I had a conversation a few days ago with a friend who asked me what I thought about blogging / podcasting / creating video content, specifically as it pertains to viewership and even more specifically as it pertains to NUMBERS of viewers for content we post to the internet.

There’s a lot of talk amongst the social media set about numbers and views and influence and what makes content “worth” creating.

Unfortunately, all that talk about numbers assumes that people are equals, when we most clearly are not. o_O

Authorities & Audiences

Let’s say, for instance, that you have 100 Facebook Friends and they’re all people that you’ve grown up with or met IRL (in real life) that share no particular concentration in any industry. Let’s also say that *I* have 2,434 Facebook Friends and you and I happen not to share very many mutual friends… Logically, if I post something, it’s more likely to receive responses, hits, views, whatever, because my listening audience is immensely larger than yours.

Let’s take that same scenario and change how you created and cultivated your audience of 100 FB Friends… Let’s say that you were an expert in a particular field and the people you reached out to and also accepted FB friend invites from were all involved in or interested in your chosen profession. Let’s say you had conversations with this specialized audience and they recognized you as an authority.. Someone who was known to have interesting, important & relevant things to say and similarly useful links to share.

NOW.. If you and I post about the same information at the same time, except it happens to be along the lines that you and your friends normally kick it about, my larger population is trumped by your way smaller one because your readers are PASSIONATE about your content and mine are not.

On top of that.. All this numbers-talk only takes into account first-tier connections. If my Twitter fanbase is 10 people, except one of those 10 people following me has 60,000 followers, I might not directly have a large audience, but someone following me might. Similarly.. If I have 10 and one of my ten followers has 10 and one of her ten followers has 10 and one of his ten followers has 1,000,000… You get the picture, so there’s no actual telling who’s going to receive wider distribution when they output content.

So.. Unless your ability to pay rent depends on how many readers/viewers you have, don’t worry about it. The number is entirely irrelevant unless you can make money by serving ads to those people. You might ask yourself what the point is of creating content if there aren’t going to be very many people watching…

Content For Whom?

First of all, you want to create content FOR YOURSELF.

Back in the day, when I was trying to decide what I wanted to blog about, my friend Penelope Trunk told me (paraphrasing) “You should blog about what you’re passionate about… or else you’re going to stop doing it”. That had to be THE most important thing I’ve ever heard about blogging and it’s absolutely true. I’m writing this post right this very second because I FEEL LIKE IT, and for no other reason. I’m enjoying thinking about it. I’m enjoying writing it. I’m going to enjoy posting it and receiving feedback about it. :D

Second, you want to create content for your Passionate Viewers.

Again, back in the day… I was discussing the creation and production of web shows with my friend Drew Olanoff and he told me his opinions about views vs viewERs. Basically, my experience up until that point had been with the technical side of creating videos and I had had little-to-no interaction with end-users, viewers that weren’t my personal friends, and certainly not entire communities of people who interact with each other based on a common love of or respect for a show.

Paraphrasing Drew’s point.. He felt that it was better to focus on your small amount of Passionate Viewers than to attempt to cater to a potentially way larger number of people that might drop by your show, watch an episode or two and bounce.

At the time, I didn’t understand why that would be, but I was willing to consider the theory. I eventually agreed entirely when my own shows & blogs gained an expanded audience and I got to experience the differences between the groups firsthand.

My stats have pretty consistently looked like this for the past few years.

93% Passers-By and 7% Regulars… Except the Regulars make up 17% of my visits.

I would certainly rather keep my current percentage of Regulars than increase my numbers of Passers-By at the expense of some of my Passionate Readers/Viewers.

While it would be nice to keep the current Regulars and convert some of the Passers-By into still more Regulars, I like to think about blogging relative to real life instead of relative to other, immensely more popular blogs.

Subscribers, Commenters, Lurkers & Passers-By

I currently have 118 people who subscribe to BillCammack.com by email. If you think about that… When was the last time that you gathered 118 people somewhere so they could listen to something you said? o_O … Probably “Never”, because I know that’s the answer for me.

So, each one of y’all 118 people, I appreciate you for tuning in. :) Thank You, and I try to keep things interesting around here. ;)

My actual subscriber number currently reads 244, because they add in people who subscribe via RSS and receive my blog articles in their feed readers. I’m sure a number of those are “bots” (robots, automated computer processes), but for those of y’all that are real people, Thanks for subscribing! :D

Even amongst subscribers, you have Lurkers, who read the articles but don’t comment directly on my blog. That doesn’t mean they aren’t sharing my posts with other people and discussing my ideas on other social networking sites & forums. I’m happy about that as well, because I don’t blog so people can come to my site. I blog because I feel like it and if someone else gets something out of it, that’s icing on the cake. If someone finds what I write to be entertaining, educational or useful, even better! :D

Then, You have the behind-the-scenes commenters.. The people that strike up conversations with me about my content when we run into each other at parties. The people that email or DM me to let me know what’s going on with them or that they enjoyed a particular post. It’s always gratifying to hear that someone got something out of an article I didn’t even have to write. It’s like when I happen to walk down a street or get into a particular subway car and tourists ask me for directions. I just happened to be there to point them in the right direction, and that’s always a good feeling.

