CNN aired “Black In America: Silicon Valley” last night. It was actually more interesting than I thought it would be. I would have done the show differently, but I’m me and CNN’s producers aren’t.

Disclosure: I’ll watch *ANYTHING* with Angela Benton in it! >:P~~~

Yum, Yum, Yum, and a Liverwurst A La Mode!!! >:D

So I was gonna watch this show regardless of what happened in it.

I had no idea what the NewME Accelerator was before just now.

I knew Angela had gone to California for some reason, and that Wayne Sutton was there also, but I didn’t know what they were doing.

I wasn’t watching the show tonight, because my DVR was catching it, but I got a text about 15 minutes after the show started, from my aunt, asking me, basically, why *I* wasn’t in this particular CNN show. :D

oh.. Disclosure #2: I’m also partial to Soledad O’Brien, because a homeboy of mine said he used to date her when he was at Harvard, but you know how dudes tend to exaggerate their interactions with females, so that’s an unconfirmed report. ;)

Anyway… This show was about people that are involved in founding startups.

Startup Culture

I’m “Internet Famous” (#6 of 154,000,000 Google results for “Bill”), (#2 of 1,440,000 Google results for “Cammack”), but that’s not what I do.

I’m a video editor and a content creator.

I edit television shows, corporate videos, web and personal content for my clients.

I also do my own videos and co-star in my friends’ videos:

YouTube Link => youtube.com/watch?v=wTHn5oFPmi8

That’s ENTIRELY DIFFERENT from what startup-people do.

With a startup, you think you have a good idea, you think you can technically implement it and make it into a website or an app, you think you can get people to recognize the value in using it, you think you can build a base of passionate users, and then you think you can get someone to give you money to go farther in your project than you could have on your own, or you think that someone will buy your company from you and roll it into their current set of offerings.

That’s a lot of thinking, hoping, and praying involved with that process, and I’m not interested. :D

If I had wanted to do a startup, I would have done it already, and it would have been successful.

Friends of mine founded blip.tv:

and Makerbot Industries:

and Tumblr:

and Rocketboom

Photo Credit: Francisco Daum

and I’m friends with investors like Jeff Pulver:

So, if I had wanted to do that, I could have done it, and I can still do it, but I’m not interested in it, because I’ve seen how DEDICATED my friends have had to have been in order to be successful, and how much of their actual lives they’ve had to sacrifice, and that’s not my idea of a good time.

I get in, do my work, output my video, invoice my clients, and then CHILLLLLLLL, and that’s the way I like it. >:D

Working on a startup starts *AFTER* you finish doing whatever else you do to get money, because it’s a huge gamble… An incredible gamble that depends on a lot of things working the way you think they will.. Some of which are under your control and many of which are not, such as when an internet bubble bursts or when an economy goes down the drain, or some other team beats you to market with a similar product and soaks up your projected user base that you were going to use to demonstrate demand for your site or app.

On a slightly-related note, that’s one of the reasons why women have such a hard time dating in Manhattan, NYC. The guys here are busy. We have things to do. We don’t have time to frivolously throw away, sharing gelato with you at some bistro. :)

Your window of opportunity to spend time with us is severely limited, because we always have more that we want to accomplish, and unless you work in the same field as we do, or you’re working on the same startup as us, you’re not going to see us much.

If dudes wanted to live the leisurely, waste-time life, they would have stayed in Kansas instead of moving to NYC to try to grind it out and make it happen.

Black In America: Silicon Valley

First of all.. Congratulations and Props to all the founders and participants for heading out to California to take part in NewME Accelerator and going for what they know! :D

So, The first thing that happens is Angela says “For whatever reason, African Americans [edit] tend to be consumers of technology and not really creators of technology”.

IME (In My Experience), this is true. There’s a difference between UTILIZING technology and creating something that other people use.

Similarly, there’s a difference between posting videos on a website and CREATING VIDEOS that you post on a website, like Jay Smooth does, for instance:

YouTube Link => youtu.be/7_z0TUN_DwQ

As a member of the content creation community, this was one of the shortcomings of CNN’s show. They never explained what it means or what it requires to think up and attempt to implement a startup, and then attempt to gain traction, get it funded and get it sold.

It was literally impossible to go into the actual intricacies of this field in an hour-long show, which is actually only 44 minutes of show time plus commercials.

Not only that, but CNN didn’t go into *HOW* they prepared in between their “pop quiz” pitch and their actual pitch at the end of the 9 weeks.

They didn’t show *ANY* of the process that takes you from doing a wack pitch to a good one. This show needed to be at least two hours long, and probably three, to do it properly.

As someone who knows startup founders and knows the amount of work that they put in, every single day, to make their projects successful, I was entirely set up and then short-changed by the show.

The way they started it, I thought we were going to experience the process. We didn’t. There was a lot of good information, and it was entertaining, but it was the equivalent of saying “Bill is going to mix a record now”, and then you hear the mixed record. What happened in between? o_O

On top of that, CNN never showed what a pitch actually is.

Basically, a pitch is a terse explanation of why people would use your product, how they would benefit from it, and, in this case, how you intend to provide ROI (Return On Investment) to your investors.

This is a completely different skill from a) coming up with a product idea, b) being technically able to create an actual application, c) being able to recruit a team to work with you if necessary, and d) networking and publicizing your app.

For instance.. My pitch, which I never use in actual conversation, is “Bill Cammack helps you create quality video & audio effortlessly. Working with Bill ensures quality control and on-time delivery of your presentation,
freeing you up to do other things with your time.”

