Bill Cammack » relevant

Are You Still Relevant? [Part 2 of 2]

Bill Cammack — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 14:34:59 +0000

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.

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

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Are You Still Relevant? [Part 1 of 2]

Bill Cammack — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:27:00 +0000

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

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Twitter Evolution (Here Come The Civilians)

Bill Cammack — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:43:24 +0000

I joined Twitter a little over two years ago, around the time of SXSW 2007. I was already about a year behind its launch. I wrote Twitter Has â€œRuinedâ€ My Life in June 2007. This picture is on that post, and includes Mike, Justin, Anil, Kenyatta, Debbie, Grace, Eric & myself and was taken by Jared. I fully expect to see 5 if not 6 of these same people later today at an IRL get-together.. two years later:

Photo Credit: Jared Klett

The reason I joined Twitter is the same reason I joined any Social Media site. There were people that I ALREADY KNEW that started using a new site, app or tool and I wanted to be involved in this new (and hopefully BETTER and INNOVATIVE) way to contact them or keep up with what they’re doing. What that did was give Twitter a particular flavor for me. It was the place where I went to receive up-to-the-minute information about people that I was keeping in contact with anyway via newsgroups or forums or email or their blogs or whatever.

The first thing I did was stop looking at the public timeline. Some people are fascinated with what random people have to say about random topics. I’m not one of those people. It’s very nice that someone in France saw a bird. I was interested in ‘hearing’ about who was trying to find a cab in Austin Texas to get from one SXSW party to another or that someone had a question or answer about videoblogging or editing or some other topic I was interested in. This is because I joined Twitter following certain people, meaning they were going there, so I wanted to be there too. Granted, it was about 50 people, but I already knew from prior experience with them what I was going to hear from them, and that’s what I was ‘buying’ into.

I remember standing on a line at nighttime, waiting to get into a party (which I normally don’t do, but this was extenuating circumstances), and I happened to be standing behind a few civilians (people not deeply involved in the internet) who started talking about what they had Twittered. One of the gals had announced that she went shopping. Another one had announced that they were going to be coming to this party that we were waiting for. I remember thinking “ah… THESE are public-timeline-people” and considering how all of us standing there use the same service but will never be in contact with each other, because they’re talking about NOTHING! Or, I should say, all the rest of THEM will never be in contact with ME. They’ll have their little pocket of people to communicate with and share stories about ice cream parlors and the mall. I remember being glad that everyone has their own set of people they Twitter with and having absolutely ZERO INTEREST in any of them becoming a follower of mine on Twitter.

Fast-Forward to July 2009 and all the civilians are running around trying to get more Twitter followers. Huh? They don’t care who you are. They don’t care what you do. They don’t care what you said… or IF you said anything at all. Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow. The clear focus is quantity over quality… like as if you get a prize for having a certain amount of Twitter followers.

I understand why this is, to a degree. For a lot of people, Twitter is their first opportunity at feeling what it’s like to be popular. The concept of one-to-many communication is fascinating and enticing. People can send a message from their phone on a bus somewhere and be heard all over the world, or at least by all of their followers at the same time, even if they’re all locals. You can tell a joke and 10 people might “lolol” at it. You can be the first one to break news about a bridge falling down or a plane landing in water. Normally, the only people who would hear you are people who you could physically tell, or people who read your blog after the time it takes you to post it and the time it takes them to check it and read it. All of a sudden, you get to feel like thousands of people care what YOU have to say. I see why people have become addicted to that feeling.

Personally, while I fully APPRECIATE the fact that randoms read my material, I’m most interested in what the people who know what I’m talking about and go through the same things I go through think and have to say about what I post. Right now, I have 2,586 Twitter followers and I’m following 895 people (which is STILL too many people to follow and actually read what everyone has to say). I know people with TENS OF THOUSANDS of followers who are also following that same number of people back! :O … Obviously, they’re using Twitter for a different purpose and experience than I am, but at those numbers, it’s clear that the vast majority of those people being “followed” are actually being IGNORED due to so many posts coming through on each refresh that most of them are flooded off the bottom of the stack before ever having a chance to be seen. Also, if someone COULD read thousands of posts a day, that would mean that they weren’t WORKING and were about to get FIRED from their jobs.

