One of the things I find laughable about Social Media is that it’s sold to people that don’t know anything about Social Media.

This makes it possible for people who are ABSOLUTE GARBAGE at creating and maintaining their own online presence to make money telling other people how THEY should represent themselves or their companies online.

I’m not the type of person to knock the next man’s hustle, but that’s exactly what it is.. A HUSTLE. Smoke & Mirrors.

There are LOTS of people who are legitimate and present great solutions to their clients, but some people are just embarrassingly horrible at Social Media and still they’re heralded as gurus amongst their fans.

Presence Management

I was walking with a friend the other day and we were across the street from a store. I pointed the store out to her and she read the name of it from the letters that spanned the top of the storefront. I balked when she said the name, because something sounded odd to me. I knew it wasn’t her accent, so I looked at the store again and told her what the real name was…

The reason I had to tell her the name was that I had seen the store when it first opened and she was seeing it now for the first time in life. Between now and then, A. LETTER. HAD. FALLEN. OFF. OF. THE. BUILDING. AND. THE. OWNER. DIDN’T. HAVE. THE. PRIDE. IN. HIS/HER. OWN. STORE. TO. REPLACE. IT.!!! :/

There was no way my friend could have correctly pronounced the name without the missing letter. There was also no way she could have known the letter was missing from that distance. This is someone’s STORE that they want you to ENTER and BUY items from. That letter has been missing from that sign FOR YEARS, and regardless of how much income the owner receives, he or she refuses to replace the letter and restore the sign to its original quality. The NAME of the store!… The owner doesn’t care about the public’s perception of the store that they’re hoping to make money from.

This is what I see when I go to certain so-called Social Media Experts’s sites. Garbage. Eyesores. They have the nerve to tell you that they’re going to help *YOU* with your internet presence when their own presence is entirely unacceptable.

Conversion Of Cred

What’s laughable about this is that people actually need a consultant to tell them which consultants are doing the right thing. Since I knew what the sign was SUPPOSED TO SAY, I was able to instruct my friend as to what the store was actually called. Similarly, people approach supposed SMEs for help, consulting and guidance and they don’t realize that the people they’re hiring aren’t any good, but just happen to suck a little less than they do. They would be better off asking someone who they TRUST to point them in the right direction instead of hiring someone based on their number of Twitter followers or some other useless statistic that’s held up as an indicator of proficiency in Social Media.

It’s supposed to be a big deal and SO GOOD for your company if you have a bunch of Twitter followers. SO GOOD for your company if you have a bunch of Facebook fans. As of this week, SO GOOD if you have a bunch of followers on Google Buzz. The problem is that a lot of these people don’t tell you what you’re supposed to DO with your bunch of followers.. because they don’t know themselves. O_o

These SMEs have all these people supposedly in their pocket, yet they can’t convert them into ANYTHING useful. They don’t convert into video views. They don’t convert into blog post hits (CPM). They don’t convert into live stream audiences. They don’t convert into click-throughs (CPC). They don’t convert into actions (CPA). They don’t convert into sales (CPS). They don’t even convert into people that might sit down and have a beer with you when you come to their town.

The reason they can’t convert is that they have no idea what they’re doing with Social Media because they spend all their time name-dropping, reading about new technology, reading other people’s OPINIONS about new technology, blabbering about nothing on microblogging sites and shilling for companies while spending No. Time. In. The. Trenches. None. The same sites they’re telling you to be a part of?.. They’re not on them themselves. They don’t have any time to USE the technology because they spend all their time trying to make money with Social Media by telling YOU to do what THEY’RE NOT EVEN DOING! O_o

Do As I Say…

That person that told you to get on Ustream or BlogTV or Qik or Livestream or Tinychat or Tokbox?.. When was the last time you saw THEM do a live show? Usually Never. That person that told you you needed to be on Blip or YouTube or Vimeo?.. What have you seen THEM do with internet video? Usually Nothing. That person that told you they were going to build a website for you?.. What does THEIR website look like? Their business site? Their personal site?

That person that told you to get on Facebook?.. How often do you see THEM on Facebook? Did you notice that everything you see with their name on it has been AUTOMATICALLY. REPOSTED. FROM. TWITTER. and that they’re not actually on Facebook at all, except as another repository for followers? Have you noticed that they never comment on or even click “LIKE” on anything you or anybody else you know ever wrote? Have you noticed that they never respond to any Facebook responses they received from their auto-posted material? How is that a Facebook presence? How is that helping THEM? What do they know about Facebook that they’re going to turn around and instruct YOU to create an account there?