What that means in English is that (amongst other things) I’m a video editor, and the reason you should give me money to spend MY time on YOUR project is that I’m better than you, I’m faster than you, I know what actual quality is in video presentations, so you’re purchasing quality control, as well as not having to waste your own time that you could have spent getting money doing what YOU do well, in the process of creating an inferior product in a much longer time period.

Of course, things are different for me, because I don’t pitch to companies. Companies pitch their projects to me. My job is to point out my stellar track record and the companies and networks I’ve worked for that all require top-notch work.

There’s no such thing as 99% of a television show. You get ‘er done, or you fail.

I can’t afford to fail, so I go in loaded for bear and make it happen.

No Wack Demos

Navarrow Wright told the group “No Wack Demos on demo day”, which amounts to “You’re going to be ON-POINT by the time you have to give your presentation that counts”.

I thought this part was important because people don’t tend to realize that there are people better than them at what they do or what they’re trying to do, and that they can receive valuable information from those people, including “Your presentation sucked, and here’s why”.

There’s no point in wasting your time reinventing the wheel, when you can just get the goods from someone that knows more than you and then move forward, look good, present well, and be successful.

It’s like with mixing music. I personally don’t believe in people being able to do their own “mastering”, which is some kind of finishing process that people do.

DIY Mastering doesn’t make any sense, because it’s the same person listening to the track on the same amplifier and speakers in the same room, so what’s different? o_O Nothing. If you want a track mastered, you send it to A MASTERING ENGINEER that has better equipment than you have, a better room than you have, and better sensibilities than you have when it comes to finalizing records.

I felt like their session(s) with Navarrow did exactly that. It gave them a window into what they SHOULD have been aiming at, from someone that knows the drill and can accurately inform them how far along they’ve progressed, or not.

Arrington, Conway, Kapor & Meritocracy

They aired a preview of “Black In America: Silicon Valley” several days ago, and some people were crying about what Mike Arrington had to say on the program.

I had been looking forward to hearing whatever controversial statements he made, but there weren’t any. As far as I can tell, he was accurately recounting his personal experiences in his field and location.

That’s like if I were to say that 80% to 90% (anywhere from 4 out of 5 to 9 out of 10) of the people that have hired me as a freelance video editor are white, you don’t get to cry about that because, not that I care enough to count clients, but that would be my honest guesstimation of historical reality.

I’m not demeaning black businesspeople by saying they make up either 1/5 or 1/10 of the people that have put money in my pocket. It’s just, AFAIK, a fact.

I also agree with what Ron Conway said, which is that it’s not necessarily what you know, but instead, it’s who you know.

You can have as many Facebook and Twitter and Google+ followers as you like, but if none of them are relevant to your professional field, you actually have approximately zero influence when you create a “call to action”.

If you have good ideas, but don’t know anybody that will forward you to someone that can actually help you get to the next level, you’re either going to be stuck on the ground floor or moving very slowly, as you’ll only be able to do as much work as you can afford to do around your regular work schedule, instead of being able to devote all your working hours to your startup because you received some funding that will sustain you and possibly a couple other coworkers until you get the product working well enough for a beta test, build your community and go for the big bucks.

Mitch Kapor said “The part that is meritocratic is great, but there’s a big part of it that isn’t”. I would agree with that, however, that statement applies to the United States in general. People hire who they like and want to spend time with and want to see succeed, so long as those people have the base amount of skillz to actually get the job done in the first place.

If nobody wants to look at you, nobody’s going to hire you.
If nobody wants to tell you “Good Morning” when you walk onto their job site (assuming it’s an on-site gig), nobody’s going to hire you.
If nobody has any “checks and balances” references for you, such as 500+ Linkedin Connections, nobody’s going to hire you.

Yes.. These things could be a function of some kind of racial or ethnic bias. They could also be a function of, let’s call it a “social bias”, because regardless of what your heritage is, you don’t know anybody who investors or potential clients trust to vouch for you or vet you as someone worth doing business with.

Unfortunately, we can’t change people’s skin color and get a do-over so we can see how much better or worse their lives and careers would be, so all that’s left to do is be the best you can be and get what you get from your own hard work and diligence.. Not only in learning to program, but also in authentic networking that results in your being connected to the right people that can and WILL put you in touch with the right people when you need it.

Otherwise Known As “Having Friends In High Places.” >:D

Hire A Front For Your Company

So, next up, Professor Vivek Wadhwa dropped some REAL SCIENCE on the NewME Accelerator team, which I can tell from looking at their faces during the reaction shots.

They only aired a couple of his statements, but I can tell he said a whole bunch of stuff that CNN didn’t have time to air (again, because this should have been a 3-hour show instead of a 1-hour show).

Part of what he said was “Get a white guy to be your front man”. This was advice that had been given to him at the time he was doing HIS thing, and he was informing the NewME team about this technique.

Of course, that’s not going to work for me because I have my own props.

My name and face are branded all over creation, so I don’t get to send anyone else out to network for me or get me business under the guise that they’re the ones doing the video editing, because who the *** are THEY? :D haha I’ll get LESS WORK instead of MORE if I send anyone but myself as my personal representative.

However.. Like I said above.. Internet startups are mainly ideas and programming. It’s recognizing an underserved market and filling that void. The hands-on part is behind the scenes. It doesn’t matter who you send as the representative of the company. Dude’s job could merely be figurehead/front-man, and the money you’re paying him will be worth all the extra opportunities you get to pitch investors and clients if things work out the way you suspect.

In fact, I would advocate this style for anyone that has a WACK PRESENTATION, whether they’re white, black, Asian, Hispanic, whatever.

