Bill Cammack

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Are women funny?

My sister Liz is funny, but that’s because she’s my sister and we share superior genes. Kim will catch you out there with a slew of punchlines if you get on her nerves, FRLZ, and I think Mel’s probably pretty mentally dangerous in a snap-fest, but, overall… are women FUNNY?

I know there are female comedians, and I’ve been laughing incessantly over how I can’t tell Tina Fey apart from Sarah Palin,

but… in general… are women funny? And if so… Is there “Male Humor” and “Female Humor”?

I’m thinking about this because I watched / listened to a panel of bigwigs in the internet comedy space yesterday. After they spoke, they had a Q&A session, and my homegirl Kathryn Jones got her hands on the mic…. RUH ROHHHH!!! :D

Kathryn Jones & Bill Cammack

So, basically, Kathryn asked “Where is the content BY women and the content FOR women?” and the answer was “um, uh, um, uh, um…” hahahahaha :D Kathryn’s been asking this question ever since I met her, so as soon as I saw her get the mic, I was like AWWWWW HERE WE GO!!!!! :D

The answers made sense, business-wise, and the thing to remember is that this internet stuff is business for them, not art or entertainment. If you do “art” and nobody watches it or buys ads on your content, you get fired. If you do business, and it’s the same business over and over, you get advertising dollars and you keep your job.

Basically, they said they have a demographic and they cater to it. Business 101. If the people watching your content is GUYS, then you make more content that GUYS would like so that they tell MORE GUYS to watch your videos and you grow your community and make more money.

Rocketboom had a study done a while back, which IIRC determined that a whopping 8% of their viewership was female. Of course, that has to do with Eye Candy, but that’s a different topic. The point is… well… the point, I guess, is a question… “If 92% of your viewership is male, why cater to females at all?” or, “Why not do things that affect 92% of your viewership instead of 8%?”. That’s how I was feeling during that silent period right after Kathryn asked her question and the panelists were mentally deciding who was going to address it. :)

One panelist even said that if they were going to do female-oriented content, they would have to make a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SITE! :D This and other comments that escape me right now are what got me thinking about this topic. Is there a difference between “female humor” and “male humor”? Do women (in general) get stuff that’s “funny to women” and men get stuff that’s “funny to men”?

Assuming that’s the case… In this era of niche marketing, there’s no “space” for the combination of “male and female humor”. Doing stuff to attract women will “turn off” male viewers, taking away from “the bottom line”. The question becomes whether attempting to increase the low percentage of female viewers will decrease the number of male viewers to the point that it wasn’t worth it in the first place.

The moderator had the solution… technically… which was to bring in female content creators to make videos specifically geared towards a female audience. However, this fit EXACTLY into the other two theories, which were basically “We’re going to cater to what our demographic is” and “If we’re going to ‘add’ females, we need to make a completely different site”.

On a different topic, yet the same, in a way… I ran into the same issue with my DatingGenius blog. Being a guy, I can blog all day and all night about tricks and tips for “getting girls”. It’s easy to create content for males, because all guys want to know is how to get around the artificial obstacles women throw up which prevent / delay guys from getting laid. It’s not so easy for me to create content for women, because I have to reverse-engineer it. I think to myself “What would *I* do to them?” and then figure out their defense against me and write it. The only other way I get female-oriented material is through actual discussions with my myriad homegirls and selecting common issues that they have, like why guys catcall.

Thinking about this question in terms of my own content, it’s clear to me that if I gave a damn about having female-oriented content and I knew damned well that my mind didn’t generate this stuff on its own, I would need to bring in someone who understands “female comedy” to handle that part of my business for me. This is why it was funny to hear “um, uh, um…” when Kathryn brought up the same topic she always brings up :D , because you would think that if I’VE heard the question a million times, THEY would have heard the question a BILLION times and done something about it by now.

However… Being that internet video is about “the bottom line”, viewership, eyeballs, revenue sharing, CPM, CPC etc etc etc, women may just have to wait until they’re seen as a “market” worth throwing funds at…. haha Wait… I forgot something. :D

Assuming that it’s NOT the case that there’s “male humor” and “female humor”, there should be a crossover. You should be able to make comedy shows by females that males flock to (other than because they think she looks good and don’t give a damn what she’s saying anyway) and comedy shows by males that increase the female presence in your demographic surveys.

The whole idea may be self-fulfilling. We can’t get female numbers up higher than blah blah percent, so why bother catering to them? Meanwhile, not catering to them doesn’t increase your female viewership past those traditional percentages.

I have no idea and totally don’t care what my demos are for DatingGenius. I try to mix it up and have something for tha fellaz AND tha ladiez! Then again, DG isn’t a business. It’s something I do for kicks. If I were doing it for money, haha, I might be in the same boat with the panelists, saying essentially “Our statistics haven’t show that the sector you’re asking about is worth us wasting our production money on, due to lack of ROI”.

So maybe it doesn’t matter whether women are funny or not. Even if they WERE, they’re not going to see any light unless businesses can figure out ways to make money off of them. Seems to me like a void waiting to be filled by women that are willing to create their own content, encode, post, distribute and market it THEMSELVES and take advantage while the currently established sites get caught slippin’.

~Bill

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In professional productions, broadcast or corporate, there is a deadline. If you miss that deadline, you lose. If you don’t want to miss that deadline, you have to hire someone competent and trusted. People competent and trusted have rates. If you don’t want to pay that rate, you can hire someone else.

