Bill Cammack

I joined Twitter a little over two years ago, around the time of SXSW 2007. I was already about a year behind its launch. I wrote Twitter Has “Ruined” My Life in June 2007. This picture is on that post, and includes Mike, Justin, Anil, Kenyatta, Debbie, Grace, Eric & myself and was taken by Jared. I fully expect to see 5 if not 6 of these same people later today at an IRL get-together.. two years later:

Photo Credit: Jared Klett

The reason I joined Twitter is the same reason I joined any Social Media site. There were people that I ALREADY KNEW that started using a new site, app or tool and I wanted to be involved in this new (and hopefully BETTER and INNOVATIVE) way to contact them or keep up with what they’re doing. What that did was give Twitter a particular flavor for me. It was the place where I went to receive up-to-the-minute information about people that I was keeping in contact with anyway via newsgroups or forums or email or their blogs or whatever. Read the rest of this entry »

I think I’m starting to see why people think it’s important to gain Twitter followers. They think you can use Twitter in ways that you actually can’t. I touched on this in “Shilling Away Your Social Capital”, but I think we need to think about this a little more deeply.

Stop Begging

Begging on Twitter will net you diminished returns, and quickly. First of all, if you’re begging people to come to your site, event or live stream, that means NOBODY’S THERE to begin with. That’s YOUR fault. You didn’t pub it correctly. You didn’t let people know what was happening. You didn’t inform them WHY they should show up, which is the most important thing.

If nobody showed up to your live stream, take that as a hint that nobody cares. Instead of making yourself look even worse by begging and then STILL nobody shows up, accept the situation and roll with it. Also.. Do not alienate the few people that decided to check out your show by acting like they don’t matter. If you wanted more people than you got?… Keep. It. To. YourSELF and keep broadcasting. If there are more people in the room than on your live stream, that’s the way the cookie crumbled. The show must go on. Live with it.

If you insist on begging, understand that nobody’s going to click ANYWHERE just because you asked them to. Your task is to provide them INCENTIVE in the format of text which explains what they’re going to see, hear or receive if they show up. If you can’t do that, don’t expect any viewers, AND retain whatever integrity you have left by not begging at all. Inform people about what’s happening, and if they show up, they show up. Read the rest of this entry »

Bill Cammack – Twitter followers post, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Recent Visitor Map for “Why your number of Twitter followers doesn’t mean ISH”
Posted April 8th, 2009 @ 2pm (6 hours live)

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. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m pretty sure I first became aware of Twitter two years ago around the time SXSWi 2007 was going on. It was fun to keep up with who was at which party and who was trying to get a cab home or to the next event.

Once I got involved with Twitter, I noticed that there were two styles of following people:

1. Follow only people you actually know or want to read.
2. Follow everyone that follows you (not including spammers, etc).

Steve Garfield & Bill Cammack

Steve Garfield from SteveGarfield.com apparently subscribes to #2. Steve is currently following 10,666 people @ twitter.com/stevegarfield while 9,714 people follow him. (note: Steve speaks about this in the comments below. Click Here to jump to Steve’s reply)

Meanwhile, Veronica Belmont appears to subscribe to #1 and is currently following 480 people @ twitter.com/veronica while 154,033 people follow her.

The question is “Which style works best for you?”.

Off the bat, following everyone didn’t work for me. That was when I was only following 200 people. I’m currently following 2,067 people @ twitter.com/billcammack, while 2,324 people follow me.

The first thing I did, back in the “200″ days was make another account strictly for following the local NYC Twitterers (Yes, “Twitterers”. If they wanted their posts called Tweets and their users Tweeters, they should have named their app “Tweeter”. Too Late.). That worked well until basically all of the people I was following stopped using Twitter to make plans, favoring more private apps. Read the rest of this entry »

Twitter changed the game as far as blogging. Instead of posting something, and MAYBE people would stop by your blog and MAYBE they’d read your articles and MAYBE they’d leave a comment, all of a sudden, what you had to say was being pushed to people who actually REQUESTED to hear what you had to say by following you and then either checking the site itself or installing an app or widget on their computers or phones.

Twitter > Bill

I noticed that the traffic on the Yahoo Videoblogging Group fell off DRASTICALLY as Twitter presented a far better and faster way for people to get immediate responses to questions than an email list.

I also noticed A LOT OF PEOPLE putting a lot of their ideas on Twitter instead of their own blogs. I didn’t really think much of that until I talked with Tyme White about it ten (10) months ago, back in March, 2008:

Tyme: “Yes, the conversations are moving away from blogs but the problem is the same problem that has always existed, one I warned about at least two years ago. How many times has a writer published an article, a larger site wrote about it, and the conversation took place every where but on the writer’s site? Same problem – the writer would have to keep up with those conversations. Now, the same root problem exists, but there are many more sites where the conversation can take place. The writer publishes the entry and now a discussion can happen on the originating blog, any blogs that write about it, any site that aggregates content (Reddit, Chawlk, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.), Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, any of the social sites that are popping up, forums…the list is long.”

The question is: does it matter to the writer if the conversation takes place in other places? If the answer is no, the writer would have one strategy. If the answer is yes, it does matter and the preference is for the conversation to take place on their blog, well, that would take a different strategy, wouldn’t it?”

So, referencing that practically-one-year-old post by Tyme… Does it matter where *YOU* blog your material? I blog mine to BillCammack.com. I post references to my blog posts on Twitter and Tumblr. Read the rest of this entry »