Bill Cammack » podcast

Blog Subscribers, Commenters, Lurkers & Passers-By

Bill Cammack — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 20:04:53 +0000

I had a conversation a few days ago with a friend who asked me what I thought about blogging / podcasting / creating video content, specifically as it pertains to viewership and even more specifically as it pertains to NUMBERS of viewers for content we post to the internet.

There’s a lot of talk amongst the social media set about numbers and views and influence and what makes content “worth” creating.

Unfortunately, all that talk about numbers assumes that people are equals, when we most clearly are not. o_O

Authorities & Audiences

Let’s say, for instance, that you have 100 Facebook Friends and they’re all people that you’ve grown up with or met IRL (in real life) that share no particular concentration in any industry. Let’s also say that *I* have 2,434 Facebook Friends and you and I happen not to share very many mutual friends… Logically, if I post something, it’s more likely to receive responses, hits, views, whatever, because my listening audience is immensely larger than yours.

Let’s take that same scenario and change how you created and cultivated your audience of 100 FB Friends… Let’s say that you were an expert in a particular field and the people you reached out to and also accepted FB friend invites from were all involved in or interested in your chosen profession. Let’s say you had conversations with this specialized audience and they recognized you as an authority.. Someone who was known to have interesting, important & relevant things to say and similarly useful links to share.

NOW.. If you and I post about the same information at the same time, except it happens to be along the lines that you and your friends normally kick it about, my larger population is trumped by your way smaller one because your readers are PASSIONATE about your content and mine are not.

On top of that.. All this numbers-talk only takes into account first-tier connections. If my Twitter fanbase is 10 people, except one of those 10 people following me has 60,000 followers, I might not directly have a large audience, but someone following me might. Similarly.. If I have 10 and one of my ten followers has 10 and one of her ten followers has 10 and one of his ten followers has 1,000,000… You get the picture, so there’s no actual telling who’s going to receive wider distribution when they output content.

So.. Unless your ability to pay rent depends on how many readers/viewers you have, don’t worry about it. The number is entirely irrelevant unless you can make money by serving ads to those people. You might ask yourself what the point is of creating content if there aren’t going to be very many people watching…

Content For Whom?

First of all, you want to create content FOR YOURSELF.

Back in the day, when I was trying to decide what I wanted to blog about, my friend Penelope Trunk told me (paraphrasing) “You should blog about what you’re passionate about… or else you’re going to stop doing it”. That had to be THE most important thing I’ve ever heard about blogging and it’s absolutely true. I’m writing this post right this very second because I FEEL LIKE IT, and for no other reason. I’m enjoying thinking about it. I’m enjoying writing it. I’m going to enjoy posting it and receiving feedback about it. :D

Second, you want to create content for your Passionate Viewers.

Again, back in the day… I was discussing the creation and production of web shows with my friend Drew Olanoff and he told me his opinions about views vs viewERs. Basically, my experience up until that point had been with the technical side of creating videos and I had had little-to-no interaction with end-users, viewers that weren’t my personal friends, and certainly not entire communities of people who interact with each other based on a common love of or respect for a show.

Paraphrasing Drew’s point.. He felt that it was better to focus on your small amount of Passionate Viewers than to attempt to cater to a potentially way larger number of people that might drop by your show, watch an episode or two and bounce.

At the time, I didn’t understand why that would be, but I was willing to consider the theory. I eventually agreed entirely when my own shows & blogs gained an expanded audience and I got to experience the differences between the groups firsthand.

My stats have pretty consistently looked like this for the past few years.

93% Passers-By and 7% Regulars… Except the Regulars make up 17% of my visits.

I would certainly rather keep my current percentage of Regulars than increase my numbers of Passers-By at the expense of some of my Passionate Readers/Viewers.

While it would be nice to keep the current Regulars and convert some of the Passers-By into still more Regulars, I like to think about blogging relative to real life instead of relative to other, immensely more popular blogs.

