The point I was leading towards in “Are You Still Relevant? [Part 1 of 2]“ is that *your* perception of yourself isn’t necessarily the same as anyone else’s. Also, if a lot of people perceive you in a certain fashion, that doesn’t make it the truth.

I will attempt to clarify, hahaha :D

Technology is changing. The way people relate to each other is changing. Back in the day, people used to send letters by Pony Express or on the train or on ships that would travel from America to Europe. Eventually, they were using telegraphs & telephones. Eventually portable phones. Eventually pagers, then text messaging and now smartphones. People used DOS, then Windows, then Mac OS. People programmed with ADA, C++, Visual Basic…..

Just because you composed incredible letters that you mailed to your loved one doesn’t mean you can kick that live, today over the phone. Just because you were a genius at database programming 15 years ago doesn’t mean you know A SINGLE THING about Twitter. Just because I was involved in live streaming three years ago doesn’t mean I know anything about it TODAY:

Jonny Goldstein & Bre Pettis – October, 2006

The way I’ve seen things happen… A LOT, in Social Media is that someone does ONE THING… *EVAR* IN LIFE, and from that point on, they’re declared relevant. Their opinions on totally unrelated things are heralded because they invented something ONCE, or they wrote ONE really popular blog post or book or they worked for ONE company that everyone was jocking at the time. After that, there’s no need to look at that person’s track record.. It’s like they made it into the hall of fame.

The difference with the hall of fame, like, in Baseball or Football is that you don’t ask hall-of-famers to coach teams AFTER they’re inducted. Why is that? Because the systems their teams used and that they individually excelled at… are OVER. There are new formations, new plays, new philosophies, there’s new equipment, players are faster and stronger… The ONLY way a hall-of-famer would be selected to coach a current team is if he had proven that he understands and mentally excels in the workings of the CURRENT environment.

The way I see it.. For those of us who care about such things, we have a new opportunity every single day to reestablish our relevance in our chosen fields of knowledge or expertise. Actually, I suppose there are two sorts of relevance. There’s the relevance in which you’re like a textbook… You’re still a relevant source of information about Pascal programming…. For whatever THAT’S worth….. Then there would be relevance to current concepts or technologies. What I’m saying is that the hall-of-famers DEFINITELY deserve all the props for their past achievements! No doubt. A lot of people act like relevance in one area is transferrable to relevance in another and tend to follow people as authorities on things that they really aren’t.

The reason I started out with part 1 of this article is that my “reaching back” situation helped me to recognize the lack of transferral of relevance over time. There are at least two reasons why it’s necessary for me to reestablish relevance with people I knew a long time ago, when we were kids.

1. Time has passed and they may not even remember ever having spent time with me.

2. “The Game” has changed immensely for all of us since we were kids. Whatever relevance I *HAD* in that environment isn’t applicable to our lives in their current formats.

This is why I ask(ed) the question “Are you still relevant?”. I don’t mean relevant to yourself or relevant to the people you interact with right now. The question is, how long do your props last? How long will people give you credit for whatever you did in the past? How long can you ride on past glory? How long will people still say “There goes whomever!” if you’re not striving to stay on top of new technologies, concepts and philosophies? Have you let yourself get out-of-date? If so, what’s your plan on rectifying that? Do you have one? Do you care?

On the flip side of that, what are the credentials of the people that you “follow” or consider to be authorities in their field? What are the credentials of the “experts” that you hire to work on your projects or help your company excel? The dating columns you read? What do the writers really know about people or relationships? Have you checked into any of this, or did you take someone else’s word that this person knows what they’re talking about and subsequently passed that potentially erroneous information on to your own friends and followers?

Are you accepting advice from people who were good at Atari 2600 games about XBOX games?… Are you accepting advice from guys that don’t know any women about women?… Are you asking gals that get played left and right what their advice is about men?… Are you relying on someone with NO RECORD WHATSOEVER of being a video producer or editor to complete your project professionally and on time?… Are you relying on someone with no record whatsoever of increasing a company’s ROI, efficiency or visibility to lead your company to Social Media glory?…..

Good Luck with that. ;)

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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Related Posts

• Are You Still Relevant? [Part 1 of 2]
• Why your number of Twitter followers doesn’t mean ISH
• How You Feel Doesn’t Matter
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I was talking with my friend Remo last night and he asked me about Twitter. I’ve been on Twitter for over two years at this point. I posted about it back in June 2007 [link].

At some point, he asked me about its usefulness. As I travelled back mentally to when I first joined, I reconnected with the essence of Twitter’s usefulness to me.

At the time I became aware of Twitter, we were all hanging out on the Yahoo Videoblogging Group. South by SouthWest 2007 was in effect, and I got to follow along in essentially real-time as my friends couldn’t get cabs from one party to the next. From my command centre, I could keep up with things going on hundreds of miles away. Actually, I probably knew more than the people ‘on the ground’ did.

