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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Egregious photo of myself with Kathleen! :D

Social Media is insanely skewed towards positive feedback. Because of this, a stigma is attached to negative feedback, regardless of how truthful that feedback is. People are literally AFRAID to say or type ANYTHING that they might be criticized for… by ANYONE… which necessarily and obviously creates a disingenuous society.

Put another way… As long as you’re being nice to people, you can say whatever you want. As soon as you’re not being nice… TO ANYBODY… you’re out of bounds. As long as everyone agrees with everyone, there’s lots of above-board chatter and clinking of glasses. As soon as someone disagrees, the chatter moves to the back-channel. The criticism or negative belief thrives behind the scenes, it’s just that there’s no trace of it in the same places where there’s a ton of positive feedback.

Keep It To Yourself

For example, I attended a flashmeeting one time (an internet-based meeting where people communicate with each other via webcam and “pass the mic” back and forth to each other) which was called in order to “critique” people’s website ideas. People were ASKED to attend this meeting and give their [honest] opinions about what they saw/heard/read. One of the first people to speak didn’t like the implementation of the site in question and proceeded to say so. This person was not being harsh or demeaning at all. They were saying what they thought was WACK (not good) about the site and what they felt the person needed to improve on.

In what was most likely the middle of their comment, they suddenly disappeared from my screen, and the moderator appeared. The person’s video and audio was cut off entirely. The moderator then went on to explain to all of us that we were here to offer POSITIVE feedback about the sites and then said, without actually saying it, that if we had anything other than that to say, keep it to ourselves.

The rest of the meeting contained only positive feedback. I thought at the time, and still think that it was incredibly retarded to call a meeting to critique things and then OUTLAW any criticism that might make the site creator feel badly. If your site SUCKS, it SUCKS. Period. If there are things you can improve on, it’s in your best interest to hear it before you continue down the wrong path, at least in that particular person’s eyes. So even in cases where the comments are beneficial to you, just about nobody’s going to say anything that might be interpreted as “negative”.

Linkbaiters

This, by the way, is what makes linkbaiters popular yet infamous. They say things that everybody was already thinking, but nobody was willing to say. People like to subscribe to linkbaiters on the internet the same way a crowd forms around a fight, IRL. If they had to throw their own hands and risk getting punched in the face, they’d run away, screaming.. But since someone else is fighting, they’re perfectly willing to get as close as possible to watch, ooh, aah and cheer for a good beatdown. People have built entire sites around this concept and have become moderately popular inside the fishbowl / echo chamber because of it.

So, essentially, unless people are willing to carry the stigma of being labeled an internet villain, they’re not going to say ANYTHING negative about ANYBODY, *evAr*!… Unfortunately, this behavior spills over into their personal relationships and makes people incredibly disingenuous when it comes to unfriending people.

Living in Public

One of the side effects of Living in Public is that to some degree, everyone knows your business. They don’t know all of your business, but they know enough to make judgments. I have the unique position of knowing a lot of people… I mean A LOT of people. Not “know them” as in I’ve seen them around on the internet and we clicked “accept” on friend invites, but that I’ve actually physically hung out with these people and we’ve developed whatever relationships we’ve developed during that time. Right now, for instance, I have 1,367 Facebook Friends and 586 of them live in my town, New York City. This means that I could hang out with a different person every single day for way more than a full year without repeating people. JUST in this town, and JUST from the people I know from Facebook.

An issue that arises from this situation is that you end up making the acquaintance of people that have problems with each other. Some of them started out as friends, and probably even introduced you to their friend at the time, and now they’re enemies. They’d never actually USE the word “enemy”, though, due to the aforementioned stigma, so they’ll just say they’re “not friends”. That’s all well and good until people start contacting you on the back channel, asking you why you’re still friends with XYZ after they did ABC to whomever. Then, if you refuse to hop on the bandwagon for something that isn’t your problem AT. ALL., the person that was *JUST* begging you to get down with their program gets mad at YOU for “choosing the offending person over them”.

Frenemies

One popular way for people to deal with these situations is to become the pathetically-termed, yet insanely funny “Frenemies” (an enemy disguised as a friend). This concept came up in a conversation I was having with a friend and I thought she had made it up herself. I didn’t realize that people actually do this. I figured that people that had a problem with each other would just say so, agree to disagree and let that be that. At the time, I wasn’t aware of the political cascade that would occur if, for instance, two people that work with each other every day proclaimed that they were now rivals, to whatever degree.

