“Content is King” is a lie that’s been perpetuated in web video circles for a few years now. “Eye Candy” has always been.. Queen.. but I’ve recently noticed that the tables have turned and Content actually *has* overtaken EC..

I wrote about EC in March 2008 and mentioned “the formula”, which was that whatever actual content you had, the way to get views for your show was to have an attractive female as the ‘front’ or the ‘face’ of the show. She didn’t have to know or understand JACK about JACK so long as she could look good and read her lines. I probably noticed this formula in 2007, since I got started in online video in 2006.

Regardless of the content, the most popular shows were headlined by a female that was nice to look at. Period. (with the one obvious exception being Ze Frank’s “The Show”)

It was even worse on YouTube, because everybody knew that YT took the picture that represented your video from exactly 50% into your episode. If your video was 6 minutes long, the still YT would take was @ 3 minutes. So.. Regardless of what the actual content was, people would figure out the final length of their show and insert a few frames of a chick in a bikini exactly in the middle. They’d upload their show, YouTube would pull the image of the bikini chick, all the boys would click on it expecting to see some ass, the video would get popular and then eventually ‘featured’, where it could really take off and get more views.

This worked, BTW, with videos that didn’t even have a female IN THEM, because guys couldn’t figure that out without clicking on the bikini-chick, by which time your ‘view’ was already counted. Thanks, sucker! :D

“The Formula” was so pervasive that I was discussing doing a show for these guys’ company and one of them actually said to me (verbatim) “We’d love to do a show.. but we don’t have a girl.”

Having a female headlining your show that guys would enjoy imagining having sex with was certainly the key to success back in the day, but at this point, if you look at numbers of YouTube subscribers as well as episode views, Content has clearly come into its own as guys and gals who are actually talking about something intelligent or providing some kind of actual entertainment value to their viewers have vastly outpaced the “Look at me and my tits” chicks.

I mean, VASTLY, like left them in the dust. I didn’t think it would happen, but it has, and there’s no end in sight. I think what happened is that the early adopters enjoyed success at the time, because they were the only ones doing it. Now that everybody and their sister has a YouTube channel and is doing the exact same thing, it’s tough to gain new followers / subscribers. As a matter of fact, an annoying trend has developed, where people actually ASK YOU not only to subscribe to their channels, but to rate their episode “5 Stars”. :/ .. Um.. How are you going to TELL SOMEONE what to rate your episode? wow. “Please rate my episode” I can understand. “Please rate it 5 Stars” (Top Rating Available)? Come on. :/

So.. If you don’t have any girls (or, no *attractive* girls), do your show ANYWAY. *THIS* is your time! :D Eye Candy is OVER!

You have as much chance of your show becoming popular as anyone else. So long as you have a good topic that’s sustainable (you can consistently release episodes ad infinitum), the viewing public is willing to accept, watch, listen to, follow, friend, subscribe, rate and virally pass your show on to their friends & relatives.

If you don’t believe me, go check out the current Revision3 lineup, including my friend Anthony Carboni‘s show, “Bytejacker”.

Blog about what you’re passionate about in text, audio or video.. Be consistent, relevant, informative & entertaining and you have a shot at becoming popular in the ‘online video’ game.

Content, at this point, truly *IS* King, so the only things limiting you are your own imagination, creativity and determination.

Make It Happen! :D

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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Let’s say you have something that you do well. One thing. Just one. Next thing you know, you find out about Social Media and all the good things that are now available for everyone to take part in. Before you jump in the pool, consider that you might not be able to swim. Don’t get in over your head with Social Media, because the effect is going to be *YOU* looking unprofessional, AND broadcasting that YOURSELF to the entire world.

Let’s say you’re a football player. Let’s say you have lots of IRL fans and it seems like a good idea to you to start utilizing sites/apps like Twitter, Ustream, Qik, Youtube, Livestream, BlogTV, Tinychat, Tokbox, Facebook, MySpace, etc etc to increase your numbers of “followers” and increase your international visibility. To a degree, this will work for you. If you overdo it, you won’t be able to spend the required amount of time to maintain your position in any or potentially ALL of your endeavors. If you don’t maintain your positions properly, people are going to start recognizing you for SUCKING at Social Media more than they recognize you for playing football.

