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
–
Follow Bill via Google+ | Facebook | Twitter | Email Subscription | RSS Feed

Related Posts

• What Do You See As The Future For Major Media Companies?
• #NOBLOG Status (Plausible Deniability)
• Content is King, *NOW* (Eye Candy is Over)
• Freedom of Consequences
• Demographics & Monetization

Back in 2008, I wrote the Guide To Dating The “Internet Famous”.

Fast-Forward to 2010, and “Things done got too far gone!” :D

At this point, EVERYBODY has a smartphone, EVERYBODY is uploading media to the net and EVERYBODY’S business is in the streets.

Fortunately for all of us, Chrissie B. and Tim K.-S. co-created #NOBLOG status!!! >:D

#NOBLOG Status

There are some people that enjoy telling others where they went, what they did and whom they did it with. Lots of apps and networks allow us to make this information available ahead of time, in real-time, or after the fact… Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, Gowalla, Pegshot, Brightkite, Latitude, Loopt… Even video streaming sites like Ustream, Bambuser & Qik allow you to stream live video to the internet from your smartphone.

Even if people aren’t live streaming, they’re taking pictures and shooting video that may very well end up being seen by people that you know, who weren’t there at the time.

This is where #NOBLOG status comes in handy. It’s basically an agreement between everyone involved that there’s a media blackout surrounding an entire event or an individual occurrence at an event. The point being that whatever is happening or just happened won’t show up on anyone’s blog.

I guess the hashtag (the pound sign, “#”) is part of the fun of the concept because it’s used to define Twitter searches, like #LindseyLohan, so technically, you should never see a Twitter post that includes #NOBLOG, now, should you? ;)

Necessity Is The Mother Of Invention

At this point in the social media game, connections between people look more like a web than a line connecting one person to another. I believe the top number of mutual Facebook friends I have with anyone is 436. This means that if that person types “Hanging out at XYZ with Bill Cammack”, right off the bat, 436 people that I know might receive that information in their “Most Recent” news feed on their FB home page.

That’s just on ONE social network. If that same person posts the same message to Twitter, they have literally THOUSANDS of followers (as do I), so there’s no telling what the overlap is there.

That’s also only including real-time media. If that person takes a picture, posts it to Facebook and tags me in it (which, yes, I’m aware that I could shut that ability down using Facebook privacy preferences) then everyone that I’m connected to is going to see that picture show up in MY media stream on my own Facebook page.

This is all well and good because the vast majority of the time, my friends and I are broadcasting our adventures to the internet anyway. The more media, the merrier!… Sometimes, however, it’s important to apply the brakes.

It’s necessary for people who spend time together who each have vast networks of acquaintances, business associates, clients & fans to share an understanding that if something spontaneous occurs that at least one of us would rather not have advertised, it won’t hit the airwaves.

If we don’t share that trust, we can’t be authentic with each other. We’re only going to give each other what we’re willing to have broadcast all over creation, which is most definitely NOT the way to build strong, important and lasting relationships with people.

#NOBLOG is essential because sometimes….. “Ish Happens! \o/” hehe and it might be cool that the people who were there know about it, but it might *NOT* be cool for our personal business to be disseminated to the thousands of people we’re connected to that weren’t there.

Situations

#NOBLOG doesn’t imply that something major occurred. It could be something as simple as someone whose social media persona doesn’t include “swearing” cursing in a video. :D

When I write articles, there are certain words I block out, like **** and **** and mother******… If I happen to be speaking IRL to a grown-ass man or a grown-ass woman (and we’re not in a business situation), I’m liable to curse my ass off.

I don’t block words because I’m uncomfortable with them. I block them out of courtesy to other people that MIGHT be uncomfortable with them. That doesn’t mean I want a video of me saying FILTH FLARN FILTH FLARN FILTH broadcast on the internet, so that might have to get a #NOBLOG. :D

Here in NYC, we tend to drink a lot. >:D .. People’s relationships to each other tend to evolve and devolve, depending on how drunk each of us happen to be at the time. This can clearly also lead to #NOBLOG situations.

