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
 

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What exactly *IS* a Social Media Expert?……

Over the last year or two, the terms Social Media Expert and Social Media Consultant and Social Media Strategist blah blah blah has become a staple in people’s bios. I had SME on my Linkedin profile for a while and then I removed it.

I removed it because too many people were using it and it didn’t mean anything anymore. I decided that I’d rather have people recognize me as a video editor, which is a concretely-defined craft, instead of one of the millions of SMEs that suddenly permeated the online world.

Recently, there have been a couple of situations that have caused people in the Social Media community to band together and point fingers at people and say “You’re a bad SME!” :D Unfortunately… In order to call someone out for doing the wrong thing, you have to have a DEFINITION of a Social Media Expert to begin with.

Vaporware

The problem with nailing down a definition for SMEs is that it’s actually an umbrella term. What I mean is, if I say I’m a video editor, and then you think to yourself “What does Bill Cammack do?”, your mind returns “He edits video”. If I say I’m a SME, your mind returns “…………………” because that term by itself doesn’t mean JACK.

Now there are A LOT of ACTUAL EXPERTS whom occupy a SUBSET of SMEs. These people have actual jobs that they actually do and are actually good at. Aside from those [relatively few] people, the rest of the SME field is selling vaporware. Not by the STRICT definition, which, according to Wikipedia is:

Vaporware is a term used to describe a software or hardware product that is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge after having well exceeded the period of development time that was initially claimed or would normally be expected for the development cycle of a similar product. The term implies unwarranted optimism, an as yet unannounced abandonment of a project, or sometimes even deception; that is, it may imply that the announcer knows that product development is in too early a stage to support responsible statements about its completion date, feature set, or even feasibility. However, most vaporware would not be considered a hoax since the makers have a genuine intention to create their product, even if it ultimately never materializes. Products with unspecified release dates or long development times that outwardly demonstrate regular, verifiable progress in production are not normally labelled vaporware.

The reason I consider it vaporware is because SMEs are selling you “nothing”. They have no product. Their product is ideas. Most of them don’t actually DO *anything*. There is no TEST to become a SME. You don’t have to pass the bar. You don’t have to agree to ethics… In fact, the recent situations have brought to light that there ARE. NO. AGREED. UPON. ETHICS. when it comes to SM. You don’t have to graduate college with a degree in SM. All you have to do is add a comma and three words to your title, and *POOF*… You’re a Social Media Expert.

What SMEs are selling you happens to be valuable, though… :)

The reason why the IDEAS that SMEs sell you are valuable is because otherwise, you’d have to waste your own time and energy figuring these things out yourself… IF you’re that smart to begin with and IF your business can stand for you to take time away from putting bread on the table to research progressive concepts. This is why it’s better for YOU to pay a SME to tell you what to do. It’s better for your bottom line and time is spent more efficiently.

So this is why it’s been tough for people to define what a SME actually is. The field ranges from people with actual products and services down to vaporware salesmen and saleswomen. The only way to define the entire group is to point out the lowest common denominator across the board, which is:

A Social Media Expert is *ANYONE* that knows more than *YOU* about Social Media

That’s right. SME is a RELATIVE term, not ABSOLUTE. The reason people make money as SMEs is that they (we) pioneered the space while you were sitting in your office doing cold calls and setting up business lunches. Now, we know more than you do so you can either pay us for what we know OR use up your own staff’s time reinventing the wheel. Also… By the time you reinvent that wheel (if you’re successful at all), the game will have changed and you’ll STILL be out of position.

If you go to a conference, or even watch a video from a conference that shows the crowd, you’ll see A FEW people on stage, kickin’ knowledge, and you’ll see A LOT OF PEOPLE in the crowd, perfectly silent, amazed at what they’re hearing. The thing is that ALL of those people have SME in their titles. This is what makes them SMEs TO. YOU. :)

You can also see this in some of the work that’s produced from people hiring these so-called SMEs. You might see a video and go “Man. That was absolutely GARBAGE!”, and that video was created by someone who was an SME… ACCORDING TO whomever hired them to handle the business. That’s one of the funny things about this whole thing. Since the people doing the hiring know LESS than the SMEs they’re hiring, they can’t possibly be CRITICS of those SMEs. They can tell “This person knows more than I do”, but they can’t tell how up-to-date they are or whether the person they’re hiring is well-regarded and respected in the field. That’s why I got rid of the title… There’s no way to separate the wheat from the chaff. hahaha Somebody go make SME-RATINGS.COM! :D

Is Bill Cammack A Social Media Expert?

