Social Media

People always want to know how to make money with social media.

The problem is that social media doesn’t make money FOR you. Social media ENABLES YOU to make money…. maybe.

Everybody wants to know how their sales are going to increase once they hire you to create a website or set them up with a presence on Facebook or Twitter.

In Fact… Your sales are NOT going to increase unless a) YOU know what to do with your own internet presence, or b) you HIRE SOMEONE ELSE that knows what they’re doing to handle that aspect of your business for you.

Buying Trophies

In contemplating social media strategies, you have to see yourself as the owner of a race car team and your goal is to win races, thus receiving trophies.

As the owner, you have to decide where you’re going to allocate your budget (money) so you achieve your desired outcome.

If you’re racing in a legitimate organization, you can’t BUY TROPHIES. If you could buy trophies, your competition would be able to buy them too and there would be no reason to run any of the actual races.

Similarly, in social media, you can’t BUY SUCCESS. If you could, everybody would pay some money, receive a positive ROI and there would be no need for professionals at any point of the process.

Unfortunately, this is how a lot of people sell social media to you. They know you know less than they do, so they give you useless tidbits of information and charge you handsomely for “consulting” with them. This is usually the best thing for them to do because if they told you what you REALLY needed to do to be successful with social media, THEY wouldn’t get very much of your money because most of them don’t’ have any of the technical skills necessary to actually DO any of that process for you.

Winning Races

In reality, you have to actually WIN RACES to receive trophies.

What’s the process involved in doing that? o_O

1. You get the trophy by winning the race
2. You win the race by finishing in first place
3. You finish the race by starting the race (driving)
4. You enter the race by having something to drive (a car)
5. You have a car and a driver because you spent MONEY on them

As you can see, you spend your money ENABLING yourself to potentially win. You don’t spend money directly on the WIN.

What does this look like in social media strategy?

The part that people TELL YOU is that you need a website and a Facebook account and a Twitter account. The part that they TELL YOU is that you want people to follow you and the more the merrier.

Budgeting Maintenance

The part that they DON’T TELL YOU is that they’re selling you a car, not a trophy. They’re selling you the ability to MAYBE win.. POSSIBLY…

They also don’t tell you that this isn’t a car show, it’s a race. If it were a car show, you could bring your car to the venue and potentially win a prize for “prettiest car”, or “best paint job”, or “best-built engine”… Being that this is a RACE, it means that you need a DRIVER. o_O

If you’ve already spent money on the car (website), someone has to drive it (maintain your presence). That’s either going to be YOU or someone you hire to maintain your online presence for you.

If you’re going to do it yourself, you’re going to have to spend HOURS each week interacting with customers and potential clients, reading blog posts, writing blog posts, updating your inventory on your site, searching the internet for positive and negative references to your company, checking your statistics to see which items and pages are the most popular and which aren’t doing well, reading and replying to emails, paying attention to the endless flow of twitter posts from the thousands of people you “followed” because some idiot told you to, fielding phone calls and returning voicemails from people that got your number from your website, reading and intelligently replying to comments you receive on your blog, keeping spam and other dumb comments out of your comment section, reading up on the latest technologies for maintaining your presence, spending time on trial & error with new and potentially exciting products…

Thanks For The Money

THIS is what they don’t tell you. They’re’ just like “Give me your money. Here’s your website. Peacebeyotch! :D”. This is why so many people have garbage internet presences, because nobody told them that after you make a blog, you have to populate it and constantly update it. Nobody told them that if you make a site where you’re selling products on the internet, you THEN have to spend your time advertising your product or you need to hire someone else to do that for you.

Nobody told them that if you make a Facebook page and then you don’t actively participate in conversations, you don’t build any rapport and you don’t make any sales. Nobody told them that they needed to participate in conversations that are important to OTHER PEOPLE and not just those that revolve around your being able to sell something and get some money.