The top level is the online commenters! :D .. I shouted out many of them 10 months ago in my last post of 2009: billcammack.com/2009/12/31/world-in-my-eyes-happy-new-year.

It’s the commenters that make my blog a community instead of a bunch of speeches by Bill Cammack. Lots of times, readers get more out of what the commenters share than what I initially posted!… I learn stuff from them also and I’m open to changing directions if someone has a convincing argument that things are actually different than I currently believe them to be.

So.. Thanks again, commenters! :D .. We almost have another full year together under our belts! :D

How Many Do You Need?

The way I see it, from my personal experience with online communities between 2006 and 2010, the only people you should be concerned with if you’re thinking about starting a blog or podcast or web series are 1) YOURSELF, and 2) the people who are genuinely interested in what you’re talking about and are willing to read, listen, watch and maybe even join in the conversation.

If that’s 100,000 people?… Fine… However, it’s ALSO fine if it’s 10 people.. five of whom are related to you. :)

If you feel like you NEED a bunch of people to consistently watch your show and click on your advertisements or else you’re not going to be able to MAKE your show, you have the wrong business model. Do it cheaper. Use fewer graphics. Spend fewer hours creating it. Edit it less. Use a webcam instead of a video camera. Output once a week instead of once a day. Output once a month instead of once a week. If you have something you want to express, just figure out how to do it within your budget & time constraints and make it happen!

In fact.. Sometimes, I’ll write an entire blog post or make a video just so ONE PERSON can see it (or maybe a specific, small set of people). In those cases, if 1,000 people watch the video and the person/people I made it for didn’t, I wasn’t successful in communicating my expression to them.

OTOH.. If 10 people watch a video and I know that the three people I made it for saw it?… Mission Accomplished! :D

Related Posts

• Email. Not Facebook. Not Twitter. Not Phone. Not IRL…
• Famous For Nothing [Fame, Part 3]
• How To Make A Blog Post
• Time, Part 07: “Subcontracting”
• Freedom of Consequences

Being connected with people on social networks like Facebook, Twitter & Foursquare has taken on a new importance in people’s lives in 2010 AD.

It used to be a frivolous decision whether to add someone as a “friend” or not. It used to be similarly unimportant whether you deleted someone after becoming friends with them. Those days are over. :) Friending and unfriending people is serious business now, as people’s IRL lives spill over into their online presence and “art” begins to imitate life…

Errors In Judgement

I personally learned this a while back when I deleted someone from a contact list on one of the social media sites I use. I deleted this person for very VERY *VERY* poorly-rationalized reasons. My thinking at the time was “I have this flimsy reason to delete them and no reason I can think of *NOT* to delete them”, so I went ahead and did it.

Long Story Short.. I found out that I had caused the deleted person grief, due to the asynchronous nature in which we relate to each other on the internet.

When we relate to each other IRL (In Real Life), we’re both aware that we’re spending time together and building or destroying our relationship to each other. Relating online works totally differently. You see people in pictures and they don’t know. You read their blog posts and they don’t know. You are in the same room with them at parties and they don’t know….

Just today, I got a message from a gal that was randomly searching the internet for information about something and landed on a blog post I wrote a couple of years ago. If she hadn’t sent me that message, I wouldn’t have known that she EVER read my blog in life.

So, it turned out that the person I had deleted was asynchronously paying more attention to me than I had been paying to them. In effect, I had frivolously disrespected a fan, which is bad policy as far as business and HORRIBLE policy as a ******* human being.

Realizing the error of my ways, I apologized, explained and immediately reinstated the person whose online contact I had unceremoniously discarded. That was when I first realized that the online was seeping far into the offline.

Justice Is Served

I’ve also been deleted by people.

This is very hard to figure out when you have 2,300 Facebook friends. The only way I can tell is when someone I used to be connected to shows up in a picture with a mutual friend and their link looks different. I follow the link and it says “Add as friend”. :D

Personally, I don’t give a flying ****. 2,300 contacts is too much to efficiently manage. What I do care about though, is what I might have done to cause that person to delete me. I think it’s always good for one’s self-improvement and evolution when one can figure out how he’s inadvertently hurting other people.

One of the reasons is that cliques tend to form in social media circles and you can be penalized by being friends with someone that the other team has decided they don’t like anymore. That’s just a fact of my life that I have to live with. I don’t care about people’s beefs with other people, so I’m just going to have to suffer from the fallout of people’s petty rivalries.

Another reason is that people meet you IRL and don’t have the same impression of you that they had from your online presence. This is one of the reasons why I try to keep my internet posting as real as possible. There’s no point in meeting a new gal and then she finds out after the fact that I already know a million chicks. It’s like “Here’s what’s going on.. If you want to be down, get down.. If you’re not interested, that’s cool too. :)”. Still, you have people that don’t read enough of your material or they only read the social media posts and not the dating posts and then they’re all aghast when you’re pressed up on some chick (or their sister) at a party.

Too Bad.. So Sad.

So.. Having experienced both sides of the deletion issue, I can tell you that it’s in your best interests to figure out *IF* you should friend someone in the first place and figure out what your boundaries are for deleting them if they do something you don’t like.

