Your “Social Brand” is what people expect to happen when you show up on a social scene. Most people don’t have a social brand at all. Nobody expects them to do anything except drink some alcohol, ramble on about some smalltalk drivel and then go home.

Part of the reason for this is that people are scared to death to talk about what’s really interesting to them. They’re scared of being judged or categorized. They’re scared of being associated with the wrong people or disassociated from the right people. They’re scared that they’re blowing business opportunities by not sticking to blogging about whatever topic makes them money…

Social Brand vs. Business Brand

A while back, Reader “Justin” asked me something to the effect of “Are any of your potential clients turned off by your dating blog?”. That’s an excellent question, which I think gets to the heart of this particular discussion. “Is my business brand adversely affected by my social brand?”.

My initial, instinctive reaction to this question is “How the **** would I know, considering that people that don’t want to talk to you….. don’t TALK to you?” \o/

I mean, IMAGINE someone sending you an email saying “I was going to pay you money to make MY COMPANY look better than it otherwise would have, but since you call chicks ‘chicks’ and not ‘women’, I’ve decided to hire an inferior, slower, unproven editor and maybe my work will get done on time and in a professional manner and maybe it won’t. Good Day.” :D

Other than making a post about that and blasting it all over the modernized world on my blog, My only possible email reply to that is “You are an idiot. Thanks for the laugh.”

First of all.. Other than broadcast television work, my name doesn’t even APPEAR on probably 95% of the work I do. People don’t hire me so they can say I worked on something. They hire me because I’m faster and better.

Second, I do a lot of work through alliances, like Tribe Nine Creative. I enable companies to offer audio & video services outside of their expertise in packages to their clients.

Combining web design, coding and media creates a one-stop shop where people can get their entire site built instead of having to deal with several contractors.

Third.. Which is really “First”, I don’t even WORK with random people. “Potential Clients” are referred to me via word of mouth by people that I’ve already worked for or people who are friends of mine and understand the level of quality I bring to a project. I haven’t carried business cards in years. If someone asks me, I say “I’m a video editor.” and rarely expand any further than that.

You Lose Some.. You Win A Lot More

Having said all that… :D Yes… I can imagine that my business brand has been adversely affected by my social brand. I wouldn’t know anything about this due to the “Say positive things only” nature of the internet. I’ve heard things that people have said about me on the back-channel, but the people I’ve heard about didn’t have any business for me anyway… or, rather.. They don’t have any money to afford the budget, so we weren’t going to be working together REGARDLESS.

But, Yes.. I can imagine that there are several things about my social media presentation that would turn potential clients off to the idea of hiring me for a project. I think we need to look at this from a dating perspective. There are lots of women that are turned off to the idea of dating me because of things they’ve seen or read or that I’ve told them to their faces. What difference does that make until I run out of chicks?

None.

You lose girls off the roster, you get some more. Clients don’t want to work with you for whatever reason, you either stick with your regular clients or make new affiliations with trusted colleagues. Personally, now that Final Cut Pro allows me to send clients real-time video via iChat Theater, I can do supervised edits remotely with any client in any city, town or rural area that has a Mac and a decent internet connection:

I was already doing this via Skype anyway, but the point is that I have access to way more “Potential Clients” than the subset of “Potential Clients who are turned off by my dating blog”. That’s like asking “Do you care that the Jersey Shore girls were only interested in dating Italian guys?”, with the answer being “Hellz Naw” because they’re a subset of girls in New Jersey, an even smaller subset of the girls in the Tri-State Area and a miniscule subset of the girls in the USA. \o/

Social ROI

Having said all THAT….. :D

The benefits I’ve received from my Social Branding have far outweighed (in my estimation, because as I said, the net is heavily skewed towards the positive) whatever business losses my wallet may have suffered because of it. I’ll tell you why…

When I show up somewhere, people have a good idea of what’s about to happen.

A lot of people are going to meet a lot of people and we’re all gonna have a good time. :D

There will probably also be chicks around because I rarely go anywhere without them.

We’ll probably be talking about dating, because as Reader “Michele” asked me, “Don’t you ever get tired of talking about dating?”, the answer is HELLZ NAWWWW!!! >:D

Personally, I’m way more interested in people knowing what I’m about socially so they can decide to get down with the program or leave me the **** alone when they see me IRL. I have no problem with either one. I’m a fan of people because they’re talented and/or I think they’re cool people. Whether they like me or not doesn’t figure into that equation.

What I’ve found.. Again, due to the egregiously-positive skew of feedback to what’s posted on the internet, is that the guys & gals that read my blog get laughs out of it, entertainment, food for thought and discussion topics with their SOs or their friends. To ME.. That’s worth infinitely more than a few thousand dollars that a potential client doesn’t want to pay me that I’m going to get from someone else anyway. :D

If I weren’t going to get pIZaid, REGARDLESS?.. Yes.. It would be more of a consideration. I’d still blog one way or another because the great opportunity we have with the internet is to meet people who think & feel the same way, whom we would never have met if we would have had to go somewhere IRL in order to make their acquaintance. We get to learn about each other asynchronously so that by the time we meet f2f, we’re either Pro or Anti each other and we have good reasons why we feel the way we do.