If you look busted, or you mumble when you try to speak English, or even though you know how to program, you sound like an idiot when you try to articulate your thoughts, or you have serious issues with public speaking, it’s really in your best interests to hire someone better looking, more articulate, and more confident in public than you are to be the spokesperson for your company.

Fortunately, I’m genetically predisposed to being gregarious, which is why I have 3,000 Facebook Friends, 3,000 Twitter Followers 4,000 Google+ Followers, etc, and I do my own networking as well as connecting other people that I determine should know each other for business or personal reasons.

Nobody’s better at being me than I am. >:D

Relationship Issues

I was glad to see a dude from my school alum.MIT.edu/www/BillCammack on the show, and I was also glad that he and his girlfriend created a site/app about dating, being that there’s just about NOTHING I enjoy talking about more than women! >:D

However.. And I realize that CNN may have edited this to look a certain way to craft a storyline, but if you’re dating a chick, her safety is ON YOU and her transportation is ON YOU! :D

For a few months while I was at school, I had an official girlfriend, like people actually knew we were together.

During that time, if I needed to export her from my dorm room in West Campus, *I* had to walk her ass all the way to Mass Ave so she could get the bus back to her school.

It’s all in the game. It’s part of the deal. If there are 8 people living in a 3-bedroom, small-ass-house, and your girlfriend isn’t invited to make it 9 people, how you interact with her is ON YOU.

Word to Herb. That’s what Skype is for. iChat. Do something! :D

On top of that, Angela left 3 daughters back at her crib. Wayne left one son at his crib. I saw some other video of at least one other person having a wife and child, so they’re not likely to be too sympathetic to “My girlfriend has to take the bus” when their loved ones don’t even have that option.

It was cute that CNN brought up the “white girlfriend” storyline and then cut up a bunch of sound bites, so we really have NO IDEA, WHATSOEVER what anybody thought about dude’s girlfriend’s skin color, but, again, it barely, barely, BARELY skimmed the surface and short-changed us AGAIN as far as something that might have been interesting and relevant about this situation and could have sparked important conversation.

Seriously.. CNN left so much material on the cutting room floor that it’s just embarrassing.

Hopefully, they won’t recycle the tapes they used and they’ll do a WAYYYYY extended version of this program (which I doubt), but my suggestion to Angela and friends is to get your hands on the raw footage before they delete it, because there are at least 3 more documentaries y’all can make from this.

Anyway.. The point is that he’s the only one that came with a co-founder. Everyone else in the house was a standalone. That’s automatically going to put you at a disadvantage, because half of your team wasn’t invited to the house.

It’s going to be on you to figure out how to make that situation work for you.

Everybody there was scrambling to make a good demo in the time they had in the house. Nobody has extra time to take care of someone else’s business.

For next season, secure a sponsor like Ford, so there’s at least one car dedicated to the house, so if someone brings extra team members, he or she can make moves without inconveniencing other NewME members.

Walking While Black

So, Wayne was walking down the street between a cafe and the NewME house when he was apparently stopped for WWB.

I would have enjoyed seeing the actual footage, but either CNN decided not to air it or they didn’t have a camera crew with Wayne when the incident occurred.

Arrington had already said that it’s a white and Asian world out there. In situations like that, WWB is going to happen one time, so local cops can put an eye on you, check your ID and check your demeanor.

After that, it should never happen to you again, because the rest of the team should be informed that you’re in the area and liable to be walking around in the middle of the night.

In fact, this goes back to what I was saying about getting a Ford sponsorship, so NewME members don’t have to be walking all over creation.

If it happens to you more than once, *THEN* it’s a potential harassment problem.

I know this sounds dumb, but life isn’t fair. Deal with it.

In fact, it’s not even really a police issue, it’s a guy thing.

When you’re used to an environment being a certain way, and then it changes (in this case, going from having essentially ZERO minorities around to having several, who don’t appear to own cars), you’re going to want some information about the new person/people.

I went to a bar on Long Island one time with a “well-tanned” friend of mine, and we had been hanging out for for a while, when this guy with a fancy Italian nickname walks over and introduces himself to me.

I shook his hand, and eventually, he got around to asking me what we were doing there.

I looked him in the eye and told him we were there to drink some brews and check out some chicks.

He nodded, and then I asked him if that was a problem. He said it wasn’t, so the three of us hung out until he walked back over to his 7-8 local homeboys and told them what he had found out.

My friend and I chilled, without incident, until the bar closed down. Meanwhile, the dudes that had sent their envoy over had proceeded to get in a fight with another crew of 5-6 white dudes, right there on the dance floor of the bar, which was rather entertaining. :D

The point being.. If someone’s concerned that you’ve entered “their space”, it’s actually BETTER FOR YOU that they step to you and decide for sure whether they have a beef with you or not, than it is for them NOT to approach you and then if you eventually have to interact with them, they’re working off of entirely unfounded and incorrect conclusions that they made up about you in their own minds.

Go For Yours

Even though CNN devoted all of like 25 seconds to it, I think that Anthony Frasier‘s storyline was the most currently relevant and compelling narrative amongst the NewME members.

The only way out from under the current American economic crisis for a lot of people is going to be reeducation.. PREFERABLY in a field that doesn’t leave you relying upon local people and companies for job and career opportunities.

If your job is to put doors on cars and they move the plant to another country to maximize profits, you’re not getting another car-door-putting-on job. You have to learn a new skill.. ASAP.

I really like Anthony‘s response to “How can I buy my mother a house?”, and wish him the best of luck with his startup, playd.it, which is described as “Foursquare for gamers. See what your friends are playing on everything from Xbox to mobile. Discover new games and rate the ones you already played.”

