One of the lines in the Bush song, “Everything Zen” says there’s no sex in your violence.

I’ve been thinking that a lot while watching the content that people have been posting to Google+, except the version I’ve been thinking is that there’s no social in your media.

One of the opportunities we have online is to demonstrate how similar we are to each other. That’s a valid and worthwhile pursuit, but at the same time, you want to show how different you are as well.

This isn’t so obvious in the world of Twitter, for instance.. You can only be so creative with 140 characters. Adding the incessant flood of Twitter posts into the equation, it’s very easy for people not to notice that they’re all posting the exact same thing.

Nobody’s actually checking to see if the shortlink they posted is the same one that was posted 10 minutes ago, which is the same one that was posted 20 minutes ago, which is the same one that was posted 23 minutes ago, which is the same one that was posted an hour ago, which is the same one that was posted yesterday and the day before that.

Welcome To The New World, Neo

On Google+, this is painfully obvious, as you look at your stream (or a particular circle you’re browsing) and you see the exact same bird shove the exact same OTHER BIRD into the garbage can in an animated .GIF file. (if you don’t know what that is, it’s basically a very short, embeddable movie with no audio).

um… The Empire Strikes….. Cat? :/

Not only are these things regurgitated 24 hours a day, but they’re posted verbatim. There is ZERO value added by the poster to the viewer’s experience of seeing the bird kick the other bird off the ledge again.

I found this behavior relatively strange, until I read a reply from reader “Hakim” the other day, who likened the phenomenon to those early-morning joke emails people used to send out before they discovered Facebook and Twitter… or even MYSPACE, for that matter! :P

Thinking about it that way, at least it makes sense at the lowest common denominator of being social. “Oh.. That’s a funny movie of the bird kicking the other bird into the trash.. Let me share it with my friends, so they can get the same laugh I did! :D”

Sometimes, that style backfires on you, though, and you end up telling a joke several days after it already made its rounds, so now, not only do you NOT look original, but you simultaneously look neither CURRENT nor RELEVANT.

If that’s not your goal, however.. being memorable.. then, what *I’M* currently saying to you ISN’T RELEVANT! :D

I suppose the question is whether you want to be a news-MAKER or a news-REPORTER.

There are people who make entire blogs and entire web shows (and entire television shows) out of being reporters. That’s their job. It’s what they do for a living… What’s *YOUR* benefit in being a reporter? o_O

Mind you, I’m not talking about a journalist.. Someone that actually writes down their own opinion about something or at least researches a topic to write an article… Like, what’s your WIN in being the 31st person to repost the bird-kicking .gif?

Is it just that it’s easy to do and doesn’t require you to think or type? o_O How about next time you’re thinking about reposting a funny movie, instead, you just type “Happy [Monday], Everybody! :D”?

How about that?.. It probably takes just as long as sending the picture, and you can send out a personal message to people that distinguishes you from the rest of the picture-posters.

Is it better to be someone submerged in a crowd or someone that stands out in a crowd?

LULZ FTW!!!

ok.. So you insist on posting pictures as a demonstration of your ability to socialize… How about posting DIFFERENT pictures?… Why not start posting pictures of your pet lizard? People would notice you, then. There would be like 80,000,000,000 cat pictures and then your *ONE* picture of a cute lizard. You can even type something cutesy on the picture, like “I CAN HAZ CHAMELEON? :P”

So let’s say you take one step forward and start posting links to articles. That’s nice. How’s about now you add your own opinion before you press “Send”? Did you read the article yourself? Did you get anything out of it? Did it make you think? Why not share what you thought about with your readers so you can distinguish yourself as a thinker?… perhaps, even… a READER!!! :O

I mean, seriously, folks.. What do you think would happen IRL (in real life) if you walked up to someone at a party, you both smiled at each other and then you traded showing each other cat pictures on your smarphones instead of actually saying anything to each other? haha First of all, you’d get kicked out of the party for being weirdos. Second, you’d walk away from that exchange feeling all warm and fuzzy from all the cats you just saw and shared, but you wouldn’t have any new and valuable information about the person you SUPPOSEDLY just socialized with, and they wouldn’t know anything new or useful about you, either.