That’s just a building block, however, because physically spending time with someone can give you a radically different understanding of who they are as a person and what they’re really about.

Use It or Lose It

Blogging has allowed me to say whatever I want to whomever cares to listen. I’d much rather utilize that blessing by sharing a small percentage of what I think about dating and what I do socially than write some stiff, boring business blog, hoping to entice someone to put some money in my pocket.

On top of that, because I’m an interesting person and not a business drone, I literally have THOUSANDS of people that I’m in contact with via social media and could reach out to if I ran out of regular clients and decided to secure some new ones. The Social begets The Business.. Not the other way around.

Is it IMPORTANT to have a Social Brand?.. Not at all. In fact, if you’re the type of person that doesn’t ENJOY being sociable, you’re better off being in Networking Mode every time you go somewhere. Glad-Hand people and smalltalk them to death with minutiae.. That is, if you elect to go to social functions at all. It’s better for people to think NOTHING about you socially if your job is your life and socializing will make people less interested in doing business with you because it’s obvious to them that you don’t care about them at all other than to try to make a buck.

Do you have a Social Brand? O_o .. If so, what is it? What do people expect to happen when they meet you IRL? Are your dating or business careers being helped or hindered by your social presence?

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Everything you do in public adds to or subtracts from your cred, and is compiled in your virtual resume. Which resume are you building, and what do you hope to get out of that?

Bill Cammack – Channeling What Women Want

When I got started, three years ago, in 2006, My idea was to make a site that started out as my making my own videos but would expand to a group of people collaborating to make videos for the site. This is why I was initially branding ReelSolid.TV instead of BillCammack.com.

Pretty much immediately, I started getting recognition for my videos, except *I* wasn’t getting recognition for my videos. People knew that ReelSolid.TV was producing them, but nobody knew who ReelSolid.TV was.

Once I understood that, I had a choice. I was either going to continue publicizing the group (which was only me anyway), or I was going to start publicizing MYSELF. I chose to publicize myself because the group is merely an umbrella.. a catch-all. Let’s say that ReelSolid.TV is defense and BillCammack.com is offense. ReelSolid is more saying “I’m not necessarily the one that created this, though it’s my site”. BillCammack is saying “I did this. Add it to my resume”.

2 1/2 years later (I think I branded ReelSolid.TV for 6 months before changing over), I’m satisfied with my results. I’m currently top-10 out of 395 million entries for “Bill” and top-10 out of 396 thousand Google entries for “Cammack”. That works for me, because anything that I do these days, people are like “Oh.. That’s the same guy that did this, this and that”. In fairness, I’m a freelancer, so it’s actually in my best business interest for people to recognize my name as well as my best personal interest. I like to “Stand or Fall” on my own merit.

Nicknames

Other people like to brand nicknames. Two that come to mind offhand are PurpleCar and Pistachio. Thanks to Social Media, this is a viable option. You can use a nickname and associate that name with a consistent avatar across SM sites and people will become accustomed to addressing you by your nickname. Also, by tagging your media with your nickname, people will be able to find your work or writing on Google just as easily as your “Government Name”.

The only problem here is the same problem I had with ReelSolid.TV. Unless you intend on continuously utilizing your nickname to do business or blogging or whatever you do, you’re probably better off using something that will come along with you into your new projects or genres. Granted, nicknames are less of an issue than something specifically saying TV, because if you want to go into music, you can be PurpleCar Records or Pistachio International.

An upside of nicknames is that they’re catchy and unique, at least within your niche, and therefore way more easily remembered and shared with others. I’m sure there are tons of Lauras that do the same thing, but only one Pistachio. There are lots of Christines, but only one PurpleCar. There are tons of Bills, but only one ReelSolid.TV

Company Names

Other people’s approach to the internet is to ONLY open their mouths to say something about their company or the company they work for. You’re basically the mouthpiece or the “face” of that company. That’s beautiful for the company, but once you leave that company, there’s going to be no trace that you ever existed on the internet.

That’s exactly what some people want, so that works for them. Other people leave a company after a couple of years and think they’ve developed such a fine reputation amongst the people they’ve interacted with on the net, only to find out that outside of the context of “He/She works for Company X”, nobody recognizes you at all, and you basically have to start from scratch.

I think the question really comes down to what you’re trying to build on the net. Do you want people to know who YOU are and what YOU’VE done? or are you only on the internet for business purposes? What will it mean to you three years from now when nothing’s published under your Government Name and everything you wrote comes up under your former job’s name? OTOH.. What will it mean to you down the line if people know your name, but didn’t learn enough about your company in the meantime to make it a household name and as successful and recognized as it could possibly have been?

So… What do *you* brand, and why?

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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“Personal Branding” has been hotly debated recently in my circles. “Do I have a personal brand?” “Does personal branding exist?” “Am I a brand or a person?”

Part of the reason this is discussed so often is that people tend to define a personal brand in terms that don’t mean anything. By using terms for PEOPLE that are used to categorize COMPANIES, people are turned off to the concept or fail to understand the true meaning of the term.

Does personal branding exist? Yes. Do *YOU* have one? Maybe.