Of course, this is infinitely worse if you’re supposed to be a Social Media Expert (SME). Do. Not. Get. Caught. Slippin’. in your Social Media if you want someone to pay YOU to handle THEIR SM for them.

Website

Your website is your home base. It either speaks to your ability to create and maintain a site, your vision in what you think makes up an attractive site (since this is supposed to represent YOU), or your ability to reach out to people that know what they’re doing and have them code sites for you. If you have none of these skills and your site looks like GARBAGE, nobody’s going to want to hire you to make a site for them, or do anything for them, actually. If you’re not an SME, but a football player, you MIGHT get some credit, being that you’re not supposed to know how to create your own website anyway. You’re supposed to know how to catch a football and run towards YOUR end zone. However, you still won’t get away with it because you supposedly made enough money during your career to hire someone to make you a decent site.

If you have comments, answer them. People aren’t commenting for their health. They’re attempting to communicate with you. Show them the courtesy of acknowledging that you read what they wrote, appreciate them and thought about their comments. If you don’t have time to do that, hire someone to admin your site. If you can’t do either, you might want to shut off comments entirely.

Don’t let people spam your site either, or else it’ll look like you “live” in a run-down tenement building.

Twitter

If you’re already a celebrity, you might get over with “I just ate a sandwich” as your Twitter posts. For the most part, nobody cares. Make sure you come up with relevant and current comments to share, or your list of followers is going to be mainly spammers who only followed you hoping that you’d follow them back.

Make sure you monitor your @replies and respond when you can, unless you want to be known as a broadcaster and not part of the actual conversation. The people who claim to follow tens of thousands of people are LIARS because you can’t get that many updates in any of the Twitter apps. They’re MISSING more updates in each refresh than they’re getting. If you’re not paying attention to your @replies either, you’re a tool on this app and people will figure this out relatively quickly.

Stop. Dropping. Names. Nobody cares who you know. Unless you have something CURRENT and RELEVANT to say about someone, save it. “I saw Omar Epps at the supermarket” is a waste of everybody’s time. If you have a link to a preview of something he acted in, let’s have it, and thanks.

Stop acting like your number of followers translates to anything at all. When you can get 80%, 50% or even 20% of your so-called followers to respond to one of your calls to action, THEN you’ll have something impressive. If you have 10,000 followers and you routinely do live streams where 15 people show up while you’re twittering it every 5 minutes, you’re making yourself look worse, not better. Focus on how well your network disseminates information that you send them, NOT how many people clicked “follow” and then never paid attention to you ever again.

Facebook

Do not make yourself Instant Pariah by hawking your wares 24/7 on Facebook. Do not send people messages every day about your new album that’s coming out. Do not invite people to your group over and over if they’ve declined to join. Do not keep begging people to check out your links or donate to your cause. This is what YOUR stream is for, on YOUR Facebook page. If people are interested in what you’re offering, they will see it on their home page and click on it. They might even visit your page or your group ON THEIR OWN! :O Be careful not to shill away your social capital.

The more you beg people to check out your content, the LESS it looks like ANYBODY’S checking out your content. Capisce? Make it easy for people to subscribe to your pages so they can OPT-IN to getting your updates instead of clicking delete every time they see your name in their inbox because they already know what you’re going to say, because it was the same thing you said yesterday and the day before…

Live Streaming

Do NOT live stream stuff that nobody cares about. Are you at the Football Hall of Fame? People want to see that. Are you walking to the store to buy a beer? Nobody cares.

‘Matter of fact, even IF you’re at the Football Hall of Fame… If you’re walking around doing nothing interesting or you have no skillz at verbally hosting a show, save it. Film everything you can all day and see if you can make an interesting video out of it for airing at a later date. Just because something’s LIVE doesn’t make it COOL *OR* GOOD. If you want to be known as the clown that live-streamed an event from the nosebleed seats where the performers looked like Lego blocks and you couldn’t even tell who they were and the camera was shaking around because you didn’t bring a tripod.. Go right ahead. I guarantee you it will detract from your brand’s props way more than it’ll add.