Subscribers, Commenters, Lurkers & Passers-By

I currently have 118 people who subscribe to BillCammack.com by email. If you think about that… When was the last time that you gathered 118 people somewhere so they could listen to something you said? o_O … Probably “Never”, because I know that’s the answer for me.

So, each one of y’all 118 people, I appreciate you for tuning in. :) Thank You, and I try to keep things interesting around here. ;)

My actual subscriber number currently reads 244, because they add in people who subscribe via RSS and receive my blog articles in their feed readers. I’m sure a number of those are “bots” (robots, automated computer processes), but for those of y’all that are real people, Thanks for subscribing! :D

Even amongst subscribers, you have Lurkers, who read the articles but don’t comment directly on my blog. That doesn’t mean they aren’t sharing my posts with other people and discussing my ideas on other social networking sites & forums. I’m happy about that as well, because I don’t blog so people can come to my site. I blog because I feel like it and if someone else gets something out of it, that’s icing on the cake. If someone finds what I write to be entertaining, educational or useful, even better! :D

Then, You have the behind-the-scenes commenters.. The people that strike up conversations with me about my content when we run into each other at parties. The people that email or DM me to let me know what’s going on with them or that they enjoyed a particular post. It’s always gratifying to hear that someone got something out of an article I didn’t even have to write. It’s like when I happen to walk down a street or get into a particular subway car and tourists ask me for directions. I just happened to be there to point them in the right direction, and that’s always a good feeling.

The top level is the online commenters! :D .. I shouted out many of them 10 months ago in my last post of 2009: billcammack.com/2009/12/31/world-in-my-eyes-happy-new-year.

It’s the commenters that make my blog a community instead of a bunch of speeches by Bill Cammack. Lots of times, readers get more out of what the commenters share than what I initially posted!… I learn stuff from them also and I’m open to changing directions if someone has a convincing argument that things are actually different than I currently believe them to be.

So.. Thanks again, commenters! :D .. We almost have another full year together under our belts! :D

How Many Do You Need?

The way I see it, from my personal experience with online communities between 2006 and 2010, the only people you should be concerned with if you’re thinking about starting a blog or podcast or web series are 1) YOURSELF, and 2) the people who are genuinely interested in what you’re talking about and are willing to read, listen, watch and maybe even join in the conversation.

If that’s 100,000 people?… Fine… However, it’s ALSO fine if it’s 10 people.. five of whom are related to you. :)

If you feel like you NEED a bunch of people to consistently watch your show and click on your advertisements or else you’re not going to be able to MAKE your show, you have the wrong business model. Do it cheaper. Use fewer graphics. Spend fewer hours creating it. Edit it less. Use a webcam instead of a video camera. Output once a week instead of once a day. Output once a month instead of once a week. If you have something you want to express, just figure out how to do it within your budget & time constraints and make it happen!

In fact.. Sometimes, I’ll write an entire blog post or make a video just so ONE PERSON can see it (or maybe a specific, small set of people). In those cases, if 1,000 people watch the video and the person/people I made it for didn’t, I wasn’t successful in communicating my expression to them.

OTOH.. If 10 people watch a video and I know that the three people I made it for saw it?… Mission Accomplished! :D

“Street Game” Production Notes

Bill Cammack — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 15:13:09 +0000

Street Game Production Notes

I just completed a 5-part audio project entitled “Street Game”. The episodes are embedded here, in chronological order. Playing Episode 01 will play all five in order:

Frank, one of my top commenters on my DatingGenius dating blog was the inspiration for this particular project. I rarely find comments amusing, funny or progressive compared to what I personally know about “the game” (getting girls, whatever), but I found myself consistently laughing, learning and THINKING after I would read Frank’s comments on my blog posts. I was reminded of back in the day when my friends and I would spend hour upon hour kickin’ it about what we learned in the trenches with chicks, coming up with new techniques and throwing out techniques that TOTALLY didn’t produce for us! :D I wanted to bring the flavor of that to the net, and I got way more than I expected.