If you delete someone, you should be fully prepared for them to be upset at you and potentially act out by deleting YOU from other sites y’all are connected on.

You should also be prepared for them to be mad if they meet you in person, feel like y’all built rapport and then you reject their offer to add you.

You should also be prepared for them to be mad at you if you decline their FR when you have a lot of mutual friends with them.

You should also be prepared for them to be mad at you if y’all were friends IRL back in the day and you don’t want to be socially connected to them now.

Is any of that rational? Nope. :) This a free country (world). People can be connected to or not connected to whomever they want. A friend of mine has a Facebook account where she uses a fake name and another one where she uses her real name. She thinks I don’t know who she actually is, so she accepted my friend request for the fake account and ignored me on her real account. :P

Then, you have the set of people that only friend people they “know IRL” on Facebook. I understand why people use that style. They’re using online as only an extension of their offline lives. Being the type of person that likes meeting new people and learning new things, I go in the other direction. If I had to rely on the time I get to spend IRL with people to build my relationships to them, I’d be way back on something like 900 friends instead of 2,300. I’d rather make the connection and read someone’s content so the next time I run into them, I know more about them and either have relevant and interesting things to say to them or I’ve determined we shouldn’t be friends IRL and keep it at “hi” and “bye”.

Catchin’ Feelin’s

Someone who shan’t be named *COUGHcathybrooksCOUGH* said “Just because you have friends in common with people does NOT mean that you should be friends with someone. Period. Full stop.”

That’s absolutely true.. However, you can’t control how someone else is going to feel about your accepting a bunch of people they know and then not accepting them. I’m not talking about what’s fair in life. I’m talking about how personally people are taking social media connections now that the civilians are trying to catch up to the fishbowl residents.

This is especially relevant on LBS (Location-Based Services) like Foursquare, Gowalla, Latitude, Loopt, Brightkite… There aren’t currently distinctions between people that you’re connecting with in order to be sociable and people that you actually want to KNOW where you are whenever you check in. The choices you have are a) only add people you actually want to meet up with or that you want to meet up randomly with you, b) add everyone and be sociable, or c) make two accounts so you can use the app in its intended fashion but still connect with random people everywhere in the world that would like to be your friend on this service.

On top of that, you have people trying to add you that you have a history with, so you might end up deciding whether To Friend or Not To Friend the Ex! O_o

What about people you used to work with or *STILL* work with? How do you handle it when your boss wants to be friends with you on Facebook, since y’all are friends on the job, right? :D What about clients, if you’re a freelancer? What do you share on each site? Is your twitter stream completely different from your Facebook stream?

Some people utilize Fan Pages. This is all well & good if you’re an entertainer, because you’re offering one-way content. You talk and people listen. I have a Fan Page, but it has approximately 1/20 of the population my personal page has because I can’t listen to people from a Fan Page, so it’s essentially useless to me.

So what camp do you fall into when it comes to social media connections? Are you still living the “Online friends aren’t REAL friends” life, or do you aim to treat your virtual friends the same way you would treat your IRL friends & neighbors?

When was the last time you told someone IRL “Lose my number.”? >:D

Related Posts

• E-Stalking [Part 4]
• Social Media: You’re Doing It Wrong
• Facebook: Should You Add Someone You’re Dating?
• Social Media Smoke & Mirrors
• CNN Presents “Black In America: Silicon Valley”

I can’t tell you anything about the actual Fast Company Influence Project because I never clicked on it. I never came close to clicking on it, which is where I feel we will discover some of the myriad lessons to be learned from this situation.

First Impression

The first time I heard of the project, I didn’t hear of the project.

What I mean by that is that I didn’t realize that I had had a run-in with the project before I realized that a) there was a project and b) people didn’t like it.

I’m sitting here minding my business, having a productive day, as usual.. When I get an IM from someone that I rarely have IM conversations with…

When you haven’t communicated with someone in quite a while, you want to lead off your message with that person’s NAME or at least a simple “Hi” or “How are you?” to see if you get a response BEFORE getting to your agenda. This is not what happened. I received:

Hey. Did you join the Fast Company thing? Here’s a link to sign up [shortened link to who the **** knows what]

So first of all, my name wasn’t on it. Second, they threw their agenda at me directly. Third, they didn’t describe the situation as anything other than a “thing” (which is why I had no idea that this had been a connected event until later). Fourth, they sent me a SHORTENED LINK, which nobody in their right mind follows.

This entire thing reeked of SPAM and I wasn’t sure that this person’s account hadn’t been compromised. I sent back “Thanks, I’ll check it out… How is _______?”, referencing a new initiative I knew that person had recently started.

No reply.

Nothing.

So now, this thing looks COMPLETELY like spam, so I completely disregarded it and went on with my day.

Second Impression

Hours later, this buzz is going around about some Fast Company contest. It’s not a GOOD buzz, though. It’s people shaking their heads like “Why did they do THIS? Who thought THIS was a good idea? \o/”.

So I still wasn’t aware of this contest even though I receive the FC Newsletter every day. I don’t actually read their newsletter. It’s just something I haven’t bothered to unsubscribe from that I was AUTO-SUBSCRIBED TO back in 2007/2008 when I was a FC Expert Blogger:

The point being that in my particular case, a newsletter is being sent to me which has no influence over me, which probably contained references & links to this so-called “Influence Project”, which I’ll never know because I don’t care enough to skim back through the emails and check.

