The Emperor wears no clothes.

Here’s how fads occur..

Someone does something that other people agree is a good or stylish thing to do and then everyone copies that person.

Eventually, all the guys want to buy the same car and all the gals want to buy the same boots and sunglasses and nobody realizes they’re all following one person’s idea.

One of the social media fads has been to incorrectly categorize the credit people deserve for how large their social network is.

People who are merely information-passers are being said to have influence.

This has been going on for years already. Companies have actually posted job descriptions that require the applicants to have more than so many Twitter followers. I’d like to laugh at that except that it’s so pathetic. I already explained why the number of followers someone has doesn’t mean anything at all, but let’s go over that again.

Follow Me Back

When I first got involved with Twitter, a couple of years before the Civilians found out about it and talked about it on the evening news like as if they understood what they were supposed to do with it, the philosophy of the community was “follow back”. Anybody that followed you, you were ‘supposed’ to offer them the courtesy of following them back. This was fine with me at the beginning, because the only people that knew of me on Twitter were my friends from other social media sites, so anyone that added me, I actually WANTED to listen to.

This got out of hand when randoms started following me. I became accustomed to 10 new people that I had never heard of before following me on Twitter every single day. This made me question the concept of automatically following people back because it was no longer people I wanted to hear from. My Twitter stream was being diluted with minutia & drivel instead of being a rapid-access version of forums or newsgroups I had been a member of.

I stopped auto-following people. Meanwhile, I noticed that others continued to auto-follow, going so far as to figure out programs to automatically add anyone that followed them so they didn’t have to sit there all day, clicking “follow” on their accounts. Next thing you know, there are people with tens of thousands of Twitter followers that they don’t know and that don’t have any relevant information for them and that they have zero demographics for in order to explain to someone why the community they have access to is valuable to their company.

Amassing Followers

There are some people that are celebrities and microcelebrities and weblebrities (etc, etc) that actually had a lot of people following them legitimately. These people were popular in the space or pioneers or selected a niche and always kicked out pertinent information that people wanted to listen to. This was way before the SUL (Twitter Suggested User List), and these people were amassing a crowd of listeners who were passionate about what they had to say.

Other people, I noticed, hehehehe were making rapid advances towards surpassing my number of followers without having anything relevant to contribute whatsoever. These people are social media clowns.. bums.. There was no way they should have been advancing like that, so I started studying their progress to figure out what was going on.

SInce Twitter only updates their following/follower counts once a day, it took me 3 or 4 days to figure out what was happening. The people who were progressing way beyond their personal merit always had their followING count leading their followER count. In fact, the gap was becoming wider every day.

How To ‘Game’ Twitter

If you think about this, it makes sense. If you have 10 followers and I have 2,888 (my current count as of this writing), I seem prestigious to you. If I follow you, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to follow me back, first of all out of reverence for my accomplishments on Twitter (amassing followers) and secondly, so that you can say you’re connected to someone that a lot of people follow.

So.. I can essentially add ANYONE with fewer followers than I have and there’s a good chance they’re going to follow me back. On top of that, once they developed apps that told people who was following them back and who wasn’t, people were afraid of being unfollowed, so they got with the program.

These same apps added bulk following and unfollowing and then it was off to the races. The system-gamers would add HUNDREDS of people every day by going to the general population timeline and clicking “Follow” for anyone that posted anything. A percentage of those hundreds they added (which explains why their followING count is always higher than their followER count) add them back. The ones that don’t add them back get bulk deleted using the peripheral application. Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

This is how people got so many Twitter followers before the SUL. In fact, gaming Twitter was so prevalent that people were getting people to pay them to explain how to amass followers. There were “clubs” where your price of admission for joining the club was that you had to follow everyone involved and your win was that everyone involved would follow you back.

Useless Community

Hopefully, you see what the problem is with gaining “followers” this way. You’re building a community of nobodies that don’t know anything in particular and have no particular demographic. People are following you IN ORDER TO GET FOLLOWERS FOR THEMSELVES and couldn’t possibly give a flying **** about what you say, ask or recommend.

