Bill Cammack

Grace, Christine, Bill, Kathryn & Annie

I’ve been popular since the first memory I have available to me, somewhere around 5 years old.. or maybe 4, if I could actually pinpoint dates.

I’ve had crews since Kindergarten. I’ve always had my close set of friends that do stuff together and then a reputation that emanated from there.

If you had never heard of me in a school that I was in, you heard of something that I did, but you didn’t know I was the one that did it, or you didn’t know that I was the catalyst behind the action.

That doesn’t matter.. I know what I’ve done, and it’s my own personal resume of action, events and achievements. As funny as it seems, being that I’m usually the #3 Bill on Google, behind Gates & Clinton, I’m not actually interested in random people knowing what my name is or being able to spot me in a crowd. I’m DEFINITELY interested in my friends being able to find me and see what I’m doing. It’s basically, if we’ve shared part of our lives together, I want you to be able to get in touch with me if you feel like it.

Having said that, there’s a certain privilege that you get used to when your reputation has preceded you for your entire life. You have nothing to prove to anyone, because everyone who was there knows what happened. Your clients know the quality of the work you did for them. Your homeboys know the fun they had hanging out with you. The chicks you messed with know what you did to them. It’s like the saying goes… ” If you don’t know… You’d better ASK SOMEBODY! :D ”

Spheres of Influence

Social Media has afforded us all the opportunity to expand our spheres of influence. I have friends I talk to on a regular basis from Germany, England, Hawaii, Canada, Israel and coast to coast across the United States. That’s all lovely, but if you don’t manage your online relationships properly, you make yourself beholding to the sites that you use to interact with your friends scattered all over the planet. I’m thinking that that’s what led to my Social Nightmare the other night. :) Read the rest of this entry »

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): Read the rest of this entry »

Roxanne & Shane, founders & owners of Bare Feet Studios & Beachwalks.tv have been consulting and in the internet industry a lot longer than I have and I was fortunate enough to receive some vital coaching from both of them concerning Time, specifically relating to being a freelancer.

I physically met Roxanne Darling two years ago in November 2006, but I knew her already from the Yahoo Videoblogging Group. We had some great and important conversations and I knew she had her finger on the pulse of what was going on in this new “New Media” world I was diving into from my Corporate and Broadcast video background.

Rox & Shane did their own show, Beachwalks.tv, but what I didn’t know at the time was that they were also very, very, VERY busy with their consulting business where they have 12 years of experience working in internet technology, streaming media, audio & video podcasting, new media creation and consulting, content management systems, event production, and public speaking.

Fast Forward to March 2007, and I accompanied Rox to NYC’s BlogHerBiz ‘07 conference. We were filming or attending discussions all day, which probably amounted to 6 or 8 hours, tops, before we shut the productions down and got ready to socialize for the rest of the evening.

When Rox turned her computer on, she said something about having 80 emails since she had last checked this morning. I remember laughing at that, thinking “ha ha, you have all this spam/bacn to get rid of, hahaha” To my shock & horror, I found out she had 80 actual legitimate BUSINESS emails, with more coming in.

At the time, I was probably only getting 30 emails a day… like, meaning in a 24-hour period… and those were mostly garbage. There was something about Rox’s email situation that told me to pay attention, because I was looking at my future. We headed to the socializing events with both of us knowing that by the time she returned from having a good time (and, less importantly, business networking at the same time), even MORE email would be stacking up… Read the rest of this entry »