Due to the “Whose side are you on?” nature of the echo chamber, camps would develop inside that office and then resonate extermally throughout their entire social set. In order to avoid this, these people pretend to still be friends while they talk about the other person “behind their backs” on the back channel. It’s not actually behind their backs though, because since everyone knows everyone else’s business, everyone knows they’re enemies, but everyone ALSO knows to play it off as if they’re not during IRL hangouts and especially in anything they write on the internet.

Hide in Plain Sight

Keep it up! You’re about to be unfriended. [Bre and Bill]

This behavior also extends to individual relationships that aren’t in any kind of spotlight. If you’re on Twitter, for instance, there’s a site you can go to called Qwitter that will email you if someone stops following you and tell you when it happened. I’ve also had people tell me that they noticed that their Facebook friends count went down by one since the day before and wonder who it was that “quit” them. Clearly, that would be impossible for me to figure out with > 1,300 Facebook friends, but it’s still an interesting question… “Who unfriended me, and why?”

Unfortunately, due to the nature of our surrounding environment, it’s better for people to attempt to slither away, unnoticed, than for them to say “I didn’t like that you did or said XYZ, so I don’t want to be your 1,367th Facebook Friend anymore!” If they were to tell you what they didn’t like, you’d then have the ammunition to disseminate throughout the back channel, “Would you believe that XYZ unfriended me because of ABC?”, so it’s in their best interest not to say anything to you at all and just hope you didn’t notice.

Another style is to not unfriend the person at all… merely refuse to respond. This is a tricky one, because a) people become really busy as we’re trying to do what we’re trying to do on the internet, all day, every day, and b) I know personally that I get so much correspondence that I just can’t / won’t respond to everything or else all I’d do is answer emails every day. When someone’s paying me to answer my own emails all day, that’s what I’ll do. Until then, that’s not how we’re livin’.

This is a pretty good technique for people that don’t live in the same town and socialize in the same circles. For people that DO.. The jig is up when y’all run into each other in person. As soon as your unfriendly demeanor is determined, it’s *YOU* that might get unfriended, as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and everything else remains within arm’s reach on my G1.

So… ARE there ethics to unfriending people? SHOULD there be? COULD there be? Personally, I don’t believe there can be, because our culture is skewed towards hiding and talking behind people’s backs instead of attempting to resolve differences that arise between us.

What do you think?

~ Bill Cammack

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Interestingly enough, both Alana Taylor & Amanda Gravel posted about people’s Facebook rap tactics this week… although their topic is really universally applicable in the world of Social Media.

Essentially, Amanda’s post was about how people send friends requests with zero context or explanation of who they are or why they want to be “friends” with her. Alana’s post is about a guy friending her and immediately writing stuff to her that she found creepy:

Alana: “WHATT?? Can you come off as any more of a creep???

I have no idea who this guy is, but he is telling me in a Facebook message that his fantasy is to marry a girl he sees in a picture!?!?!”

hahaha Oh Man! :D Online dating is a bad idea to begin with (Especially if she’s a PC-user. Bleech! :( ) But I think the problem here is that the lines have blurred between Social Media sites and online dating sites. I don’t think the fact that Facebook throws people’s relationship status updates on their front page helps either, haha.

I went the other day to the Facebook home page and saw that a friend of mine had broken up with whomever she had been dating. At least that’s what I thought I read, because there was this big, red broken heart in the middle of the page with the caption “Whomever is no longer listed as in a relationship”. Come to find out later that day when I talked to her that she hadn’t broken up with her boyfriend, she had hidden her status entirely. For some odd (read: stupid) reason, that prompts Facebook to issue the announcement “no longer listed as in a relationship”. Um…. WHO CARES? How about NOT announcing that AT ALL, or at least changing the name to something less misleading, such as “Whomever has hidden their relationship status”.

So, since Facebook likes to tell people when other people are single (or show no relationship status at all), it makes sense that single guys are going to hit on single girls and see what they can get. Unfortunately, a lot of guys get their rap tactics from television and movies (which are… SCRIPTED!) and really have nothing intelligent to say to women at all. In this case, these guys should have read “Take her to the Book Store!”, because “You look good” and “I have fantasies about you and me” isn’t gonna cut it. It’s ALSO gonna get your spot blown when you get blogged or twittered about. :D

ChrissieB: “Men, please listen up, “women talk!” If you ask 1 girl out & DM another girl in her network about a date as well, you will NEVER get a date.”