Nobody told them that if you follow 3,000 people on Twitter, you’re going to have so many updates that you can’t possibly read all of them, much less contemplate them and reply to them. Guess what? :D .. If you can’t read everything from the 3,000 people you’re following, the people that are following 60,000 people don’t see what YOU WROTE either. o_O

Are You Qualified?

Even if you tried to maintain your own internet presence, how good are you at doing that? How good are you at socializing? How good are you at holding conversations with people? How good are you at SPELLING and GRAMMAR? HAHAHA How good are you at knowing which posts to weigh in on and which to leave alone? How good are you at finding out where people are talking about you or your company, what they’re saying and how you can respond to them? How much time do you have to monitor the internet and respond quickly, giving yourself the appearance of caring as opposed to the appearance of someone that built a car that they don’t know how to drive or built a store that they don’t have time to stock and maintain?

So.. Next time you’re thinking about incorporating social media into your business strategy, recognize that you have to budget not only to BUILD your site, but also to MAINTAIN it.

If you don’t have money to pay someone to maintain your site, either it’s not going to get done or you’re going to have to pay yourself to do it during time that you could have spent billing clients and making your money back.

Either way, nobody’s going to hand you a trophy because you got a website built or because you made a Facebook Fan Page or a Twitter account. That’s not where the work ends. That’s where the work starts.

Related Posts

• Budgeting For Internet Video (You Get What You Pay For)
• Social Media Smoke & Mirrors
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• Thoughts about the “Fast Company Influence Project”
• Famous For Nothing [Fame, Part 3]

I can’t tell you anything about the actual Fast Company Influence Project because I never clicked on it. I never came close to clicking on it, which is where I feel we will discover some of the myriad lessons to be learned from this situation.

First Impression

The first time I heard of the project, I didn’t hear of the project.

What I mean by that is that I didn’t realize that I had had a run-in with the project before I realized that a) there was a project and b) people didn’t like it.

I’m sitting here minding my business, having a productive day, as usual.. When I get an IM from someone that I rarely have IM conversations with…

When you haven’t communicated with someone in quite a while, you want to lead off your message with that person’s NAME or at least a simple “Hi” or “How are you?” to see if you get a response BEFORE getting to your agenda. This is not what happened. I received:

Hey. Did you join the Fast Company thing? Here’s a link to sign up [shortened link to who the **** knows what]

So first of all, my name wasn’t on it. Second, they threw their agenda at me directly. Third, they didn’t describe the situation as anything other than a “thing” (which is why I had no idea that this had been a connected event until later). Fourth, they sent me a SHORTENED LINK, which nobody in their right mind follows.

This entire thing reeked of SPAM and I wasn’t sure that this person’s account hadn’t been compromised. I sent back “Thanks, I’ll check it out… How is _______?”, referencing a new initiative I knew that person had recently started.

No reply.

Nothing.

So now, this thing looks COMPLETELY like spam, so I completely disregarded it and went on with my day.

Second Impression

Hours later, this buzz is going around about some Fast Company contest. It’s not a GOOD buzz, though. It’s people shaking their heads like “Why did they do THIS? Who thought THIS was a good idea? \o/”.

So I still wasn’t aware of this contest even though I receive the FC Newsletter every day. I don’t actually read their newsletter. It’s just something I haven’t bothered to unsubscribe from that I was AUTO-SUBSCRIBED TO back in 2007/2008 when I was a FC Expert Blogger:

The point being that in my particular case, a newsletter is being sent to me which has no influence over me, which probably contained references & links to this so-called “Influence Project”, which I’ll never know because I don’t care enough to skim back through the emails and check.

Public Impression

The other way I get my news is through Facebook. The reason why I have 2,237 Facebook Friends and 122 Facebook Fans is that I want to LISTEN to the people I’m connected to via social media, not TALK *AT* THEM.

I want to know what they think is cool & interesting & happening so that I can find out about it myself, but also so I can broadcast the info I find useful to the people that are following me. On a fan page, the only info you get from people pertains to YOU, which is a waste for someone like me who isn’t an entertainer. I already know about ME. I want to know about YOU.