This is why numbers of followers can’t possibly translate to “influence”. In order to have influence, you have to be determined to be an authority on the topic. The people that built their follower lists from people that recognized them as thought leaders, pioneers in the space or innovators have an active, useful, passionate group of listeners. THAT’S useful. What’s NOT useful is people who have tens of thousands of followers from gaming the system and providing no consistently demonstrable value to their “community”.

Unfortunately, when you incorrectly assign credit to numbers of followers, both camps look exactly the same. The person with 60,000 followers seems more influential than the person with 2,888 followers strictly by virtue of quantity over quality.

This is why companies go out like suckers and hire people based on their apparent fan base instead of whether they can do a job in a professional, efficient and cost-effective manor.

Anyway… Twitter finally figured this out and then set a cap on how much your followING number could exceed your followER number. This worked decently, but the damage was already done. People that shouldn’t have had so many followers already did. Also, they didn’t stop gaming the system by following people for no other reason than trying to get those people to follow them back, they just slowed their roll to the limits that Twitter set.

The next travesty was the Twitter Suggested User List.

Suggested User List

Photo Credit: Jared Klett

Basically, since people were joining Twitter and then having nobody to follow and nobody following them, Twitter offered people suggestions of whom they might follow… including someone’s ******* CAT! :/ (and *NOT* including then-presidential-candidate Barack Obama).

The problem with this was that at the end of the Twitter account creation process, they offered you two links.

One was a gigantic green arrow, which indicated that you could activate your account and automatically follow everyone on the SUL.

The other was a TEXT LINK that was practically unnoticeable that allowed you to activate your account WITHOUT adding the people on the SUL.

Of course, tons of people clicked on the green arrow, resulting in everybody on the SUL gaining tens of thousands of followers every single day who had never heard of them before, didn’t give a flying **** about them and probably hadn’t even heard of them before they accidentally followed them as a consequence of creating a Twitter account.

There was a hue and cry about this (as there very well SHOULD have been) from the people that had struggled to promote themselves and create their follower lists through legitimate marketing tactics and online presence management. The numbers that it took them years to build were surpassed in mere days by people who shot up from 20,000 followers to 200,000 followers in a matter of weeks, absolutely dwarfing the stats of the legit group and making them seem less popular… less… ?influential? O_o

The Town Crier

This is why it’s pathetically laughable when people attempt to equate number of followers with influence. Do you have a large network of people to whom you can quickly disseminate information? Yes. So does the Town Crier.

The Town Crier is in charge of telling people what influential people told him to say. The Town Crier didn’t make a single policy and probably wasn’t even invited to the meeting where the policies were made. He IS, however, the person that informs the masses about these policies.

Does that make the Town Crier influential? Nope. The Town Crier is a source of information.. A newscaster. An anchorperson for the nightly news. Does the anchorperson write the articles? Nope. Does the anchorperson decide what stories go on the air? Nope. Does the anchorperson film anything or interview anyone in the street? Nope. They’re not influential AT ALL, even though they’re the ones that INFORM YOU about news stories by reading from the teleprompter.

It’s exactly the same for people that have built social networks without demonstrating to anyone that they’re an authority on ANYTHING AT ALL. Are you influential because you have the ability to inform 60,000 Twitter accounts of an opportunity? Some people say “yes”. I say “no”. You’re a good person to *USE* to get the word out about something, but your numbers don’t indicate that you’re affecting anyone’s thought processes. Your numbers don’t indicate that you can get anyone to do anything they wouldn’t have done anyway without hearing your opinion. Your numbers don’t indicate how you attained them or why your followers followed you. Your numbers don’t indicate who’s actually listening to you. Your numbers don’t indicate who gives a **** what you think. Your numbers don’t indicate that you can build and maintain a community for a client and offer them an impressive ROI if they hire you to handle their social media presence.

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Ladies… If you really want to learn about your man’s personality, hang around him when he’s playing video games.

All of y’all that are dating gamers know I’m telling the truth.