Public Impression

The other way I get my news is through Facebook. The reason why I have 2,237 Facebook Friends and 122 Facebook Fans is that I want to LISTEN to the people I’m connected to via social media, not TALK *AT* THEM.

I want to know what they think is cool & interesting & happening so that I can find out about it myself, but also so I can broadcast the info I find useful to the people that are following me. On a fan page, the only info you get from people pertains to YOU, which is a waste for someone like me who isn’t an entertainer. I already know about ME. I want to know about YOU.

* Side Note: Facebook automatically reduces your home page’s “Most Recent” stream to something like 250 people. Unless you want them selecting the 250 people that you’ll be listening to, go to the bottom of your “Most Recent” page, click “Edit Options” on the right side of the blue bar and increase the number in the box that says “Number of Friends” to a number that’s larger than your current number of friends. Click “S ave” and you’ll now see whatever your friends are posting, not some pot luck selection.

So anyway.. I hadn’t heard anything about this contest on Facebook, I wasn’t monitoring Twitter, because I only have so much time in my day and something’s got to give. I don’t read the [daily] newsletter and the only indication I received about this was half-assed and didn’t even have the term “Influence Project” in it… So, to me, the project didn’t even exist.

I’m not saying this because I feel like FC gives a damn about influencing Bill Cammack. I’m saying this because the people that I’m listening to ARE the influencers. I don’t need to be directly influenced because if 3 or 4 people whose judgement I respect as far as social media indicate that something good’s going on, I’m hopping on the bandwagon, sight unseen. I’m not going to PUB IT to anyone I know until I get inside and play around with the site or app and determine to my own standards of quality that it’s worth telling other people about, but as far as being an early adopter, I know some of the EARLIEST ADOPTERS around, so I’m perfectly willing to follow their lead in situations that they’ve already researched.

Unfortunately for Fast Company, this works in the opposite direction as well…

Negative Impression

When the same people whose opinions I respect begin posting, reposting & RT’ing why something was a BAD IDEA or at least misses the mark, I’m inclined to read their posts about the situation and STILL never visit the actual site/location/app they’re talking about.

In fact, the only reason I’m writing this right now is that friends of mine are STILL buzzing about what a bad idea this was, so I decided to throw my two cents in. >:D

This is the reason you don’t want “just anybody” making up your social media strategy. Vision, Perception & Ability are all relative. If your concept of influence is flawed or skewed, you’ll never know that because it’s your idea and it’s what your version of reality’s based upon. If you think that the number of random people that you can trick into signing up for something indicates INFLUENCE, you’re barking up the wrong tree and you’re tarnishing the reputation of any company that takes your advice.

Pyramid Schemes work by each person telling the person below them that they can get rich if they can convince people to follow them. The more people you have under you, the more money you can make. What they don’t tell you is that the money is made by duping more suckers into joining the scheme. :D The product isn’t whatever you’re selling… The product is *YOU*. You’re like the cow that got told to come to the farm to give milk and then you’re like “Huh?.. What the hell is HAMBURGER??? O_o”.

Wrong Impression

Similarly, INFLUENCE has nothing to do with NUMBERS. I know of people that have tens of thousands of Twitter followers and everyone that I respect recognizes them as clowns. Their “Calls To Action” produce nothing at all (for example, 30 viewers to a live stream when you Twitter it to your 20,000 followers once every 20 minutes for two hours). They have ZERO unique opinions, regurgitating what they read in Mashable or TechCrunch or TechMeme. The majority of the people they’re following are robots, defunct accounts and real accounts of people that have nothing relevant to contribute at all. This is why between their own brains and the people they’re listening to, nothing unique or groundbreaking is ever produced.

I’ve been complaining about this literally for years, as talentless people are consistently selected for projects because the companies are banking on the fact that this person has 100,000 followers across several social media outlets, so every single one of their GARBAGE videos will appear to be well-received and popular because of the fanbois clicking on any tinyurl these so-called influencers feed them.

What happens next is that companies consistently get what they deserve. NOTHING! :D They hire scrubs that make GARBAGE content and then they get lots of page views from people that aren’t the target audience of the advertisers, which results in ZERO click-throughs, ZERO video views, ZERO subscriptions and generally ZERO ROI for the company that thought that the number of people following someone on Twitter indicates that their content or ideas are worth something.

The funny thing about this is that MOST of the actual influence occurs on the back-channel, where people say what they really feel about what’s going on. It’s not found out here in the open where people can read our ideas today and Google our ideas 3 years from now. The people that you think AREN’T influencers are having their discussions IRL, f2f and you never hear about it while your company goes down the tubes because you’re taking advice from the wrong people.

Lack of Impression

Ultimately, everything we’re doing is attempting to catalyze Conversion.

It’s all well & good that you can attract attention to yourself.

It’s lovely that you were able to amass 30,000 Twitter followers by clicking “follow” on every single post you saw in the live feed and hoping that they followed you back.

It’s great that you take pictures at conferences with other people.

It’s sweet that you know a lot of people whose names you can drop in Twitter posts.