* Side Note: Facebook automatically reduces your home page’s “Most Recent” stream to something like 250 people. Unless you want them selecting the 250 people that you’ll be listening to, go to the bottom of your “Most Recent” page, click “Edit Options” on the right side of the blue bar and increase the number in the box that says “Number of Friends” to a number that’s larger than your current number of friends. Click “S ave” and you’ll now see whatever your friends are posting, not some pot luck selection.

So anyway.. I hadn’t heard anything about this contest on Facebook, I wasn’t monitoring Twitter, because I only have so much time in my day and something’s got to give. I don’t read the [daily] newsletter and the only indication I received about this was half-assed and didn’t even have the term “Influence Project” in it… So, to me, the project didn’t even exist.

I’m not saying this because I feel like FC gives a damn about influencing Bill Cammack. I’m saying this because the people that I’m listening to ARE the influencers. I don’t need to be directly influenced because if 3 or 4 people whose judgement I respect as far as social media indicate that something good’s going on, I’m hopping on the bandwagon, sight unseen. I’m not going to PUB IT to anyone I know until I get inside and play around with the site or app and determine to my own standards of quality that it’s worth telling other people about, but as far as being an early adopter, I know some of the EARLIEST ADOPTERS around, so I’m perfectly willing to follow their lead in situations that they’ve already researched.

Unfortunately for Fast Company, this works in the opposite direction as well…

Negative Impression

When the same people whose opinions I respect begin posting, reposting & RT’ing why something was a BAD IDEA or at least misses the mark, I’m inclined to read their posts about the situation and STILL never visit the actual site/location/app they’re talking about.

In fact, the only reason I’m writing this right now is that friends of mine are STILL buzzing about what a bad idea this was, so I decided to throw my two cents in. >:D

This is the reason you don’t want “just anybody” making up your social media strategy. Vision, Perception & Ability are all relative. If your concept of influence is flawed or skewed, you’ll never know that because it’s your idea and it’s what your version of reality’s based upon. If you think that the number of random people that you can trick into signing up for something indicates INFLUENCE, you’re barking up the wrong tree and you’re tarnishing the reputation of any company that takes your advice.

Pyramid Schemes work by each person telling the person below them that they can get rich if they can convince people to follow them. The more people you have under you, the more money you can make. What they don’t tell you is that the money is made by duping more suckers into joining the scheme. :D The product isn’t whatever you’re selling… The product is *YOU*. You’re like the cow that got told to come to the farm to give milk and then you’re like “Huh?.. What the hell is HAMBURGER??? O_o”.

Wrong Impression

Similarly, INFLUENCE has nothing to do with NUMBERS. I know of people that have tens of thousands of Twitter followers and everyone that I respect recognizes them as clowns. Their “Calls To Action” produce nothing at all (for example, 30 viewers to a live stream when you Twitter it to your 20,000 followers once every 20 minutes for two hours). They have ZERO unique opinions, regurgitating what they read in Mashable or TechCrunch or TechMeme. The majority of the people they’re following are robots, defunct accounts and real accounts of people that have nothing relevant to contribute at all. This is why between their own brains and the people they’re listening to, nothing unique or groundbreaking is ever produced.

I’ve been complaining about this literally for years, as talentless people are consistently selected for projects because the companies are banking on the fact that this person has 100,000 followers across several social media outlets, so every single one of their GARBAGE videos will appear to be well-received and popular because of the fanbois clicking on any tinyurl these so-called influencers feed them.

What happens next is that companies consistently get what they deserve. NOTHING! :D They hire scrubs that make GARBAGE content and then they get lots of page views from people that aren’t the target audience of the advertisers, which results in ZERO click-throughs, ZERO video views, ZERO subscriptions and generally ZERO ROI for the company that thought that the number of people following someone on Twitter indicates that their content or ideas are worth something.