The way he plays his games is the exact same way he’s going to interact with YOU….. um… assuming that he cares as much about YOU as he does his VIDEO GAMES….. which isn’t likely.

What game are we playing, anyway?

I don’t know much about dudes that play Mario Bash Bash or Dance Dance Revolution or whatever cutesy, corny games they make these days. I know about FPS. First Person Shooters. War Simulations. They’re still called “games” because Atari was a game. You had a little cutesy tank and would shoot a little square at the other cutesy tank and try to hit it more times than it hit you.

Technology has improved to the point that these so-called “games” are now being utilized as preparations for actual war.

I found this out from watching my friend Baratunde Thurston‘s show Popular Science’s “Future Of…”.

One of the episodes is about the future of Combat, and it’s rather enlightening…

Popular Science: The Future of the Military — Perhaps

Drones have become common battlefield tools in the past decade but are typically controlled at the company or battalion level, which respectively have about 135 and 650 soldiers apiece. FCS wants tools like the UAV at the platoon (approximately 40 soldiers) and even squad (10 members) level. The vision is also to expand the range of applications. The Massachusetts-based company iRobot manufactures a PackBot currently deployed overseas, which the military uses primarily to scout for improvised explosive devices, while the SUGV, also made by iRobot, may one day lead infantry assaults like the one I witnessed. A single soldier can comfortably tote a SUGV, and the controller, copied almost directly from that of an Xbox game console, was designed to be intuitively easy for a young recruit to use.

Look Familiar?: The controls for FCS unmanned
vehicles are modeled after those used for video
game consoles
Photo Credit: Brent Humphreys

One of the soldiers handed me the controller; I donned the head-up display and started driving. The robot crashed into a wall. After practicing for a few minutes, I was able to steer into one of the buildings and scan for insurgents. There was something exciting — and faintly disturbing — about the notion that I could help battle insurgents with technology that felt only slightly elevated from the R/C cars of my childhood. But I wasn’t totally sold. Removing the display, I asked what would prevent an enemy from shooting the SUGV as soon as he spotted it. “Nothing,” replied one of the soldiers nearby, Lt.-Col. Ed House. “But if he does, we know he’s there, so the SUGV has accomplished its mission. Better to shoot a robot than a soldier.”

So.. Laugh all you want while people call our war simulations “games”, but that’s not what’s actually going on.

Dominance

One of the things that a lot of women can’t grasp is why guys do the confrontational things we do. We fight. We go to war. We remain in the rat race when we’re already rich and have more money than we’re ever going to spend during whatever’s left of our lives…..

This is because we’re built to prove that we’re better than the next man.

This is why we cheer for our home team.

New York is better than Philadelphia on this day in Football. Montreal is better than California on this day in Baseball. Our country beat the living **** out of your country in a war, so we get to tell you what to do and/or steal all of your oil.

This is our lives. This is what matters. This is what moves us. This is what we’re passionate about.

THIS is what’s going on when we’re online playing video “games”. YOU stepped to ME on an equal battlefield where you had the same opportunity to select guns and power-ups as I did and I *WAXED* you!… SIT. THE. ****. DOWN! :D That’s what it’s all about. Proving minute after minute that you’re better than someone else. If you don’t understand how good that feels, you’ll never understand hardcore gamers.

I’ve personally (thanks to my teammates and other people I’ve made alliances with via gaming) been #1 in the world in a game that took two months to play. When the smoke cleared and the dust settled, I was BY FAR the #1 base capturer, planet-wide. There were players from the USA, Japan, England, France and a few other scattered countries that were represented in the game. Also, the guy I left in the dust at #2, I happen to know he was cheating, because I know him and played with AND against him.