This is “Hustle” or “Grind”, even though currently-popular music would have you believe that both of those words have negative, illegal connotations.

Without this type of work ethic, people waste their time instead of improving themselves, learning a new skill, networking, or publicizing their products.

You have to have a goal.. Something to look forward to.. Something you want, like buying your mother a house, and then you have to use the fuel you receive from that to propel you forward into potential greatness.

Whether you succeed or not, at the end of the day, you know you did all you could to create the future you wanted for yourself, instead of slacking, brooding, lamenting, and dreaming about what might have been if you would have applied yourself.

It’s Easy To Talk. It’s Hard To do.

Regardless of CNN trying to tell a 3-hour story in 1 hour, I’m glad they did this installation of “Black In America” about a sector of the society that isn’t typically focused on.

Hopefully, as several of the NewME members stated in the final block, people who “look like them” will get the idea that THEY can do the same things in life if they apply themselves.

Programming isn’t the point. Moving to California isn’t the point. Being an internet-famous blogger or social media personality isn’t the point.

The Point is that all of these startups began with an idea and progressed into implementation.. The Point is that you don’t have to accept the 1-5 ways that society claims you can make money or gain fame or pull chicks or whatever your goal in life is.

Sit down. Lay down. Stand around. Think about what’s missing for you or for someone else. Think about whether you can fill that need. Think about whether it’s economically feasible for you to attempt to fill that need. If it isn’t, sell the idea to someone else, or recruit other people that already have the equipment and skillz you need to pull it off, and offer them some kind of ROI for getting involved with your idea.

It doesn’t even have to be elaborate. You might be really good at using clippers to cut hair and shape up lines. ok, fine.. You look all fresh ‘n fly when you go to the club, but how about lining up a few customers at $10 each, then investing $80 in a shiny, new set of clippers & trimmers, making your money back immediately, and then letting all the rest of it be profit? o_O

Maybe you didn’t even KNOW that there are people that will give you money in return for a percentage of ownership of your company if they believe in your idea.

Maybe you didn’t even consider attempting to get investors and sponsors and passionate consumers and family members to assist you in realizing your goals and dreams.

So I think the show made some important points, although, like I said, being someone that knows what it takes to do what we do on the internet, even to write a long-ass blog post like this one, I’m aware that CNN skimmed over A LOT of the technical aspects of what needed to be done over the weeks that the NewME team was in Silicon Valley.

I’m sure the production goal was to show social issues and not technical ones, but I think that if you’re going to attempt to tell a story detailing bias in a community, you have to describe and display the technical merits and prowess of the people that the bias is supposed to be against.

Like, I can’t just say that someone didn’t hire me to do a video for them because I’m not white.. I’d have to demonstrate that I’m better than the person they hired, and then demonstrate that the potential client KNEW I was better than the other person and still hired them instead of me.

CNN didn’t delve far enough into the individual members’ skillsets to potentially make the case of “This startup should have been funded, but wasn’t, and it’s potentially because of a societal bias in this field”.

Anyway.. I enjoyed the presentation. It was good to see some social media people on the big screen. :)

Good Luck to them on their startups, and Good Luck to Angela on season 02 of the NewME Accelerator! :D

YouTube Link => youtu.be/UHceXqOMFrI

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According to klout.com/BillCammack, I’m a “Broadcaster”.. To them, that means “You broadcast great content that spreads like wildfire. You are an essential information source in your industry. You have a large and diverse audience that values your content.”

I mention that because I’m glad they changed my category from “Pundit”. Pundits get on my last nerve. :D

I didn’t have anything against pundits before a few months ago when I started following the Republican debates to see whether they were going to field a viable team to potentially defeat President Obama in 2012.

The problem I have with them now isn’t really their fault, but they have to deal with a new development in television broadcasting which I call “Internet Blog-Influenced News Cycles”.

When Hillary Is President

Back in the day… The day was exactly February 09, 2007, in fact, which I know because I posted this link => http://billcammack.com/2007/02/09/reelsolidtv-episode-39-when-hillary-is-president/, I recognized that this was going to be an issue for television stations.

At that time, my long-time friend and business associate Joseph Ruiz and I were videotaping events for politicians.

Also, at that time, I had never even heard of Barack Obama, which is why the post and the video are entitled “WHEN Hillary is President”! :D

Blip.TV Link => blip.tv/file/146156

I was filming with my MiniDV camera, but I saw several camerapeople with large cameras with stickers for television stations on the side.

I remember thinking to myself, I’m going to have this video live way before they are, because *MY* network is already in place, and waiting for media from me to go live.

The stations the camerapeople were shooting for only had news at 12 lunchtime and 6pm, and Hillary spoke around 10:30am. This meant that by the time I encoded my video, tagged and uploaded it, it would be going live around 2pm, whereas the camerapeople wouldn’t even be back to their offices before 12pm with the tapes, AND THEN they were going to have to give the tapes to producers, who were going to have to watch the whole thing for content and then write copy about it and decide which sound bites to use, AND THEN the producers were going to have to hand the tapes off to editors to make into the final product (which I know because that’s what I did for Bloomberg Television and Court TV for years), AND THEN it was going to be another hour before that video would be ready for air, AND THEN they were only going to play a few seconds’ worth of the video because they had so many other things to talk about during their 30 minutes (22 minutes, actually, when you subtract the time for commercials) of television news between 6pm and 6:30, and that’s exactly what happened.

