Bill Cammack

So, ten (10) days ago, The Kid posted “PLEASE visit lizburr.com!!! :O”, ’cause I needed to put my homey ON BLAST for her wack compete stats!

Liz Burr = Healthy …. Her Blog Stats… Not So Much. :/

So I made that post and did everything short of a Jerry Lewis Telethon for her stats, and what thanks does a brotha get?

Today, I receive THIS! :/

grrrrrrr… :)

Now, the corny part is… If you look at the chart, TEN DAYS AGO is when her curve changed and got steeper! You see that, RIGHT?!?!… So, CLEARLY, due to The Kid‘s efforts to hook a sistah up, she’s DIRECTLY BENEFITTED, and *THIS* is the thanks I get! :/

Chicks, man!… Can’t live WITH ‘em. Can’t live WITHOUT ‘em! :D

damn.

~Bill Cammack

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billcammack vs lizburr, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Liz Burr was hangin’ with The Kid for a hot minute there, but I’m really concerned about how she FELL THE #&$% OFF in her compete standings, so please visit lizburr.com so she might have a chance of holding her head up high in a stats conversation with Bill Cammack.

Thank You,
The Management

~Bill Cammack

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Liz & Bill, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Liz Burr & Bill Cammack

My fellow MIT alum, Liz Burr doesn’t care about my pictures. :( She doesn’t care if The Kid drinks a bunch of alcohol and hangs out with a bunch of chicks. :(

(L to R) Oz Sultan, Florence Holdeman, Bill Cammack, James Im, Michelle DeForest & Whitney Hess @ TechSet NYC
Photo by Brett Petersel

This is what I’ve learned since consolidating my blogs into one stream, which is BillCammack.com. Consolidation has gotten me a ton of hits/traffic/whatever, but the end result hasn’t been a crossover by “fans” of any particular aspect/section/category of my blog/life.

For instance, even though my “Brass Rat” is in a ton of pictures, people I’ve known for months are like “I didn’t know you graduated from MIT!”.

Limor Fried, Bill Cammack & Phil Torrone

Or people that happen to know that I’ve been page 1 on Google for “Bill” for the last 8 months apparently never clicked through, because they ask stuff like “So… What do you do?”, indicating that they’ve never been to my ABOUT or CLIENTS/PROJECTS pages, which are clearly marked at the top of my site. :/

I also mentioned in “How many people read my blog?” that 88% of my hits are “single-serving friends” (ref: Fight Club), so there can’t possibly be any crossover if people are only accessing ONE PAGE on my site. :D

So now that I don’t care anymore, I’m splitting my feeds. I used to be interested in people finding out several things about me, but that’s not how this game works. :) The way it works is that people look for what they’re interested in at that moment, and then they move on. IMO.. There’s no point in showing people OTHER STUFF that has nothing to do with what they’re currently interested in. If they came to my site to see pictures, they’re not interested in editing. If they came to research video editors, they’re not interested in my video blog. If they’re interested in my video blog, they’re not interested in my dating advice, etc etc… So now, I’ve created a feed for each particular interest:

Bill Cammack
RockStar
DatingGenius
Video
Social Media
Photos

I didn’t want to do this before, because I was attempting to gather people with different interests into one location. Forget that. :D If people want to read about Social Media and not wacky dating advice, more power to them. I feel they should have a way to get ONLY what they want from my site, instead of what I’m trying to offer them while they’re here.

This also solves an issue I was discussing with Liz Burr about my new “Rock Star” series:

“Rock Star” is partially a standalone series, but it’s actually not. It’s a lifestyle blog at the same time that it’s a music blog. In one way, it should have its own site, and in another, it’s actually a part of my usual video blog. Splitting Feeds solves that issue for me, entirely. Also, if I decided to make a different iTunes feed just for the show, all I have to do is link to the new, standalone “Rock Star” feed.

The “downside” to separation is that BillCammack.com becomes invisible, and just the “host” for whatever people are really looking at. However, the way I see it, my site was invisible to begin with, as most people were Googling stuff and ending up here and then skating immediately. At least this way, if they can subscribe to one particular aspect that they like, they’re more likely to receive an update in their reader that they might actually be interested in, instead of a random picture of The Kid posing with his bike.

A lot of shows and sites have been receiving the Fail Whale recently.

There’s nothing wrong with failing. Happens all the time. “Happens to the best of us”. Sometimes, it’s not actually a failure so much as an inability to meet requirements for continuation. You could have a perfectly successful show as far as getting the job done and delivering on time, but you’re just not getting the numbers of views or members or whatever your sponsors asked you for and your authorization to continue the show (or your funding) gets pulled, and that’s that.

More important than failing is what happens AFTER you fail… What happens to your media? What happens to your site? Did you think about this before you started your show?