The funny thing about this is that MOST of the actual influence occurs on the back-channel, where people say what they really feel about what’s going on. It’s not found out here in the open where people can read our ideas today and Google our ideas 3 years from now. The people that you think AREN’T influencers are having their discussions IRL, f2f and you never hear about it while your company goes down the tubes because you’re taking advice from the wrong people.

Lack of Impression

Ultimately, everything we’re doing is attempting to catalyze Conversion.

It’s all well & good that you can attract attention to yourself.

It’s lovely that you were able to amass 30,000 Twitter followers by clicking “follow” on every single post you saw in the live feed and hoping that they followed you back.

It’s great that you take pictures at conferences with other people.

It’s sweet that you know a lot of people whose names you can drop in Twitter posts.

It’s pathetic when you pull out the gun and squeeze the trigger and everyone realizes you have no bullets.

If you can’t convert, you’re useless. Period. If what you’re offering isn’t going to result in a company being better off than when they hired you, they should have saved their money or hired someone with a proven track record in that field.

Conversion isn’t achieved by getting people that don’t own lawns to visit a page where they’re selling lawn mowers. O_o The number of “nobodies” that you can get to sign up for something indicates your POPULARITY on the net as opposed to any potentially useful business value.

In order to be an “influencer”, you have to be able to run with the Big Dogs and potentially influence OTHER INFLUENCERS. Your ideas have to ultimately land in the laps of people who represent conversion to your clients. Getting a bunch of people to sign up for something proves nothing at all…. well.. other than proving that you don’t know what influence actually is.

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So I’m watching Kirstin Butler‘s videoblog, YouDigest, and she brings up the latest fad.. CrowdSourcing or UGC (User Generated Content):

society and the individual: how much for that idea in the window? from Kirstin Butler on Vimeo.

This is an intelligent and useful concept. I just did it to Kirstin…….. meaning [I just did it] to Kirstin, not I just [did it to Kirstin]…

Anyway…

What I’m saying is.. Instead of wasting my time making my own video about the topic, I just embedded hers and typed about it. That’s crowdsourcing. I used the content that she already generated to make my own post. If I don’t spend my time, I’m not wasting my money, because Time = Money. Not only am I not wasting the money I would have had to pay myself to make the video Kirstin made, but I got to spend that time making money on my own. Double benefit.

What people don’t realize is that your quality decreases along with the amount you’re willing to pay to get something done. Sure, there are the rare cases where someone really talented is trying to get their start in the business, and you can get some stuff for free that’s really good. Other than that, you get amateur garbage that you compile into something that looks like “World’s Funniest Videos” or whatever that show used to be called.

If that’s what you want for your company, to be seen as a collector of GARBAGE, go right ahead. There are really too many people in this “industry” trying to get by by cutting corners. A better idea is to get a group of regular contributors together who create quality content on a regular, scheduled basis. Of course, the problem with this is you’re going to have to shell out some ducats to get them to post to YOUR site instead of their own. If you’re not going to get PAID for something you do, you can AT LEAST get the social cred from it, or google juice or SOMETHING! :D

I suppose the question is whether this situation is going to “turn the corner”. Is providing UGC going to be a benefit to any of the content creators?.. ever?? :D I can understand it for people that have no other means of distributing their content and are trying to “break in”. To me, it seems like something where you want to get in and then get back out ASAP. Make your content, distribute it, make connections and then get on with the REAL business you meant to do.

I don’t have a good perspective on the “Why”s of randomly contributing UGC, because I have my own site, my own shows, my own blog posts, my own hits, my own demographics, etc etc so I’m mentally removed from the “How Can I Be Down?” mentality. It seems to me that some standards need to be developed as far as what UGC is worth. Until that time, there will always be calls for free materials from people that spent their time creating it instead of making money for themselves, thus DONATING to your show by sending you that material.