It’s pathetic when you pull out the gun and squeeze the trigger and everyone realizes you have no bullets.

If you can’t convert, you’re useless. Period. If what you’re offering isn’t going to result in a company being better off than when they hired you, they should have saved their money or hired someone with a proven track record in that field.

Conversion isn’t achieved by getting people that don’t own lawns to visit a page where they’re selling lawn mowers. O_o The number of “nobodies” that you can get to sign up for something indicates your POPULARITY on the net as opposed to any potentially useful business value.

In order to be an “influencer”, you have to be able to run with the Big Dogs and potentially influence OTHER INFLUENCERS. Your ideas have to ultimately land in the laps of people who represent conversion to your clients. Getting a bunch of people to sign up for something proves nothing at all…. well.. other than proving that you don’t know what influence actually is.

Related Posts

• Famous For Nothing [Fame, Part 3]
• Email. Not Facebook. Not Twitter. Not Phone. Not IRL…
• There’s No Social In Your Media
• Why “Jersey Shore” SUCKED This Season
• Deleting People From Facebook

Two years ago, in May 2008, I wrote “Fame, Popularity & Star Power” and then “Fame (Part 2)” two weeks apart from each other. The main point was that I was trying to figure out how to articulate my thoughts about fame in order to respond to an opinion my friend Dave had expressed about why I do what I do.

I never actually figured out how to exactly articulate the difference between what I’ve done for basically my entire life and what a lot of people do now. Today.. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I ended up watching a video where someone interviewed Melyssa Ford.

Melyssa was saying something about something… and then she goes “Fame used to be the by-product of success and now it’s the ultimate goal”. A few seconds later, I rewound it and listened to that line again and was like “HOLY ****!!!!! :D That’s EXACTLY The Point I Was TRYING To Make!!! :D”

Fame vs. Popularity

I’m not famous.. Though a lot of people will say that I’m MicroFamous or Internet Famous. I’ve been ranked inside the top 15 Google results for “Bill” (out of currently 377 million results) since February, 2008 (2 years and counting). I’m also inside the top 30 results (out of 264,000,000) for “Bill” on bing.com. I’ve been blogging for years, and BillCammack.com is currently serving 5,000 pages per week, according to Quantcast & Google Analytics.

Whatever infinitesimal amount of Fame, Popularity, Star Power or Personal Brand Recognition I currently enjoy is, as Melyssa would say, a by-product of my success. It’s a fringe benefit. It’s icing on a cake. It’s certainly not THE POINT of anything I do and it’s certainly not *WHY* I do anything I do.

When I post a video of something I did or somewhere I went..

It’s not so you or anyone else can go “OOOOOOOHH! Look at what Bill did! :O”.. It’s because I. ALREADY. DID. IT. and I’m trying to share an incredibly small percentage of my real life experiences with whomever might be interested. If I stopped filming things, I’d STILL be doing a bunch of cool stuff with a bunch of cool people. If I stopped blogging, I’d still be hanging out with a bunch of chicks and enjoying myself. I’m not performing or doing anything that’s out of the ordinary for me. I’m just trying to share so you have a SLIIIIIIGHT idea of what my life is like.

Sharing

Even that last sentence seems to be braggadocio. Who the **** cares what *MY* life is like? :D

Well… All I can say about that is that back in the day my friend Dan McVicar (a.k.a. Clarke Garrison on “The Bold and the Beautiful”) created and hosted a Social Media site called “The Late Nite Mash”.

My friend Marty Daniels, whom I met through Dan’s site, lived somewhere in the sticks where I was never going to visit and filmed a video while walking around at a county fair in his local area.

Was the video exciting and action-packed? Nope! :D However.. I got to experience something I never would have experienced, being that a) I wasn’t going to ever travel there to go to that fair, and b) it was being filmed through Marty’s “eyes” and experiences, so it was necessarily different from what would have happened if I had been there filming with my own camera.

I got value out of that, which I obviously remember to this day, so my goal in sharing is to attempt to pass that on to people that don’t live in NYC or don’t live in the USA at all or experience this city in a completely different way than I do.

Also, I get correspondence and blog comments from people that watch my videos or read my blog posts and got something out of it. TO ME… That’s what it’s ALL about… Sharing. Messages In Bottles. I send out the communication. If you received it, good. If you got something out of it, even better! :D

I couldn’t give a damn about serving 5,000 pages a week. I’m way more motivated by the 50 people that are currently subscribed to my blog by email. Thanks, y’all! :D I see youse out there! ;)

I’m also motivated by and thankful for my set of regular commenters, including recently Steve, Frank, Christine, Gail, C-Jay, Albert, Sophia, BM, Elly, Michele and even Fishingrod, who’s been SLACKIN’ lately, but I know she still loves me! :D

To Me.. It’s all about the communication. I post and output media in order to share, with you. If I stopped doing it, the events of my life would continue as they always have.. I’d just have more time to do them instead of taking time out to write long-ass blog posts like this one. :)

Fameballing

Going back to Melyssa’s point.. Now that so many people have access to expressing themselves via Social Media, a lot of them are doing what they can TO become famous, which has become an END instead of a BY-PRODUCT. The question for them is “What can I do to get more Twitter followers? O_o What can I do to get more Facebook friends? How do I get people to consider me a Fameball?

