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

Social Media

People always want to know how to make money with social media.

The problem is that social media doesn’t make money FOR you. Social media ENABLES YOU to make money…. maybe.

Everybody wants to know how their sales are going to increase once they hire you to create a website or set them up with a presence on Facebook or Twitter.

In Fact… Your sales are NOT going to increase unless a) YOU know what to do with your own internet presence, or b) you HIRE SOMEONE ELSE that knows what they’re doing to handle that aspect of your business for you.

Buying Trophies

In contemplating social media strategies, you have to see yourself as the owner of a race car team and your goal is to win races, thus receiving trophies.

As the owner, you have to decide where you’re going to allocate your budget (money) so you achieve your desired outcome.

If you’re racing in a legitimate organization, you can’t BUY TROPHIES. If you could buy trophies, your competition would be able to buy them too and there would be no reason to run any of the actual races.

Similarly, in social media, you can’t BUY SUCCESS. If you could, everybody would pay some money, receive a positive ROI and there would be no need for professionals at any point of the process.

Unfortunately, this is how a lot of people sell social media to you. They know you know less than they do, so they give you useless tidbits of information and charge you handsomely for “consulting” with them. This is usually the best thing for them to do because if they told you what you REALLY needed to do to be successful with social media, THEY wouldn’t get very much of your money because most of them don’t’ have any of the technical skills necessary to actually DO any of that process for you.

Winning Races

In reality, you have to actually WIN RACES to receive trophies.

What’s the process involved in doing that? o_O

1. You get the trophy by winning the race
2. You win the race by finishing in first place
3. You finish the race by starting the race (driving)
4. You enter the race by having something to drive (a car)
5. You have a car and a driver because you spent MONEY on them

As you can see, you spend your money ENABLING yourself to potentially win. You don’t spend money directly on the WIN.

What does this look like in social media strategy?

The part that people TELL YOU is that you need a website and a Facebook account and a Twitter account. The part that they TELL YOU is that you want people to follow you and the more the merrier.

Budgeting Maintenance

The part that they DON’T TELL YOU is that they’re selling you a car, not a trophy. They’re selling you the ability to MAYBE win.. POSSIBLY…

They also don’t tell you that this isn’t a car show, it’s a race. If it were a car show, you could bring your car to the venue and potentially win a prize for “prettiest car”, or “best paint job”, or “best-built engine”… Being that this is a RACE, it means that you need a DRIVER. o_O

If you’ve already spent money on the car (website), someone has to drive it (maintain your presence). That’s either going to be YOU or someone you hire to maintain your online presence for you.

If you’re going to do it yourself, you’re going to have to spend HOURS each week interacting with customers and potential clients, reading blog posts, writing blog posts, updating your inventory on your site, searching the internet for positive and negative references to your company, checking your statistics to see which items and pages are the most popular and which aren’t doing well, reading and replying to emails, paying attention to the endless flow of twitter posts from the thousands of people you “followed” because some idiot told you to, fielding phone calls and returning voicemails from people that got your number from your website, reading and intelligently replying to comments you receive on your blog, keeping spam and other dumb comments out of your comment section, reading up on the latest technologies for maintaining your presence, spending time on trial & error with new and potentially exciting products…

Thanks For The Money

THIS is what they don’t tell you. They’re’ just like “Give me your money. Here’s your website. Peacebeyotch! :D”. This is why so many people have garbage internet presences, because nobody told them that after you make a blog, you have to populate it and constantly update it. Nobody told them that if you make a site where you’re selling products on the internet, you THEN have to spend your time advertising your product or you need to hire someone else to do that for you.

Nobody told them that if you make a Facebook page and then you don’t actively participate in conversations, you don’t build any rapport and you don’t make any sales. Nobody told them that they needed to participate in conversations that are important to OTHER PEOPLE and not just those that revolve around your being able to sell something and get some money.

Nobody told them that if you follow 3,000 people on Twitter, you’re going to have so many updates that you can’t possibly read all of them, much less contemplate them and reply to them. Guess what? :D .. If you can’t read everything from the 3,000 people you’re following, the people that are following 60,000 people don’t see what YOU WROTE either. o_O

Are You Qualified?