My video went live around 2pm that day. I was watching the news at 12 on the stations that had sent cameras… nothing… When they finally announced the event at 6pm, they used probably about 7 seconds worth of footage, or the amount of time that Ronnie and Mike got to fight on Jersey Shore before the 300-pound bouncers that are always standing barely off-camera jumped in, and then they moved on.

Meanwhile, I showed the entire speech from beginning to end because I had had my camera rolling the entire time, and I have *ZERO* time constraints because I am my own internet network.

2011 – Rise Of The Pundits

Fast-Forward to 2011, and the television news has been fully affected by social media powerhouses like Facebook and Twitter.

They know that if they don’t report things immediately, they’re going to be LATE in the news cycle.

This calls for an entirely different approach from when people used to have to wait for 12pm, 6pm, and 11pm to roll around so we could find out what was going on in the world.

If something important happens at 1pm, 6pm is too late to report it as if it’s news.

This is also why a bunch of newspapers fell off, BTW. The time it takes to figure out the story, get it approved by executive producers, put it in print form, print the copies, and move the physical papers to the locations where people can buy them means that you’re AUTOMATICALLY going to be out-of-date way before your newspaper hits the stands.

The papers that didn’t migrate to an internet-based delivery format lost out.. BIG TIME!

This is why we’ve now experienced the rise of the pundits.

According to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pundit_(expert):

A pundit is someone who offers to mass media his or her opinion or commentary on a particular subject area (most typically political analysis, the social sciences or sport) on which they are knowledgeable. The term has been increasingly applied to popular media personalities.[1] In certain cases, it may be used in a derogatory manner as well, as the political equivalent of “ideologue.”

Pundits are necessary because they’re expected to speak *BEFORE* facts are revealed instead of *AFTER* facts are revealed. o_O

This is simultaneously what makes them so annoying to me.

I agree with the first part of the definition: “Someone who offers to mass media his or her opinion or commentary”, but I disagree with the second part: “on which they are knowledgeable”.

Because you know something about politics doesn’t mean you know *ANYTHING* about a particular political situation.

For instance.. I know about music mixing. If you show me a video and then say “The mixer used Waves’ Renaissance Compressor instead of Waves’ PuigChild compressor.. Why did s/he do that? o_O” I’m going to tell you that you get two different sounds by using the two different compressors on a track, AND that RComp is transparent (to my hearing), while PuigChild colors the sound (makes it sound different than it originally did).

However.. If you were to play a song for me and then ask me the dumb-ass question “Do you think the mixer used RComp or PuigChild on this track? o_O”, I have no choice but to tell you a bunch of garbage, because I. DON’T. KNOW!

Either the track sounded the same before the compressor went on, in which case, I’d guess RComp, *OR* it sounded different before the compressor went on, in which case, I’d guess PuigChild, and that *ASSUMES* that the person asking me had some sort of advance knowledge that it HAD to be one of the two that was used.

What Do You THINK?

This is why pundits are so annoying.

The news cycle is now immediate. I find out things from Twitter and Facebook way faster than I do from television, even if I leave a news channel running live all day.

This is because if a bridge falls down or a plane lands in some water, Citizen Journalists don’t have to wait to decide whether they care about an event or not, and they don’t have to wait for EPs (Executive Producers) to approve their media. They just send it.

Granted, and to the credit of Mass Media, there’s way more fact-checking that goes on before they output their content all late and after-the-fact.

The new immediacy of the news cycle, which has been created by internet connectivity and Citizen Journalism, has made pundits necessary to fill the space between when a television station finds out about something and when they can actually report something substantial about it.

Meanwhile, it’s all garbage.

As soon as the Herman Cain, feel-a-chick-up-in-a-car allegations were dropped, all of a sudden, we were subjected to infinite opinions about Sexual Harassment and whether he did it or not.

Not only did we have to hear this ONCE, but CONSISTENTLY and PERSISTENTLY, until he finally had a press conference to deny the allegations.

Meanwhile, none of these people know jack-**** about jack-**** because they weren’t there (if she has ever been in a car with Cain at all), and they don’t know what happened, so they need to STFU.

BLAH BLAH BLAH Should he bow out of the race? o_O

BLAH BLAH BLAH Are women going to come out of the woodwork, accusing him of harassment? o_O

BLAH BLAH BLAH Is he going to lose a lot of support in the next poll? o_O

Meanwhile.. When the actual fact rolls around, he’s still at the top of the charts with Romney, and when he says the allegations are unfounded, he practically receives a standing ovation at the Republican Debate, so all this punditry was just a big waste of time, wasn’t it?

C’Mon, Sunn :/

To make matters worse, the television stations feel the need to discuss these things consistently, throughout their broadcast day, in order to appear “on top of the news”.

I wish there were a “How do you know that?” or “What facts are you basing your opinion on?” button that we could press and get these people to STFU when they’re just running their mouths about things they don’t know anything about.

In fact, their opinions don’t matter, and except for actual experts in certain things like health matters and monetary policy, there’s only a slight percentage chance that anything they say will turn out to be accurate at all.

The only reason the experts are accurate is because they’re giving their opinions based on a series of actual situations that panned out a certain way in the past.

What can you say for sure in the Cain situation?.. Nothing.

Their statements are diametrically opposed. Either he’s lying or she’s lying. There’s no statistical evidence supporting either guess. Sometimes guys are telling the truth in Sexual Harassment situations, and sometimes gals are. Sometimes, they both are, but they interpreted the situation differently or remember it differently, especially if alcohol is involved.

All you can do, honestly, is report the facts (or lack thereof) and then move on.

