Bill Cammack

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Please keep your eye on the ball, people. Wake up. Stop letting people tell you gibberish that clouds your minds to the facts, if you’re going to hire them to work for you or even associate them with your brand.

Some people in this space are always “Talkin’ LOUD, and Sayin’ NOTHIN’!”. The funny thing about this is that since for the most part, there aren’t real professionals in ANYTHING strewn across the Social Meda Expert world, the only thing that businesses have to make their hiring decisions on is what people tell them who know only marginally more than they do to begin with.

As an example, let’s look at the video aspect of Social Media. Basically, video on the net is an extension of the fad of emailing jokes to people in the mornings. You would come to work and turn on your computer and there would be several jokes emailed to you from people that thought the jokes were funny. Eventually, this style of passing an email from person to person was termed “viral”, and the goal became to make “viral videos”. Read the rest of this entry »

My friend Chris Brogan has inadvertently caused a stir. :D

From the little I’ve read about the situation, (you can read about it yourself, on Chris’ site) basically, he accepted a $500 gift card from Kmart to write a blog post about Kmart. He was completely transparent that he was writing a sponsored blog post. As part of the deal, he also received the opportunity to give away a second $500 Kmart gift card. Here’s what Chris says he did with the money:

“I realized really quickly that I could do two good things while satisfying the project request: I could give someone else a $500 gift card for the holidays, and I could use my shopping experience to buy toys for the Toys for Tots program. (My kids kept the jackets and my boy kept some pants.)”

This kind of thing was discussed AT LENGTH exactly one year ago, when Cheryl Colan made a post questioning Steve Woolf & Zadi Diaz’s sponsorship & advertising practices with regard to their show Epic-FU in her post “What Up, New Media?”. Cheryl posted a video on that page speaking about her issues if you want the background on that 99-coment-long saga.

The point in both cases was whether bloggers or content creators can GET PAID and talk about products with integrity at the same time.

While I personally don’t see anything wrong with Chris getting paid to blog about something, I see the problems that some people are going to have with the situation. Read the rest of this entry »