The reason you can hand out money for the funniest video of the week is because you didn’t have to pay ANY producers to produce your show and you didn’t have to pay ANY editors to make the individual clips that you’re showcasing. As long as the amount you give out in prizes < the amount you would have spent on actual staff, you can demonstrate ROI... so long as ROI can be derived from random entries from random people with no particular skill or concept of quality when it comes to making videos.

If your goal is to be seen as a viable and respected content creator, you might want to rethink the "get it for free" UGC model entirely.....

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
Subscribe via RSS or Email
Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
 

Related Posts

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So I had mentioned to a friend of mine a few months back that I was going to start doing Reputation Management / Online Presence Management for people other than myself. I’ve pretty much peaked, heading through year #2 of being a top-10 Google result for “Bill” as well as a top-10 Google result for “Cammack”. There’s nowhere else to go. I’m bored. *yawn*

Bill & Debbie

So yesterday, I’m chatting with this same friend, who’s starting a new business soon. He wants to be involved with Social Media, except he sees how much time, energy and research I put into it and he’d rather spend his time making money than doing research he’s not going to get paid for and that I already did.

As we’re chatting, I can tell that he doesn’t really “get it”, and eventually, he directly says something to the effect of “I can’t see what my benefit is in getting involved in these sites and this social stuff”. This makes sense to me, because unless you’re LIVING Social Media, you’re not going to be privy to the effects… You’ll only be able to see the “cause”….

What I mean by that in my case is that if you pay attention to my internet presence, what you will see is a lot of socializing. Socializing through IRL meetups, tweetups, pictures, videos, links posted to websites, comments made on people’s blogs, my own blog posts… *presence*. What you’re seeing is how I reach out to other people and relate to them. This.. is the “cause”.

One of the MANY, MANY “effects” is the new access and relationships I have to them and that they have to me which makes us more likely to do business with each other or pass business to each other that we’re not going to do. These relationships might not appear to the casual onlooker to be anything but people hanging out & having good times together. What happens, though, is that people get comfortable with your character as a person as well as your work ethic / dedication to your projects, and that’s worth way more than emailing a resume to some company you’d like to do work for.

I’ve been freelance for years, and I don’t work for random people. I don’t check Craig’s List and wherever else might have listings for random people that need video editing work done. I get all my work through word of mouth. People call *ME* and ask if I’m available to work on their projects, not the other way around. This is because when I get on a project, I’m ON.THE.CASE. In my entire career, I’ve “missed air” ONCE, which was something like at 4am, doing an overnight shift for Bloomberg Information Televison, and my 2-minute news package went on in the next cycle (I think 20 minutes later? 30?), instead of at the exact time it was scheduled. That was my fault, and I don’t remember why it happened, but the point is that other than that, I have like a 99.996% success rate for completing projects on deadline.

Because of that, and other things, like my overall fun and easygoing demeanor, people tend to hear of me from other people I’ve done good work for and contact me with projects. THAT is Social Media in action. My way of being is an advertisement for myself as a person and my work is an advertisement for my skill at what I do.

Similarly, Social Media opens doors for you when otherwise, you’d have to stand in line with the rest of the nameless, faceless, personality-less resumes that are laying on the potential client’s desk. Or, maybe the nameless, faceless, personality-less emails that the client receives, explaining EVERYTHING about the proficiencies of your group and NOTHING about who you are and what you’re about as people.

So, essentially, Social Media is rolling the dice, in a way… You’re putting more information out there and offering people chances to “judge” you. People overuse that term and cry about it too much, “WAAAAAAAAH… YOU’RE JUDGING MEEE! WAAAAAAAAHHHH!!! :O”, but that’s exactly what it is. People will use what you present to them to decide whether they like you or not… Whether they love you or not… Whether they want to do business with you or not… Whether they respect you or not… Whether you know what you’re talking about or not… Whether you’re current & relevant or not… Whether you can bring any ROI to their company or not… Whether they want to sit down for some brews with you or not…..