Since this isn’t acceptable entertainment, a whole bunch of know-nothings are booked to talk yang on television, for essentially ZERO educational value.

To make matters worse.. Depending on which station you tune in to, you get a totally different spin on the exact same content.

One channel says “Please don’t frack our water, so we can light it on fire and get sick from drinking it”, and then the next channel says “**** your health! :D .. We don’t want government telling us we can’t pollute your water”.

One channel says “The only way to stimulate the economy is to put more money in the hands of ‘Job Creators’ by not raising taxes against them and simplifying the tax code so they have confidence that the game’s not going to change on them next year after they hire a bunch of people” and the next channel says “We need to go into more debt and tax people more so we can put Americans to work right now”.

Meanwhile, nothing actually gets done, and people continue to starve and lose their homes, with no end in sight.

What I’m wondering is that if these pundits are supposed to be so knowledgeable about their specific areas of concentration, how come they’re not arriving at the exact same conclusions and providing viable and irrefutable solutions to this current American crisis? o_O
–
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Anthony Weiner fessed up in a press conference about his role in the recent scandal that the internet’s been buzzing about:

Direct Link => http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/43301263#43301263

It would take me longer than it’s worth to figure out a coherent storyline for this article, so I’m just going to write about my experience with and thoughts about this situation.

I heard about it several days ago. Some politician was alleged to have sent a picture of tha dilznick to some chick on Twitter.

*yawn*

I immediately didn’t care, but it kept coming up on Facebook, so I checked a little more into the information.

Turns out that this dude supposedly sent the picture over public twitter to some chick… Sure… That’s likely. :/

Turns out that the person who reported it is a conspiracy theorist… Sure.. He’s credible. :/

So.. Not knowing anything about anybody involved in this situation (I’ve never heard of Anthony Weiner before whenever this scandal started), I assumed it was a setup, and an extremely poor one at that.

In fact.. This very issue came up Thursday night when I was chillin’ with some friends after the blip.tv party.

Almost verbatim, here’s what I had to say about it:

I think this is a setup. I don’t believe it. The concept is so stupid. I mean.. Think about it.. Whomever set this up doesn’t understand how the internet works.

Why in the hell would some dude send a picture to a chick over PUBLIC TWITTER when he could have DM’ed it to her, sent it to her privately on Facebook, texted it to her phone, I mean there are myriad ways he could have sent this thing, but whomever set him up decided that they were going to make it look like he sent it over public twitter?

The idea is stupid and the setup sucked.

HAHAHAHA However… I also told my friends *THIS* last Thursday, five days before Weiner fessed up:

The only thing that bothers me about this situation… THE *ONLY* THING that bothers me about it..

is that he refuses to say that that’s NOT a picture of him or that it IS a picture of him.

He knows damned ******* well whether he wears underwear like that or not. If he doesn’t, he should be able to say “That’s not me”.

(if you’re interested in how obvious the picture is, click here => static1.businessinsider.com/image/4de26913cadcbb2f38270000/weiners-weiner.png)

On top of that.. If he *DOES* wear underwear like that, he should know damned well whether he took a picture of himself in it. If he didn’t.. he should be able to say “That’s not me”.

So, my stance last Thursday night was that I didn’t know anything about the guy to believe him or not believe him, but the setup sucked so badly that I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

His excuse at the time was that he had been twittering and then… Yes.. Twittering. The word “Tweet” was made up by people after the fact. If the individual posts were Tweets, the service would be called TWEETER, you idiots.

His excuse at the time was that he had been twittering and then he happened to notice a post that he didn’t create appear in his timeline as if it came from him, which was this pic of tha dilznick, and he immediately deleted it and kept twittering.

He also claimed that his Facebook account had been hacked recently and he was looking into the security issues, blah blah blah.

These excuses work fine for drones that don’t understand how the internet works.

Let me tell you how the internet works.

If you don’t create media, there *IS* no media. Capisce? >:D

Weiner’s refusal to say whether that’s a picture of him or not indicates to anyone worth their salt in Social Media that He. Takes. Pictures. Of. Himself. In. Underwear.

Here’s an example… I’m 5’9″. I have never dunked a basketball on a regulation hoop in my entire life. Never. I never have, and I never will. Not without assistance or stepping on someone’s back and propelling myself to the hoop.

To make matters worse, I don’t even PLAY basketball. I play hockey.

So I can guarantee you.. 100%.. immediately.. without blinking an eye, that there are ZERO authentic pictures of The Kid dunking a basketball on a regulation hoop anywhere in existence in the entire universe, because a) I’ve never done it, and b) the only times I’ve dunked a basketball EVAR is on way shorter hoops, and nobody was taking pictures at the time, and I most certainly didn’t pose for any.

So, some dude saying “I can’t say for sure whether that’s a picture of my underwear and my leg or not” indicates clearly to me that a) he’s taken pictures of himself like that, b) he’s taken pictures in that set of underwear, c) he’s taken pictures of himself from that angle, and d) he knows all these things, so he’s waiting to see whether he can get over or not, and the only issue is “Did he send this picture out over public Twitter or not? o_O”

So, Fast-Forward to today, and I’m watching this video of Weiner’s confession that I posted above, and this is what dude has to say for himself:

Last Friday night, I tweeted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as a direct message as a part of a joke to a woman in Seattle. Once I realized I had posted it to Twitter, I panicked, I took it down and said that I had been hacked.

This is where I started searching for slapping-forehead smileys like these =>

Like I said before.. I was already sure that it was a picture of him by his lack of absolute denial. The only question I had was *HOW* that picture got in his public Twitter stream, and now we know.. Weiner *FAILED* to mark it as a direct message, and it went to EVERYBODY instead of just that one chick.