That’s the flag I planted. I planted it for myself. I planted it for my team. I planted it for my country. It’s in the books. It’s a done deal. You can NOT take that away from me, EV*A*R. This is what we do. We represent ourselves. We represent our friends. People talk about us in languages we don’t even understand, because they respect our skills and the dignity with which we carry ourselves whether we win or lose. If you’ve never felt this, I can’t explain to you how important it is or how good it feels. If you’ve never gone into matches where people wrote you off because they’ve never heard of you and then you defeat a team that everyone agrees is one of the tightest squads playing the game today and then people STILL don’t want to give you your propers.. I can’t explain how that feels to you. If you’ve never beaten up A SECOND HERALDED TEAM in the same tournament and the peons don’t want to give you your props, but both of the teams you beat have respect for you (and you for them) that’s lasted to this very day… I can’t explain to you how that feels. :)

Dating

What does this have to do with dating? :D Well… Before that day we got drunk and went out to the club and you were looking good and we decided to kick it to you because you were HAWT and turning us on… We were gaming with our homeboys.

Before you got added to the roster, we already had a bunch of IRL friends and online friends. You’re going to have to make your way up the ladder. You don’t get instant props because you’re the “girlfriend”. Going to your moms’s house for Sunday dinner isn’t high up on our list of things to do.

Sitting around on a bench with the other henpecked boyfriends at the mall while you shop for duplicate pairs of black shoes that you don’t even need to waste your money on isn’t high up on our list of things to do. That chick-flick you rented on DVD might never see the inside of our XBOX or Playstation3, ya dig? :D

At the same time that you’re at a decided disadvantage if you date a gamer, you also have an unique opportunity to be around him when he’s being REAL. You’d be surprised that some of the most calm, intelligent, cerebral dudes will be screaming and cursing at the top of their lungs when people mess up and do the wrong thing or the game jerks them. huh Some friends of mine didn’t know who I am and challenged me to one-on-one games of HALO. I hadn’t even PLAYED HALO in months, but thank God my skillz came online after about 10 minutes and I pistoled and sniper-rifled them to death so many times that both of the top dogs at the party quit and didn’t want to play anymore. I would have been severely embarrassed and depressed, had I lost to them, considering that my boy Mak and I used to whip ass on the guy that won the first HALO tournament and his crew DAILY before he won and received his MLG contract (meaning we never saw him again, or else we’d STILL be whipping his ass to this day). I tried to lighten the party’s atmosphere by informing the guys I beat that there was no way they should have beaten me anyway, because I’m a World-Class FPS gamer, but they were still shell-shocked haha :D

It’s easy for a guy to be cool, friendly & gentlemanly around you when you’re out on a date because nothing important’s happening. Yeah, he’s trying to convince you to give him some, but that’s really a reflection on YOU. When he’s gaming, it’s a reflection on HIM and his self-esteem and self-perception. Dating is basically wasting time waiting for the chick to give it up. It’s a bunch of downtime until you get to the nitty-gritty. When you’re the last guy (as usual) left on your team and it’s up to you to defeat three or four other players and accomplish your objective, that’s when every split second counts and life gets REAL.

If you have the opportunity to be around your SO when he’s in this zone, you’ll see who he really is. You’ll see what matters to him.. what makes his heart pump faster. Ask him to take out the trash now, and you might get a response you didn’t expect. Ask him if he loves you now, and he might ignore you completely. He probably didn’t actually even HEAR YOU because he’s so immersed in the game. Tell him you’re ready to go to church, and maybe he’ll quit the game to drive you there… maybe he’ll put the controller down so he can see you to the door and lock you out… maybe he’ll ignore you completely… maybe he’ll split the difference and without looking up from his game, say “PAYCE!!!… Don’t let the door HIT’cha where the Good Lord SPLIT’cha! :D”

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack/@DatingGenius

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This season of my video show/stream/whatever is entitled “Delusions of Grandeur”, basically because the only way I could swindle myself into doing it was to pretend that I had an audience. I already know everything I’m typing, and I’ve already seen everything that I post as a video, so the only reason to post them is for other people to see/read them, for whatever reasons they might have.

The problem with this is that since the audience isn’t real, I do whatever I feel like doing. If I feel like playing guitar, I do that. If I feel like talking to myself, I do that. If I feel like making a 15-minute documentary about Harlem, I do that.

