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

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

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

Website

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

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

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

Twitter

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

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

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

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

Facebook

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

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

Live Streaming

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

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

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

Text Chatting

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

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

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

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

~Bill Cammack

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A year ago, on January 06, 2008, I wrote and posted “Do NOT Tamper With Your Comments!”. At the time, I offered “Turn On Moderation” as an alternative:

Bill: “Turn On Moderation – Make it so that NOBODY’S comments make it to personalblog or widgetblog unless YOU approve them. That way, when everything ends up positive, you just look like you spun the situation by only letting the comments through that you liked. This is DIFFERENT from changing people’s posts because there’s never anything negative for people to see in the first place, AND dissenting comments don’t become agreeing comments with the same person’s name on the top, posted at the exact same time.”

I wrote that line at a time when I wasn’t doing a lot of commenting on other people’s blogs. I hadn’t achieved a perception of the potential effects of “You *just* look like you spun the situation by only letting the comments through that you liked” on people who visit your blog and make comments that never get approved. Let me tell you about it.

Initial Perception

Initially, when I check out a blog for the first time, I’m thinking that the person who wrote the posts is looking for A DISCUSSION. I’m thinking that if they didn’t want A DISCUSSION, they would have turned off comments.

Actually, one of the very first times I ever posted on someone else’s blog, it was a dating blog and the woman had written flawed advice. With my naive way of thinking about blogs as sort of “personally-hosted forums”, I wrote a nice long comment about what was incorrect about her ideas. To her credit, she emailed me my words, when she could have just deleted them. Hats Off to her for that. :) My ideas could have been lost in space, because I had written them directly to her blog entry form. Last time I ever did *THAT*.

She emailed me my words and explained to me that she wasn’t going to host my ideas about her post on HER site, and if I wanted to, I should place them on MY site. At the time, I wasn’t hip to trackbacks and pingbacks. I had a short email discussion with her expressing my opinion that I thought she was lame for having a blog and ONLY approving comments that made her look good. Pretty soon after that, I found out that this is pretty much status quo. She represents the mainstream and I’m “odd man out” on this issue.

So I approach blogs that are new to me with the naive perception that what I’m looking at represents reality. I feel like the blog post itself is the same blog post that people responded to in the comments and hasn’t been altered after the fact, unless a note is placed there, saying what the edit was. I also assume that the comments represent the honest and factual response of “the community” to the post.

Moderation Experiment

This weekend, I got to experiment with the much-discussed faux pas (which many have termed *BLUNDER* or worse) which I’ve seen called “MemphisGate” (so funny!) or the TheKeyInfluencer situation. You can read about the actual events here, but the point is that A LOT OF PEOPLE felt like putting their two cents in on this situation, which meant I got to post on a bunch of blogs I’ve never heard of before.

Most of my comments went right through, without moderation. Some of them landed in moderation and were eventually approved. Others landed in moderation and then never saw the light of day.

When this happens… When your posts “disappear”, there could be several reasons for this:

1. It was the weekend, and the human moderator only pays attention to their site during weekdays = EPIC FAIL
2. The software never sent out the notification that there was a new comment in moderation
3. The human moderator gets too much email, etc to be able to handle everything = EPIC FAIL
4. The human moerator didn’t think they would LOOK GOOD with your comment on their page, OR they knew damned well that they didn’t have a rebuttal to what you said, so they chose not to approve your comment.

There are more possibilities, but let’s consider how someone might perceive you IF they choose to believe that you didn’t allow your post on their site because it makes them look bad or brings up points they never considered and have no counter-argument against….

All of a sudden, your site is now a show. It’s spin. It’s not an honest representation of “the community”‘s thoughts about what you posted. There’s no need to read your comments, because the best we can hope for is HALF of the story. It’s like reading the recommendations section on linkedin. The only comments there are going to be BENEFICIAL to that person.

So now, we have to wonder WHY you’re only accepting SOME comments and rejecting others. Is it that you really didn’t think out what you posted, and you’re not prepared to intelligently debate it? hmmmmmm……

Like I said in “Social Media Experts? (SMEs)”, there are a lot of DERIVATIVE posters on the internet. Basically what they do is Ambulance-Chase and blog about whatever the current hot topic is in hopes that they might get some traffic. Apparently, we’re living in a “me too” culture, where people see a chance and then hop on the bandwagon and go ME TOO! ME TOO! without really having anything intelligent to ADD to the discussion. The problem with doing that is that when people bring up things you never considered and that you have NO REBUTTAL FOR because you stole someone else’s ideas in the first place, you can’t say ANYTHING without looking even worse, so the best deal is to make sure that post is never seen at all on your site.

What Difference Does This Make?

The reason this is important is that discussions jump off immediately on the internet, and then you have a small window of time to get your two cents in before people forget about it entirely and move on to the next instant scandal. If someone says “I don’t like X” and then you type “This is why X happened” and hit enter and then see “Your comment is awaiting moderation” and then your comment never sees the light of day, you’ve wasted the time it took you to think up and write that post… AND you may have lost the idea ENTIRELY if the comment’s never approved. Even if your comment shows up two days later… It’s too late. The conversation’s already over. People have already decided that you didn’t have anything to say.