Odds are, compared to whomever’s reading this right now, yes I am, If you’re willing to accept the definition I’ve proposed in this post. If not, feel free to offer YOUR definition of a SME in the comments. Compared to YOU, I’m a SME because:

I have a better Google ranking than you: Bill
I’ve been doing this longer than you: May 27, 2006
I have more twitter followers than you: ~1,700
I have more facebook friends than you: ~1,100
I have TWO myspace accounts with more friends than you: ~600 each
I’ve produced more videos for the web than you: ~350 for my own site, not counting work for clients
I’ve created more social sites than you
I’ve maintained more social sites than you
I’ve been IN more videos and participated in more projects than you
I’ve done more live broadcasts and logged way more hours than you
I’ve contributed literally YEARS worth of advice & feedback on the Yahoo Videoblogging Group
I’ve studied, and learned DIRECTLY from more successful internet show creators than you

etc etc etc… All of which doesn’t amount to a hill of beans… EXCEPT for the fact that through my trial and error, I’ve amassed knowledge that you don’t have. Meanwhile, there are people that have done 100x what I’ve done in the space, and *I* consider THEM Social Media Experts. Even people that haven’t done more than I have, but are experts in CSS or Social Media Site building or making sponsorship deals or WHATEVER I haven’t specialized in are experts to me.

Original vs Derivative

Besides separating the multitude of SMEs into people with tangible skills and vaporware peddlers, you also need to separate the original from the derivative. Of course, this is impossible to do when people either fail to or refuse to reference where they got their ideas from.

Before someone came up with the courtesy of identifying in twitter posts where they saw the information, I was guilty of this myself. I would see that someone I was following made an announcement that, say, Joost released a new version. I would then take the link, make my own post on twitter or my blog and send out the announcement myself. Of course, this gives the impression [unintentionally, in this case] that *I* somehow had this knowledge and shared it. At this point, we put “via @whomever” or “RT @whomever” to give the appropriate credit to the person we received the information from.

You might be wondering “What difference does it make?”. I mean, knowledge is knowledge, right? The problem with hiring derivative SMEs is that they’re actually working of of other people’s information and don’t have ANY in-depth knowledge of the subjects they post about. For instance, going back to my Joost example… By not RTing my source, if someone contacts me and wants more information about Joost, I. can’t. give. them. any. because I’m not a part of the company and I’m not the person who directly received the information and first broadcast it. So I might LOOK like I’m “in the know” because I’m actually aggregating other people’s comments and “taking credit for their thoughts and concepts” by omission.

That will work for your company as long as you don’t need anything other than the information that’s on the surface. They can tell you to build a Ning site, but they can’t tell you WHY. They can tell you to add such and such widgets or modules, but they can’t tell you WHERE to place them or tell you anything about how the community of that particular site interacts with each other. They can tell you you need to live stream, but they don’t know how to rawk Ustream, Mogulus or BlogTV. They can tell you you need to be on youtube, but they can’t tell you how to interact and build friends and communities. They can tell you you need to have a blog, but they can’t tweak the theme themselves. They can tell you to put a mybloglog widget on your site, but they can’t tell you how to build interest inside their community for your site. They can make a video, but they can’t make the mouths sync with the audio. They can make an audio podcast, but they can’t patch in more than one guest. They can write a post, but they can’t comment intelligently about it so you never see them commenting on THEIR OWN MATERIAL!!!??? :/

Meanwhile, with ORIGINAL SMEs, who actually THINK UP their own material instead of regurgitating what they read from other people, the “live show” is the same as what you read on the blog or the microblog. The conversations are more in-depth and they don’t lose an iota of functionality if Twitter goes down (disabling their support system like a game show life-line).

Quality Assurance?

Again, some sort of sanctioned, agreed-upon rating system would help here. What would also help is some kind of concrete definition of what the E’s supposed to mean in SME. Until that happens, we will continue to have people with MINIMAL skills in Social Media running around claiming to be experts, merely because nobody’s authorized to say that they can’t. So, until the time where ANYTHING gets defined in this field, let’s stop OOOHing and AAAHing when a so-called Social Media EXPERT makes a misstep. Adding words to your title doesn’t make you ANY smarter, ANY more original or any more PROFICIENT in working on projects for clients OR maintaining your own internet presence.