We also have business deals going on that the general public isn’t aware of. Even though I have lots of clients’ information on my online resume, I do lots of work that my name never goes on and nobody knows that I did.

If I’m chatting with friends about business deals I’ve made, or ESPECIALLY deals that haven’t been finalized yet, I damned well sure need for that information to *NOT* make the back-channel rounds, so a #NOBLOG agreement might need to be in place in order for me to feel comfortable discussing important issues.

You also might need to declare #NOBLOG ahead of time. This normally happens when you want to have an incognito evening in a public location. If you don’t inform people that it’s a private event, next thing you know, they told their friends where they’re going to be.. who told THEIR friends where they were going to be and all of a sudden you have a big party that you hadn’t planned on, and in fact had intended to hide from tonight so you could share some Quality Time with someone.

All For One.. One For All

Clearly, #NOBLOG doesn’t work unless everyone agrees to it AND they can all be trusted to STFU. All you need is for a friend of a friend who happens to be there and that you’re not aware is connected to your personal social sphere to start blabbering about what’s going on in order for your business to make the rounds.

Basically, Unless you’re sure that everyone in your group is down with the program, it’s best for you to assume that #NOBLOG status isn’t available to you. If someone unverified joins your group, revert to the default “Internet Famous” protocols and always be prepared to Deny. Everything! :D

Remember.. If there’s no media of it.. It never happened. ;)
–
Connect with Bill via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Email Subscription, RSS

Related Posts

• Facebook: Should You Add Someone You’re Dating?
• OMG!!! STFU!!! :(
• Guilt By Association / Social Media Connections
• Why “Jersey Shore” SUCKED This Season
• Bill’s Dating Tips For Women [Part 04]

What I affectionately refer to as “Revisionist History” may actually be more accurately called Historical Revisionism. There are actually two types, one which has a positive connotation and implies that intelligent people took another look at the data that’s currently available to them and came up with a valid interpretation of that data that differs from what’s been widely accepted about that event up until now. The second type is when people decide they don’t like how the past looks and decide to reinterptet it for their own benefit. The latter is what I want to talk about right now.

Time goes forward… Not BACKWARD. Things happen and then they move from the present into the past. Once they’re in the past, there’s no way for you to affect them, being that nobody’s created a time machine yet. If you tell a story ONE WAY at the time, and then turn around and tell a DIFFERENT STORY later on.. Assuming you had your wits about you when you told the story the first time, you are attempting to revise history. Here’s an example:

Back in the day….. (right, Frank?) I used to hang out with this chick that had a boyfriend and she would lie to him all the time about what she had done or where she had been for the last several hours while she wasn’t answering her phone. I didn’t think anything of this becuase that’s what people do when they’re in a relationship and they don’t want to suffer the consequences of their SO knowing who they really are.. They lie. Fine. I get that.

So this same chick tells me a story one day about where she had been on a particular evening when her boyfriend had been looking for her. The story was that her cell phone had run out of batteries and she had decided to walk home and it took her about an hour. This is what she told me and this is also what she told me she told her boyfriend.

Weeks or months later, her boyfriend does something she doesn’t like and then she tells me that on the night that she told him she had walked home, she was actually hanging out with other guys at a bar and having a good time. The reason this information came up was that NOW she felt vindictive and wanted to mentally feel like she was hurting her boyfriend. I say “mentally feel” because she never told HIM this version of the story. She only told ME so that she could feel like she was being defiant and get it out of her system so that she wouldn’t get dumped by this guy and then feel like a JERK when she got over it and wanted to be with him again….. Which, of course, is exactly what happened. She got over it.

Now.. I couldn’t give a damn what some chick tells her boyfriend. What I *DO* care about is that she decided to lie TO ME about it as well because she wanted sympathy at the time. He had been rather upset that he couldn’t find her and had SCREAMED on her and she was scared that he might dump her so she told me the same story she told him in order for me to assure her that walking home with a non-working phone wasn’t a dumping offense.