At least, those old-ass email jokes are something you might actually have said to someone when you ran into them at the water cooler at your job, or if you got stuck in an elevator with them.

In fact, what you would do if you ran into someone at a party is you would SPEAK. TO. THEM., because that’s how humans roll.

Even if you have nothing to say off the bat, SOME of your friends and acquaintances are posting how they feel about things or talking about something they liked or disliked. Why not jump in on one of those conversations? Let them know you agree or disagree and take your chances on building or destroying a relationship with them. At the end of the day, you might have more or fewer friends than you had this morning, but even if you’re losing, you’re at least INVOLVED in the game. :)

The Business Of Social?

This advice would also come in handy for businesspeople. Feel free to actually have a.. Well.. Feel free to at least FAKE having a real conversation with someone about something so that every time you open your mouth, people don’t go “Here comes that shill again, trying to convince me of something that’s in *their* best interest. :/”

How about selecting a customer at random and beginning a dialogue with them?.. Can’t do that much? How about commenting on a post they wrote or linked or a picture they shared of their son in the football game? How about doing *ANYTHING* that might POSSIBLY, REMOTELY be perceived as SOCIAL instead of acting like a hunter in a target-rich environment?

I can’t ask the pictures-at-a-party question to shills, because, yes… YES, they WOULD come up to you at a party and have NOTHING to say to you except things that benefit their business or company. I met a gal at a birthday party.. a BIRTHDAY PARTY, that told me to my face that the only reason she was there was to meet people that might be useful in helping her promote her book.

She didn’t say more than that, but she was basically like “**** the birthday-person.. I’m not here to celebrate jack-****. I’m here to make some business contacts and be out.

If that actually works for your company (and your social life), more power to ya. :) Good Luck with that! :D

The way I see it, there are only so many hours in each day. You can spend your time being regular, or you can attempt to stand out in the crowd. You can play it safe with the number of “friends” you currently have, or you can take a chance by selecting what’s behind curtain #3.

I’ve already met some new and interesting people on Google+.. Either because they stepped out in front of the crowd, or because I did.

This is your opportunity to be creative and progressive. You’re no longer limited to 140 characters, although I already see some people that wish they were, so they could continue to act like their creativity is being stifled by the designated Twitter limitations, when, in fact, it’s the other way around and Twitter makes them look good, while Google+ exposes their true limitations by removing their restrictions.

If you’re going to take that 20 seconds to find and post an animated .gif, why not skip that and instead, take 40 seconds to come up with a short, original, thoughtful statement or question that might make you THE NEWS instead of THE NEWSCASTER? :D
–
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One of the things I find laughable about Social Media is that it’s sold to people that don’t know anything about Social Media.

This makes it possible for people who are ABSOLUTE GARBAGE at creating and maintaining their own online presence to make money telling other people how THEY should represent themselves or their companies online.

I’m not the type of person to knock the next man’s hustle, but that’s exactly what it is.. A HUSTLE. Smoke & Mirrors.

There are LOTS of people who are legitimate and present great solutions to their clients, but some people are just embarrassingly horrible at Social Media and still they’re heralded as gurus amongst their fans.

Presence Management

I was walking with a friend the other day and we were across the street from a store. I pointed the store out to her and she read the name of it from the letters that spanned the top of the storefront. I balked when she said the name, because something sounded odd to me. I knew it wasn’t her accent, so I looked at the store again and told her what the real name was…

The reason I had to tell her the name was that I had seen the store when it first opened and she was seeing it now for the first time in life. Between now and then, A. LETTER. HAD. FALLEN. OFF. OF. THE. BUILDING. AND. THE. OWNER. DIDN’T. HAVE. THE. PRIDE. IN. HIS/HER. OWN. STORE. TO. REPLACE. IT.!!! :/

There was no way my friend could have correctly pronounced the name without the missing letter. There was also no way she could have known the letter was missing from that distance. This is someone’s STORE that they want you to ENTER and BUY items from. That letter has been missing from that sign FOR YEARS, and regardless of how much income the owner receives, he or she refuses to replace the letter and restore the sign to its original quality. The NAME of the store!… The owner doesn’t care about the public’s perception of the store that they’re hoping to make money from.