You can’t add MD at the end of your name and claim to be a doctor. I mean, you CAN, but nobody will let you operate on them without seeing your degrees and reading or hearing testimonials from your references. You can’t put on a Giants jersey and get admitted into the stadium, onto the field and into the game, unless you’re an actual, currently-active member of the team. What’s the barrier of admission to calling yourself a Social Media Expert?…

As long as the SME you hire does your company good, and you see ROI in terms of your company making more money or building and maintaining a new customer/user community or less of your hours being wasted trying to figure out what someone else already knows, good for you. However, since there is ZERO QUALITY ASSURANCE in the field of Social Media “Experts”, it’s not exactly “the blind leading the blind’… but in most cases, it’s “the LESS blind leading the MORE blind”.

~Bill Cammack

Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
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Yesterday was a fantastic day. :D

I got to meet Kfir Pravda, who was here for a few hours in NYC Friday morning awaiting his connecting flight to Israel. I was familiar with Kfir from blogging as well as our involvement with the Yahoo Videoblogging Group.

We’ve had interesting discussions about the direction of online video and television, but I never figured I’d meet him in person, since I had no plans to travel to Israel.

Fortunately, our schedules and locations coincided, and I was able to enjoy the morning with Kfir, Kathryn Jones, Jeff Pulver and Keren Dagan.

One of the benefits of social media is that you can learn about people and their ideas at your own pace. If you see something interesting, you can bookmark their site or add them on a social network or follow them on a status update service. The effect is that you can gain a respect for someone without ever having met them in person, or if you’re a lurker, without them ever even knowing that you exist. I already appreciated Kfir for his ideas before I walked into “The Library” at the Regency Hotel. The intangibles of meeting him in person amplified that appreciation.

As much as you might be able to tell about someone from reading their blog posts or comments, there’s much more to be gleaned from having real-time, F2F conversation with someone. How do you greet each other? Do you have similar senses of humor? Is this person as sharp in a real-time, constantly-evolving conversation as they are in text, which they may have taken an hour to write, or in a video which they may have scripted or rehearsed many times before recording it? Is this someone with whom you would probably have been friends, had the “accident of birth” placed you in the same geographical location?

Previously, I asked “How Social is ‘Social’ Media?”. Yesterday, there was a ton of “Social” and a ton of “Media”! :D Jeff Pulver was broadcasting live to Qik utilizing his Nokia N95 and his portable hotspot (described/shown in the video below).

I recorded a Seesmic video with my MacBook Pro. So, not only did we share breakfast with each other, we shared ’sharing breakfast’ with our friends on other social media sites as well. :D

This time, social media came through BIG TIME! :D Fortunately Keren was keeping an eye on the clock, because our conversation had become three hours long with no end in sight. There really ought to be laws against having so much fun before 2pm! :D

It was a pleasure meeting Kfir & Keren. It makes such a difference when someone steps off of a blog page or computer screen and you get to experience them IRL. It was great to hang out with Kathryn & Jeff as well. I’m going to strive to sift through the QUANTITY of consistently increasing adds and contacts and have more QUALITY interactions like this one through social media. :D

Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC

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Bill_Cammack_Fast_Company_Blogs_Best_2007.jpg, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Fast Company made a collection entitled
“Best of the Fast Company Blogs: Business Trends of 2007“.

My slide, (pictured above) for my FCE Blog “DeMux” is here.

Bill Cammack:DeMux

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2008 has arrived. 2007 was a complete TRIP, for real. The playing field changed right out from under us as we were playing the game. Every other week, there was some new technology that people flocked to and either disturbed or enhanced our interactions with each other and our friends, fans and clients.

As I mentioned in my Fast Company Expert blog, I realized that as quickly as I’ve been running to keep up with technology, just as quickly, I’ve been running ahead of, or, more importantly, AWAY FROM friends of mine that aren’t anywhere near the leading edge of technology and really couldn’t give a damn about it.

That’s not good enough for 2008. Nope. :/ This year, I’m taking my technological advancement in reverse and seeing how many of my friends I can recoup from the past. There’s no reason I should have 352 followers on http://twitter.com/BillCammack, and not one of them is a friend of mine from 5 years ago.

“Social” media is supposed to be just that… SOCIAL. If that’s true, I’ll be able to reconnect with friends and acquaintances from past phases of this long-ass life! :D Hopefully, I can find out who’s doing what and who’s working where and who has several kids and who moved to another country…

‘07 was all about business. ‘08 is about WE… The PEOPLE! :D

Bill C.
Cammack Media Group, LLC
ReelSolid.TV Season 03: Delusions of Grandeur

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