So… While the blog poster gets to look self-righteous because he or she said what they said and gathered a bunch of comments which either agree wholeheartedly, offer neutral points or offer “softball” negative points which the blog owner can easily knock back out of the park, the person who the story was about and the people who don’t see things the way the blog owner does are SOL.

From the side of the blog owner, it’s important to note that you’re losing credibility when people realize you’re just gathering positive statements about yourself. We start to wonder how many OTHER people posted comments that disagreed with you and were deleted… Did they actually OUTNUMBER the positive comments you allowed through moderation? One never knows…

The Solution

Initially, I was going to write this post as a fruitless campaign to get people who moderate their comments to SAY. SO. ABOVE. THE. COMMENT. BOX. so we can avoid wasting time posting something that isn’t going to be seen while the point’s being hotly contested.

Personally, I would LOVE to have that warning so I could:
a) read the post,
b) NOT read any of the positively-skewed comments and
c) move on to the next blog ASAP.

Some people REALLY aren’t diligent about monitoring their blogs, and in fact, their blogs aren’t important to them, but actually something peripheral OR even merely an extension of their job. There has to be a better solution than WONDERING whether your post is going to be approved SOON or AT ALL.

The solution is to have your own Public Relations Machine well oiled and ready to roll at a moment’s notice.

This way, regardless of where or when something jumps off that you need to address, people who decide to Google your name can find out where you represent yourself on the net and go there right now to find out if you’ve made any responses to the current “tempest in a teacup” (hahaha What a great term! :D ).

A good combination of blogging, microblogging and videoblogging or perhaps live streaming would serve this purpose very well.

If the problem’s on Twitter, address it there, leaving “@-comments” for people whose attention need to be called to the fact that you’ve responded in a decisive and timely manner.

If the problem’s on someone’s blog, write your own blog post and make sure you include a trackback to their site. If their site doesn’t accept trackbacks, leave a comment on their site with a link to your site. Unfortunately, you run back into the same “I don’t want dissenting ideas on my blog” issue, but even if your comment and link aren’t approved, you’re still self-expressed and your ideas are still SOMEWHERE on the net for people to find if they care to search for more information about the situation.

There are lots of live streaming solutions to choose from. My current weapon of choice is Ustream (even though I hope they VASTLY improve their co-hosting setup), because it’s quick to set up, rock solid for signal reliability IME (several times, I’ve been “on the air” for six hours at a time without incident) and people don’t have any issues watching from The UK, France, Israel, The USA… AND they’re working on an app to make Ustream available on iPhones, which is going to be a game-changer, for sure. :D

The obvious benefit of being able to “go live” at any time is that anyone who’s interested can make their way on over to your site and hear your explanation “straight from the horse’s mouth”. Also, new posts will be popping up even as you speak, so interested parties can find them, link them in the text chat and the discussion can jump off onto that tangent.

That’s not a good solution for everyone, though haha.. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll probably end up looking WORSE instead of BETTER by live streaming, so if that’s the case, skip audio & video and stick to text where you can craft your ideas, PROOFREAD THEM and run them by assiociates or advisors before you post them to the WORLD. WIDE. WEB. :D

~Bill Cammack

Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
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Podcamp with BlackRobb & the Hip-Hop Association, originally uploaded by thehalfshow.com.

Bill Cammack, streaming live from PodCampNYC.

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Podcamp with BlackRobb & the Hip-Hop Association, originally uploaded by thehalfshow.com.

Thanks to Jason Thomas (TheHalfShow), for taking this shot while I was live streaming the Hip-Hop session from PodCampNYC! :D

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On Tyme Said, @Juanita L.(29) writes :

Bill, since you are into video what do you suggest people do when they want to get into video?

As A LOT OF PEOPLE have found out over the last couple of weeks, hahaha, I suggest for people that want to get involved with putting videos on the internet (or any other content, for that matter) that you think outside of the box of your own personal experience and sphere of influence.

I could have learned my own lesson yesterday. Tyme posted about me, and while I appreciated it, :) I didn’t think anything else about it. Next thing I know, there are 29 comments on the post. Next thing I know, someone dug up some video that I posted months ago. Next, people started digging in the crates for videos I posted about a year ago! :O

I don’t know how many hours worth of material I’ve posted since 2006, but what I DO know is that everything I’ve posted, I’ve MEANT to post. I meant for it to sit on the internet, and I meant for people to be able to watch it whenever they felt like it, from WHEREVER they felt like it. I’ve received hits from Japan, Hawaii and Australia, so I’m rather comfortable with the concept of my videos being watched literally world-wide.

Meanwhile, it’s becoming easier and easier for people to post videos to the internet. Peggy mentioned Seesmic. All you have to do is have a webcam, click on record, talk and save the video, and you’ve contributed content to the internet. However… There’s a false sense of privacy that comes along with that. Maybe you were talking in the middle of the night to another friend using a service like that. However, that video sits on their servers indefinitely. That means you weren’t *just* talking to your friend. You were talking to EVERYBODY that chooses to watch that video. You might just get put on BLAST, like this => Trapped in a cube.

Now, that video was no big deal, but you get the point. Regardless of who you MEANT for a video to go to, once you put it on the net, you relinquish all control over it. People can watch it, link it, download it to their computers, save it to their iPods… whatever.

So the way to get started in Internet Video is:

A) Practice in Private.
B) Post in Public.

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