Even if you tried to maintain your own internet presence, how good are you at doing that? How good are you at socializing? How good are you at holding conversations with people? How good are you at SPELLING and GRAMMAR? HAHAHA How good are you at knowing which posts to weigh in on and which to leave alone? How good are you at finding out where people are talking about you or your company, what they’re saying and how you can respond to them? How much time do you have to monitor the internet and respond quickly, giving yourself the appearance of caring as opposed to the appearance of someone that built a car that they don’t know how to drive or built a store that they don’t have time to stock and maintain?

So.. Next time you’re thinking about incorporating social media into your business strategy, recognize that you have to budget not only to BUILD your site, but also to MAINTAIN it.

If you don’t have money to pay someone to maintain your site, either it’s not going to get done or you’re going to have to pay yourself to do it during time that you could have spent billing clients and making your money back.

Either way, nobody’s going to hand you a trophy because you got a website built or because you made a Facebook Fan Page or a Twitter account. That’s not where the work ends. That’s where the work starts.

Related Posts

• Budgeting For Internet Video (You Get What You Pay For)
• Social Media Smoke & Mirrors
• Google Plus Circles – How To Use Them
• Thoughts about the “Fast Company Influence Project”
• Famous For Nothing [Fame, Part 3]

One of the things that makes me who I am as a video editor is that I can visualize aspects of the project that haven’t occurred yet. When I see a scene or a picture, I know how it will work (if at all) with other footage I’ve seen. When I hear something, I know what I can use it for. Basically, I create the video while I’m reviewing the footage and then I basically trace what I already saw instead of building a video from scratch and wondering whether it’s going to work or not.

There are a lot of elements that go into making a video that don’t become important until the final output, yet if you don’t pay attention to those elements ahead of time (known as pre-production), you may end up needing to re-do all the work you just did. Elements include frame dimensions (16×9 vs 4×3), frame size (in pixels), data rate, codec, font, font size, lower 3rds, drop shadows, transitions… For just one example, if your video is going to be seen @ 320×180 (width and height, in pixels), you’re going to want to deal with your font sizes differently than if you were going to present in 1280×720 HD (high definition). If you act as if you’re going to output in HD, you might have to change all your titles when the client sees them in 320×180, because they can’t be read.

The reason I bring this up is that this ability increases my efficiency. I know the questions to ask ahead of time so I don’t waste time. Also, I can see my way clear through to the end of the project. I can basically “see” the finished video as if I fast-forwarded time to when I was finished. This is because everything goes onto a “checklist”. If I know what the video dimensions are, I can visualize the size that the final output will be. If I know the font, I can imagine what the text will look like…

OTOH… If I *DON’T* know what the background color is… That becomes apparent to me in my visualization and I ask the client if they want to use a background image or they have a specific color in mind. Same thing for font color or music selection. I have a good basic idea of what’s missing and what I need to figure out ASAP in order to efficiently get the job done.

What does it look like when I don’t know an aspect of a project? It looks…. blank. It looks like nothing. I can’t really explain it. It’s just a lack of data. It’s like in the movies when they’re trying to solve a mystery and you flip to the page you need and it’s torn out of the book. You can’t visualize what’s on the page, because it’s not there, other than perhaps a torn border on the inside.

What do I do when I have zero information? If I’m working on something for a client, I’ll ask them, and the project can resume when they figure it out. If it’s something I’m supposed to be in charge of, then I have to go through the process of research and selection, similar to Time, Part 04: “Spend Your Money”.

The reason that post is called “Spend Your Money” is that there are some things that it’s not worth your time to do. In the time you wasted reinventing the wheel, you could have cleared your desk of other projects and invoiced clients for your time. In that particular case, I searched all over creation for a better solution than was presented to me by a professional and then ended up buying that exact same application anyway, AFTER wasting a bunch of time.