The value of Twitter for me was an acceleration of the interaction that was going on in the Videoblogging Group. Instead of sending a post, which was essentially an email, to a bunch of people and then waiting for them to be notified of it, read it, think about it, respond to it and then having to check back to see if I got an answer.. Suddenly, I could get responses to my queries immediately, if not sooner. Everybody that I was following was from our group, so everything I read was relevant and interesting to me, either on an educational or social level.

Flip Da Script

As we discussed the “right & proper” ways to utilize twitter, two camps evolved: “Follow people you want to hear from” and “Follow everyone that follows you [minus spammers]“. I basically joined the second camp. This had two important effects. My timeline had too many entries for me to follow because there were too many updates in each refresh, and the Twitter posts I was looking at were decreasingly relevant to anything at all. This meant that I had to search through MORE posts to find LESS relevant material, because there were only 10 pages of Twitter “archives” you could look through at the time.

So I made a second account, specifically to follow local NYC people. That was all well and good until everyone I was following stopped using twitter to announce where they were going. This was because there were no Twitter groups, so everything you said was available to whomever was following you, whether you wanted them to show up where you were hanging out or not.

Spammers

Meanwhile, people started spamming Twitter with “follows”. Some users would follow everyone in creation, hoping for a “follow back”. This was obvious, because the number of people they were following would be twice the number of people that were following them, or worse. These people continued to play the numbers game until they had spammed enough people to look like people actually cared what they were talking about. In reality, the people they spammed were happy to have someone follow them and followed back either out of courtesy or because they were in that second camp that I was in at the time of following people that followed you.

Useless

This is why your number of twitter followers doesn’t mean ISH! :D

You are being followed by people that have no idea what you do. You are being followed by people that have ZERO relevant information to contribute to your education or entertainment. You are being followed by people that flood the potentially relevant information off of your screen before you can possibly read, think about and react to it.

This is why people who claim to be following 60,000 people are full of ISH. I *guarantee* you that they are, because my timeline updates too quickly while I’m currently following 705 people. Even my group that I made specifically to listen to on TweetDeck moves too quickly, and that’s probably only 200 people.

I guarantee you it’s impossible for people to follow tens of thousands of people on Twitter, for two reasons. Updates will force most of those posts off the bottom of the queue before you even get the chance to see them and the time that it would take to read all of those posts, even if you could, would require you to sit in front of Twitter all day, reading irrelevant information and parsing it for something you could use. These people would literally do nothing else all day other than sit on Twitter, aggregate other people’s ideas and regurgitate them to their own followers.

Defunct Accounts

You can go on Twitter Karma and see your list of followers sorted by date of most recent update. At the time that I checked, when I was following ~2,400 people, there were quite a few that hadn’t updated in a full calendar year. Granted.. Some of those people may have blocked their data from being generally accessible, but upon random sampling of these accounts, they had literally updated 200 times or fewer and never used that account again. Also, that doesn’t mean that they’re not listening. It just means that they’re not sharing. It might also indicate that they’re currently using a different account.

Either way, the point is that one of your “followers” most likely doesn’t exist. They’re either not listening to you AT. ALL., or if they’re listening, they’re not responding or RTing (re-tweeting). I would estimate that around 200 out of my 2,400 followers at the time hadn’t updated in 2009, meaning at least for three months. Feel free to speculate about the numbers of defunct accounts for people that have 24,000 followers and 240,000 followers…

Evidence

If you’d like to check what your actual reach is as far as people following you on Twitter, start asking questions. See how many answers you get. Announce a live broadcast… See how many of your tens of thousands of followers tune in. Recently, I’ve seen popular Twitterers doing trivia contests, asking questions and handing out prizes. DO SOMETHING that demonstrates that that number on your Twitter home page actually translates to something tangible and something that isn’t an horrifically-low percentage of the people that have “subscribed to your channel”.

While you’re at it, ask a question that’s relevant to something useful to YOU. Ask about digital video data rates. Ask about replacement blades for your lawn mower. Ask about ANYTHING that’s not some generic audience participation exercise and see how useful your thousands upon thousands of Twitter followers are.

Influence

Having said all that.. Even if there are 20,000 defunct accounts out of 240,000, that still leaves 220,000 active accounts :D It’s possible that you have influence over 220,000 people that have no particular skill set or purchasing power. Of course, this has to be multiplied by the number of people that will RT what you posted.

In a generic sense, this is much better than my personal 2,381 followers (which is probably more like 1,000 followers). You are 100 times as likely to reach out to someone who will accept what you’re offering them.