People want people to follow them… They want *ANYONE* to follow them. They just like how it FEELS to be followed. It doesn’t matter what they have to do or how bad they make themselves look so long as someone new subscribes to their channel or RSS feed.

This is the difference I was trying to explain to Dave, but failed until now. I’ve been popular since my earliest memory I still have available to me, around 5 years old, in kindergarten. I have *ALWAYS* had crews my entire life. I’m currently Facebook friends with guys and gals I knew in Elementary School, JHS, High School, College and from work & social environments after I graduated.

I meet new people every single time I go to an event, which is several times a week here in NYC. I’m popular FOR REAL, as a by-product of who I am as a person. I’m successful in business FOR REAL, as a by-product of how I conduct myself when I work for clients and their passing that information on via word of mouth so new prospective clients call or email *ME* asking if I can work for them, not the other way around.

This is exactly the explanation I was looking for, so Thank You, Melyssa Ford! :D

Who are you, again?

Lots of people these days are putting the cart before the horse. They want to be famous, but there’s no reason why they should be. They want to have successful blogs, but they don’t write ANYTHING ORIGINAL. They want people to follow them so they can enjoy the sensation of people seeming to give a flying **** about anything they ever thought about.

To me, that’s completely empty and worthless, which is why I’m finally getting to put this topic to rest two years later. I’m popular because I’m supposed to be.

Anywhere you put me, I’m going to make new friends & acquaintances. I’m MicroFamous because of who I am and what I do… EVERY DAY.

I did it yesterday, I’ve been doing it for years, and I’m gonna do it again today because being popular is natural to me and not something I hope to be, wish I was or would like to convince other people that I am.

I just spent a couple of hours writing this post because it’s worth it to me. I get my own kicks out of it, my email subscribers are going to receive it a few hours from now. My RSS subscribers are going to receive it right after I press “Publish”. Eventually, I’ll run into someone that will mention this post to me f2f, IRL and then I’ll be fascinated, amazed and appreciative that the current wonders of technology afford me the privilege of speaking to whomever feels like listening to, watching or reading my content.

So now I’m fully self-expressed on this topic. :D I’m fully prepared to explain to someone why I’m different from people who output content to get attention and collect followers, yet whom under careful inspection are clearly exposed to be attention-whores and who are, in reality… Famous For Nothing.

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Let me tell you how Social Media works…

There are two layers. There’s the online layer and then the offline layer.

The online layer is where we all say whatever we want about ourselves and expect people to take our word for it. The offline layer is where you have to PUT UP OR SHUT UP. You’re either the same person IRL (In Real Life) that you claim to be online or you’re not.

If you ARE the same person, your “Cred” (credit, props, believability) increases. Street Cred, Social Cred.. Whatever Cred you built online, your reputation will become infinitely more valid if you walk the walk instead of just talking the talk.

If you ARE NOT the same person, your Cred will DISAPPEAR. Beleedat. Gone! :D Nobody’s going to believe anything you have to say after your IRL presentation disproves who you made yourself out to be online.

Who Are You, Really?

It’s now the year 2010. Everybody that you know has their own online networks. Everybody that you know has an opinion about you, good, bad or neutral. Everybody that you know has EXPRESSED THAT OPINION about you to their friends. Being that we tend to all have the same friends in this space, all you need is for the word to come around from several people before the rumors about you are accepted as proven fact.

For example.. The other night, I was hanging out with Halley, Rahul, Kripa & Tarun for St. Patrick’s day (which was an EVENT on its own, but we won’t get into that, haha).

During the evening, my blog came up in conversation. I’m always caught off guard when someone mentions that they read the messages in bottles that I float out onto the internet.

I’m not exactly surprised, being that I’ve averaged 264 “uniques” per day for the last full year (An “unique” being a visit to a website from a distinct IP address, most likely indicating that a different person came to the site for each address so you can gauge how many people are accessing your content), but being that there’s no telling who’s reading if they don’t leave a comment, I have to assume that everybody I know or NOBODY I KNOW is reading this. :D

The point is that everyone I spent time with last night got a decent idea of what it’s like to hang out with me, albeit under overly-loud, overly-crowded circumstances due to St. Patty’s. The time we’ve spent together IRL is going to flavor their experience if they read something I write. The online and offline are going to be weighed against each other and my authenticity will be determined by each individual.

What happens after that is that information hits the back-channel.

As much interaction as we have in public on the internet, much more goes on behind the scenes. Back-Channel information is also considered more authentic because people are free to say what they really think without fear of public backlash. That guy Bill is an alcoholic. That guy Bill is a womanizer. That guy Bill wouldn’t hesitate to punch you in your face. That guy Bill is a gentleman. That guy Bill won’t ever leave you laying around drunk in a pile of garbage at the end of the night…

Whatever it is, people trade stories about you, and if you’re someone like me, who has 413 Facebook Friends in common with Chris and 349 FB Friends in common with Sarah and 347 FB Friends in common with Dina, there is LOTS OF INFORMATION floating around on the back-channel defining how people perceive you and act towards you that you never even find out about. Fortunately for me, I’m an empath, so I can actually FEEL when someone’s acting differently towards me compared to what I’m used to from them. Most people can’t do this, so they’re pretty much oblivious to how their offline shenanigans are affecting their online reputation.