That person that told you to get on Twitter or Jaiku or Pownce or Buzz? What are THEY contributing to their community when they post? Usually Nothing.. Regurgitating links to other people’s posts or other people’s ideas with no ORIGINAL CONTENT whatsoever. How is it humanly possible that they’re following hundreds of thousands of people when spending only one second per update would mean they can only read 3,600 posts in an hour, FORGET ABOUT thinking about that post and/or typing a response. Do these people spend an hour a day reading Twitter? Four hours? Eight? When do they do their actual work then?

What does the discussion look like that follows what they write? Who cares enough to chime in? Do the commenters know anything about the topic, or are they just fanbois going “ME TOO!.. ME TOO!”? Who’s even paying attention to their posts? How many of their “followers” represent currently active Twitter accounts? What’s been the tangible result of any “Call To Action” they’ve ever made on Twitter? How many people watched their video? How many people arrived to watch their live stream?

That person that told you you need a blog?.. What does THEIR blog look like? Original content? Paraphrasing stuff they just read on Mashable?

What do their comments look like? Is the blogger even PRESENT in his or her own comment stream? O_o Do they even READ the comments they get on their posts? Do they respond intelligently or AT ALL?

Do they even CARE whether anyone comments on their page, or are they just interested in getting the retweets, shares and reblogs?

How much time do they spend interacting with their own community?.. The people that cared enough to read their blog and then bless them by joining in the conversation?

Do they even bother to check whether the comments they’re getting are from real people? How many times have you gone to a blog and there are 13 comments on the thread and 11 of them are obvious spam? Do you have your system set up like mine, where I get an email every single time someone posts a comment on my blog? Are you getting the emails from your blog, or are you just not reading them? Do you care what your blog looks like? Are you planning to fix the sign on the front? If not, you’re not the right person for SOMEONE ELSE to hire for Social Media work, are you?

Also.. If you’re a blogger and happen to be illiterate, instead of hiring someone to make you a custom theme and incorporate fancy pictures of yourself, hire a proofreader. I know this is slightly problematic because if you don’t know the difference between “there”, “their”, and “they’re”, you can’t very well tell that you need HELP in order to know that you should hire someone to fix that for you before you announce your level of education to the world.

Educated Decisions

The first thing you want to do if someone wants you to pay them to do ANYTHING is see examples of their work. If they’re going to paint, you want to see something they painted that’s similar to the job you want done. Social Media offers you the double-opportunity to judge someone’s potential worth to your company by a) seeing what they’ve done for others and more importantly, b) what they’ve done for themselves.

If you’re telling me that your company creates websites and YOUR website is garbage, you’re a clown. If you’re telling me you’re a video editor and there’s no tangible evidence that you ever edited anything for anybody in this lifetime, you’re a clown. If you’re telling me that you can bring crowds to your clients’ shows and you can’t bring crowds to your own live streams, you’re a clown.

The second thing you want to do when someone offers you a Social Media strategy is ask them “WHY?”.

WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? Keep asking them that until you’re satisfied with the answer. If you know you’re not smart enough to know what the answer should be, hire a consultant to help you find the right Social Media group to hire for your project. Too many people ask me uneducated or perhaps MISeducated questions like “How much traffic will I get when we make this site?” and “How many people can I count on to watch my video if I put it on YouTube?” because people are running around pumping it up like you win some kind of prize just for creating a presence in the space.

What should I do? Make a Twitter account. Why? So people can follow you. Why? So you can look popular and sought-after, speak to people and listen to what they say back to you. What people? Any people. Why would I want to talk to random people about my business? So you can make them aware of your business and then advertise your goods & services to them. How do I specifically advertise to Twitter people local to me who need my Elite Lawn Mowing Services? You have to advertise to everyone and hope word gets around. For that, why don’t I spend my money on flyers and hand them out around my town? Good idea.

Time, Money, Energy, Resources

Social Media is a vehicle. It’s an opportunity for you to express yourself to people that otherwise would never have heard of you or your ideas or your business.

What they don’t tell you is that HAVING a presence isn’t enough. You have to MAINTAIN your presence.

If you’re going to make a blog, you have to POST CONTENT on your blog. Photo set? Post photos. Social Media community (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Ning…)? Get involved.

