication because you weren’t in the mood for hearing about their business that day and skipped right over their media, as usual, if you haven’t blocked their updates already with social media site privacy controls.

Business Applications

HA!!! I almost forgot! :D .. When someone declares themselves a Social Media Expert and then their website *SUCKS*, they’re organically communicating that they’re a fraud and just trying to get paid before people figure out they don’t know what they’re talking about. When people try to tell you that you should utilize live streaming, for instance, and every time THEY try to do it for themselves there are glaring technical difficulties, you’re absorbing the fact that they’re Snake Oil Salesmen.

I overheard a conversation this guy was having while I was waiting at a restaurant for a homegirl of mine to arrive for lunch. The guy’s explaining WHY the person on the other end of the phone should spend $600 to get a website done, and amongst the incentives, this guy says “OH… YOU’LL *DEFINITELY* GET MORE TRAFFIC!”. I minded my own business, but I wanted to yell at him “YOU ******* LIAR! GETTING A WEBSITE CREATED DOESN’T *GUARANTEE* YOU MORE TRAFFIC!!!”. That’s how a lot of people are living these days, tryin’na jump on the Social Media bandwagon and bilk people out of money while it’s still a hot term.

Businesses do the same thing, although you kind of EXPECT them to, since they’re businesses and not individuals EMPLOYED by businesses.

Pepsi went out like suckers a few months ago with their “Amp up before you score” iPhone app. :D

I mean, really… I’ve been doing a dating blog for around four years where I call chicks “chicks” every single week and even *I* would have been the first one to raise my hand and go “This isn’t going to go over well with the female population”.

Ahhh to be a fly on the wall at the meetings where some BRAINIAC came up with this and the drones sat there and didn’t dare to say how bad an idea this was. Does Pepsi even EMPLOY women? :D Were none of them ASKED for their opinions about this app before it went into development, GOT developed, was TESTED and finally RELEASED?

So.. Yes.. When I was thinking about this months ago, I was like “How did this happen?” Now, it’s clear to me that what people read between the lines is just as important as the lines themselves, if not even more so. While the lines deviate slightly from each other, what you’re organically communicating is consistently building people’s perceptions of you in pretty much the same direction.

How’s that workin’ for ya?

I had briefly entertained the concept of “turning my branding around” at the time, but I was too busy and disinterested to think about it. At this point, I realize that changing my branding style or focus would be the same mistake as forcing a television blog at the expense of cultivating my dating blog.

Whatever it is that we enjoy (or at least focus or HARP on, if it’s not something enjoyable) is going to have an ever-present influence over our content creation. I don’t have any problems getting girls, so it’s not natural for me to blog about problems getting girls. I don’t live in Arkansas, so it’s not natural for me to blog about life in Arkansas.

I drink alcoholic beverages and I hang out with my friends. If I didn’t tell you that, you’d see my drinks and my friends in the pictures I post to the internet. Most of the stories I have are from parties or bars, so friends and drinks are going to be mentioned in my blog posts. If I check in on Foursquare or @reply people on Twitter, it’s going to be clear that I was hanging out.. again.. as usual.

Is “I like to enjoy myself” a good Personal or Organic Brand to have? For me, it is. I have great conversations with people that read my blog when I run into them IRL. There are lots of people that told me they enjoyed the Harry Potter video. There are lots of people that recognize me from the over 1,000 pictures I’ve posted from my hangouts over the last few years. I would MUCH RATHER have people chat with me about stuff like that than business, video editing, compression, data rates & monetization. *YAWN*

So the questions for *YOU*, I suppose.. are “What are you branding about yourself without meaning to?” and “How’s that workin’ for ya?”. If you don’t know what you’re projecting or you know what it is and it’s not in line with your goals for 2010, it might be time to rethink your strategies and take your brand in a totally new direction.

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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“Personal Branding” has been hotly debated recently in my circles. “Do I have a personal brand?” “Does personal branding exist?” “Am I a brand or a person?”

Part of the reason this is discussed so often is that people tend to define a personal brand in terms that don’t mean anything. By using terms for PEOPLE that are used to categorize COMPANIES, people are turned off to the concept or fail to understand the true meaning of the term.

Does personal branding exist? Yes. Do *YOU* have one? Maybe.

Basically, a “personal brand” is what people EXPECT when you come to mind. Period. Some people have this and some people don’t.

A personal brand is achieved through ACTIONS which people come to associate with your name or face. If you never DO anything that people perceive, you do not have a personal brand, IMO. This is because your name doesn’t “ring bells” and doesn’t alter anyone’s perception of a situation when they find out that you’re involved. This does NOT mean that you aren’t important… It merely means people don’t KNOW who you are and/or what you do.