D-Oh! >-<

Another problem with kicking "You look good" as your opener and closer in a rap email is that Social Media chicks spend a considerable amount of time expressing their personalities and ideas online. This allows you to E-Stalk them at your leisure. It’s not like meeting them in the club, where you don’t have a chance to know anything about them EXCEPT for how they look. So… When the only thing you have to tell them is your physical reaction to a picture you saw of them, you’re telegraphing the entire reason you friended them in the first place.

OTOH, it’s disingenuous to “Fake it ’till you Make it”. I’m not saying to hide the fact that you think she’s physically attractive. I’m saying “You look good” has to be ONE of the reasons you wanted to talk to her… not THE ONLY REASON you wanted to talk to her. :D

Amanda’s post was more generally applicable outside the realm of “the pursuit of happiness”. When you’re going to “friend someone” on Facebook or wherever, it’s usually a good idea to tell them WHY you’re doing that. This is an ESPECIALLY GOOD IDEA if you have no contacts in common with them, whatsoever. Even if you do have a bunch of people in common, that doesn’t mean that you and this other person should be contacts, like for no reason.

I’m definitely guilty of sending out messageless Facebook friend invites. :) However, when I do that, I’m more extending the *opportunity* for someone to be in contact with me than attempting to begin an active dialogue between us. It’s more of an indication, an acknowledgment that I’ve seen Social Media content from that person that I’ve found interesting, cool or educational. I currently have 668 Facebook “friends”. Assuming I were able to remain awake for 24 hours in a row, that means that I could interact with each of them for 2.1556886 minutes per day. Oh… that’s assuming I didn’t interact with anyone from Myspace, LinkedIn, forums, mailing lists, comments on my own site, iChat IMs……. So, for me, friending people on Facebook is more like “Hi. I’ve seen you around. Get in contact if you want to :) “.

However, if your goal is to start up some sort of non-shallow relationship with someone, Amanda’s absolutely right that it REALLY IS a good idea to let them know WHY you’re friending them and don’t make them search all over creation to figure out who you know, what you do and what you feel the value TO YOU is of meeting that person. Also, if your goal is to kick game and get on, realize that “You look good” worked for Richie Cunningham because “Happy Days” was a television show. It was in the script that Richie would do dumb stuff, but get the rap anyway. That stuff doesn’t work IRL and it works even less online. Balance out your approach between what your benefit is to kickin’ it with her and what HER benefit is to kickin’ it with YOU and you’ll have a much better chance not to end up in the tabloids.

DatingGenius

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Chris, Rana & Bill, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Chris Boucher, Rana Sobhany & Bill Cammack

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Raymond M. Kristiansen wrote a post on January 11, 2007 entitled “The Audience of Ten”. He also made a post with the same name to the Yahoo Videoblogging Group. They’re both good an interesting reads if you’re planning to do a “show” on the internet.

Basically, Raymond was making a distinction between having a few viewers and having many viewers. I understood TECHNICALLY, what he was talking about, but I didn’t have any IRL experience that would have made me really empathize with his points. His focus was on the HOW and WHY of doing a show being based on WHOM you were doing the show FOR.

I’ve kept Raymond’s concept in mind over the more-than-a-year since I read it. In the last month, I’ve had reason to revisit the concept to attempt to determine the “sweet spot” of “Audience”, as it pertains to me, personally.

My third and most recent “season” of ReelSolid.TV, my interenet video show, is entitled “Delusions of Grandeur”. This isn’t a personal statement, even though everyone that actually knows me IRL will tell you that DoG fits *me* PERFECTLY! :D The reason for the title is that as I contemplated WHY I would do a show, the reason is for the audience. I don’t have to do a show for ME, because I’m already living my own life. I already know what’s happening. I’m already getting laughs or education from what goes on around me. I’m enjoying NYC sights and sounds every day. So it’s not for me that I would make a show….. or, is it?……

Some people just enjoy being famous or internet famous. Some people enjoy being popular, even if they have to play themselves out to gain status/notoreity/fame/infamy. That’s of no interest to me, because I’ve always BEEN popular. I had a pivotal discussion with David Karp on June 10, 2007. I know what day it was because I shot this video:



As part of the discussion that day, David brought up the concept of “popularity”, and I insisted that that had nothing to do with my doing shows. At the same time, he sparked a question for me, which was “What’s the goal? Why do it?” which correlated with Raymond’s question “Who do you do it for?”