The way I felt when I was trying to find a better solution was the same way I feel when I have no information about an aspect of a project. It’s basically that you’re in the dark and have no clue at this point in time how you’re going to get from point A to point B. IMO, That’s the time that you want to subcontract:

Main Entry:
2sub·con·tract Listen to the pronunciation of 2subcontract
Pronunciation:
\ˌsəb-ˈkän-ˌtrakt, ˌsəb-kən-ˈ\
Function:
verb
Date:
1842

intransitive verb
: to let out or undertake work under a subcontract transitive verb 1 : to engage a third party to perform under a subcontract all or part of (work included in an original contract) —sometimes used with out 2 : to undertake (work) under a subcontract

The goal of subcontracting is increasing your efficiency on a project and most likely your ROI as well. For instance, I don’t do 3D Modeling. If a client wants a 3D model as a part of their video, there’s NO WAY I’m going to waste MY TIME figuring out how to do it and slooooooowly creating what the client wants with my lack of skill. Nope. I’m going to query people that I know that do that type of thing, check their availability, their interest, the date on which they feel they can deliver the video and how much money they would need to do that. If the client gave me a definite budget for that section, that will be one of the first things I mention so that if the number’s too low, whomever I contacted won’t waste any of their time thinking about a project they’re not going to do anyway.

If there isn’t really a budget for an addition to a project and there’s not going to be enough money for me to bring someone in that knows what they’re doing, that aspect of the project gets VETOED. Period. It’s not happening. “Your budget doesn’t allow for this”.

The reason you want to veto these things (and sometimes the entire project, if the client can’t understand budget constraints) is that in the time you wasted making that model, you could have finished the entire project using skills that are actually in your repertoire. Actually, there’s another option. Bounce it back to the client. “If you want this part done, have it done yourself and get it to me in 1280×720, Apple Intermediate Codec (or whatever) and I’ll cut it into the video.

On top of that, when you work more slowly and you’re not getting paid by the hour, the time you’re spending is becoming “worth” less and less to you and you’re decreasing your own rate. At the same time, if you ARE getting paid by the hour, I think you STILL want to subcontract, because a lot of customers return not only because of your pricing and attention to detail, but also because of your speed of delivery. I think it’s better to spend some of your project’s budget to get a better product than you would have delivered and get it way faster from someone who knows what they’re doing. Also, it’s good business. When you look out for people and pass them work, they’ll look out for you through passing YOU work they find out about that isn’t in their realm of expertise and also by going above and beyond to provide you with excellent work, completed on or before your proposed deadline.

All of this stuff needs to be worked out during pre-production, and you need to put down in writing what you intend to deliver to your client and approximately when. This comes in handy when, down the line, they go “Oh… Can you make it like this?” or “Oh.. Can you change that?”, because they get to see very clearly what you agreed to in the beginning, and you can explain to them how much extra it’s going to cost them to make these changes or bring in subcontractors to replace that photo montage wth a 3D model.

Of course, there are lots of other aspects to deal with. Website creation. CSS Coding. Video Compression for web, television, DVD, etc. Publicity. Community Growth & Management… All these areas and more can bring your production to a grinding halt, so you might want to consider making professional alliances and subcontracting. If you can make a video but you’re not good at making websites, hire someone else to do it. If you can make the site but not tweak it, hire someone to code. If you can get a video to look good in its native format but you’re no good at compressing video for the web or DVD, hire someone else to do it. If you spend all your time creating your show and you have no time to have a presence on your social site and interact with your community, hire a community manager and have them create a list of things for you to do or respond to so you can efficiently maintain a presence and make people feel like they’re actually communicating with YOU and not just on some fansite.

So take a long, hard look at your projects to see if there are areas where the time you’re spending isn’t worth the money you’re getting for that time. Get in tune with your actual strengths and weaknesses in your chosen field. Search for areas where you’re just not that good, and you should really hand the ball off to someone else who can do the job better than you can. Seek out opportunities to turn those empty spaces in your business plan into something that makes sense as far as your ability to complete the project on deadline and within your budget constraints.

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
Subscribe via RSS or Email
Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
Time Category: billcammack.com/category/other/time
 

Related Posts

• Blog Subscribers, Commenters, Lurkers & Passers-By
• Business, 2010 [Time, Part 09]
• Time, Part 06: “What’s Your Budget?”
• Talkin’ LOUD, and Sayin’ NOTHIN’! (sayin’ nothin’)
• Time, Part 05: “Focus & Motion”

Check it out… If you want to be seen as a businessperson and not a HOBO (read: bum, derelict, vagrant), stop contacting people about projects without including budget information.