Reputation vs. Reality

Before I get to my point.. Another advantage that I have is that I live in New York City, the center of the universe. :)

Everybody comes here sooner or later.

I’ve hung out with people from Texas, The UK, Hawaii, Japan, California, The Netherlands, Ireland, Israel…

There are A LOT OF PEOPLE that know what it’s like to have a f2f IRL chat with me and I really doubt any of them would give you an extremely different opinion of who I appear to be. That’s because I’m not acting. I’m trying my best to deliver via text what I actually think about or do. Much is lost in translation, but I’m attempting to express “The Real”.

Most people don’t have the same opportunity to meet so many people unless they go to a festival or conference such as South by Southwest® (SXSW®). That means they don’t get much practice at interacting with people IRL that they’ve built relationships with online. I would compare it to going straight to a professional sports playoff situation without having played any of the regular season. There’s a great opportunity for brand advancement and an even greater opportunity for brand destruction.

Your online presence is a virtual representation of yourself, like Second Life or The Sims. Before people meet you, they’re likely to assume that the way you are online is the way you are IRL. There’s no reason not to, because all they know about you is what they’ve read. Once they meet you, they will come away with the impression that you’re outputting authentic content that expresses who you are as a person or that you’re AN ACTOR. If you’re determined to be an actor, your media will be perceived as AN ACT. You’re writing a character, like Don Quixote or Jason Bourne.

Matt Damon isn’t Jason Bourne IRL. When you watch his movies, you don’t go “Man… Matt Damon could kick someone’s ass! :D”. Similarly, if your IRL presentation isn’t congruent with the content you post online, people probably won’t mention it in public blog posts or comments, but on the back-channel, the word spreads rapidly that you’re FULL OF ****! :D Everything you carefully built by typing words online that you never intended to back up in person is going to be undermined when you go to a conference and people meet the real you. Believe me.. It’s too late for trickery. The time for snake oil sales is OVER. Whether people tell you to your face or not, your smoke & mirrors aren’t fooling those of us that actually know what time it is and your reputation for mediocrity, tomfoolery or just plain WACKNESS is getting around.

So here are some tips for those of you that are doing it wrong and undermining your own brand with lameness:

Stop Name-Dropping

If you go to a conference where you’re glad-handing with hundreds of people, stop Twittering about ONLY the ******* CELEBRITIES you met or people who you’re trying to suck up to. If you pose for 80 pictures with “The People” on your camera and then only upload the ones where you’re with stars, YOU SUCK! If every time you post something to Facebook, it’s an advertisement for yourself, your clients, or someone whose **** you’re riding, you look like exactly what you are.. A SHILL, and everybody knows it and nobody likes it.

On top of that, you’re actually doing your clients a disservice. I automatically ignore all media from shills because I know they’re trying to push something. If you think you’re getting your clients exposure by being a walking advertisement, you’re wrong. You’re getting them IGNORED, because they aligned themselves with YOU, and you’ve proven that you don’t give a flying **** about people other than using them for “eyeballs” or “hits”.

I don’t give a damn when your next concert is if the last time I heard from you it was to advertise your previous concert. I don’t give a damn that your client is doing a live stream when the last live stream you produced was STRAIGHT GARBAGE, technically AND content-wise. I don’t give a damn that you were standing next to some bigwig at a party and shouted them out on Twitter when they don’t even mention that you were there at all. If I cared about that, I’d read TMZ, not your lame, obvious, redundant, non-progressive blog or twitter posts.

Pay Attention IRL

If you go to a tweetup, DO NOT spend the entire time on your ******* laptop. :/ Act as if you have a life other than being online or just stay your ass at home. This goes *TRIPLE* if you happen to be the ******* GUEST. OF. HONOR. of the tweetup. If people are showing up to a location to meet *YOU*, make ******* SURE that you spend as much time as humanly possible interacting with them. Handle your online business BEFORE or AFTER the meetup. At least act as if you give a damn about people who pay attention to you that aren’t stars that you can try to get props for by Twittering their names all over creation.

I guarantee you that it’s “The Little People” that have more props on the back-channel than the celebrities do. You know why?… hahaha Because there are MORE LITTLE PEOPLE THAN CELEBRITIES! :D .. Think about that.

When you name-drop about a celebrity, who do you think RTs your post and sends it to Facebook or wherever? Other Celebrities?… Nope!.. It’s The Little People. Meanwhile, what the commoners are SAYING is that you’re a JERK and you’re nothing like you present yourself to be online. The next time you pull the same stunt, the word goes out again, and again and again until people accept rumor as fact that you’re an actor and what you say online is as valid as “Fake Steve Jobs”.

Also.. I’m not saying to pay attention to commoners because it’s good public relations. I’m saying that the respect or disrespect that you show your audience IRL is way more important than writing something on the internet. I met this chick one time that’s very talented and I’m a fan of hers, but when I introduced myself to her, she didn’t even say what her name was. That was lame enough as-is, but she’s a performer. It’s her *JOB* to put her name out in public so people come to her shows and buy her media. I was like “How lame is this chick that she’s not even pubbing herself when a commoner (s far as SHE knows) walks up to her and says ‘Hello’?”. As talented as she is, her IRL presentation SUCKED and I immediately became an un-fan. Not of her media, but way more importantly, of her as a person.