When you attempt to revise history, you erode your credibility. There’s no way around this. As long as there are people around who remember what really happened, you’re going to either look like a jerk who’s trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes or you’re going to look like you are currently EMBARRASSED about your past. Being that it’s the year 2009 as I write this and Social Media has been in full effect for quite some time now, there are a. whole. hell. of. a. lot. of. people. that watched your PRESENT in real-time. Whatever you posted at the time, that’s what people remember. There’s no way around THIS EITHER, other than never posting anything to the internet and ‘keeping your business out the street’.

Relationships

Relationships change. I know LOTS of people that used to date each other in ’06, ’07, ’08 and even ’09 that aren’t dating each other now. That’s not my problem.

Friendships change. I know lots of people that used to be friends and at the time of this writing, they are not. That’s not my problem either.

I have pictures with couples that are no longer couples and friends that are no longer friends. Regardless of how they feel about each other NOW, they don’t get to change MY history, which includes ALL OF US sharing good times together.

Regardless of what you say NOW (and you may very well have perfectly legitimate problems with your former SO or friend), y’all were rather happy with each other at the time and that’s the spirit in which the pictures were posed for, taken and posted. Up until you achieved a problem with the other person, you derived as much pleasure from the pics as I did, if not MORE.

What about The Kid?

Ethically, Morally or however you want to categorize it, I don’t get to have special privileges when it comes to revisionist history simply because it’s my camera. COULD I? Certainly. DO I? No. It’s all in the game. If you’re not going to play it the “right” way, don’t play it at all.

I currently have 1,887 Facebook friends, about 900 of whom I’ve hung out with at some point IRL. This means that every once in a while, someone I’m visually associated with is at least accused of and at most proven to have deviated from the norm.

Let me make this perfectly clear…

I. Will. Not. Adjust. My. History. To. Fit. How. You. Feel. About. The. Present.

If someone that I’ve spent time with falls out of favor with you, that’s YOUR PROBLEM and not mine. I don’t care. I’m not interested. You’re a grown-ass-man or grown-ass-woman so act like it and deal with your own problems.

If you decide that you don’t want to do business with me because I’m friends with someone who’s been accused of doing something stupid or has been PROVEN to have done something stupid, good for you. Between my own freelance work, Tribe Nine Creative, and a company I’m about to go on retainer to, I don’t have any more work-hours to assign to people that *WANT* to work with me, much less people that are concerned about who I hang out with or what it would mean to their company’s image to be associated with me, being that I’ve been visually associated with someone else whose internet presence they don’t like.

In fact, the whole concept is RETARDED because other than for television credits,

my name doesn’t even APPEAR on people’s video projects. The people in my Client List are there because I PUT them there. There are lots of companies I’ve worked for that are NOT listed, such as News Corporation / Fox News. So, if you don’t want to do business with me because of people I socialize with, enjoy that life. :)

Porno Chicks

In an attempt to see how it would feel to be embarrassed to be Facebook Friends with someone, I sent a friends request to this porno chick chick that I HEARD was a porno chick, hehe :) Fortunately, she declined my “friendship”! HAHAHA because I regretted it almost as soon as I pressed “send”. :D Facebook doesn’t have any facility for you to retract friendship requests, so, similar to pregnancy, I knew that once it was in there, there wasn’t much I could do about it.

I wanted to know how I would feel knowing people had some tangible evidence that I had associated myself with a porno chick. Pretty much, that was the only controversial-type person I could think of to add and since I know a few sex-bloggers, I actually have mutual friends with her. It was a weird feeling. I’m not sure it was sustainable. On the one hand, it’s clear that it’s not YOU that’s being a freakazoid and on camera, to boot. On the other hand, being “friends” with this person implies some sort of endorsement of her lifestyle. That shouldn’t be a connection that’s made, but it’s made all the time, whether people mention it transparently or on the back-channel.