Basically, a “personal brand” is what people EXPECT when you come to mind. Period. Some people have this and some people don’t.

A personal brand is achieved through ACTIONS which people come to associate with your name or face. If you never DO anything that people perceive, you do not have a personal brand, IMO. This is because your name doesn’t “ring bells” and doesn’t alter anyone’s perception of a situation when they find out that you’re involved. This does NOT mean that you aren’t important… It merely means people don’t KNOW who you are and/or what you do.

For instance, if you google Emmy Award Editor I’m #1. Actually, I’m #1 AND #2, because the youtube version of the collab I did with Indy Mogul is in the second slot, with 11,240 views. People hit my resume page or my “about” page every single day, so lots of people have associated the name Bill Cammack with quality videotape editorial. This is what they EXPECT when they find out I worked on a project… Quality.

So what about Ian Jenkins?

“Who?” :D

Ian Jenkins is a friend of mine who edits and works A HELL OF A LOT HARDER than I do. :) Ian edits a show for Next New Networks called “Fast Lane Daily”, which just won a 2008 Webby Award.

That’s Ian in the white FLD shirt and headphones. Also pictured are a couple of other NNN friends of mine, J-Rad & Alan Kaufman.

Now… If I had a project I wanted to get done, Ian Jenkins would be one of the top guys I’d want working with me. That’s because I happen to know his work ethic and the skill and dedication he brings to the table. I know this because I’ve spoken to him, I’ve seen his work and I know people that work WITH him. Does he broadcast this himself? No. Not that I know of. Is he crafting a personal brand? Not that I know of. He’s doing what he does. IS “Ian Jenkins” a brand? HELL YES! :D That’s because when *I* hear his name, I EXPECT certain things from a project Ian worked on.

So who’s the better editor? Bill Cammack or Ian Jenkins?…. Unfortunately, editing is highly subjective. The only thing that matters is whether the job gets done WELL and ON TIME. So I say NEITHER of us is better as a editor. My personal brand is more recognized, because I spend hours every day working on it and Ian doesn’t give a damn. :) Ian meets deadlines every. single. day. while I play SOCOM. I’m freelance, so I’ve worked for a ton of shows, companies and people for advertising, corporate and broadcast productions. Ian’s a staffer, so he works on one show, and it runs on the internet, but he probably produces 15 videos for every one that I output. Ian shoots video as well. So do I, but I’d rather edit, and Ian’s probably better at shooting, because he does it infinitely more than I do.

My point is… You can’t tell JACK from how well someone uses the internet to publicize themselves. I’m not going to tell you to google Video Editor Resume (I’m #3) to figure out who’s GOOD or who can make it happen. That’s just a list of people that know how to use tags, or even worse, actually PAID PEOPLE to get them better rankings on google. :/ Doesn’t mean they’re any good at what they do AT ALL. Doesn’t mean their name “rings bells” IRL. What matters is what people know or perceive about you, which IS your personal brand, whether you LIKE that or not and whether you EMBRACE that or not.

Regardless of whether you brand YOURSELF, people are going to brand YOU. I started telling people to Google “Bill” (I’m currently #9 of 541,000,000 pages for “Bill”) because I don’t carry business cards, and it’s really the easiest way for people to get in touch with me. Next thing I know, hahaha this is how I’m being introduced to people at parties. :) This wasn’t MY idea, but people get a kick out of that and it spreads from person to person.

Actually… And I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about this… :D Neither my professional accomplishments nor my stellar search engine rankings (e.g. women dating nyc #3) are what most people that I meet “know me for”. It’s always “….. YOU’RE that guy that’s in all those pictures with all those women! :D”.

So, BESIDES not overshadowing your BUSINESS brand with your SOCIAL brand, :) the moral of our story is… Do you have a personal brand? Maybe. It depends first of all on whether you actually DO ANYTHING, and second on whether you’re letting people KNOW that you do these things or whether other people are publicizing you. If people think differently of something because you’re involved with it, that’s your PERSONAL BRAND at work. This does NOT only have to do with business either. We’ll get into that another time. You might have a personal brand when it comes to dating. The fact that you can be trusted in general and your word actually MEANS SOMETHING is potentially part of your personal brand.

There’s also NEGATIVE personal branding, such as when a client refuses to pay you for several months for work you did for them and you’re getting ready to blast their name and company all over the WORLD WIDE WEB for not living up to their agreements EVERY SINGLE DAY until you get satisfaction, which would amount to receiving PAYMENT IN FULL for services rendered. But that’s a story for another day. :D

So that’s what I think about personal branding. If you’re in the “public” eye (as ‘public’ as our small Echo Chamber gets) brand yourself or other people will do it for you. Whatever opinions come to mind when people hear your name or see your face, that’s YOUR brand. Even if NO opinions come to people’s minds or they’ve never heard of you, that doesn’t matter as long as YOU know what you’re bringing to the table. “The Fame Game” isn’t for everybody. Not everybody CAN do it, not everybody SHOULD do it and not everybody does it WELL.

So.. Does ‘Personal Branding’ exist, or am I talking about vaporware? :D

What do you think?

~Bill

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