If you’re going to have co-hosts, make sure they know what they’re talking about. Don’t bring people on the screen just so you can drop names, because what’s going to get around is that they didn’t know that whomever was so boring and not worth watching ever again. Make sure you have an agenda and a topic. Most people aren’t any good at talking about stuff on the fly, so make sure they know what they’re coming to talk about and your viewers know what they’re coming to see.

Text Chatting

Similar to live streaming.. If you’re going to host a text chat, have a topic. If you create a topic, stick to it. Do. NOT. use “bait & switch” to get people to show up to your chats. Do not promise them one thing and then talk about something totally different when they arrive. The back-channel is alive and well and you will be talked about like a dog. People will know that you’re trying to game the system and cheat people into becoming viewers while duping potential clients that you can actually draw a crowd.

Make sure you can moderate your chat. Make sure you can kick people and ban them if necessary. It’s your party and everyone there is your guest. Act accordingly and regulate. If you have no skillz at being on video and moderating a live chat simultaneously, hire someone else to sit in and moderate your chat from a remote location.

If you run out of topics, shut the chat down. Don’t just sit there like DUHHHHH and turn what would have been a nice, short event into a long, boring event. Learn to recognize when the action peaks, plateaus and then starts falling off. Quit while you’re ahead. This is also why it’s good to set time limits on your chats. You can go longer if it’s still good, but when you hit that time limit, nobody can complain that you took your toys and went home.

Oh……. And if you can’t spell, stick to video.

~Bill Cammack

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Lindsey Chen, my blogging partner in our Lindz & Bill series, is today’s host for Next New Networks’ “Fast Lane Daily”. YAY!!! :D

Check it out above or click here to download for your iPod!

Congratz, Lindz! :D

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Adrienne & Bill

So I’m chatting with Adrienne Brawley the other day, and we’re discussing web shows since we’re both shooters and editors. We were talking about my post Personal Brand? No Crossover, and the topic of internet show hosts came up.

I “matter-of-factly” mentioned how several female show hosts either ACTIVELY HIDE their boyfriends or whatever and some of them merely omit the fact that they’re in relationships, to which Adrienne replied something to the effect of “But the guys don’t have to say who they’re dating.”

That’s where I lost whatever point I was about to make, because all main & auxiliary mental power was diverted to attempting to recall even ONE instance where a guy was asked about that.

Once I realized I wasn’t going to be able to cite a single instance in the 2+ years I’ve been involved with internet shows, I started thinking about WHY I couldn’t come up with one. :) What I decided was,

Nobody Cares Who Guys Are Dating

According to my Quantcast demos, my site has a 65% female readership. BlogHer has 61% female readership. Rocketboom has 65% male readership. Digg has 58% male. Wallstrip has 56% male. Blip.tv has 51% male. The point is, that according to statistics, it’s mostly males that are watching internet shows (even though studies are saying there are actually more females on the net, they just don’t identify themselves in surveys as female).

So, basically, there are a lot of guys that watch these shows, and if you go to IRL conferences or at least look at the flickr sets from these conferences, you’ll see there are a ton of guys at these things as well. There really isn’t a lot of representation for the female population. So that’s one reason why there isn’t any pressure on guys to disclose their dating status. Nobody cares.

Remember Dig A Tech Girl and Dig A Tech Guy? You probably don’t, because I didn’t either! I had to google all over creation to remember what the name was. Interestingly enough, when I finally found the guys’ page, the first two entries were Chris Boucher and Oz Sultan.

Chris, Rana & Bill

Bill & Oz

Anyway… At the time, ALLLLLL the attention was on the girls and none on the guys. There were a lot of complaints that a lot of the women on the list didn’t have ANYTHING to do with tech and that it was yet another reason to line up attractive females and rate them, as we Americans love to do! (and probably the rest of the entire world) :D

What Difference Does It Make?

I would love to see a study (which is clearly infeasible) about the effects on viewership / community participation for a female show host before and after she revealed that she was “involved”. Off the bat, I’m clear that a) it’s nobody’s business and b) her relationship status has nothing to do with whether she has a fun personality or can read a script beyond a 2nd grade level. Personally, I think that in most cases, it wouldn’t make any difference at all. I think that in most cases, people like what they like about a show host and their relationship status has no bearing whatsoever on their performance in the show, on Social Media sites where they follow that host or IRL.