What’s even more pathetic about this situation is that there’s a popular commercial that was recently released (before the scandal) where this dude tells his boy that instead of replying to him in an email, he accidentally clicked “Reply All”, and had sent it to the whole company, and the rest of the commercial is spent with that guy running all over creation stealing computers and smartphones from coworkers so they don’t see what he accidentally sent to them.

Life Imitates Art.

So I’m like “oh.. He just ****** up. \o/”. No conspiracy theory. No setup. He just ****** up managing his social media presence.

Oh well. :D hahaha In fact, the conversation Thursday night included considering a brilliant scheme to publicize him as a politician.

I counted that as a possibility because I had never heard of Andrew Weiner before a couple of weeks ago or whenever this story broke, and a fake leaking of a fake picture that could easily be explained away after the publicity wears off is a pretty good use of today’s social media outlets.

Nope… He blew it, and now he’s at the podium crying about something I can’t figure out. What’s he crying for? o_O

He wasn’t crying when he was sending pictures of tha dilznick to random chicks behind his wife’s back. :D

What is it with these people?.. I just finished writing about Arnold Schwarzenegger tappin’ the maid to the point that he popped a kid out of her that arrived a week apart from when his own wife had a kid, and then 14 years later, he goes “Sorry”.

Three years ago, I wrote about Political Sex Scandals in general.

Why are y’all crying NOW? o_O .. Why are y’all (fortunately, Weiner didn’t do this) making your wives take the Perp Walk with you to the podium in a show of solidarity and “I’m sticking by my man even though he did XYZ”?

You didn’t invite your wives to the action, so leave them out of your press conferences.

So let’s take a look at my favorite highlights from Weiner’s confessional press conference:

Weiner [00:30]: Last Friday night, I tweeted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as a direct message as a part of a joke to a woman in Seattle. Once I realized I had posted it to Twitter, I panicked, I took it down and said that I had been hacked.

First of all.. What kind of joke involves a picture of tha dilznick? :D hahaha If you would have sent that picture to a dude, you might could have gotten punched in your ******* face, so what kind of a joke would it have been after that? o_O

If you’re going to fess up, fess up all the way. There isn’t any “joke” here. You were flirting with a chick, including sending her pictures of yourself. It’s too late to half-step on your confession. You’re not going to look any more proper by claiming that you joke around with women by sending them pictures of your body parts. In fact, you’re going to look dumber, so just admit that you were kickin’ it with her and you got stimulation out of it so we can move on.

Second.. Why in the **** are you flirting with chicks on public social media outlets when you have a wife? :D .. At least Tiger Woods got caught TRYING to be sneaky.

I mean, I realize that Weiner THOUGHT he was sending it to her via DM, but C’MON, SUNN! :/ get another ******* account for that. Jeez. :/

Third.. If you don’t know anything about social media, consult with people who do BEFORE you make even more of an ass out of yourself by coming up with excuses that you can’t sustain.

I watched him being interviewed by Rachel Maddow (watch the bottom video for the episode I saw).

While the conversation was going on and he was saying he was being pranked, I was like “ok then.. This must *NOT* be a picture of him at all, because how in the world would someone get a picture of him to FAKE Twittering to some chick if he never took a picture like that of himself ever in life?”

4 minutes into the video, Rachel says “Because you haven’t answered a question about whether the photo is you or not, you realize that everybody now thinks the photo IS you, and so where there’s smoke, there’s fire, there must be a real scandal here, you must have been doing something creepy here.. Let me ask you whether or not you want to answer that question, and then let me ask you what the answer to it is”. This is where I sat forward and was waiting for Weiner to IMMEDIATELY say “Nope, that’s not me”. Instead, he says “We don’t know for sure. The photograph doesn’t look familiar to me”.

BUZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ… Wrong Answer.

That’s your leg or it isn’t. You own underwear like that or you don’t. You took a picture of yourself in underwear or you didn’t. It’s available in digital form or it isn’t.

0 or 1. There’s no “in between” here.

As SOON as he wouldn’t deny that he’s in the picture, I was sure that it WAS a picture of him and he had been coached to not deny it because if the truth was ever found out, he’d look like more of a liar than he already made himself out to be.

That was good coaching, but too little, too late.

Weiner [01:00]: I’m deeply sorry for the pain this has caused my wife and our family.

Yeah. That’s cute, but what pain is that, exactly? o_O

This dude (according to what he says NOW) hasn’t even been in the same room with chicks he’s been flirting with on the internet. No physical contact. He hasn’t had sex with ANYBODY other than his wife. What’s the problem here?

In fact, I think he did more damage to himself and people that love and support him by coming up with weak, unsupportable lies about being framed.

Imagine Arnold being like “Well.. You see… What had *HAPPENED* WAS… I was in this movie about myself being cloned, right.. and someone took advantage of that and swabbed my DNA from a glass when I was at a restaurant and created a clone of me with my housekeeper, 14 years ago, and…”

C’mon, Sunn! :/ .. If you’re busted, you’re busted. If you **** up and send a picture of tha dilznick over public Twitter, you have to realize that there are people that follow you by RSS, meaning that whatever you send out, regardless of how quickly you delete it, may very well have been emailed to them and be sitting there in their inbox, hours, days or weeks after you delete it… Once you press “send”, you’re toast. If you don’t know even that much, you need to stay out of social media, entirely.