Brand Yourself Consistently

It’s kind of funny to me when people ask me why I have so much Google Juice for Bill and for Cammack. It’s really very simple.

Everything I do has my name on it.

It’s completely astounding to me that these so-called Social Media Experts EPICALLY FAIL at branding themselves consistently, which is probably the MOST BASIC thing they should be doing. Anybody you see branding themselves as BillCammack and TheBillCammack and TheRealBillCammack and BillC and BCammack and BConline and TwitterBill and BlipTVCammack and SocialBill and BillYahoo and YoutuBill IS. A. *******. IDIOT! Dead up, they’re IDIOTS! :D

Select ONE NAME and stick to it. Select ONE AVATAR and stick to it. Select ONE GRAVATAR and stick to it. Don’t make people guess who wrote something or guess how to find you when the next major platform is launched. Make sure you have a Google Profile so your name shows up under a basic Google search, even if you don’t have any props for your actual blog or site.

Stop Padding Your Stats

Originally (and I wasn’t down with Twitter when it first started, but I believe my account is three years old now), the number of people following you on Twitter meant something because there was no reason for people to follow people whose opinions they didn’t care about.

Once it became a status symbol to have more Twitter followers than someone else, people started padding their stats. They way they did this was to follow anybody that wrote anything on the general timeline. We all knew who was doing this because they were pretty much following twice the number of people that were following them, or to put it another way, for every two RANDOM PEOPLE that they followed, one person was following them back.

This is how some people got high numbers of Twitter followers and came to be regarded as influential when they really aren’t. The evidence of this is when they do a call to action and their tens of thousands of “followers” only yield fewer than 100 visitors to their live stream or fewer than 10 comments on their blog post.

What these people didn’t count on was that they would eventually be judged by PASSIONATE followers instead of RANDOM followers. They didn’t expect that Twitter was going to create lists based on relevance to a particular industry or topic. They didn’t realize that adding a bunch of randoms was going to make them look like what they were… People thad added a bunch of people JUST to entice those people to add them back.

Eventually, Twitter caught on to this and shuttered that behavior. Unfortunately, the next big thing was the Twitter Suggested User List (SUL), which lots of people rode to fame and glory, ending up with hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers because everyone who created a new account after that was offered to auto-follow everyone on that list with the click of one button.

The reason y’all need to stop this is because you look dumber instead of smarter having all these “followers” that you can’t convert into anything useful for yourself or your clients. You would be way better off building relationships online or offline with people and adding them because you actually want to hear what they have to say and because you feel that their opinions are valuable to you.

Having said that.. There are lots of people with high follower counts who DIDN’T pad their stats and instead followed BACK everyone that already followed them. Again, these people were obvious because their follower/following ratio remained 1:1 while you could watch the padders stay WAAAAAAAY ahead of their followER count with their followING count while they were building their “community”.

Put Up or Shut Up

It’s not impressive to be able to utilize new technology. It’s impressive to utilize new technology WELL. Nobody cares if you can broadcast via Ustream or Qix live from your smartphone if you’re a boring person and the place you happen to be is as boring as you are. The ROI to your client isn’t in knowing that they CAN use new technology but rather in finding out WHEN and HOW they should use it. The more you upload GARBAGE to your YouTube, Ustream, Vimeo, & Blip accounts, the more clueless you make yourself look.

On top of that, you’re not providing actual ROI to your clients. You’re providing them something to go OOH and AAH about so that they waste their money hiring you to do NOTHING for them because you SUCK at Social Media. Instead of merely showing them that the tools exist, show them what they can do with the tools, why they should use them and when and how they SHOULDN’T use them. Show them with concrete examples of your skillz, which should exist somewhere on your site being that you’re a Social Media Expert, right?

If you’re offering web design services to your clients, your websites had BETTER be pretty good-looking, right? O_o If you’re offering video editing services, you should have examples of videos that you’ve edited, right? If you’re supposed to be on-air-talent, you should have samples of shows that you were on, right?

Trust & Believe that you’re not slick. You’re not fooling anybody that actually knows about Social Media with your lack of content to back up your lofty claims. You’re not fooling anybody with your lack of original ideas, regurgitation, retweets, name-dropping and overall poor emulation of a Social Media Guru.

The way this industry works is that people smile in your face and then talk behind your back. What they’re saying behind your back is their honest impression of you. If your IRL presentation is the same as who you claim to be online, you’re golden. If it isn’t congruent, one of these days (or many of these days) you’re going to miss out on a major opportunity because the person you have the opportunity to pitch to TODAY already heard about your incompetence and/or treachery on the back-channel YESTERDAY.

My suggestion is that you stick to what you actually do well and leave the rest of Social Media to the professionals. If you’re not savvy enough to figure out what you don’t do well enough to charge clients for and guarantee a generous ROI, hire an ACTUAL Social Media Expert to tell you who you are and who you aren’t.

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