I needed to go to this extent because being that I’m an independent person and not a drone, I’m not interested at all in what people do or get involved in that has nothing to do with me. I didn’t have anyone on my current roster of almost two thousand people that I felt like I might be able to say “Oh, that’s just the last straw!.. I can’t believe he/she did that! :O”. Meanwhile, I know chicks that are upset that I call chicks “chicks”. :D I just wanted to see how it felt to be SOOOO interested in someone else’s business that I would elect to terminate my social media contact with them because of something they did or said.. ESPECIALLY something they’ve been doing I was told that they’ve been doing for years.

AAAAAAAAAAND STAY OUT!!! :D

The bottom line is that media has now been removed from the hands of the newspapers and television stations and placed firmly in the hands of common folk. That chick pointing a phone in your direction on the subway is taking a picture or video of you. There are video cameras watching the streets and the sidewalks in front of places of business. People are shooting video with their smartphones or their video cameras or still cameras or even their iPods now. Your best bet, if you don’t want to be involved in the Social Media game is to STAY. OUT. OF. IT. ENTIRELY!

If you’re not the subject, you’re going to end up in the background of someone’s picture or video. It might be someone you know or someone you don’t. You might be tagged in the media and you might not. If you know damned well that you’re not supposed to go to a certain party, DON’T. GO. TO. THAT. PARTY. instead of going and HOPING you don’t get discovered. That ended in 2008.

Even if you don’t show up in images, you’re going to show up in text. Someone’s going to post your name on Twitter or mention that they were hanging out with you on Facebook and then Google’s going to pick up that mention of your name or your handle and you’re gonna get busted.

Even if they don’t type your name onto the net, they’re going to TELL PEOPLE who they hung out with at the party. Even if they don’t post a picture to the net, they’re going to show it to their friends. The only way for you to attempt to regulate your online presence is to hang out with people that don’t post media to the internet.

Same thing goes for relationships. If you think your relationship might EEEEEEEEVER break up and you might feel sour about that, don’t go all over creation in 2010 posing with your current girlfriend or boyfriend. Save yourself the anguish and keep your relationship(s) to yourself, stop announcing them on Facebook, stop making lovey-dovey videos that you’re going to have to tear down from the net as soon as y’all fall out of favor with each other. It’s way easier to deny information that was never published than to try to reel in media that people have been looking at for YEARS already and were privy to anyway because they were standing right there when y’all were very happily showing off your friendship or relationship by posing for pictures together.

Related Posts

• Your Girlfriend Is A Ho
• Single.. But Not Really
• That’s Your Man’s Problem
• Girls Don’t Have Friends That Are Guys
• Facebook: Should You Add Someone You’re Dating?

Bill surrounded by Marisa & Melinda from uncensoredinterview.com

Asians In Manhattan

Please don’t ask me what’s going on in this picture. Thank you very much. Moving right along….. :D

There are A LOT of Asians in Manhattan, NYC. However, if your “understanding” of Manhattan comes from watching television or films, you’d probably assume that there weren’t any at all.

I don’t know anything about the casting industry, but it pretty much seems that unless someone writes elements specifically attributed to Asians (and we all know what THOSE are) into a show, you’re not going to see any Asian brothaz headlining American films unless they blow up large, like Chow Yun-Fat.

I was actually expecting to see another one of my favorites, Tony Leung show up on the scene, but that’s not really the point I wanted to make.

The Map Is Not The Territory

There are lots of things about dating that you’re never told. Sometimes, this is because people are hiding information from you. Other times, it’s because they were never privy to the information themselves. There are people that want to hand out dating advice that they derived ENTIRELY from films, television and reading. There are people that want to give dating advice that have kicked it to a grand total of ONE CHICK IN THEIR ENTIRE LIVES, hooked up with her and are doing the family thing and think they have relevant information to share about doing things OTHER than that. There are people that want to tell you how to carry yourself in a bar when they don’t *GO* to bars! O_o People that want to tell you about juggling multiple chicks when they’ve NEVER DONE IT. People that want to talk about running simultaneous LTRS that have NEVER DONE IT. People that want to give you advice on pulling chicks that weren’t even interested in you when you walk in the door THAT HAVE NEVER ACHIEVED THAT!