Since you have an air-date, there isn’t an infinite amount of time that can be spent on your project. This is another reason to hire a competent editor. You can either have a REALLY GOOD video in 8 hours or an “ok” video in 8 hours. Actually, depending on how much you skimp, you might not have a video AT ALL in 8 hours and miss your deadline.

Quality’s important when you’re doing professional work. This is because the company that hires you cares about its image and its brand. The whole point is to get people to feel like trusting the company with their business based on how they present themselves through media. Because of this, companies tend to go with post houses or editors that they know can and will make them look good, and pay those people accordingly.

Getting involved with video productions on the web is totally different. There’s no revenue stream coming from advertisers down to companies down to producers, shooters and editors. If a company’s going to make videos for the net, they have to be prepared to take a financial loss in return for increased brand recognition or social cred. They will NOT be making their money back via revenue-sharing. Unless they get tons of views, they will NOT be making their money back via sponsorships. They *have* to treat their videos as ADVERTISING and not some vehicle to make money with. They have to weigh their increase in social and business cred against the cost of their videos in order to justify a budget… ANY budget.

This is what makes it tough for professionals to feel like getting involved with the internet video business. Everyone in the space is trying to “make it”. Everyone’s clawing for that next dollar and that next passionate viewer and that next page hit to the point where it’s like a high school play. “Oh… could you run the lights for me?” “Could you dress up like a tree and stand in the background here for an hour?” “Can you pull the string that opens the curtains?” It’s REALLY incredibly unprofessional, but like I said, it needs to be, because these aren’t video production companies… They’re companies that are attempting to UTILIZE video on the net to gain something else. The bottom line is to spend as little as you can to produce videos that get you as many views as you can get that you can turn around and sell to someone that wants to advertise something.

So what you end up with is individuals or groups whose budget is 1/3 of your day rate who want you to get on board with doing a project that you know is going to take you three days. This is where TIME comes back into play. The question you have to ask yourself as a freelancer is “What else could I be doing during the time that I’m spending on this person’s project?”. Let’s see… You could be:

• Doing work at your actual day rate
• Socializing and making new business connections
• Learning new styles and concepts in editing
• Learning about new sites and apps on the web
• Reading what others have to say in their blogs about your chosen field
• Doing Trial & Error testing of new tools and concepts you’ve recently acquired
• Doing follow-up calls & emails on invoices people haven’t paid you for yet
• Posting to your blog or video blog
• Spending time with family & friends
• Enjoying your hobbies & other entertainment
• Living YOUR life

So, basically, the point of the budget is to get the producer, shooter or editor to focus on YOUR project instead of doing ANYTHING ELSE UNDER THE SUN that’s more beneficial or entertaining to him or her. Therefore, the lower your budget is, the less time that person’s willing to apply to your production.

Unfortunately, there’s a baseline to the amount of time that’s necessary for a project, so there’s a baseline to the budget. For instance… If someone gives me a tape that’s an hour long, off the bat, that’s an hour that has to be spent loading the tape onto the drive (less time if it’s coming from a digital source, like an SD card or P2 card). There are only two other ways around this expenditure of money/time. Pay someone else to be a loader and make sure they coordinate with the editor so they know how to load the tapes properly, or DO. IT. YOURSELF. Do it yourself and say to the editor, I have this drive with all the footage on it, and I need you to edit it. Saves you money right off the top.

There’s also a baseline in PLANNING that’s necessary for a video. If you give me a page with clearly marked ins and outs, video and dialogue cues, I can crunch that out in no time. If you give me NOTHING, then you have to pay for all the time it takes me to watch all your footage and make up an entire story in my head that makes you and your company look good. Even if the final product is 30 seconds long, if you gave me three hours of footage from which to select the best 30 seconds…….

Then you have to deal with changes. If the editor you hire isn’t also going to be the EP (Executive Producer), you’re going to have opinions about the video after it’s done. “Change my title”. “Move this part here”. “Take that part out”. “Change the volume”. “I don’t look good here”. This means that MORE time is taken listening to / reading your changes and more time is taken making them and then encoding the file and getting you a review copy. This is why a lot of work is done on a day rate basis instead of a package deal basis. Video is almost entirely SUBJECTIVE and people will tweak and tweak until they run out of time (air-time deadline) or money (budget / agreement). As long as they’re paying for the time they’re taking up (and to the degree that it makes it worthwile to the editor), more power to them.

This is why production companies are now swooping down into the space and creating all these web shows. Their editors are STAFFERS. They get paid REGARDLESS of how many people watch the videos, whether they go viral, whether there’s rev-share advertising on it, whether it has a shelf-life of more than three days. This works for the reasons I stated above. Production companies gain social & business cred from doing QUALITY WORK. Since they pay their editors to DO that work, their ROI is continued and increasing business from clients who want that same level of quality and consistency for their productions.

Is there a solution to this? I don’t think there will be. In fact, it’s not even actually a ‘problem’. Since most people are concerned with hits and viewership and membership, it’s not an issue for them to output GARBAGE and do that for as close to $0.00 as they can. Their reputation is based on how many eyeballs they can attract to sell to advertisers and NOT the quality of the video on their site(s). Nobody’s ever going to ask them to get their team to make a web video for them or a corporate video for them or something to go on broadcast television. Nobody’s going to ask them to work on a film… evAr. As long as the video is the means and not an end, it’s going to remain a high school production, and as long as that translates into hits, views and sales, these web companies are going to be happy.

The only decision here is whether to dress up like that tree and go stand in the background or only entertain video production proposals from individuals and groups with a focus on quality and an understanding of what it takes to make that happen.

~Bill Cammack

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