If you think you have things to bring to the table that people would enjoy and it would enhance your relationship to them or even CREATE one if you don’t have a relationship to them right now, by all means, Social Media is for you. If you don’t feel that way about yourself or you just don’t LIKE socializing or you aren’t any good at it, you might want to leave SM alone entirely or hire someone else to handle that business for you.

Bill & Dan

Another question was how could he be EFFICIENT in making Social Media connections? Well.. That requires research on WHERE people in your field or industry congregate on the internet. Is it on Facebook? Ning sites? Specific blogs? Twitter? FriendFeed? Forums? Newsgroups? Is there a Newsletter you should subscribe to? Bulletin Boards? IRC chat rooms? Meebo? Tinychat? Oovoo? Tokbox? Is there a show you should watch on YouTube or Blip.TV?…..

If you know where to look, go for it. If you don’t, then you might be better off creating a presence in as many arenas as possible and letting the chips fall. Or, you may be better off leaving Social Media out altogether, as the ends don’t justify the means, according to your company’s bottom line.

The way I see it.. As long as you’re a decent person and you’re decently good at what you do for business, socializing and networking is completely in your best interest. Especially in these times where companies are laying off entire departments, NOW is your opportunity to cultivate new clients that are looking for what it is that you do but don’t want to hire a staffer. NOW is the time to let people know what you’re bringing to the table. If you have to show them a YouTube video to do that.. fine. If you have to write a blog post or comment on someone else’s.. fine. If you have to participate in discussions or live streams or IRL conferences to get people to know who you are and what you do.. fine. The opportunity’s here right now, and there’s no telling how long the window will remain open…

I’m in an unique position because I make friends quickly & often. I’m what people call a “connector”. Every time I go somewhere, I’m introduced to new people and I try to make sure that people that I already know are cool get introduced to other people I know are cool. The system works via checks & balances. I have 286 mutual Facebook Friends with someone I know. This means that I have 286 opportunities to receive a negative review of her, and I haven’t received *ONE*. :D

Online Presence Management puts you in position to win or lose based on your personal merits. That’s a game that I very much enjoy playing. Are there lots of pitfalls? Certainly. If you can’t see how increasing your socialization and/or networking can help your business, you might want to chat with a consultant. If they’re legit and they can’t see it either, they’ll tell you so and you can save your money for traditional advertising or stamps to mail those resumes around. :) If they can see something you can’t, that might be a good opportunity for you… again, assuming they’re legit.

Social Media can take up a lot of your time, but can also produce great benefits, if utilized properly. Currency (Speed) is important. Relevance is important. Intimate Knowledge of your product or service is important. Passion is important. Accessibility is important. Redundancy is important (using the same avatar across social networks, for instance). Recognition as a thought leader or someone who tests out the new technologies is important. It all comes down to making sure that the time you spend on SM (or the money you spend, hiring someone to do it for you) works for your bottom line and is an overall benefit to you or your company.

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
Subscribe via RSS or Email
Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
 

Related Posts

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Reader Adam H. had a couple of questions about what I thought about the Fast Company / Robert Scoble / Shel Israel thing that’s been going on now for about a month. The first GlobalNeighbourhoods.TV video was dropped on March 19th… Actually, the first FOUR episodes were released on that date and since then, post-production of that show has essentially been non-existent during a virtual metalstorm of criticism of nearly every single aspect of that show.

I commented five days ago on Shel’s site here and here. I thought I’d say something today about budgeting for internet video, with the focus being essentially that you get what you pay for, and if you don’t pay for anything it’s not only the content creator that’s going to be ridiculed, it’s YOUR brand.

Here’s the problem with internet video. I’ve been saying this for probably over a year now, and nothing’s different today. The way television works (which I know, because I’m a broadcast editor) is that the money comes from advertisers. The reason the money comes from advertisers is because they want to take advantage of *you*… the viewer. They know that 2 million people are going to sit in front of the television and watch this show, so they’re willing to pay the network to get their product in front of that many potential customers. Television is ALLLLLLL about sales. That’s why they call them “soap operas”. The point was to sell soap. ACTUAL soap.