This is what I see when I go to certain so-called Social Media Experts’s sites. Garbage. Eyesores. They have the nerve to tell you that they’re going to help *YOU* with your internet presence when their own presence is entirely unacceptable.

Conversion Of Cred

What’s laughable about this is that people actually need a consultant to tell them which consultants are doing the right thing. Since I knew what the sign was SUPPOSED TO SAY, I was able to instruct my friend as to what the store was actually called. Similarly, people approach supposed SMEs for help, consulting and guidance and they don’t realize that the people they’re hiring aren’t any good, but just happen to suck a little less than they do. They would be better off asking someone who they TRUST to point them in the right direction instead of hiring someone based on their number of Twitter followers or some other useless statistic that’s held up as an indicator of proficiency in Social Media.

It’s supposed to be a big deal and SO GOOD for your company if you have a bunch of Twitter followers. SO GOOD for your company if you have a bunch of Facebook fans. As of this week, SO GOOD if you have a bunch of followers on Google Buzz. The problem is that a lot of these people don’t tell you what you’re supposed to DO with your bunch of followers.. because they don’t know themselves. O_o

These SMEs have all these people supposedly in their pocket, yet they can’t convert them into ANYTHING useful. They don’t convert into video views. They don’t convert into blog post hits (CPM). They don’t convert into live stream audiences. They don’t convert into click-throughs (CPC). They don’t convert into actions (CPA). They don’t convert into sales (CPS). They don’t even convert into people that might sit down and have a beer with you when you come to their town.

The reason they can’t convert is that they have no idea what they’re doing with Social Media because they spend all their time name-dropping, reading about new technology, reading other people’s OPINIONS about new technology, blabbering about nothing on microblogging sites and shilling for companies while spending No. Time. In. The. Trenches. None. The same sites they’re telling you to be a part of?.. They’re not on them themselves. They don’t have any time to USE the technology because they spend all their time trying to make money with Social Media by telling YOU to do what THEY’RE NOT EVEN DOING! O_o

Do As I Say…

That person that told you to get on Ustream or BlogTV or Qik or Livestream or Tinychat or Tokbox?.. When was the last time you saw THEM do a live show? Usually Never. That person that told you you needed to be on Blip or YouTube or Vimeo?.. What have you seen THEM do with internet video? Usually Nothing. That person that told you they were going to build a website for you?.. What does THEIR website look like? Their business site? Their personal site?

That person that told you to get on Facebook?.. How often do you see THEM on Facebook? Did you notice that everything you see with their name on it has been AUTOMATICALLY. REPOSTED. FROM. TWITTER. and that they’re not actually on Facebook at all, except as another repository for followers? Have you noticed that they never comment on or even click “LIKE” on anything you or anybody else you know ever wrote? Have you noticed that they never respond to any Facebook responses they received from their auto-posted material? How is that a Facebook presence? How is that helping THEM? What do they know about Facebook that they’re going to turn around and instruct YOU to create an account there?

That person that told you to get on Twitter or Jaiku or Pownce or Buzz? What are THEY contributing to their community when they post? Usually Nothing.. Regurgitating links to other people’s posts or other people’s ideas with no ORIGINAL CONTENT whatsoever. How is it humanly possible that they’re following hundreds of thousands of people when spending only one second per update would mean they can only read 3,600 posts in an hour, FORGET ABOUT thinking about that post and/or typing a response. Do these people spend an hour a day reading Twitter? Four hours? Eight? When do they do their actual work then?

What does the discussion look like that follows what they write? Who cares enough to chime in? Do the commenters know anything about the topic, or are they just fanbois going “ME TOO!.. ME TOO!”? Who’s even paying attention to their posts? How many of their “followers” represent currently active Twitter accounts? What’s been the tangible result of any “Call To Action” they’ve ever made on Twitter? How many people watched their video? How many people arrived to watch their live stream?

That person that told you you need a blog?.. What does THEIR blog look like? Original content? Paraphrasing stuff they just read on Mashable?

What do their comments look like? Is the blogger even PRESENT in his or her own comment stream? O_o Do they even READ the comments they get on their posts? Do they respond intelligently or AT ALL?

Do they even CARE whether anyone comments on their page, or are they just interested in getting the retweets, shares and reblogs?

How much time do they spend interacting with their own community?.. The people that cared enough to read their blog and then bless them by joining in the conversation?