So this is what’s fascinating and annoying to me about the evolution of Twitter, or maybe it’s not evolution, but that the lunatics are now running the asylum. Every show you turn on, some civilian is talking about Twitter and trying to sound intelligent when they’re reading off of the teleprompter and don’t even know the proper inflection to put on words. They SHOULD be embarrassed, but they’re not, because they know that nobody else watching their report knows anything more than they do about the topic.

Twitter addresses are becoming like phone numbers to the civilians. They’re treating this like as if having 2,586 followers means that I have 2,586 people’s phone numbers or 2, 586 people’s ear when I want to talk about politics (which is never) or sell them something or have them all tune in to one of my live broadcasts. Not only is that completely untrue, but with all these people running around trying to get followers by adding everyone in creation, your list of followers is incredibly diluted by people seeking that virtually anonymous fame / acknowledgment. I think the funniest / most pathetic part of this is when people add you and then you delay checking their profiles for a few days, and by the time you do, they’ve already UNFOLLOWED YOU! :D This is completely ridiculous and shows you who only added you in the hopes you would add them back and inflate their fake popularity ranking of Twitter followers.

Is any of this a problem? No. I still follow the same core of people I’ve been following from 2007 to 2009. I’ve added people along the way whom I’ve found to be interesting online or that I’ve met IRL and shared good times with. :) I add some people because their bios look interesting or indicate that they might have something to say that I might want to hear or that they might have an answer to a question that *I* have, should they choose to follow me back. It’s just interesting, seeing people coming to the table these days with ZERO sense of community, looking to win a blue ribbon for having the most people follow them in the least amount of time or gaining people that they can peddle their wares to online. *yawn*

There are lots of interesting new people showing up as well, diving into Twitter head-first with valuable, RELEVANT information. Hopefully, they’ll be able to separate the wheat from the chaff and find good groups of people to interact with efficiently & productively. I used to subscribe to the concept of “follow everyone that follows you”, but as I said, that became too many people to honestly follow, so I pared it down to ~700 and now it’s back up to ~900. I’ve been using apps to set up groups, which helps.. but I think I need another subdivision so I can sort people by RELEVANCE and attempt to get back to the essence of what I loved about Twitter when I first started using it.

~ Bill Cammack

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Twitter? Or Your Blog?

Bill Cammack — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:24:14 +0000

Twitter changed the game as far as blogging. Instead of posting something, and MAYBE people would stop by your blog and MAYBE they’d read your articles and MAYBE they’d leave a comment, all of a sudden, what you had to say was being pushed to people who actually REQUESTED to hear what you had to say by following you and then either checking the site itself or installing an app or widget on their computers or phones.

Twitter > Bill

I noticed that the traffic on the Yahoo Videoblogging Group fell off DRASTICALLY as Twitter presented a far better and faster way for people to get immediate responses to questions than an email list.

I also noticed A LOT OF PEOPLE putting a lot of their ideas on Twitter instead of their own blogs. I didn’t really think much of that until I talked with Tyme White about it ten (10) months ago, back in March, 2008:

Tyme: “Yes, the conversations are moving away from blogs but the problem is the same problem that has always existed, one I warned about at least two years ago. How many times has a writer published an article, a larger site wrote about it, and the conversation took place every where but on the writerâ€™s site? Same problem – the writer would have to keep up with those conversations. Now, the same root problem exists, but there are many more sites where the conversation can take place. The writer publishes the entry and now a discussion can happen on the originating blog, any blogs that write about it, any site that aggregates content (Reddit, Chawlk, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.), Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, any of the social sites that are popping up, forumsâ€¦the list is long.”

The question is: does it matter to the writer if the conversation takes place in other places? If the answer is no, the writer would have one strategy. If the answer is yes, it does matter and the preference is for the conversation to take place on their blog, well, that would take a different strategy, wouldnâ€™t it?”

So, referencing that practically-one-year-old post by Tyme… Does it matter where *YOU* blog your material? I blog mine to BillCammack.com. I post references to my blog posts on Twitter and Tumblr.