DoG is indicative of a cycle. In order to do an internet show, you have to delude yourself into the believe that someone, ANYONE is watching your show. Otherwise, by definition, there’s no point in putting you videos or audio or text ON the internet. It’s a beacon… A message in a bottle. You don’t know WHO’S going to get the message, but you’re hoping… BELIEVING that somebody will. So in order to do a show, you pre-fabricate your audience in your own mind, then you speak to that audience, and hopefully a REAL audience catches on to what you floated out there into the stratosphere.

Some people don’t have this problem. They just love to see/listen to themselves talk. :D That’s great for them, because they don’t need an audience. They just need to have a camera pointed at them to feel accomplished and happy with what they’re doing. More power to them! :D

When I decided on DoG, I wasn’t thinking about Raymond’s “Audience of Ten”. I was thinking about the audience at large. I was thinking about the people that randomly land on my site because of google searches. I was thinking about the people that happen to be looking for a topic that I happen to have had something to say about and just dropped in. I was NOT thinking about “core viewers” or “passionate viewers”. I wrote “Are You A Tech Elitist?” from the standpoint of someone that was focusing on the non-core and recognized a deficiency in my own core relations. With more and more Twitter followers and more and more Facebook and LinkedIn contacts, my time was being spent managing the social media masses instead of relating to the core. This is what brought me back to Raymond’s concept.

When I returned, however, I wasn’t focusing on the numbers being the difference. I was focusing on RELATIONSHIPS being the difference. The perfect example for me is my iTunes feed.

I receive stats on how many times each of my videos is pulled through iTunes. That number has never been higher than 30 within, say, 3 hours of a video release, and it’s currently sitting around 6 within the first hour. iTunes doesn’t give you any feedback about WHO IT IS that’s downloading your videos. Another thing is that when people use iTunes, they can take your show with them on their iPods or iPhones, so all you understand as the content creator is that there was one download of your video. That doesn’t mean that that person didn’t watch it 18 times and show it to their friends. So… In the mindset of focusing on the social media masses, I completely neglected my iTunes feed, meaning that as I redesigned BillCammack.com, mentally catalyzed by Tyme White, I broke my link from my video category to my iTunes feed and didn’t bother to check it because “in the grand scheme of things”, it was only 6 people anyway, right?

I received my wake-up call when my friend Adrienne Brawley asked me “So… what happened to your iTunes feed?”

All of a sudden…. And I mean *ALL* of a sudden, I completely, fully and POSITIVELY understood WHY I needed to fix my feed, and WAY MORE IMPORTANTLY, I recognized the sector of the audience that’s important TO ME when I make videos or write posts. I suddenly realized that amongst the random hits I receive from people looking for dating advice or footage of snow in Manhattan, NYC, I have a few, VERY IMPORTANT hits that I get that are from people that are ACTUALLY INTERESTED in what I’ve said or done now. Interestingly enough, DoG glosses this over, because you delude yourself into believing that lots of people care, which makes everyone like fans in a stadium. It’s the opposite of not seeing the forest for the trees. It’s not seeing the individuals for the crowd.

What it’s about for me certainly isn’t “popularity”, as I told David. Popularity’s useful for people that just want to be admired by a bunch of people they have no relationship to. It’s about having a good conversation IRL with Kenyatta about a blog post we both commented on. It’s about Tim saying he enjoys my work. It’s about Lux being able to rattle off DatingGenius concepts to new people that hang out with us because she’s watched me DEMOLISH people with the DG Live Show so many times already and people always come up with the same arguments. It’s about instigating-ass Annie throwing me under the bus every chance she gets. It’s about Charles laughing with me over something I said or did on the net. It’s about Grace shaking her head when I break down “the real” to her. :D

So, finally, I understand Raymond’s concept, and I agree with it for the most part. As I do videos going forward, I’m going to do them for the audience that I know I have and that I enjoy receiving feedback from. I might do them for individuals or I might do them for groups. I am NOT going to be focusing outside of that, however I welcome anyone who finds anything interesting to watch, give feedback or join in the fun. :)

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