This model doesn’t exist with internet video. Not only do you generally have a smaller audience, but you can’t prove demographics. This means you can’t convince an advertiser to give you big money to do an internet show. Since there’s no real revenue stream, it’s spawned a mentality of individuals and companies trying to do or get something for nothing. The less they can spend and still have a video to put on youtube or wherever and try to get hits, page views and revenue shares, the more they like it.

That’s the internet video formula. Spend little, get a garbage product, have people click on it anyway, split the revenue with the host. As we’ve seen with people that have gotten millions of hits on a video and pulled in maybe a couple of thousand dollars worth of revenue, it’s just not worth it. The odds are low that you’re going to get that many hits, and the fact of the matter is that time is money. Unless you have a sponsor, making video on the internet is a money-LOSING situation.

For example… If you work in NYC, and you’re the slowest, least-knowledgeable nonlinear video editor with his/her own system, you can still get $30/hour. Using that insanely-low number as a base, let’s look at the time that it would take to do the Shel Israel show. Actually… Let’s kick it down to McDonald’s wages… What do they get? $10/hour? Is that minimum wage at this point? Let’s say you could get someone to work for $10/hour to make Global Neighbourhoods Television.

The first thing you have to do is shoot the show. Assuming the company you’re going to talk to is local to you, you have to get paid for the time you spend at that company plus the time it took you to travel there. Let’s say you spent 5 hours at a company, traveled another two hours to get there and back and shot 2 hours of footage while you were there (I have no idea how long they actually take or how much they shoot to do their show).

Off the bat, your show has now cost you $70 in time and $15 in tape if you didn’t buy bulk. That’s assuming you already own a camera. That’s assuming you already own a microphone. That’s assuming you already own lights. That’s assuming you’re going to run the camera yourself WHILE you do the interview. If you want to have a cameraman follow you around, let’s say you were able to find someone else that was willing to work for my version of minimum wage, $10/hour. That means that your show is infinitely better, but that it now costs you $140 to shoot. It also means that most likely, the person that you hired… SUCKS, so there’s a good chance that you won’t get anything good for your no-budget production.

Now you have a show “in the can”, meaning you have the elements, but you don’t have a finished show. This means that you have to find someone that’s willing to edit your show for $10/hour. Off the bat, there’s going to be a two-hour loading fee because if you used tape, it has to be ingested into the system in real-time = $20. If you didn’t hire a producer for $10/hour to make sense out of the footage that you shot, that means that the editor has to play through ALL of your footage to extract the best parts = another two hours = $20. Now, the editor is either charged with making your show him/herself, or it’s a supervised edit, meaning someone is telling the editor what they’d like to see happen. Let’s assume it’s going to take four hours to edit the show. That’s another either $40 or $80 depending on the number of people involved. That also doesn’t take into account Suite Fees and Equipment Fees.

So… Adding up this bunch of $10s, we end up with a base price of something like $165/episode for a show that’s shot in one day, by one person and edited during a four hour time span. No revisions. No changes. No more work done on that show past one day. Now… How does that money come back? Revenue-sharing? Let’s say you can get a $7 CPM (cost per mille) for your videos. That means that for every ONE THOUSAND TIMES that someone clicks on your video, you receive a whopping $7. And that’s AFTER you accumulate enough of those thousands to make it over the low limit which the host has agreed in their ToS that they’ll write you a check. That might be $25 and it might be $100, so you don’t get paid JACK unless you get 25/7×1000 views. Let’s call it 4,000 views gets you $28 and THEN you get paid.

$165/$28 = 5.892. Multiply that by 4,000 views, and you’d have to get over 23,000 views to break even if you’re working for $10/hour. Sure, you can do other stuff like have banner ads on your page and google ads, but basically, you can see that without sponsorship, Shel’s not only doing a show for free, he’s actually LOSING MONEY doing the show. SOMEONE’S got to come up with that $165/episode. If it’s a weekly show, that’s $660/month.