For instance, if you google Emmy Award Editor I’m #1. Actually, I’m #1 AND #2, because the youtube version of the collab I did with Indy Mogul is in the second slot, with 11,240 views. People hit my resume page or my “about” page every single day, so lots of people have associated the name Bill Cammack with quality videotape editorial. This is what they EXPECT when they find out I worked on a project… Quality.

So what about Ian Jenkins?

“Who?” :D

Ian Jenkins is a friend of mine who edits and works A HELL OF A LOT HARDER than I do. :) Ian edits a show for Next New Networks called “Fast Lane Daily”, which just won a 2008 Webby Award.

That’s Ian in the white FLD shirt and headphones. Also pictured are a couple of other NNN friends of mine, J-Rad & Alan Kaufman.

Now… If I had a project I wanted to get done, Ian Jenkins would be one of the top guys I’d want working with me. That’s because I happen to know his work ethic and the skill and dedication he brings to the table. I know this because I’ve spoken to him, I’ve seen his work and I know people that work WITH him. Does he broadcast this himself? No. Not that I know of. Is he crafting a personal brand? Not that I know of. He’s doing what he does. IS “Ian Jenkins” a brand? HELL YES! :D That’s because when *I* hear his name, I EXPECT certain things from a project Ian worked on.

So who’s the better editor? Bill Cammack or Ian Jenkins?…. Unfortunately, editing is highly subjective. The only thing that matters is whether the job gets done WELL and ON TIME. So I say NEITHER of us is better as a editor. My personal brand is more recognized, because I spend hours every day working on it and Ian doesn’t give a damn. :) Ian meets deadlines every. single. day. while I play SOCOM. I’m freelance, so I’ve worked for a ton of shows, companies and people for advertising, corporate and broadcast productions. Ian’s a staffer, so he works on one show, and it runs on the internet, but he probably produces 15 videos for every one that I output. Ian shoots video as well. So do I, but I’d rather edit, and Ian’s probably better at shooting, because he does it infinitely more than I do.

My point is… You can’t tell JACK from how well someone uses the internet to publicize themselves. I’m not going to tell you to google Video Editor Resume (I’m #3) to figure out who’s GOOD or who can make it happen. That’s just a list of people that know how to use tags, or even worse, actually PAID PEOPLE to get them better rankings on google. :/ Doesn’t mean they’re any good at what they do AT ALL. Doesn’t mean their name “rings bells” IRL. What matters is what people know or perceive about you, which IS your personal brand, whether you LIKE that or not and whether you EMBRACE that or not.

Regardless of whether you brand YOURSELF, people are going to brand YOU. I started telling people to Google “Bill” (I’m currently #9 of 541,000,000 pages for “Bill”) because I don’t carry business cards, and it’s really the easiest way for people to get in touch with me. Next thing I know, hahaha this is how I’m being introduced to people at parties. :) This wasn’t MY idea, but people get a kick out of that and it spreads from person to person.

Actually… And I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about this… :D Neither my professional accomplishments nor my stellar search engine rankings (e.g. women dating nyc #3) are what most people that I meet “know me for”. It’s always “….. YOU’RE that guy that’s in all those pictures with all those women! :D”.

So, BESIDES not overshadowing your BUSINESS brand with your SOCIAL brand, :) the moral of our story is… Do you have a personal brand? Maybe. It depends first of all on whether you actually DO ANYTHING, and second on whether you’re letting people KNOW that you do these things or whether other people are publicizing you. If people think differently of something because you’re involved with it, that’s your PERSONAL BRAND at work. This does NOT only have to do with business either. We’ll get into that another time. You might have a personal brand when it comes to dating. The fact that you can be trusted in general and your word actually MEANS SOMETHING is potentially part of your personal brand.

There’s also NEGATIVE personal branding, such as when a client refuses to pay you for several months for work you did for them and you’re getting ready to blast their name and company all over the WORLD WIDE WEB for not living up to their agreements EVERY SINGLE DAY until you get satisfaction, which would amount to receiving PAYMENT IN FULL for services rendered. But that’s a story for another day. :D

So that’s what I think about personal branding. If you’re in the “public” eye (as ‘public’ as our small Echo Chamber gets) brand yourself or other people will do it for you. Whatever opinions come to mind when people hear your name or see your face, that’s YOUR brand. Even if NO opinions come to people’s minds or they’ve never heard of you, that doesn’t matter as long as YOU know what you’re bringing to the table. “The Fame Game” isn’t for everybody. Not everybody CAN do it, not everybody SHOULD do it and not everybody does it WELL.

So.. Does ‘Personal Branding’ exist, or am I talking about vaporware? :D

What do you think?

~Bill

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