This is why dating is like “Asians on television”. There’s so much information you DON’T HAVE, but you think you have the correct knowledge because most of the society’s agreed upon the brainwashing. You don’t see the Asians because they’re not being cast in the media. You don’t know the bar scene because you’re not in the trenches. Meanwhile, you’re trying to live into some Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales that people fed you when you were growing up and THOSE PEOPLE know damned well that THEIR LIVES DIDN’T GO THAT WAY! :D

When I was growing up, there was a card game called “OLD MAID”…… “Old Maid”? hahaha Seriously? :D They want to act like it’s an anomaly for women to remain single for their entire lives or become divorced at some point when the divorce statistics are, what? 40%-50% in America? That’s *HALF*, people.. Like Eddie Murphy’s money. HALF!.. Half of the people that even GOT married in the first place. Meanwhile, they’re steadily giving women complexes about “being alone” when they’re older, throwing them that “There’s someone for everyone” sap rap, when in reality, there’s a good chance that they won’t find anyone they’re willing to settle for and even if they do, there’s no guarantee that their relationship’s going to last until they croak.

I was sitting around with a homegirl of mine the other day, trading stories about how many kids our exes have had so far. She and I are STILL “together”, even though all of our exes are long gone. Meanwhile, someone will try to low-rate our relationship because she and I have never “dated” or been “an item”. I know who she is for me. She knows who I am for her. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I doubt that’s going to change.

Seeing & Believing

Derek, Holger, Pat & Bill

So.. Just because you don’t see the Asians doesn’t mean they’re not there. It means you don’t know where to look, they’re being omitted in the media you’re consuming or you’re deliberately being misguided.

Same thing goes for dating. To hear people tell it, it’s all sunshine & roses. Anything that deviates from that is…. well.. Deviant. :D

There’s no benefit to anyone to give you the advice that when your wife asks you why you came home late to tell her “Mind your own business” as well as potentially “I get here when I get here”.

There’s no benefit to telling you that the gal he introduced you to as his cousin ISN’T his cousin…

There’s no benefit to telling you that if you don’t keep your wife satisfied in the bedroom, someone else is going to hannle yo bidnezz FOR YOU. O_o

So what you need to do is take advantage of blogs, etc to OPEN your mind instead of CLOSING it. You can be wary without being suspicious. Recognizing that someone MIGHT do something doesn’t mean that they WILL do that or DID do that. What it does for you is puts you in a better mental position should the unthinkable occur. If you only focus on the potential POSITIVE of a relationship, you won’t be ready for the potential NEGATIVE and might not be able to respond to it until it’s too late. It’s too late to figure out on the fly what you’re going to do when you find out someone cheated on you. It’s too late to figure out what you’re going to say or do when a chick tells you she’s pregnant. It’s too late to figure it out when someone says it’s over.

Just because someone shows you a picture, don’t assume it’s the WHOLE picture, capisce? :) There’s lots of incentive to only tell you PART of the story.. as in “The part of the story that benefits the storyteller”. Don’t assume Asians can’t act because you don’t see any Asian actors. I’m not even going to get into how they elected to cast the movie “21″… People used to think blacks couldn’t QB because they only used to hire white quarterbacks for the NFL and you saw what happened to THAT.

So don’t get caught slippin’, listening to people that have never been in the trenches telling you about dating in particular or relating to people in general. Seek out alternate sources of information, much of which you might not even want to hear, if you want to have a proper grasp on The Game.

Ignorance Is Bliss……… Maybe

I stumbled onto some pictures the other day of a close homeboy of mine and this chick I had wanted to kick it to at the time. I had a conversation with him back in the day about her and he asked me specific questions that I remember chalking up to his uncanny natural wisdom about chicks from having so much experience with them. Looking at the pictures years later, I clearly recognize that she’s way too friendly with him in them for the level of interaction that I was privy to them having and thinking back to who he was and what our relationship was at the time, he most likely hit it and didn’t tell me he did.