Do they even bother to check whether the comments they’re getting are from real people? How many times have you gone to a blog and there are 13 comments on the thread and 11 of them are obvious spam? Do you have your system set up like mine, where I get an email every single time someone posts a comment on my blog? Are you getting the emails from your blog, or are you just not reading them? Do you care what your blog looks like? Are you planning to fix the sign on the front? If not, you’re not the right person for SOMEONE ELSE to hire for Social Media work, are you?

Also.. If you’re a blogger and happen to be illiterate, instead of hiring someone to make you a custom theme and incorporate fancy pictures of yourself, hire a proofreader. I know this is slightly problematic because if you don’t know the difference between “there”, “their”, and “they’re”, you can’t very well tell that you need HELP in order to know that you should hire someone to fix that for you before you announce your level of education to the world.

Educated Decisions

The first thing you want to do if someone wants you to pay them to do ANYTHING is see examples of their work. If they’re going to paint, you want to see something they painted that’s similar to the job you want done. Social Media offers you the double-opportunity to judge someone’s potential worth to your company by a) seeing what they’ve done for others and more importantly, b) what they’ve done for themselves.

If you’re telling me that your company creates websites and YOUR website is garbage, you’re a clown. If you’re telling me you’re a video editor and there’s no tangible evidence that you ever edited anything for anybody in this lifetime, you’re a clown. If you’re telling me that you can bring crowds to your clients’ shows and you can’t bring crowds to your own live streams, you’re a clown.

The second thing you want to do when someone offers you a Social Media strategy is ask them “WHY?”.

WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? Keep asking them that until you’re satisfied with the answer. If you know you’re not smart enough to know what the answer should be, hire a consultant to help you find the right Social Media group to hire for your project. Too many people ask me uneducated or perhaps MISeducated questions like “How much traffic will I get when we make this site?” and “How many people can I count on to watch my video if I put it on YouTube?” because people are running around pumping it up like you win some kind of prize just for creating a presence in the space.

What should I do? Make a Twitter account. Why? So people can follow you. Why? So you can look popular and sought-after, speak to people and listen to what they say back to you. What people? Any people. Why would I want to talk to random people about my business? So you can make them aware of your business and then advertise your goods & services to them. How do I specifically advertise to Twitter people local to me who need my Elite Lawn Mowing Services? You have to advertise to everyone and hope word gets around. For that, why don’t I spend my money on flyers and hand them out around my town? Good idea.

Time, Money, Energy, Resources

Social Media is a vehicle. It’s an opportunity for you to express yourself to people that otherwise would never have heard of you or your ideas or your business.

What they don’t tell you is that HAVING a presence isn’t enough. You have to MAINTAIN your presence.

If you’re going to make a blog, you have to POST CONTENT on your blog. Photo set? Post photos. Social Media community (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Ning…)? Get involved.

You can spend as much money as you want on a car, and it won’t be too useful to you or your company without a driver. That driver has to be YOU or someone you hire to.. Oh… I forgot the ever-useful INTERN! :D

It’s another Social Media staple to get interns to do all the work for your supposedly-professional company. If you hire interns to do the work, your company will output intern-quality work. If you don’t hire video editors to edit video, you get what you pay for. If you don’t hire illustrators to customize your website, you get what you pay for.

Anyway… No. You’re not going to get any traffic just by having a website created for you. You’re not going to get any views just by uploading a video to YouTube. You have to create the presence, create the content, properly post the content, advertise the content, start the conversation and then maintain the conversation while simultaneously creating new content, beginning the cycle again before the first cycle ends.

Social Media is extremely time-consuming. It’s not “Set it and forget it”. SOMEBODY’S got to maintain it, keeping your internet presence fresh and relevant. A Social Media strategy doesn’t END with creation any more than the Indy 500 ends when a driver’s mechanics BUILD his car. Don’t let these people gas your head up that if you pay them to create accounts for you on Facebook, Ustream, Twitter and YouTube, your company’s going to be on the road to the riches.

Ask them WHY?… What’s going to happen AFTER you create your accounts? What’s necessary as far as time, money & resources to MAINTAIN your internet presence? If they can’t tell you that, either hire someone different to handle the Social Media for your company or get ready for the letters to fall off your store.