You can spend as much money as you want on a car, and it won’t be too useful to you or your company without a driver. That driver has to be YOU or someone you hire to.. Oh… I forgot the ever-useful INTERN! :D

It’s another Social Media staple to get interns to do all the work for your supposedly-professional company. If you hire interns to do the work, your company will output intern-quality work. If you don’t hire video editors to edit video, you get what you pay for. If you don’t hire illustrators to customize your website, you get what you pay for.

Anyway… No. You’re not going to get any traffic just by having a website created for you. You’re not going to get any views just by uploading a video to YouTube. You have to create the presence, create the content, properly post the content, advertise the content, start the conversation and then maintain the conversation while simultaneously creating new content, beginning the cycle again before the first cycle ends.

Social Media is extremely time-consuming. It’s not “Set it and forget it”. SOMEBODY’S got to maintain it, keeping your internet presence fresh and relevant. A Social Media strategy doesn’t END with creation any more than the Indy 500 ends when a driver’s mechanics BUILD his car. Don’t let these people gas your head up that if you pay them to create accounts for you on Facebook, Ustream, Twitter and YouTube, your company’s going to be on the road to the riches.

Ask them WHY?… What’s going to happen AFTER you create your accounts? What’s necessary as far as time, money & resources to MAINTAIN your internet presence? If they can’t tell you that, either hire someone different to handle the Social Media for your company or get ready for the letters to fall off your store.

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The point I was leading towards in “Are You Still Relevant? [Part 1 of 2]“ is that *your* perception of yourself isn’t necessarily the same as anyone else’s. Also, if a lot of people perceive you in a certain fashion, that doesn’t make it the truth.

I will attempt to clarify, hahaha :D

Technology is changing. The way people relate to each other is changing. Back in the day, people used to send letters by Pony Express or on the train or on ships that would travel from America to Europe. Eventually, they were using telegraphs & telephones. Eventually portable phones. Eventually pagers, then text messaging and now smartphones. People used DOS, then Windows, then Mac OS. People programmed with ADA, C++, Visual Basic…..

Just because you composed incredible letters that you mailed to your loved one doesn’t mean you can kick that live, today over the phone. Just because you were a genius at database programming 15 years ago doesn’t mean you know A SINGLE THING about Twitter. Just because I was involved in live streaming three years ago doesn’t mean I know anything about it TODAY:

Jonny Goldstein & Bre Pettis – October, 2006

The way I’ve seen things happen… A LOT, in Social Media is that someone does ONE THING… *EVAR* IN LIFE, and from that point on, they’re declared relevant. Their opinions on totally unrelated things are heralded because they invented something ONCE, or they wrote ONE really popular blog post or book or they worked for ONE company that everyone was jocking at the time. After that, there’s no need to look at that person’s track record.. It’s like they made it into the hall of fame.

The difference with the hall of fame, like, in Baseball or Football is that you don’t ask hall-of-famers to coach teams AFTER they’re inducted. Why is that? Because the systems their teams used and that they individually excelled at… are OVER. There are new formations, new plays, new philosophies, there’s new equipment, players are faster and stronger… The ONLY way a hall-of-famer would be selected to coach a current team is if he had proven that he understands and mentally excels in the workings of the CURRENT environment.

The way I see it.. For those of us who care about such things, we have a new opportunity every single day to reestablish our relevance in our chosen fields of knowledge or expertise. Actually, I suppose there are two sorts of relevance. There’s the relevance in which you’re like a textbook… You’re still a relevant source of information about Pascal programming…. For whatever THAT’S worth….. Then there would be relevance to current concepts or technologies. What I’m saying is that the hall-of-famers DEFINITELY deserve all the props for their past achievements! No doubt. A lot of people act like relevance in one area is transferrable to relevance in another and tend to follow people as authorities on things that they really aren’t.

The reason I started out with part 1 of this article is that my “reaching back” situation helped me to recognize the lack of transferral of relevance over time. There are at least two reasons why it’s necessary for me to reestablish relevance with people I knew a long time ago, when we were kids.

1. Time has passed and they may not even remember ever having spent time with me.

2. “The Game” has changed immensely for all of us since we were kids. Whatever relevance I *HAD* in that environment isn’t applicable to our lives in their current formats.