I find that concept funny, interesting and tactically correct. I wouldn’t have appreciated it at the time if he had told me he had hooked up with her because he knew how interested in her I was and it was basically a violation of “the code”. It was better for all of us for him to do his thing and enjoy her and keep it under the hat. I’m not in contact with either of them at this point, so it’s all water under the bridge, but the point is that I related to them AS IF they didn’t mess with each other because that was my perception of the situation. I see now how my perception could have been 100% incorrect and I would have been better off if I could have opened my mind to the possibility of them hooking up instead of shutting that idea out because I didn’t want to think about it and would have felt betrayed. I would have preferred the bliss of ignorance to the potential belief that my rap was undermined by a close friend.

Unfortunately….. Sometimes, it’s good to feel betrayed……….. Because you actually WERE! :D

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

Related Posts

• Why You Can’t Get A Boyfriend In NYC
• Rachel on Bravo’s “Millionaire Matchmaker”
• That’s OK… My Dog Doesn’t Speak EITHER!
• Running Dogs
• Big City Dating (Meet The Parents)

Requests For Action

I’m not sure what I think about Requests For Action (RFA)… What I mean by that is that for instance, I’m about to take part for the second year in a row in a videoblogging series that a few of my friends and I do called “New in November” (newinnov.tumblr.com).

Personally, what I would do regarding the site/series is INFORM people that it’s going on or that it’s available. What I would NOT do is request for them to do something about it, such as follow it, reblog it, RT it and DEFINITELY NOT “Please rate my video 5 stars!” :/

To me, that defeats the purpose of the viewer watching your material and deciding that your video actually DESERVED 5 stars and clicking on the meter to indicate that. If you tell people what to do, many times, they’ll do it because you asked them to, not because they give a damn or actually think your show, product or service is any good. Also, lots of times, it’s not even because you asked them to, but rather because they don’t want to be perceived as “not down with the program”. It’s like how I originally dealt with Twitter, following back everyone that followed me… out of “courtesy”. That’s something I picked up from friends of mine who were on Twitter for a full year before I found out about it two years ago. That didn’t work for me, so I don’t do that anymore. I follow whom I follow and whomever follows me follows me. Period.

OTOH..… There’s a very good reason to tell people what to do about your media. A lot of people aren’t aware that they can do things like click “like” on a Facebook post or leave a comment at the bottom of a blog post. A lot of people aren’t aware that they can rate YouTube videos or click the heart on Vimeo videos. It makes sense that you want to inform the uninformed about what they can do. I use a plugin for my site called “What Would Seth Godin Do?” which places a note at the top of my posts for the first five times someone comes to my site that says something like “You might want to subscribe blah blah blah” for that very reason. People come to my site and have no idea they can subscribe and get my posts in their email boxes or get my posts via RSS instead of having to check my site to see if I posted something new.

I also have “Share” links on my posts. That’s an opportunity, not a request. That saves people from having to go to actual websites like stumbleupon to add a post of mine. They can do it right from that link. I could also put “HEY! MAKE SURE YOU SHARE THIS WITH YOUR FRIENDS SO I CAN HAVE MORE TRAFFIC TO MY SITE!!! :D” on every single post, which I think would be incredibly obnoxious as well as ineffective.

Fishing For Compliments

I have the same issue with RFAs that I have with people that fish for compliments. When you fish for compliments, you look corny and desperate. People are more likely to tell you what you want to hear out of PITY than actually honestly feeling whatever they say. Also, people feel put on the spot when you fish for compliments. If you don’t deserve the compliment, you’ve put them between a rock and a hard place.