Here’s how the process works… When someone with 1,200 Facebook Friends and 400 Linkedin Contacts and another 1,200 MySpace Friends and 2,300 Twitter Followers clicks on your email, that email is going to be scanned for a number. If there’s no number, that email is going to be IGNORED.

There will be no action AT ALL on your email, because there are too many requests coming through every single day to sit around brainstorming about your budgetless project. The thought process is a) “How much are they trying to spend?” and then b) “How much work do I feel I’ll have to do on their project for that amount of money?”. If there’s no indication of “A”, then “B” can not be calculated. It’s like asking a soldier how long he can hold a position and not telling him how many bullets you’re giving him. It’s not worth thinking about for even a split second.

If you HAVE no budget, say so. That means that your project will be dealt with during favor-time, which is NEVER.

Even if favor-time isn’t exactly NEVER, it’s your best bet to assume that the other 5,100 people in Social Media contact with that person asked for a handout just like YOU DID and y’all are all in the same soup kitchen line, so take a number.

On top of that… If you HAVE a budget, it’s in your best interest to say what your limit is. If you don’t, you’re asking the person you want to work for you to waste their time calculating what they could do IF you had more money than you actually have… Because it’s ALWAYS more money than you actually have. So save yourself from getting ignored and if $500 is all you have, say so. You will receive an estimate, outlining what can be done (if anything) for your current budget. You might also receive estimates of what can be done if you somehow procure more money than you have right now.

‘Matter of fact… Even if your budget is $0, it’s in your best interest to say so. You might receive credit on the Government Cheese Line for being up front about the fact that you can’t pay but you’re still looking to have your project dealt with by a professional.

Either way, understand that you look CORNY asking people to discuss doing work for you if you have NO budget information in your correspondence. If you want to be taken seriously, figure out the parameters ahead of time and come to the table as if you’re trying to do business instead of with your head bowed and on bended knee with your hand out.

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
Subscribe via RSS or Email
Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
 

Related Posts

• Time, Part 07: “Subcontracting”
• Time, Part 04: “Spend Your Money”
• Business, 2010 [Time, Part 09]
• Time, Part 05: “Focus & Motion”
• Time, Part 02

Continued from “Time”, Parts 01, 02, 03 & 04:

Life is easy when you 9-5 it. All you have to do is go where they told you, do what they told you and leave when they told you. Two weeks from now, you get a check and then the cycle starts all over again.

As a freelancer, your time has to be divided amongst several things every day, and it’s up to you to get proficient with selecting what to focus on and how much time to devote to it.

Efficiency

The selection process is actually critically important. I already discussed micromanagement of time, but it’s just as important, if not more so, to minimize the time that you waste DECIDING what to focus on. For instance, it might take you one minute to read someone’s email, but it took you 30 seconds to DECIDE whether you were going to read that email. Perhaps a more efficient style would be to jump right in, start reading and if you realize it’s something you don’t care about, bail.

I know that 10 seconds or 30 seconds doesn’t sound like much, and a year or two ago, it wasn’t much to me either. When you get to the point of receiving 100 emails every day of varying levels of importance, those seconds can add up to a major time sink. Consider the process to respond to a “new Twitter follower” notification (assuming you don’t use a program to auto-follow people who follow you):

1. Hear the background notification
2. Take your mind off your current project
3. “Feel” whether this is a “check the email” moment or not
4. Type the shortcut to toggle to mail
5. Read the title
6. Click on the email
7. Find and click on the link
8. Wait for the browser window to open
9. Check their friend/follower ratio
10. Check what they’re talking about on Twitter
11. Decide whether to follow them back or not
12. Close the window
13. Toggle back to the program you were originally using
14. Get your mind wrapped around your project again

So now, because you chose to have your mail client open and polling for mail, however much time was just extracted from your focus on your current project. Sometimes, it’s necessary, like if a client emails you that there’s a change in plans or an unique opportunity comes up that requires your immediate attention. Other times, it can be put off until later (or never), so making that decision quickly is in the best interest of your time, productivity and focus.