On December 18th, 2008, Wayne Sutton blogged about the advice he received from Tyme months and months ago:

Wayne: Earlier this year I had a conversation with Tyme White about twitter and personal branding that had stuck in my head ever since I got off the phone with her. She brought up the fact that I had a lot of twitter followers but where or how would I stay connected with those followers if twitter goes down (fail whale) , twitter gets purchased by google & closed like Pownce or their business model just doesnâ€™t work and everyone leaves the community.

* For the record, that conversation actually happened months before Pownce got shut down, but I understand what Wayne was trying to say as far as making his point. *

So Wayne has over 11,000 twitter followers. It would seem to make sense for him to post to twitter a lot…

Tyme: “The reason why the conversation goes on without the writer being involved (and this is going to hurt but itâ€™s the truth) is because the commenter doesnâ€™t really care about talking to the writer. The commenter cares about commenting on the article. Unless the writer has a direct connection with their audience, the hurdle of converting a reader to a commenter is tough enough. If the reader finds the article on another site, it is a tougher hurdle to get the reader to leave the site he or she is on (particularly if it is a favorite site), and convert that reader into a commenter on the original site the article was published on. To achieve that type of interaction a deeper connection than publishing articles and hoping someone reads them is required.”

On December 20th, 2008, Chris Brogan wrote “Of Streams and Stopping Points”:

Chris: “Twitter is a stream. Facebook is both a stream and a stopping point (but mostly a stream). Your blog is a stopping point pretending to be a stream.

Itâ€™s important to think about where you want information to live, and how you want it to impact the world. For everything you toss into a stream rolls past, and if Iâ€™m not at the stream when you throw your leaf onto the waters, Iâ€™ll miss the leaf entirely, or perhaps catch only the ripples.”

I think this is a really good way to think about this topic. Do you want to post your ideas to a stream or to a stopping point? Like I said earlier, I post my ideas to stopping points, but I publicize them in streams. The question is… Which style is more relevant to the information you have for the public? Should you use streams, stopping points, or a combination of the two?

I think the answer depends upon the type of information that you’re presenting to the world.

There are lots of people who write tech blogs who are entirely derivative. All they’re really doing is regurgitating what they read or heard somewhere else and MAYBE.. if we’re LUCKY… adding literally two cents worth of their own commentary to the original information. These people are more like reporters than bloggers. They’re like the television news, informing you about what happened or what MIGHT happen. I’ve done blog posts like this, like this 2007 post where I “reported” that there was a New Joost Version Available”.

There’s no information there other than the facts that you could have read anywhere else. On top of that, that post ceased to be relevant almost immediately. Nobody cares on December 29, 2008 that a new Joost version was available on April 03, 2007.

If this is the type of information that you have to offer the blogosphere, put it on Twitter. People will see it quickly, react to it, give you credit for it, and then it will blow away in the wind. Nobody cares that it blew away, because your information was only as useful as it was timely and relevant.

OTOH, some people post original ideas that happen to be evergreen. These would be posts that are just as relevant today as they were on April 03, 2007. You do NOT want “How To Break Up With Your Girl” or “Why professionals avoid web video” to blow away, because people always want to know these things.

This is why I post to my own blog and use twitter/tumblr/etc for announcement purposes. I post evergreen, consistently relevant and interesting material, so it needs to be available when someone new searches Google for something that I wrote two years ago.

You wouldn’t, for instance, want this TIMELESS CLASSIC to go unseen, because you only referred to it on Twitter! hahahaha :D :

Permalink: Wayne Sutton TV

* Yes. I know that the video above gives an error message. Go to Wayne’s site if you want to actually see it. That’s really smart, making a video not embeddable….. *

So where should your material “live”? Should it rest on the temporary stream of twitter or the stopping point of your own blog? Who’s going to care next year about what you posted this year? Who’s going to care tomorrow about what you posted yesterday? Who’s going to care an hour from now about what you posted just now?

If you think people are going to care, make sure people can find your material on Google by posting it on a stopping point instead of tossing it away, down the stream.

~Bill

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Bill Cammack » relevant

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