Do you look fat in that dress? HELLS YEAH YOU LOOK FAT IN THAT DRESS! but who’s actually going to say that? “Nooo… Nooo… Not at all. You look great. Have you been working out? :D”.. You’re forcing people to be fake with you by requesting that they tell you something that they weren’t offering. Maybe you’re going to look fat regardless of what you wear, and the dress isn’t actually the issue. Maybe you also look GOOD to the person you’re asking, regardless of whether you’re slim and trim or not. Did you think about THAT?…

Having said that, I’m the type of person that doesn’t naturally say what I’m thinking. The question “How do you like my outfit?” may very well elicit a flood of natural comments an compliments that I was THINKING but not SAYING. However, that’s an open-ended question.. “How do you like X?” or even “DO you like X?”. It offers the listener the opportunity to give an honest opinion or no opinion at all. “This jacket looks Funky-Fresh, RIGHT???” puts the other person on the spot if they had just been thinking about how WACK your jacket looks and that they’re embarrassed to be seen with you right now.

Open-Ended References

So I guess I’m a fan of open-ended references. “Here’s this thing that’s going on” or “Here’s this new video or post I created” as opposed to “Go to my video, scroll down the page and click the meter to rate my video 5 stars”. For that, people may as well not watch your video at all, since all you want is the rating so your video can LOOK popular and appreciated when in reality it’s a bunch of your friends clicking 5-stars because you asked them to.

There are no ethics to this game, so I’m not suggesting what people should or shouldn’t do. If that’s how you get your props, by telling people what you want them to do and hoping they do it, good for you. How’s that workin’ for ya? ;) I personally wouldn’t be satisfied with telling people how I want them to react to my media. You lose the ability to separate the real compliments from what’s written by people that are simply following orders. If you can’t tell when someone honestly enjoys and appreciates your media, what do you actually have?…..

Then again, I do Social Media for fun. I enjoy expressing myself. I realize that other people are attempting to build businesses with this stuff and it’s important for them to appear to be popular and for their media to appear well-received, often-watched and usually rated “5 stars” in order to try to get a sponsorship or some kind of revenue-sharing deal or put affiliate links all over their sites or Google Ads or whatever they’re trying to do. Social Media for them is a means to an end instead of just being THE END. This is it. This is the expression. Tell me what you think about it VS Tell other people that you agree that my video is excellent. RATE THIS! vs RATE THIS 5 STARS! or maybe just Rate it if you feel like it…

I like pitches that offer the viewer/listener some kind of “value added” if they click on a link, such as “Click Here to learn how to make a Masquerade Mask! :D”

That kind of pitch tells people WHAT THEY’RE GOING TO RECEIVE if they click on the link. That’s different from telling them WHAT THEY CAN DO FOR YOU by clicking the same link. In the video, Corinne says “make sure to show us some love by subscribing”. That makes perfect sense. If you love the show, SUBSCRIBE, so you get automatic updates. Also, their show, TheadBanger is a business, so their goal is to amass viewers and create, sustain and grow a community. I’m sure a lot of their clips get passed around in emails, etc so it’s likely that there are a lot of people that see it that wouldn’t be aware that it’s an ongoing series as opposed to a one-off, so it’s a good idea to make people aware that they CAN subscribe if they want to.

Still.. The draw is the content, the hosts and their generous utilization of UGC (User-Generated Content). Their fans can actually be ON the show with them if they send in videos/pictures of their personally-created fashion items. It’s like “Here’s more of what you enjoyed in the past” as opposed to “Here’s another opportunity for you to do me a favor and click on my ratings bar”. It’s still too early in the game to figure out whether directly telling people what to do is effective at all. It’s also too early to tell whether people’s personal reputations are being sullied by their constant shilling for whatever company they work for. Maybe none of this matters at all and I’m oversensitive to the issue because I know so many people that create media and I watch so much media online every day. \o/

The way I see it, RFAs and fishing for compliments are both signs of desperation and they’re not pretty. :) If people think your video’s worth 5 stars, they’ll rate it. If people want to say something, they’ll comment. If people want to share your posts with their friends, they will. Make it as easy for them to do that if they feel like it and even though your community will be smaller, it’ll be much more passionate, dedicated and interested in what you have to say.

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

Related Posts

• CNN Presents “Black In America: Silicon Valley”
• Content is King, *NOW* (Eye Candy is Over)
• Freedom of Consequences
• Internet Blog-Influenced News Cycles
• Famous For Nothing [Fame, Part 3]