This is why I ask(ed) the question “Are you still relevant?”. I don’t mean relevant to yourself or relevant to the people you interact with right now. The question is, how long do your props last? How long will people give you credit for whatever you did in the past? How long can you ride on past glory? How long will people still say “There goes whomever!” if you’re not striving to stay on top of new technologies, concepts and philosophies? Have you let yourself get out-of-date? If so, what’s your plan on rectifying that? Do you have one? Do you care?

On the flip side of that, what are the credentials of the people that you “follow” or consider to be authorities in their field? What are the credentials of the “experts” that you hire to work on your projects or help your company excel? The dating columns you read? What do the writers really know about people or relationships? Have you checked into any of this, or did you take someone else’s word that this person knows what they’re talking about and subsequently passed that potentially erroneous information on to your own friends and followers?

Are you accepting advice from people who were good at Atari 2600 games about XBOX games?… Are you accepting advice from guys that don’t know any women about women?… Are you asking gals that get played left and right what their advice is about men?… Are you relying on someone with NO RECORD WHATSOEVER of being a video producer or editor to complete your project professionally and on time?… Are you relying on someone with no record whatsoever of increasing a company’s ROI, efficiency or visibility to lead your company to Social Media glory?…..

Good Luck with that. ;)

~ Bill Cammack

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

Related Posts

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I was talking with my friend Remo last night and he asked me about Twitter. I’ve been on Twitter for over two years at this point. I posted about it back in June 2007 [link].

At some point, he asked me about its usefulness. As I travelled back mentally to when I first joined, I reconnected with the essence of Twitter’s usefulness to me.

At the time I became aware of Twitter, we were all hanging out on the Yahoo Videoblogging Group. South by SouthWest 2007 was in effect, and I got to follow along in essentially real-time as my friends couldn’t get cabs from one party to the next. From my command centre, I could keep up with things going on hundreds of miles away. Actually, I probably knew more than the people ‘on the ground’ did.

The value of Twitter for me was an acceleration of the interaction that was going on in the Videoblogging Group. Instead of sending a post, which was essentially an email, to a bunch of people and then waiting for them to be notified of it, read it, think about it, respond to it and then having to check back to see if I got an answer.. Suddenly, I could get responses to my queries immediately, if not sooner. Everybody that I was following was from our group, so everything I read was relevant and interesting to me, either on an educational or social level.

Flip Da Script

As we discussed the “right & proper” ways to utilize twitter, two camps evolved: “Follow people you want to hear from” and “Follow everyone that follows you [minus spammers]“. I basically joined the second camp. This had two important effects. My timeline had too many entries for me to follow because there were too many updates in each refresh, and the Twitter posts I was looking at were decreasingly relevant to anything at all. This meant that I had to search through MORE posts to find LESS relevant material, because there were only 10 pages of Twitter “archives” you could look through at the time.

So I made a second account, specifically to follow local NYC people. That was all well and good until everyone I was following stopped using twitter to announce where they were going. This was because there were no Twitter groups, so everything you said was available to whomever was following you, whether you wanted them to show up where you were hanging out or not.

Spammers

Meanwhile, people started spamming Twitter with “follows”. Some users would follow everyone in creation, hoping for a “follow back”. This was obvious, because the number of people they were following would be twice the number of people that were following them, or worse. These people continued to play the numbers game until they had spammed enough people to look like people actually cared what they were talking about. In reality, the people they spammed were happy to have someone follow them and followed back either out of courtesy or because they were in that second camp that I was in at the time of following people that followed you.

Useless

This is why your number of twitter followers doesn’t mean ISH! :D

You are being followed by people that have no idea what you do. You are being followed by people that have ZERO relevant information to contribute to your education or entertainment. You are being followed by people that flood the potentially relevant information off of your screen before you can possibly read, think about and react to it.

This is why people who claim to be following 60,000 people are full of ISH. I *guarantee* you that they are, because my timeline updates too quickly while I’m currently following 705 people. Even my group that I made specifically to listen to on TweetDeck moves too quickly, and that’s probably only 200 people.

I guarantee you it’s impossible for people to follow tens of thousands of people on Twitter, for two reasons. Updates will force most of those posts off the bottom of the queue before you even get the chance to see them and the time that it would take to read all of those posts, even if you could, would require you to sit in front of Twitter all day, reading irrelevant information and parsing it for something you could use. These people would literally do nothing else all day other than sit on Twitter, aggregate other people’s ideas and regurgitate them to their own followers.