I’m thinking about this today because I read Liz Burr’s post “Do Social Media Strategies Go To Heaven?”, where she talks about her WIRED SCIENCE Facebook app and the fact that the show itself was canceled and will not be coming back to PBS. She writes:

“The show’s cancellation has me asking myself, where do social media strategies go when they’re no longer needed? So far, the results of our most significant strategies are:

• a blog with over 200 entries and 600 comments
• a twitter account with 1200+ followers
• a facebook fan page with almost 600+ fans
• a facebook application with 12,000 installs

The Facebook application is especially interesting to me because it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Since launch, the application has been averaging 100 new installs per day. This is with no paid promotional activity whatsoever. I don’t expect this to stop anytime soon, because I don’t think we will reach a ceiling going at this (slow but) steady rate of installation (considering the number of users on Facebook). I designed the application to be viral enough for it to self promote. I suppose I could turn those activities off if I wanted to.

For the blog, we have decided to stop all posting, write our goodbyes and leave commenting open for a few weeks. We will then shut down all comments, and leave the blog up for the sake of Google and reference.  I am not sure what to do with the Twitter account. It essentially was a machine for the blog and site updates, but with no more site updates, what else is there? I suppose the Facebook fan page can stay in place, however we’ll probably put up a notice about the show and site saying farewell.”

So that project is ending, because the show it was supporting wasn’t picked up for a new season. However… The work that was done will remain and fans of the show will have access to it. Basically, it becomes “what it is”. A project that used to be active and is now inactive. C’est la vie. :D

There’s a Next New Networks show called Bride-O-Rama that went “on hiatus”. :)

I can’t find on the page when the episode I embedded was uploaded, but a) I happen to know this particular show was cancelled a long-ass time ago, and b) the first comment is from October 29 so let’s assume it was canceled in late October, 2007 which was 8 months ago. Similar to the pending status of the Wired Science blog, this show remains in suspended animation. The shows are there to watch. The comments are there to read. As a matter of fact, NNN’s still serving recent ads on those pages, so anybody who happens by to check out some of the Wedisodes is helping out NNN’s bottom line.

OTOH… We have FastCompany.TV’s former offering “Global Neighbourhoods”, which as far as I know was canceled this very month, and immediately disappeared off the face of the earth as if it never happened.

Here’s what the “Global Neighbourhoods” creator, producer and host, Shel Israel had to say about it in his post Several Changes:

“That brings us to GlobalNeighbourhoods.TV (GNTV), my other online video program. Unlike WorkFast, GNTV is my baby, is an extension of not just the Global Survey, but Naked Conversations as well. As many of you know, GNTV was launched in March at FastCompany.TV, and–shall we say–had an inauspicious start.

When GNTV launched, I was not quite ready for prime time. If I was an actor, I would say I was prepared for a summer stock script reading. When the curtain went up, I found myself instead at center stage of an opening night on Broadway with some determined hecklers in the audience who managed for a while to distract me.

Most people seem to agree that I got better. After 14 episodes, I think GNTV has proved its value and professionals hungry for insights into how they can use social media in their businesses have found GNTV to have more than a little value.

A few weeks back, however, FastCompany granted my request to take back GNTV, to remove it from their site and to eventually relaunched it o a smaller scale on this site. Primarily, with FastCompany as a partner, the cost of sponsorship was too high for a new program. Here, I can charge a sponsor significantly less dollars and have great flexibility in the sort of deal I can offer. Here, I am the sole decision maker.

GNTV will go on a brief hiatus, until perhaps mid-August. I need to deal with the complexities of AV, production, storing, hosting, compressing, measuring, etc. Because some of these costs can be quite significant, I also need to have sponsorship before I restart.”

To be fair, Shel has posted a set of links to his 14 GNTV episodes he produced for FastCompany.TV on his blog. This means that assuming you knew he had a blog at all and assuming you saw that one post, you know how you can view his videos. I would guess that he Twittered the information and used whatever other publicity outlets he has at his disposal. However… Someone returning to FastCompany.TV will find that his show’s tab has been replaced with a photography show, and short of putting “Shel Israel” or “Global Neighbourhoods” in the search box, there’s no evidence that his show ever existed.

As far as his plan to relaunch his show on his own site… there goes his google juice. His videos will be available in the future at a completely different address on redcouch.typepad.com instead of fastcompany.tv. What’s the point? The point is that people are still hitting my Cory Lidle plane crash video from October, 2006, because they know where to find it from people’s bookmarks, forum posts and blog links.

If I had been moving that video all over creation, from domain name to domain name, people would hit dead links from the google searches and IME, *NOT* do more creative searches to try to find the same content… They just move on to other content that comes up easily under the google search for the same topic.