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Bill & Frank discuss MiGente, MySpace, OkCupid, Facebook and the potential pitfalls of one gal inviting another gal along on a date as a “third wheel”.

Listen / Download => Audio Version (.mp3) [11:27]

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More Episodes: http://billcammack.com/category/datinggenius/streetgame/

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Rox, Grace, Bill & Laura – April, 2008

I had an interesting experience happen two months ago back in May, which I talked about in “Who Are You?”. Basically, I sent a friends request on Facebook to someone I was friends with in Elementary School and she had ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA who I was! :D

Now, of course, there are like a million people I’ve forgotten since Elementary, so her perception of me (or lack thereof, haha) isn’t a big deal. My perception of her happened to remain fresh because she’s an actress and shows up in films or on television every couple of years, so I pretty much couldn’t forget her if I tried! :D

However.. The situation made me consider what I’ve done… or perhaps how my mind works when it comes to my friends. My system retains what I’ll call positive, negative or neutral remembrances of people or they exit my mind entirely. All the time, I’ve run into friends that I haven’t seen for years, and we picked up our conversations and hangouts as if we had just seen each other yesterday. That’s because my system operates on a kind of suspended-animation basis.

In my mind, I don’t stop being friends with someone because we’re out of contact. I either have a generally good, bad, neutral or “zero” (forgotten) feeling about them when I run into them the next time, and then we take it from there. That’s partially what makes me who I am as a video editor. I can see footage and retain it in my mind and then make the video from memory instead of having to see it physically on the screen. I never “rough cut”. I’m always laying video and audio down exactly as I wanted it in my mind, checking it and then adjusting it.

So, after “Who Are You?”, I let it lay for a couple of months, and today, I went for another round of Elementary / JHS Facebook friend invites. The difference for me this time was that I’m no longer expecting people to remember me because I “remember” them. I’m not expecting anyone else to have retained ANY information about spending time with me years ago, even if I remember buying my FIRST album with them, or spending the night at their house, or cutting school with them or playing sports against them or getting into fights with them or liking the same music they do or scoring higher than them and everyone else in three entire classes on a math test.

It’s cool. :) It is what it is. They remember me or they don’t. They’ll accept the invite or they won’t.

The other aspect of this is that even if they DID remember “who I am”… That was then, and this is now. A whole lot of time has passed and a whole lot of stuff has happened that obviously make us different people today than we were in 6th and 7th grade. It’s clearly easier to kick-start friendships with people you knew from College and High School, because we were all more developed as characters/personalities by then, things aren’t so different now as when we were in school together and not as much time has passed.

So, even if I *HAD* props back in the day, that doesn’t mean that I still have them now and wouldn’t have to start all over (if I chose to attempt to do so) in relating to them as an absolute stranger.

It’s really very interesting, and I suppose there are a lot of people who wonder WHY someone would even care about reaching back to people he or she used to know years ago. I talked about that back in April 2008, in “Digital Internet Snobbery”. Basically, by staying on the cutting edge of Social Media, I realized a year ago that everyone that wasn’t as advanced as I was, I was like “Let them eat cake”.

It’s not that I *didn’t* care. It’s that I couldn’t. Social Media takes up all of your day, every day. Staying on the edge requires a lot of R&D and Trial & Error. There’s no time for MySpace when you’re advancing on Facebook. There’s no time for Ning when you’re advancing on your own blog. There’s no time for Joost when you’re watching Hulu. There’s no time for Jaiku when you’re advancing on Twitter……

So, my goal in reaching back is to let people know that I remember them from back in the day and extend that ping to them.. That recognition. They’ll appreciate it, not appreciate it, despise it or think nothing of it. Doesn’t matter one way or the other.

It mattered the first time, because that was my wake-up call as far as how my own system works. At this point, I’mma play it where it lays. I’ll reach out when I see someone I remember and that’s that. In the meantime, I’ll figure out what I’m going to do with my OTHER 1443 Facebook friends.

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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Social Media Responsibility and Ethics

Leora & Bill

So the other day, I took some pictures (so what’s new?), except one of the chicks we were hanging out with wasn’t feeling confident about her looks.