Defunct Accounts

You can go on Twitter Karma and see your list of followers sorted by date of most recent update. At the time that I checked, when I was following ~2,400 people, there were quite a few that hadn’t updated in a full calendar year. Granted.. Some of those people may have blocked their data from being generally accessible, but upon random sampling of these accounts, they had literally updated 200 times or fewer and never used that account again. Also, that doesn’t mean that they’re not listening. It just means that they’re not sharing. It might also indicate that they’re currently using a different account.

Either way, the point is that one of your “followers” most likely doesn’t exist. They’re either not listening to you AT. ALL., or if they’re listening, they’re not responding or RTing (re-tweeting). I would estimate that around 200 out of my 2,400 followers at the time hadn’t updated in 2009, meaning at least for three months. Feel free to speculate about the numbers of defunct accounts for people that have 24,000 followers and 240,000 followers…

Evidence

If you’d like to check what your actual reach is as far as people following you on Twitter, start asking questions. See how many answers you get. Announce a live broadcast… See how many of your tens of thousands of followers tune in. Recently, I’ve seen popular Twitterers doing trivia contests, asking questions and handing out prizes. DO SOMETHING that demonstrates that that number on your Twitter home page actually translates to something tangible and something that isn’t an horrifically-low percentage of the people that have “subscribed to your channel”.

While you’re at it, ask a question that’s relevant to something useful to YOU. Ask about digital video data rates. Ask about replacement blades for your lawn mower. Ask about ANYTHING that’s not some generic audience participation exercise and see how useful your thousands upon thousands of Twitter followers are.

Influence

Having said all that.. Even if there are 20,000 defunct accounts out of 240,000, that still leaves 220,000 active accounts :D It’s possible that you have influence over 220,000 people that have no particular skill set or purchasing power. Of course, this has to be multiplied by the number of people that will RT what you posted.

In a generic sense, this is much better than my personal 2,381 followers (which is probably more like 1,000 followers). You are 100 times as likely to reach out to someone who will accept what you’re offering them.

Unfortunately, when you’re just some idiot that doesn’t specifically have anything of import to say, your followers are a function of that. This needs to be calculated into “influence”. If people follow you because you have a sexy avatar, for instance, that’s not going to be too useful to most advertisers. It’s not that you’re an authority on ANYTHING, so people aren’t going to be very likely to take your product endorsements to heart and actually buy the product.

Similarly, even if you ARE an authority on something, like video editing, that doesn’t mean that your influence is useful at all outside of that realm. In fact, your number of followers isn’t even an indication of the number of people that see you as an authority in video editing, because they might have followed you for other reasons.

Tools & Platforms

Ultimately, Twitter is a tool which affords you the opportunity to broadcast to other people what you know and what you do. If you don’t KNOW anything and you don’t DO anything, the number of twitter followers you have is completely meaningless. All these follow-back schemes are useless, because there’s no point in having 15,000 people follow you who are just as clueless as you are. Nobody’s going to pay you to advertise to your “Clueless Nation’. Nobody’s going to see you as an authority and hire you to do something because you have X amount of Twitter followers.

Your best bet is to stop crying about how many followers you have or don’t have and demonstrate originality and usefulness to the community and get your props the old fashioned way…

EARN IT!

~ Bill Cammack

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

Related Posts

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There’s a lot of talk these days about each of us having a “Personal Brand”. Some consider this to be vaporware, while others take the concept rather seriously.

A few months ago, I was asked something to the effect of “Doesn’t having a personal brand limit you?”, to which, my reply at the time was basically that your personal brand is as limiting as your personal abilities. In other words, if you can’t do very much, your personal brand isn’t going to be very valuable. Your name won’t ring any bells. People won’t associate ANYTHING with your “brand”.

For instance, there is no such thing as a “Frisbee”. Frisbee is a BRAND NAME that was made up and applied to the actual item, which is a Flying Disc. There are lots of companies that make flying discs, but we call every single flying disc in existence a Frisbee. THAT’S “Your name ringing bells”.

Same thing for “Band Aid”… No such thing. It’s an Adhesive Bandage. However, we call every single adhesive bandage in existence a Band Aid. I’ve never asked ANYONE for an adhesive bandage in my entire life.

So, think about what people associate with YOUR name… YOUR “personal brand”. Even if you haven’t tried to cultivate one, you have one. It’s merely a question of how weak or strong it is. Interestingly enough, you don’t even necessarily KNOW what your own personal brand actually is, because you might attempt to cultivate one thing, but what people take away from your internet presence is something entirely different.