Focus

Mainly what I do is edit video. If I’m just assembling something, I’ll probably have mail and instant messaging open because I’m really just organizing items and doing quality control. If I’m doing a “real” edit, all of that’s shut off, because I need to live inside my project and be immersed in it in order to provide the eventual viewer with the same level of immersion when they watch the show. I can’t afford these micro-interruptions affecting my focus, flow, disposition, mood…

This is why I can’t understand how some people have literally all day to be on Twitter. They supposedly have jobs and responsibilities, yet you see them on Twitter 24/7. Now, I understand that there’s work that doesn’t require your full attention, like I said about when I’m assembling something… But how much time that you’re supposedly working for a company are you spending passing notes in class? What do those notes have to do with your actual BUSINESS? If your employer checks your Twitter or Friendfeed accounts, are they going to see you engaging in water-cooler drivel banter? How do you reconcile this time? Is it like smoke breaks? Are you addicted to Twitter like other people are addicted to cigarettes and need to be let out of the building for 15 minutes every hour to get their addiction on?

Focus is extremely important, because you can either move forward a little on several projects in a day or you can move forward A LOT in one or two. It might be a good idea to shut it all down and have designated periods where you enjoy “Social Media Time”. Similarly, it might be a good idea to have “email time” and “telephone time” and “respond to inquiries” time. That way, you could have specific segments of your day devoted to ‘distractions’ and the rest of it spent on knocking out the projects you’ve decided are most important or whose deadlines are approaching the soonest.

Motion

The days of meetings are OVER. Period. Over. Done. I noticed this back in my experimental year, 2008, because what people knew me for changed. When I was known for editing, I would get contacted by people who needed editing. Once I became known for Social Media projects, all of a sudden, I had information that lots of people could use for their businesses, and they began contacting me, wanting some of my time.

That’s all well & good, but when I would run through the obvious video chatting options, it was always “well… I don’t have this set up…”, regardless of how large or successful the company was. This was when I realized how far behind most companies really are.

So I went to a few IRL f2f meetings. My take-away was that A LOT OF TIME was being wasted in transit. Granted, this was before I bought my g1, but I’m way faster on my Macbook Pro than I am on my gPhone, so even today, the time is essentially wasted, or at least slowed to a crawl.

The problem with moving is that as soon as you stop thinking about your current project, it’s completely stalled. It’s stalled while you THINK about going to the meeting. It’s stalled while you get dressed. It’s stalled while you head for mass transit. It’s stalled while you wait for mass transit. It’s stalled while you’re ON mass transit (at least in NYC, because you’re not going to have your laptop out on the subway and if you did, you wouldn’t have wifi anyway). If you took the bus or a cab, traffic’s ridiculous and you either wouldn’t get there on time, or you’d spend $20 to slowly get downtown. It’s stalled while you walk to the restaurant. It’s stalled while you meet with your client or potential client. THEN, it’s stalled all the way back in reverse.

So, not only do you ‘lose’ the time that you’re physically meeting with someone, you lose literally hours surrounding that meeting. This is entirely unacceptable, when all you have to do is set a time, remain efficient until you get the chat notification on your computer and click “accept”. When the meeting’s over, you click “end” and go back to what you were doing. During that time, you have the exact same functionality as a face-to-face meeting, except you can’t shake hands when you’re signing off. I’ve had more efficient meetings with people in GREECE and ISRAEL than I’ve had with people in Manhattan, NYC, USA. :/

Obviously, these issues are multiplied in situations where travel’s required. Entire DAYS can be wasted getting from one state to another. Most of the day can be wasted moving from location to location when filming something.

This is something that needs to be worked into your budgeting. It’s not just the number of hours that you work on the project, but the number of hours that traveling to and from that project remove your ability to focus on OTHER projects.

Solutions

Maximize focus by increasing efficiency and decreasing motion. Accept projects that fit into your flow and reject projects that don’t. Make exceptions for situations that compensate you properly for the entire amount of time that they take away your ability to clear your desk of other projects.

Pay attention to and note all the time that’s devoted to a particular project… Phone time, IM time, email time, video chat time, IRL meeting time, travel time and time that you actually worked on the project. Make sure people know they’re “on the clock” and will be billed for your time before interacting with them. Get your payment up front if you don’t trust them to honor your invoice. If they don’t have your money now, they probably won’t have it later either, so don’t allow people like this to owe you money so you have to waste even MORE of your time trying to get paid.

~Bill Cammack

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