There were some general shots that she happened to be in, but then when she was asked to specifically be in a pic (not with me, haha so let’s not start with the “Maybe it was YOU?” :D ), she declined, saying that she wasn’t photogenic.

* This actually happened to be incorrect, but that’s an image and self-esteem topic, having nothing to do with ethics…. *

Sharing

So I had told the group I was going to share the pictures with them. When I reviewed the set the next day, I realized that there were a couple of pictures that the non-photogenic chick (I guess I’ll call her NPC) hadn’t “signed off” on.

Now, these weren’t Social Media people. I’m sure they didn’t imagine they were hanging out with someone whose blog posts get literally world-wide coverage. 99% of the people that I hang out with know that if they see ME and they see flashes going off, that the pictures are going to be on the internet, practically immediately. Being that these people weren’t aware of this, it became MY RESPONSIBILITY to be clear on which pictures were authorized by which people for what. It’s like being a bus driver. You’re responsible for your passengers. You can’t go all buck-wild with the driving. So I ended up with three categories of pictures:

1. Pictures that were confirmed for personal use
2. Pictures that were confirmed for public use
3. Pictures that weren’t confirmed at all

Grace, Christine, Bill, Kathryn & Annie

This is one of the reasons I don’t take pictures of random people.

I don’t take pictures “to take pictures”. I’m not an “event photographer”. I’m not building a photography portfolio.

I take pictures to commemorate and broadcast good times that I have and the people that I share those good times with. Random pictures of random people mean absolutely nothing to me. Tagging the pics after the fact is probably 1/4 of the fun of the entire evening for me.

Distribution

So I’m looking through the pics and sorting them into the categories. When I had them together, I sent a specific subset to this good friend of mine, this guy who was there and part of the evening and the pictures. What I sent him was [Pictures with him in them, posing]+[Pictures that the girls had signed off on for public viewing]. The reason I specify “posing” is that some pictures feature people in the background, or unaware that a picture’s being taken. Other pictures are clearly posed and everyone in the foreground is aware of the picture and interested in being in it.

I use a digital camera, so right after I take the shot, everybody gets to see how cute they look and sign off or veto the pic. Therefore, by the time I’m working on my sets, I’m already aware that I’m working from a good set of pictures that everybody likes, except in the cases where there are things you can’t see on the small screen that become apparent in the full-size image.

So I send him the pics, and he calls me and we’re talking about the evening. At some point, he brings up the fact that more pictures were taken than I sent him. I verified that I had a couple of pictures that NPC was in. His predictable response was “Send them to me!”…

Responsibility

I took a few seconds to attempt to formulate a smooth response, but I couldn’t figure one out, so I just said “Nah. Leave her out of it.” Next came the appeals to friendship and appeals to personal trust. Of course, those met the same response and then the topic was dropped. I could hear his disappointment over the phone, but there was nothing I could do about that. Somebody was going to have to feel sad in this situation, and he was clearly the lesser of the evils.

What I didn’t have time to explain to him in the few seconds before I vetoed his request was that he has no idea how far-reaching media is these days and I do. I’m sure he feels like he can put a picture on his website or some Social Media site and nobody will ever see it, because nobody’s “checkin’ for him” like that. Well… Maybe Google’s checkin’ for ya behind your back. Maybe people are randomly looking through pictures, hoping to find people. Maybe someone that you know houses your picture from your site and puts it on their site… or puts it on MySpace… or puts it on Facebook and TAGS IT! How about that?

So, basically, the issue wasn’t whether I could trust him as a friend or not. The issue is that I had a particular design in mind for the pictures that I took, and I’m the only one that I can trust to enforce that plan. To sidetrack for a second, it’s like sex. If you don’t want to get a chick pregnant, make sure you don’t spill any liquid on her. Similarly, if you want to maintain your integrity in a situation and live up to your own word to yourself, make sure you retain control over your media that hasn’t been earmarked for general consumption.

So, do I trust him as a friend? Yes. Do I trust him to maintain MY word about something? No. I can’t. It’s just stupid. On top of that, how about the people that HE trusts? How about the people that THEY trust? Once the “NOC list” is in the open, you have ZERO control over what happens to your media and might put people in compromising situations. If you spill in the chick, you can’t shake her up and down like the cartoons to get it to come back out…..

~Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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