At this point, I think the strongest aspect of my personal brand is “Knows a lot of chicks”.

Grace, Christine, Bill, Kathryn & Annie

This is kind of funny, because I didn’t set out to brand that. It just so happens that I DO know literally hundreds of women and I also happen to take a lot of pictures of myself with them (the ladies I’m still local to / in contact with).

To a lesser degree, I’m known for my dating blog. This was more calculated than the picture-thing, because I write my blog so other people can read it… and then laugh, or cry, or get upset at somebody, or learn something…

To a STILL lesser degree, I’m known a connector. I utilize my 406 Linkedin connections to introduce people to others so they can make business deals. Also, there’s no telling how many people I’ve introduced to other people IRL, because I typically go to parties where I know ~70 people on the Facebook “definite” list.

To a MUCH lesser degree, I’m known for being an Emmy Award-winning Video Editor. I’m known for being an MIT graduate. I’m probably known for drinking a lot of beer.

For all of these reasons and more, I’m still a top-10 Google search result for the word “Bill” (or ‘bill’), and have been for more than a year now.

The reason I bring all this stuff up isn’t because I’m personally impressed with any of it. Actually, I’m completely BORED with it and I’m looking for a new challenge. The point is that through my daily utilization of Social Media, I’ve crafted several options for ways that people can perceive me. Some of those were on purpose, and some of them (interestingly enough, my STRONGEST brands) were completely by accident, being that I didn’t attempt to make myself known for these things, but it’s what people latched onto, discuss amongst each other and recognize me for the most.

This is what got me thinking about what people are doing (or not doing) with their own personal brands. When I meet people and they mostly say “I recognize you from all your pictures!” as opposed to “I’ve seen your video editing work… Excellent!”, something’s jacked up about my personal brand, right?… Or is it?

When someone that knows me for my dating blog finds out from someone that walks up to us at a party that I’m an accomplished video editor and they’re completely shocked to learn this after hanging out with me for months on the circuit, that’s poor “personal branding”, isn’t it? :)

I think it all depends on “who you are” vs “what you do”.

Interestingly enough, my personal brand is perfectly accurate for the person that I am. It’s not good for the work that I do, but was that ever my real goal? Was my goal to present myself as a video editor?

It was, when I first started billcammack.com, because all I needed for my website to do was hold my demo reel and resume for me so I didn’t have to bring actual tapes with me to meet new clients.

I get my work through word of mouth, so when people contacted me, I could just point them to my site and if they liked what they saw, they could hire me.

That’s all well and good, except if I had branded myself (intentionally or otherwise) as a video editor, that’s how people would approach me, which would be excellent for business, and horrible for socializing. The reason I say my personal brand is perfect for me is that I would much rather hang out with chicks and drink beer than edit your video for you. I would much rather blog about dating than Social Media. It turns out that my internet presence is actually a function of the things I enjoy doing.. which makes perfect sense. The more I enjoy things, the more often I do them and the more likely they are to show up in my media, whether that’s on my own site, Facebook, Twitter, wherever.

Once I figured out that I liked and was/am extremely comfortable with my own personal brand, I started thinking about other people’s brands. Specifically, I started thinking about people who trade in their PERSONAL brands to be a shill for a company.. even if it’s their own company:

Shill (intransitive verb)

1. to act as a shill
2. to act as a spokesperson or promoter [the eminent Shakespearean producer…is now shilling for a brokerage house — Andy Rooney]

It’s extremely easy to spot someone shilling. They’re normally telling you something you never asked them about, and it’s always about the same company or topic.

Basically, their goal is to leverage your association with them in order to draw your attention, and hopefully clicks, and hopefully sales, to a company’s products or services. In the short term, this is good for their pockets. Long-term, they become “that guy” or “that gal”. You know… The guy that every time you see him, he’s going to try to sell you something. That gal that everything she says or does is a commercial. It’ll be interesting to see down the line how that works out for people who do this.

What happens when the company you’re currently shilling for goes under or lays you off? Who are you now? What do you have to say for yourself now? Who wants to hear what you have to say now?

What happens when the focus of attention goes somewhere else, like how it used to be on forums and newsgroups, but now it’s on Twitter and Facebook. When you sign up for that new app/site, who’s going to “friend you” so that you can try to sell them stuff on this new site? Who’s going to avoid you because you have NOTHING to contribute to their lives other than posts with ulterior motives and affiliate links?