Part of the point of DatingGenius is to let women in on things that guys MIGHT be thinking about them so they have a better idea of what might have just happened to them in their relationships. I already know all this stuff, so there’s no benefit to *me* in telling YOU about it. If I just wanted to have fun conversations like I used to back in the day, I wouldn’t have bothered suggesting doing a podcast to Frank. I would have just talked, and none of youse would have ever heard any of this stuff. We’ve BARELY scratched the surface of topics to discuss, yet we’ve produced 68 minutes of content if you listen to Episodes 01 – 05 back to back.

I’m *VERY* happy with this project so far, and I never cease to get laughs from listening to the episodes, even though a) I was involved in the actual conversation and b) I was the one who had to edit them, so I’ve heard this material at least five times each. One of the things about editing is that the more you listen to something, the more you become immune to the events & punchlines. For some reason, that didn’t happen to me with this project. :D

Technical Issues

“Street Game” was recorded using Skype and a cell phone. I was on skype, using a microphone and Frank was on his phone. Being on the phone instead of sitting in front of a microphone caused two problems (which was my fault, because I was in such a rush to do this project that I selected this format).

#1, Recording this way meant that we had to rely upon the reception of the phone to provide a clear signal. Many times, a clear signal wasn’t present, and some of Frank’s comments were inaudible and I couldn’t retrieve them through editing.

#2, Not sitting in front of a mic meant that Frank’s volume levels were inconsistent, even if the signal itself was good. That was easily dealt with by normalizing the audio, but it’s not the optimum condition under which to record a podcast.

I would still record podcasts using this technique, however I’m aware now of the extra time that it adds between recording and posting the audio to the net. I’d rather avoid that extra time, but it’s completely manageable, and I’m 98% satisfied with the quality of the audio from Frank’s side.

From my side, I should have run my mic through my noise gate before recording it, but I didn’t have time to patch the gate in before recording. This was a project that I had discussed with Frank ahead of time, but the urge to make it happen appeared, I contacted him and ~ an hour later, we were starting the recording. That’s why I say I “didn’t” have time.

Since I didn’t use the noise gate, I had to use a software gate after the fact and also monitor the stream for areas where the gate didn’t catch random sounds/breaths/etc. Had I gated it properly from the giddyap, I could have skipped the noise reduction process as well as the normalization process. The gate would have handled the noise reduction and the compressor/limiter would have handled the volume peaks (making sure there wasn’t so much difference between the loudest and softest audio on my track).

Content

Content-wise, I didn’t take very much out of this conversation. Most of my edits were taking out extraneous noises and shortening distances between where one of us would finish a point and the other realized the point was made. The goal of this project was to give the listener a fly-on-the-wall perspective on a conversation between a couple of guys that felt they both had something to bring to the table as far as the dating scene.

The reason I felt this was unique was that most people don’t know what the hell they’re talking about and have ZERO real-life experience to back up their ideas. My experiences and Frank’s are in the same arena but from slightly different perspectives. I consider myself to be from the trenches, but I could tell from his comments on my blog that Frank was way further in the trenches towards the enemy lines… if not BEHIND ENEMY LINES, IN *THEIR* TRENCHES!!! hahaha :D I felt like I could learn things from listening to what he had to say, myself, and not only wasn’t I disappointed, as you can tell from the “tapes”, I had a mind-expanding experience, listening to what Frank was telling me.

This was not a “show”. This is why I didn’t bother to make intros or outtros or talk about websites or subscriptions or sponsors. I wanted to get the material out there for discussion/feedback and then decide which direction I wanted to go with audio. Also, the “Art” of the project includes what I chose to leave in the production, which is mostly everything. I took out some sections where I was trying to figure out what I was trying to say and going “um, well, you see, it’s like, well, what I mean is…”, but other than that, the conversation is mainly completely intact.

If you have feedback, positive or negative, please leave it in the comments below, as it will help me figure out what I want to do going forward in this medium. If you have specific comments about individual episodes, each one has its own entry @ billcammack.com/category/datinggenius/streetgame/, so feel free to click on the link and leave a comment there so we can have relevant discussions to each particular section.