Unfortunately, when you’re just some idiot that doesn’t specifically have anything of import to say, your followers are a function of that. This needs to be calculated into “influence”. If people follow you because you have a sexy avatar, for instance, that’s not going to be too useful to most advertisers. It’s not that you’re an authority on ANYTHING, so people aren’t going to be very likely to take your product endorsements to heart and actually buy the product.

Similarly, even if you ARE an authority on something, like video editing, that doesn’t mean that your influence is useful at all outside of that realm. In fact, your number of followers isn’t even an indication of the number of people that see you as an authority in video editing, because they might have followed you for other reasons.

Tools & Platforms

Ultimately, Twitter is a tool which affords you the opportunity to broadcast to other people what you know and what you do. If you don’t KNOW anything and you don’t DO anything, the number of twitter followers you have is completely meaningless. All these follow-back schemes are useless, because there’s no point in having 15,000 people follow you who are just as clueless as you are. Nobody’s going to pay you to advertise to your “Clueless Nation’. Nobody’s going to see you as an authority and hire you to do something because you have X amount of Twitter followers.

Your best bet is to stop crying about how many followers you have or don’t have and demonstrate originality and usefulness to the community and get your props the old fashioned way…

EARN IT!

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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If you’re into buying chicks but you don’t want to look like a trick, make sure you don’t overdo it as far as how fine the chick is compared to how YOU look.

Granted, we all want to bang the hottest chicks… It’s how guys are built. However, if your goal is to look like a playboy rather than a customer, make sure you hire chicks that people actually BELIEVE you could have possibly pulled on your own.

Nobody’s impressed with someone that happens to have an extra $4,000 that they’re willing to toss at a chick to do what regular chicks will do in the bar bathroom for free.

It’s like in the movie “Gladiator”. Russell Crowe is a MAN. He steps to the front lines and does what needs to be done. Joaquin Phoenix is a HERB, but he happens to be the ruler’s son, so he wants respect. His respect is entirely dependent upon people’s reverence towards his father. He has no individual props of his own. Russell is respected everywhere he goes, because his track record of honor and valor and being a straight-up WARRIOR rings bells everywhere he goes.

Similarly, if one of your goals in kickin’ it to chicks is to be seen as a player, make sure the chicks LOOK like as if they’re not on the payroll. The reason I bring this up is that some guys are actually interested in how attractive OTHER GUYS think the girl they’re with is. They really get a kick out of that. Basically, you want to seem like the type of guy that ladies actually LIKE and would spend time with instead of a guy that has a ton of money to waste and consistently patronizes hookers.

If you’re just not interested in any chicks that aren’t top-notch as far as looks and sexual ability, keep it under the hat. I was hanging out in a hotel bar one night that had a glass wall which allowed a full view of the hotel lobby leading to the elevators. I wasn’t facing the lobby, but I saw the guys I was talking to ALL focusing on the same thing, which was apparently moving slowly from my left to my right. I turn around to see what they’re looking at, and it’s this dude in a suit, leading these two chicks to the elevators. It was clear the guy wasn’t “dating” either one of them, but rather was delivering the merchandise to the client’s room. My response to that was “heh… Looks like someone ordered out”.

Would I have given credit to whomever (or however many guys) got to tag up on those chicks? Nope. It’s pretty much like a car. You might have a nice car, but anybody else that has that amount of money to spend on a car can have the exact same thing. No props.

I saw an even better one (again, in a hotel) where this middle-aged, no-looks-having dude was literally surrounded by like six asian chicks that didn’t speak A WORD of English while I was listening in. It was absolute madness. He could afford them, so more power to him, but does he get props for that? Nope. He couldn’t have actually pulled ONE of those women, let alone SIX! hahaha.. I hope they were a write-off.

See, it’s one thing, like if you’re a celebrity, like… say… Charlie Sheen… to pull a random name out of a hat. :)

If you’re a celebrity, you require DISCRETION. It’s important that the chick looks good, so you’re motivated to tap that, but it’s just as important for her to STFU after the fact. That’s what you’re paying the money for. You can’t afford to mess with some random chick that’s going to go running her mouth all over creation because she’s star-struck.

It’s actually kind of funny. I’ve met several women who used to date Rock Stars and Baseball Players and even more than 10 years after the fact, it’s STILL a feather in their caps. It’s a brand of quality to them that this particularly picky person chose them to have sex with and dated them for a period of time. That’s all well and good until some chick decides to Monica Lewinsky you and your business is all in the streets.

On top of that, you could actually imagine that one of these hookers was actually dating Charlie Sheen. He’s a famous Hollywood guy from a dynasty of actors and he’s been known to date models & actresses anyway, so hookers aren’t that far removed from that set. What about YOU though?

If you’re normally seen with regular chicks and then all of a sudden, this stunning broad appears out of nowhere, all hugged up on you like as if you were the last Louis Vuitton bag in New York City… Everybody knows that’s not your girl… She’s an employee.

~Bill

Twitter: BillCammack
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