What happens when you meet people IRL and they see you as the spokesperson for some company, as opposed to an unique individual with something interesting to say?

What happens when you consecutively shill for sites that consecutively FAIL because you have no talent whatsoever, yet people keep hiring you because you SHILL, SO, MUCH, that you have large numbers of people that follow you wherever you go and never tell you that your media SUCKS and that you need to stick to audio or text-blogging?

In the long run, what’s it worth to shill away your personal brand? I guess it depends on what you were going to do with it otherwise. What would your brand be if it you weren’t Twittering about your business all day, every day? How would people perceive you? How would your IRL interactions be different?

Some people avoid this by intelligently having several accounts. Have one for your dot-com and have one for your personal use. This way, when you stop selling widgets and start selling water coolers, you don’t lose your entire readership, because they were only interested in your for your widget-based posts.

IRL Shilling is just as bad for your image, if not worse. If every time someone runs into you they have to hear “Vote for my X” or “Can you get me some business in Y” or “Have you been to Z.com to see the latest [item you never asked them about]“, those people are going to start avoiding you… IRL, *AND* online.

In these times, when people are getting laid off left and right, Social Capital is becoming increasingly important, as well as critical for viability & longevity. If you get fired from your widget-sales job, you want the people you’ve been in contact with to rally beside you to help you find gainful employment.

If people see you merely as an agent of the company, that’s not going to happen. If your only-good-for-widget-sales lifestream becomes a please-find-me-a-job stream, people are going to tune out, because nobody cares about you.

Nobody cares about you because you didn’t care about yourself while you were shilling away your Social Capital. Think about it.

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack
 

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For a couple of months, I billed myself as a “Social Media Expert”, which I am. :D

I removed that title because in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t say anything specific or useful about me. It was mostly “Keeping up with the Joneses”. I would look at people billing themselves as SMEs and go “um… if THAT PERSON’S an expert, I’m FOR DAMNED SURE an expert!” hahahaha :D

I stopped thinking about it a long time ago, but today, I read an interesting article by Jeremy Pepper, entitled “Taking Stock – Can Social Media Do What It Claims?” that’s briefly rekindled my interest in the topic. Amongst some other interesting things, Jeremy writes:

“JP: … While people are glomming onto social media, there seems to be very little being done in the circular nature of the social media consultants.

You don’t hear/read about campaigns that are helping change the world. You don’t hear/read about campaigns that are being done with the large agencies or consultants that are trying to help make the world a better place.

You read social media people talking about social media … and that seems to be it. It’s the self-fulfilling prophecy of Valleywag’s 250. And, I have written about this before, and nothing much changes.”

Jeremy then goes on to name a few Echo Chamber Bigwigs and he gives some suggestions for useful things they might do with their massive numbers of followers on various social media sites.

As I looked at his list and what he was suggesting that these people do, I was reminded of my post from four months ago, entitled “Content / Production Value / Popularity”. As a content creator, I’ve been very interested in how people acquire followings and what they utilize their fan base for. By March 2008, when I wrote C/Pv/P it was clear to me “what’s going on around here”. :D

And, yes…. This is getting back to the point of what this has to do with Jeremy’s post. :D

What’s going on around here is that people are trying to sell stuff. Period. There are two ways to do this, but they end up at the same destination. The first way is to create content that people like and enjoy and pass on to their friends, who then become viewers and hopefully PASSIONATE viewers and carry the flag for you to their towns, cities and countries all over the world. If you look at the videos from when DiggNation came to NYC and there were lines all up, down and around the block of nothing but excited FANS, FANS, and more FANS, that’s a prime example.

The other way to “sell stuff” is to base your show or site around someone that comes with a pre-fab fan base. If you don’t understand this, it’s often confusing when you see people with LESS TALENT brought on board when there are people with obviously WAY MORE TALENT available for the project. For instance, let’s say someone’s a way better musician/producer than I am, but they don’t have any social media props. If you put the two of us up for the same project (read “selling stuff” inside the Echo Chamber), you can either HOPE that people will like his/her music, and it will catch on, OR you can go with what you know, which is that I currently have 993 Twitter followers, 734 Facebook “friends”, 636 Myspace friends, etc, etc, and Google loves to Nom Nom on everything that I do, so you can find me at the top of the search results for Bill (#5 of 388,000,000), NYC dating (#7 of 309,000), video editor resume (#2 of 802,000) and Emmy Award Editor (#1 for my resume and #2 for my Indy Mogul episode, out of 612,000 English pages).