Because of this, there are lots of different reasons that people visit my site. They visit from all over the planet, but they basically arrive through a Google search. Maybe a couple of times a day, someone’s actually looking for me (or someone named Bill Cammack), but the vast majority of the time, people are looking for ONE INSTANCE of a topic that they were thinking about at the time and decided to look up on google, like Dating women in NYC and they end up here.

I know this because web sites compile stats (statistics). People go to major lengths to compile and analyze statistics in order to determine what’s working for them, what’s not working and what they want to do next or differently, going forward. There are some major problems with “analyzing stats”, however… rather… I *should* say that if you’re not sure what you’re looking at, you’re going to have a skewed view of your readership/viewership… AND… Even if you *DO* know what you’re looking at, you’re still not receiving information which accurately depicts what’s really happening with your media.

Originally, I thought stats were the answer to DoG, because you would be sure about the size of your audience. Unfortunately, stats are merely general indications of possibilities… not even PROBABILITIES in case you decide to post something similar in the future.

Stats are like getting hit in the side of the head with a tomato.

If you’ve ever tried to hit someone walking down the street with a tomato, you know what I mean. It’s hard as hell, right? :D Wind conditions… Judging how far they’re going to travel in the time it takes the tomato (or egg, if it’s Halloween) to cross the street… Anyway… The point is that when you post stuff to the internet, you’re walking down the street. People are on the other side of the street, throwing tomatoes at you, except you don’t know it because they never hit you. As long as it doesn’t pass your head close enough to make that sound or smash on the gate next to you, letting you know what time it is, you’re going to keep walking down the street like nothing’s happening.

When you make a post, it’s the same way. Unless you see stats or receive feedback from people, it feels like nobody’s throwing tomatoes at you. Thus, DoG is the remedy for inertia in that you imagine a bunch of tomato-throwers. MEANWHILE, depending on how you monitor your statistics, you’re actually missing A LOT OF PEOPLE that *did* hit you.

For example, Tyme White informed me that since I had been separating sections of my entries using the “more” tag, people with feed readers were only receiving the information up to that “more”, and unless they clicked through to my site, they couldn’t read the rest of the post. I removed my “more” tags, because I’d rather have people able to read what they want however they want than have them skip the rest of the article because they didn’t feel like accessing my site… or maybe they COULDN’T access my site, because they pre-loaded their readers and don’t currently have fast internet access or any internet access at all.

Liz Burr informed me that I could use FeedBurner to catch my audience’s feed reader stats. I wasn’t interested in going that route, because I used feedburner for my video blog for well over a year, and although it’s good to see which videos of yours are going out so that you can spot trends or popular videos that you’ve done, there’s something really important that it doesn’t tell you…..

WHO! IT! IS! :/

This is why your stats are a tomato to the SIDE of your head. When you get hit with it, you STILL don’t know who threw it! :D

When I used to monitor my iTunes feed with feedburner, if I saw that in one day, 100 of my videos were downloaded once each, I knew I had a new subscriber. I didn’t know WHO that person was, AT. ALL. Therefore, I’m content with my current stats setup as an indication of trends of random people, and I’m not interested in even MORE stats of people who read my posts although I have no clue who they are.

IME, the net is immensely asynchronous and voyeuristic. I’m ‘guilty’ of the same thing. I don’t leave comments on EVERY video I watch or blog post I read. The environment only makes DoG worse, because in one’s own mind, your audience expands and contracts depending on how you feel about what you’re doing. If you feel like nobody’s watching… They aren’t. If you feel like Everybody’s Looking At Youuuuuu….. They Are! Ultimately, there’s no reality at all. It’s just you… floating messages in bottles….