Similarly, maybe you have the same site… except your video host fell into the Dead Pool. Recently, VideoEgg discontinued its consumer video service and sent out a notice to people that had videos hosted by them that they were going to cease to host them shortly. Also, DivX’s Stage 6 streaming video site folded. The problem with this is that A LOT OF PEOPLE had videos on their sites which were actually embedded FROM VideoEgg or Stage 6. This means that they had to scramble to a) pull all their videos from those hosts, b) find a new host for all of their now-homeless videos, c) upload all their videos to the new host and d) go to every single post and change the embed code from the Videoegg or Stage 6 location to the new host location. If you happen to have over 300 episodes online, that could be a MAAAAAAAJOR DRAG! :(

So, that’s another thing to consider when you’re ready to make a show on the internet. While you worry about content and worry about being interesting and worry about being entertaining, and worry about getting sponsored and worry about your show being sustainable and worry about growing your audience and worry about creating surrounding social sites… you ALSO have to worry about what happens when your show lands in the Dead Pool. Do you have ownership of your own content after the fact? Do you have ownership of the site that it’s on? Are you going to have to uproot everything and start all over? If you get a new sponsor, can you easily swap the old one out and continue seamlessly creating content?

Believe me, you want to figure out / negotiate all these things UP. FRONT. and NOT when you realize your show that you thought was going to run forever is going down the tubes.

Welcome to the Dead Pool.

So I’m chatting with Christine “PurpleCar” Cavalier the other day, and my current status as the #7 Google entry for “Bill” out of 21,500,000 English pages comes up. (I’m actually #5, because both Gates & Clinton have multiple entries ahead of me… but who’s counting? :D)

Bill Cammack & Christine Cavalier

So Christine asks me “How did you do that?”, and the interesting thing was that I didn’t have an answer for her. :)

I never had a goal of having a high Google ranking for the name “Bill”. I started out branding ReelSolid.TV and then switched to branding BillCammack and “Bill Cammack”.

I had no interest in branding “Bill” because it’s so generic. Not only is it a name, but people have to PAY THEIR BILLS, there’s the BILL OF RIGHTS, ducks have bills, etc… Buffalo Bills, not to mention, a ton of famous Bills… Cosby, Maher, Nye The Science Guy… I’m not even the first Bill on the videoblogging scene. Bill Streeter was there way before I was.

So I decided to think about it… Not that *I* did anything, but how did I end up with such a high ranking? Technically, I can’t say, because as Liz Burr points out, Google’s all about math. However, I do have two tips for people that aspire to some sort of distinction either on the internet or IRL….

1) Be Original

One of the reasons my posts get a lot of play is that they’re original. I made them up. I’m “kicking them off the top”. It’s FRESH information. I don’t write anything ahead of time. I’m thinking about something, I ‘feel’ it, then I go for it.

I’m not reading other people’s ideas, then regurgitating them. I’m not making people aware of what SOMEBODY ELSE said or thought. I might use other people’s material as a foundation for what MY point is, like in Women’s Guide to NYC Dating, but I make a CLEAR distinction between what someone else posted and what’s coming directly from me. If all you’re doing is regurgitating ideas you heard or read on the net, you’re a librarian…. a curator. Why would anyone go to your site for FRESH information when you offer ZERO added value? That’s what http://del.icio.us/ and StumbleUpon are for. The only reason they would visit your site is for YOUR SPECIFIC FLAVOR about things. If you’re not adding any, you don’t get play past people’s first encounter with you.

Another benefit of originality is that people pass your information around, because they’ve never seen it before, ANYWHERE! How many places can you go to see celebrity gossip? A million, plus. So if you want to separate yourself from the pack, make a site like Stephanie Frasco’s whatcelebswear.com or Marissa Nystrom’s celebzaredum.tumblr.com. You don’t go there because there are celebrity shots there… You go there because you want to know what Steph or Marissa HAVE TO SAY about celebs, what they do and what they wear = Added Value, due to their originality.

The other benefit to being original is that when conversations come up IRL about stuff you posted to the net, you actually have valid defensible positions. :) When you’re talking about other people’s stuff, your knowledge on the topic only goes so far as what you’ve READ… Not what you learned or experienced yourself. This is what causes you to LOSE PROPS instead of gaining them, because when people find out that you’re just a librarian/curator for other people’s thoughts and concepts, your conversational value plummets.

2) Be Useful

It’s great to have your own style, and people will definitely check out your blog (show, whatever) just because you’re a stylish person… especially if your style is original for some reason… but you also want to present something USEFUL to your audience. That might be technical information, entertainment or your own style of humor, even if it’s mostly funny TO YOU and makes other people cringe because of the light it sheds on their own lives and relationships. :)

When you post useful information, the effect is that people are always interested in it. It’s not the same people… It’s just that as life occurs, the same exact thing happens to different people at different times. In turn, they search google for insight on what just happened to them and end up at your site, absorbing the useful information you posted a year and a half ago. :)

Nothing educational to say?… Make up and play an interesting character or talk about what your job is or the town you live in. Give people tips on how to do photography or run an internet music show or work behind the scenes in the film industry. Show people how television shows are made:

OTOH, you don’t want to be useful ‘for no reason’. Make sure the topics are things that you normally kick it about anyway and enjoy discussing or writing about. The people that are interested in the same things will seek your posts out on the internet, and without actually becoming “internet famous”, people will start to “tune in next week” to see what you’re doing or saying now.

~Bill Cammack

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