The case where it WOULD make a difference is when that particular host is playing up her sexuality or sensuality in order to gain followers. If guys are only watching her show for T&A, it’s pretty likely that they’re imagining they have some form of a shot of being in a relationship with her or at least messing with her at some point. Revealing that she’s “spoken for” would put a completely different spin on her act and lead to several (if not MANY) disillusioned followers.

Opinions?

Ultimately, I don’t have an opinion on this topic, haha. I just wanted to post about it because I was so surprised that I was completely stuck with no response when Adrienne mentioned the disparity. If you have something to add, please write a comment below and we’ll discuss it.

The way I see it, it’s “same as it ever was”. Guys like looking at attractive women. That’s never going to end. There’s no reason why it SHOULD! :D I don’t think that should put any extra pressure on female show hosts to “play up” their attractiveness or sensuality, but we all know that “sex sells”.

As far as I can tell, the most SUCCESSFUL female hosts just so HAPPEN to be attractive, but they also know what they’re talking about, bring quality to their shows and also happen to be decent Human Beings IRL.

~Bill Cammack

Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
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Jonny Goldstein interviewed me back in August 2007 on his show Jonny’s Par-Tay [link]. Looking at the countdown timer to the end of the show, around -18:00 he asks me “So… Did you feel a little lonely before you got into all the social media stuff?” to which my response was that I’m actually LESS social NOW than I was before…

Jonny’s response was that it CAN lead to socializing, and he mentioned an instance of an IRL event, Vloggercue, hosted by Wreck and Salvage’s Adam Quirk that he was going to attend BECAUSE of the people that he met and knew because of social media.

While I agree that it CAN… How often *DOES* social media lead to actual social inteaction, for YOU? My point was that I became less social instead of more social because of the fact that my friends are always at my fingertips. For the sake of this post, I’m defining “social” as actually going somewhere to hang out with friends of mine, IRL.

Everyone sitting at that table (Grace, Rachel, Charles, Obreahny, Sandra & Mike), I’m only *seconds* away from interacting with, via social media, wherever I am. Instant messaging, status updates, texting, email, sites, forums, groups. I did a shoot in Central Park with Obreahny and uploaded it to my server sitting out in Central Park, using the park’s wireless access. I get footage from clients overseas via FTP, talk to them on skype or iChat and send them quicktime files for approval/changes. I watched a live stream of PodCamp Philly from NYC and appeared on-screen @ PodCamp Boston while I was sitting in a living room in Maryland.

There’s no reason for me to physically go ANYWHERE unless physically interacting with that person is the reason I’m going. You can’t go snowboarding together unless you actually go snowboarding. Other than that, the current state of communications enables you to be AS in-touch with someone as you want to be. I talk to my friend @CaliNative all day, every day. We’re both MIT Graduates, but we live 3,000 miles apart from each other and never met each other IRL. Meanwhile, there are people that have given me business cards, right here in NYC, that I never spoke to again after that particular day that we met.

Social media allows you to define your enviroment. You can create and maintain relationships that transcend physical and territorial boundaries. You can hold 5 completely separate instant message conversations at a time, which is absolutely impossible on the phone. Does that make you MORE social?… or LESS social? Is “social” being re-defined by technology enabling us to envision new directions?

I also say I’m less social because my tolerance for idiocy has plummeted. :) I didn’t have a lot of that to BEGIN with, but when you get to pick and choose the people you interact with on the basis of their intelligence, common sense and relevance relative to what YOU find interesting or important, it becomes really tough to tolerate people talking about ‘nothing’, or their own agenda which has nothing to do with what you find to be valuable in life.

Anil, Mike, Justin, Debbie, Grace, Bill, Kenyatta, Eric

Photo Credit: Jared Klett

So, yes. Social media DEFINITELY leads to situations where we all get together and have a good time, IRL. I think that more often, social media allows us to FEIGN getting together, which is actually *less* social than more so.

Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC

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