I had a couple of experiences recently that made me want to ‘talk’ about stats. The other day, I was hanging out with a friend of mine, and I went to get out my iPod Nano (which I won in the NewTeeVee Pier Screenings game show audience survey contest. Thanks, Om & crew! :D) to show her this video I had done, and before I even got it out of my pocket, she was like “oh. I saw that.”…. :/ ….. This is always a shocking experience, because I don’t actually HAVE DoG. If I did, I would have assumed that she and everyone else with a computer had watched/read my material. It’s one of the few surprising things in life… finding out that someone knows more than I thought they did. :)

This is where I internalized one of the useless aspects of stats… for me, at least… What good does it do me to know that three people in Australia and two in the UK watched my video if it doesn’t help me to understand that my friend I’m hanging out with right now has already watched my video? I’ve had this happen to me lots of times. Most recently, I got in a car with my cousin who had some very interesting things to say about my Fame post. This was ANOTHER shocking experience, because I wasn’t aware that she even knew that I text blogged at all. It took me a while to get up to speed on that conversation, because I totally wasn’t prepared to discuss an aspect of my existence that I didn’t know she knew about… much less that she had thought about at all OR would have had any opinions about it she felt like expressing to me. :D

The other interesting ‘stats experience’ was reading Mike Hudack‘s post on the blip.tv blog called “On Stats”. 99% of the videos on my site are served from blip.tv, so I found the first paragraph very interesting:

There’s been a lot of discussion over the last few days about how video sites count viewership. This is an extremely important and constructive conversation to have. In general, blip is one of the most conservative video sites on the Web in counting viewership. We only count one view per IP address per session and we have a number of very stringent controls in place to prevent gaming viewership numbers, whether that gaming is intentional or not. We believe that it’s in our interests — and in the interests of the overall Web video industry — that we be conservative in measuring viewership. Failing to be conservative invites a backlash from advertisers, investors and content creators as they realize that they can’t trust viewership metrics offered by major Web video platforms. We don’t want to invite such a backlash. We want to be conservative from the outset.

Let’s say an IP address is the “name” of your modem that connects to the internet. If I understood the statement about the counting of blip.tv video views correctly, that means that if you watch a video of mine, then you play it again, it only counts as one view. It will also count as one view if your roommate watches it from the same internet connection. Similarly, if you tell your whole office to watch it and they’re all accessing the same router, they all count as hits from the same IP address. I’ll have to find out how long a “session” lasts, and like I said, I’m not sure I have the exact understanding of how blip handles the count. However, this makes sense, because it stops people from doing the old YouTube trick of refreshing their videos over and over and making themselves look popular & talented when they’re not.

The point for me, as a content creator, is that before I read this, I thought the count was the count. I was actually subtracting numbers of views from my videos. This video, for instance, currently has 315 views:

Now… Besides the fact that I know more people than that saw this particular video because Kfir Pravda showed it at a conference he was speaking at in Israel, I would have assumed that maybe 200 people watched the video and the other 115 were re-runs. Of course, this doesn’t take into account situations like people downloading my videos and showing them to people on their computers or iPods, as I was attempting to do when my friend informed me she had already seen it.

You see how, again, in the realm of video, there’s the exact same “over/under” as there is in text blogging. Almost simultaneously, you feel like the numbers you’re seeing underrepresent your viewership AND overrepresent it.

Also, like I mentioned before, the numbers are useless anyway, unless you’re trying to sell a show, get sponsorship for a show or make money through revenue-sharing. Even if the stats tell me that a video of mine was watched 60 times from IP addresses in NYC, there are MILLIONS OF PEOPLE THAT LIVE HEEEEEERE!!! :D On top of that, according to Facebook, I have 271 friends in the New York, NY area. So, if I assume (ridiculously) that only people that have heard of me before are watching my videos, and not a single “random”, I still only have about a 1 in 4 chance of guessing who those 60 are. :)

The obvious solution here is to fuhgeddabouddit! Forget about stats altogether. They’re making DoG worse instead of better. More confusing instead of less so. The point of DoG in the first place was to kick-start my creativity process and answer the question “Why should I do something, film it and post it… instead of just doing it and enjoying it for myself?”

The answer, strangely enough, isn’t in the stats or the crowds. It’s not even in the audience of ten.

It’s in the One….

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