A couple of years ago, this chick Twittered that some dude in a live stream was ugly. She found out a few minutes later that he was a social media bigwig and tried to delete the post. Unfortunately, it had already been archived by TweetScan, and my friends and I had a FIELD DAY, looking at what she actually said about the dude and then all the ass-kissing she did after the fact, trying to backpedal out of the situation after she had unsuccessfully deleted her authentic opinion about his looks.

Weiner [01:14]: In addition, over the past few years, I have engaged in several inappropriate conversations conducted over Twitter, Facebook, email and occasionally over the phone with women I have met online. I have exchanged messages and photos of an explicit nature with about six women over the last three years. For the most part, these communications took place before my marriage, though some have sadly taken place after. To be clear, I have never met any of these women or had physical relationships at any time.

Inappropriate conversations? :D .. When did he agree not to flirt with women?

Has anybody ever agreed not to flirt with women? Is that written into marriage vows? o_O

What is this guy crying about?

He’s admitting in public that he’s never physically met ANY of the chicks he’s been sending pictures to, so what’s the problem?

He hasn’t broken any of his marriage vows. He hasn’t broken any laws. According to his information, all the women he’s been kickin’ it with are GROWN-ASS WOMEN over the age of consent in New York… hmm.. Well.. Since I don’t know where these chicks are from, I should just say that according to his statement, all of the chicks have been over legal consensual sexual age in their respective states… Which doesn’t matter because he hasn’t had sex with any of them.

The funniest thing about this situation is that he destroyed his credibility way more by LYING ABOUT IT AFTER THE FACT than he did by accidentally posting the picture to public Twitter.

Weiner [02:45]: I have made it clear that I accept responsibility for this, and people who draw conclusions about me are free to do so. I’ve worked for the people of my district for 13 years, and politics for 20 years, and I hope that they see fit to see this in the light that it is, which is a deeply regrettable mistake.

THIS was flavor! :D .. PROPS to Anthony Weiner for saying that. That’s the real deal, right thurrr.

“I messed up. Hopefully, y’all can get past this and remember/recognize that I’ve been doing right by y’all in MY. ACTUAL. JOB. for the last 13 years. If you want to hate on me for sending pics to chicks of tha dilznick, I respect your decision to hate on me.”

That’s respectable, as far as I’m concerned. It’s not “Please look past this”, but rather that he realizes that his getting busted is going to alienate some people, and if they can’t get over it, he respects their decision to jump ship when election time rolls around.

That’s what he should have said from the giddyap.

Some drone reporter asks “Why would you do this after you’re married?.. You know it’s wrong…”

Weiner [03:45]: You know, I… I don’t know what I was thinking. This was a destructive thing to do. I’m apologetic for doing it. It was deeply, deeply hurtful to the people that I care about the most. um.. It was something that I did that was just wrong.. and I regret it.

BUZZZZZZZZZZZZ… Wrong Answer! :D

This is what I was talking about in my article “Sex Addiction Therapy & Rehab?”

This is a bullshit lie.

It may never cease to amaze me that guys are scared to ******* DEATH to say “I’m a guy. I like chicks. I kicked it to her because I felt like it.”

That’s the answer to that question. “Yeah, I’m married. Yeah, I like chicks. Yeah, I flirt with them on the internet. Next question?”

What’s even worse is that these drones keep falling for these excuses over and over. “oh.. There must be something wrong with him! :O”.. “oh.. He must be addicted to internet porno! :O”. Sorry. The fact is that some guys aren’t only attracted to their wives and they act on their personal interests. It’s no ******* major Scooby-Doo mystery.

“I don’t know what I was thinking”… “I sent a picture of tha dilznick to some chick in Seattle as a joke”… Who falls for this stuff? \o/

“I did it. I was kickin’ it with her. I tried to send it as a DM but ****** up. Hopefully, you’ll still vote for me in the next election.”

Some reporter: “Where is your wife?”

Weiner: She’s not here.

hahahahahahaha I loved that answer. :D

Mind your ******* business. My wife is wherever she happens to be, which is where she always is.

People are too used to politicians making their wives do the Perp Walk with them and stand next to them at a podium looking like absolute IDIOTS while their husbands tell the world about how they were playing them out behind their backs.

Thank you, Weiner, for not subjecting your wife to this idiocy.

These dudes do all this action behind their wives’ backs, so why in the hell should the chicks have to be there for the mea culpa press conference?

You know… I originally intended to comment on the entire video, but it’s 27 minutes long and I just don’t care anymore. :D

If you care, go watch it => http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/43301263#43301263

The bottom line is that Anthony Weiner didn’t have sex with *any* chicks outside of his marriage. He didn’t commit *one* single crime. As far as he knows (and nobody’s stepped forward to say otherwise), all the chicks he’s been flirting with on the internet are of legal age anywhere in the United States of America.

There’s no story here.

There’s a lesson, though…

The internet is fire. If you play with it, you might get burned. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you betta ASK SOMEBODY or ca-hall Tyrone.

If you insist on doing things on the internet that you don’t want to become a part of the public record, you need to implement your Mea Culpa / Perp Walk strategy BEFORE you start doing it, not AFTER you get caught.

I mean.. Think about it… What would have happened if Weiner had successfully sent this picture to the chick in Seattle and then she would have decided to forward it to her girlfriends or her boyfriend found it (if she has one), or any number of a gazillion other things would have happened?

We’re talking about *WHEN* something’s going to go wrong, not *IF*.

Arnold was screwing the help, popped a kid out of her, concealed it from his wife for 14 years, and *WEINER’S* at the podium crying because he sent pictures and text messages to women he’s never physically been in the same room with?

What’s the matter with you people? o_O
–
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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

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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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