Miscellaneous

One of the things I found about recording audio vs typing text is that without being able to see what you wrote, you can’t be sure of how much of your point you’ve expressed. This entire conversation was freestyle. Frank and I went from topic to topic, and for the most part, we were on exactly the same page. I realized, while editing “Episode 05: Who Should Pay For The Date?” that I made an error in expressing a point and Frank and I actually discussed two different topics simultaneously. :)

At 12:23, I talk about putting a gal in cab home after an evening together. What I failed to say was that I was talking about sending her home AFTER having a good time with her AFTER going to dinner. Since I didn’t say that, Frank rightfully felt like I was talking about the gal leaving directly from dinner. Interestingly enough, the same principles apply in both situations, but there’s an entirely different dynamic with a gal that’s interested in you and is at least emotionally intimate with you and at most physically intimate with you, and a gal that just showed up to get a free dinner and get tipsy off your dime.

I didn’t really understand some of his statements until my third or fourth time through the episode, where I realized he was talking about her leaving right after dinner. I left the conversation in, because it still works and it’s still relevant along the lines of that overall situation.

Also, any of y’all ladies that would like me to take you out to Wendy’s, let me know, so I can practice my menu lines! ;)

~Bill

Twitter: BillCammack
Facebook: Bill Cammack
DatingGenius Category: billcammack.com/category/datinggenius
Subscribe to DG!: feeds.feedburner.com/BillCammackDatingGenius

Street Game 02: Female Players vs Male Players

Bill Cammack — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 01:20:38 +0000

Listen / Download => Street Game 02: Female Players vs Male Players (.mp3) [13:43]

Bill & Frank’s audio podcast derived from the DatingGenius dating advice blog.

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

Street Game 01: Denial & Experience

Bill Cammack — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 18:33:30 +0000

Listen / Download => Street Game 01: Denial & Experience (.mp3) [7:32]

Bill & Frank’s audio podcast derived from the DatingGenius dating advice blog.

Please leave comments/questions/suggestions below in the comments section of this post. This is an evolving project, so your opinion might help us make a better show! :D

Part 01 of a multi-part episode…..

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

Street Game

Bill Cammack — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:23:51 +0000

What’s up, y’all? :D

Those of you who are regular readers already know who “Frank” is, haha. He and I recorded an audio podcast this evening that I’ll be editing into episodes for release here in the DatingGenius blog under the show name & category “Street Game”.

The first few episodes are already recorded, but we’re going to be looking for feedback and reader questions, comments and perhaps call-in participation, depending on how the project goes, so stay tuned!

I’ve actually shunned the audio medium, opting to use either text or video. I now see certain advantages to using just audio, such as people being able to listen to the show on more players than they could see videos on and not needing to look at the show while it’s going on, so they can play it in the background while they have other windows open on their browsers or whatever.

Thanks to Frank for jumpin’ in on this experiment with me. For those of you interested in technical information, I used skype, and Frank was on his phone. I’m not sure what direction “Street Game” will go in, but that’s part of the fun. Right now, I’m thinking it’s going to be a daily show. It might be better weekly. We’ll find out.

Anyway… I know we had fireworks yesterday… Get ready for SOME MORE! :D hahahaha

~Bill

Twitter: BillCammack
Facebook: Bill Cammack
DatingGenius Category: billcammack.com/category/datinggenius
Subscribe to DG!: feeds.feedburner.com/BillCammackDatingGenius

Bill Cammack » podcast

Blog Subscribers, Commenters, Lurkers & Passers-By

Authorities & Audiences

Content For Whom?

Subscribers, Commenters, Lurkers & Passers-By

How Many Do You Need?

Related Posts

“Street Game” Production Notes

Technical Issues

Content

Miscellaneous

Related Posts

Street Game 02: Female Players vs Male Players

Related Posts

Street Game 01: Denial & Experience

Related Posts

Street Game

Related Posts