So when you look at it for what it is, what counts inside the Echo Chamber (aka the Fishbowl) is “reach”, or perhaps how much of a built-in marketing machine the person brings to the table and *NOT*…. I repeat… *NOT* their ability to make anything that remotely resembles a professionally produced or edited video. You do NOT have to have ANY talent as an on-air personality… you have to have a fan base. You do NOT have to have a track record of well-done videos… you have to have a fan base. You do NOT have to look good COUGHunlessyou’reafemaleCOUGH… you have to have a fan base.

This is one of the reasons the term “famous for nothing” is tossed around so much. If you ask “do you know XYZ?” or “have you heard of XYZ”, the answer will be “yes”. If you ask what that person does, you’ll see perplexed facial expressions and the scratching of heads. :D Basically, these people are popular NOW, and unless you were around back in the day when they initially developed their fan base, you can’t figure out WHY anybody would care what they said about ANYTHING outside of whatever their ultra-narrow niche of expertise is…. whatever that might be. This leads me to my point about Jeremy’s article…

There is a difference between the ability to attract attention and the ability to influence those whose attention you’ve attracted.

Lindsey Chen and I dropped a post two days ago, and two hours after I pressed “publish”, the visitor map for that one article looked like this:

Map for Top 10 Mistakes Guys Make When Trying To Get A Girl

What this means is that we wrote something that people were interested in reading.
What this does NOT mean is that we have any influence over anyone who read it.

Is it POSSIBLE that people might listen to what we have to say on topics other than dating? Yes. However, the fact that we have X amount of “eyeballs” doesn’t necessarily translate to the ability to mobilize ANY of those people in the direction of a cause. This is what makes it seem like social media is full of hot air. :D

What we’re developing is “cred”. The important question is “what area/field are we developing ‘cred’ IN?” If you’re famous for asking people questions, why should anyone care what YOU have to say? If you’re famous for being attractive… why should anyone care what YOU have to say? If you’re famous because your parents are famous? If you’re famous because you did a cool video one time? If you’re famous because you have a lot of subscribers or video views on YouTube?

Who cares?

That’s what happens when people aren’t following you for YOU, and they’re following you because of what they’re getting out of following you. If you get advance information about gadgets, people are going to follow you… Not because they LIKE you, but because THEY want to find out what YOU found out. If you made a bunch of money and sold a startup, that’s great for you! :D and congrats!… but people are going to follow you to see if THEY can learn what YOU learned and do the same thing YOU did. It doesn’t mean they like you or care what you have to say. I’m sure that most people that hit my site for dating advice don’t even read the poster’s name, or if they read it, even remember it. :)

Having said that… Along the lines of Jeremy’s question and request: “show that social media can change the world”, I do remember a situation where Chris Brogan rallied people to support Amanda Gravel in an event she put on to support someone. I’ve also seen musicians publicized and supported via social media. Very recently, Whitney Hess wrote a heartfelt post about someone she knew who died. Jay & Ryanne have traveled to REMOTE PARTS OF THE WORLD to teach people who never would have found out about it about blogging, internet connectivity and videoblogging.

So.. I’m not saying it’s impossible. It’s definitely worth a try to utilize social media for something other than publicizing ourselves, :) However, the “cred” necessary for becoming known as an authority that people can look up to to point out worthwhile causes is NOT being built up through demonstrating one’s proficiency at Public Relations. You can talk about business and social media ALL DAY, and if you turn around and don’t pay people WHAT YOU OWE THEM and ON TIME, your “cred” is ZERO. You can get interviews with “important people” ALL DAY, and if the word in the street is that you treat your fans and followers like garbage, your “cred” is ZERO. You can sell as many businesses as you want, and if nothing you have to say RIGHT NOW is original, current and relevant… your “cred” is ZERO.

So, if you’re looking for people to announce when they finally make an iPhone with the camera on the correct side so we can do video iChat with it, you’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking for people that can tell you what tools and sites to use to enhance the productivity of your company… you’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking for what Jeremy calls “a higher value to social media, where we can make people’s lives better and really rally people to help others”, I’m sure there are people that are using social media for exactly that purpose, like maybe Roxanne Darling, but for the most part… “Ain’t that type of party”.

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