PLUS… Unless you’ve got it like that, and you have a business that makes money without you being involved, you have to factor in the opportunity cost of not being able to make money during those hours that you’re shooting and editing your show. You also have to factor in downtime on your computer while videos are being rendered, compressed or uploaded to the internet.

So, even with this hypothetical minimum wage example, we’re looking at $800/month to produce Global Neighbourhoods Television…. in its CURRENT state.

So now, you’d have to wonder WHO you could get to pay you $800/month as a sponsor of a no-budget show. You’re not going to be able to sell “numbers” unless you’re popular for some reason. You’re not going to be able to sell page views either.

Apparently, what happened in this particular case is that Shel Israel’s show has been submitted for editing. Today is April 10th. The show, which was originally announced as a daily… was kicked back to being a weekly… and now hasn’t been updated since March 28th, which will be two weeks ago, tomorrow. If it actually becomes a weekly show, tack on that four hours of minimum wage editing for another $40/week = $160/month and now, the budget is approaching $1,000/month, including shipping tapes to the editor.

So now, I can get to Adam H’s questions:

Adam H: What is Bill’s opinion on this? What are his thoughts on why the videos are lag coming out, why they are long and boring, about FastCompanyTV in general?

My guess is that the videos aren’t coming out on schedule because Fast Company’s in between a rock and a hard place. They only have two choices… Release videos of the same ‘quality’ or get the videos worked on. It seems like they’ve chosen to get them worked on. Neither solution “works” for them.

If they release videos similar to what they’ve already produced, they’re going to be the subject of even more ridicule than they already have been. “They”, being the entire crew involved in this: FastCompany, Robert Scoble, Shel Israel… in that order.

If they get Shel’s videos worked on, the minimum wage editing money is going to have to appear out of thin air. As far as I know, there’s still no sponsor, even though that Seagate advertisement is STILL on fastcompany.tv/global-neighbourhoods-tv. Actually, they could virtually “pay” for Shel’s show to get edited if they have a staff editor and just tack it onto his/her list of duties for fastcompany.tv. That still incurs the opportunity cost of that editor taking time away from doing edits that were originally in their job description.

The other problem with getting the shows edited is that they’re already shot incorrectly. This means that the 4 hours (plus 2 hours for loading, plus an hour for encoding, uploading, tagging, etc) that I estimated for the edit will probably be more like 8 hours and probably spread out over several days, including running the show by an EP (more minimum wage $$/episode) and making several revisions until it’s deemed worthy to be released.

Why are they long and boring? Their focus is on “content” and not entertainment. Basically, what they do is bring you along as a fly on the wall while they hang out with business people and ask questions. Their goal is to archive these Q&A sessions. Basically, as an editor, I can tell you that watching their shows is like watching raw footage. It’s what you would see if you opened up the viewfinder on the camera they used to shoot it and pressed play. The credit that I can give them is that the only show of theirs that I’ve listened to end-to-end was the Jason Calacanis interview, which was broken up into a 20 MINUTE SEGMENT and a *24* MINUTE SEGMENT with a third segement still to be released. I probably watched the first 5 minutes’ worth, then let it play in a background window like a radio program while I did other things. So I can guess that if the niche that they report on consistently has topics/guests that someone’s actually interested in, then their long, boring videos are consistently useful to someone. I’d love to see stats on how many people are return viewers and what percentage (time-wise) of these 44-minute and counting videos are actually being watched.

What about FastCompany.TV in general? hahahaha Interestingly enough, I said what I had to say about FastCompany.TV when I heard about it through the grapevine. I left my comment on Robert Scoble’s announcement post, three months ago, on January 16th, 2008. Video quality isn’t based on a website… It’s based on a team. Bring the same team and you get the same videos.

Meet the new boss….

Same as the old boss………

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