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

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

Social Brand vs. Business Brand

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You Lose Some.. You Win A Lot More

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

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

None.

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

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

Social ROI

Having said all THAT….. :D

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use It or Lose It

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

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

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

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

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What I affectionately refer to as “Revisionist History” may actually be more accurately called Historical Revisionism. There are actually two types, one which has a positive connotation and implies that intelligent people took another look at the data that’s currently available to them and came up with a valid interpretation of that data that differs from what’s been widely accepted about that event up until now. The second type is when people decide they don’t like how the past looks and decide to reinterptet it for their own benefit. The latter is what I want to talk about right now.

Time goes forward… Not BACKWARD. Things happen and then they move from the present into the past. Once they’re in the past, there’s no way for you to affect them, being that nobody’s created a time machine yet. If you tell a story ONE WAY at the time, and then turn around and tell a DIFFERENT STORY later on.. Assuming you had your wits about you when you told the story the first time, you are attempting to revise history. Here’s an example:

Back in the day….. (right, Frank?) I used to hang out with this chick that had a boyfriend and she would lie to him all the time about what she had done or where she had been for the last several hours while she wasn’t answering her phone. I didn’t think anything of this becuase that’s what people do when they’re in a relationship and they don’t want to suffer the consequences of their SO knowing who they really are.. They lie. Fine. I get that.

So this same chick tells me a story one day about where she had been on a particular evening when her boyfriend had been looking for her. The story was that her cell phone had run out of batteries and she had decided to walk home and it took her about an hour. This is what she told me and this is also what she told me she told her boyfriend.

Weeks or months later, her boyfriend does something she doesn’t like and then she tells me that on the night that she told him she had walked home, she was actually hanging out with other guys at a bar and having a good time. The reason this information came up was that NOW she felt vindictive and wanted to mentally feel like she was hurting her boyfriend. I say “mentally feel” because she never told HIM this version of the story. She only told ME so that she could feel like she was being defiant and get it out of her system so that she wouldn’t get dumped by this guy and then feel like a JERK when she got over it and wanted to be with him again….. Which, of course, is exactly what happened. She got over it.

Now.. I couldn’t give a damn what some chick tells her boyfriend. What I *DO* care about is that she decided to lie TO ME about it as well because she wanted sympathy at the time. He had been rather upset that he couldn’t find her and had SCREAMED on her and she was scared that he might dump her so she told me the same story she told him in order for me to assure her that walking home with a non-working phone wasn’t a dumping offense.

When you attempt to revise history, you erode your credibility. There’s no way around this. As long as there are people around who remember what really happened, you’re going to either look like a jerk who’s trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes or you’re going to look like you are currently EMBARRASSED about your past. Being that it’s the year 2009 as I write this and Social Media has been in full effect for quite some time now, there are a. whole. hell. of. a. lot. of. people. that watched your PRESENT in real-time. Whatever you posted at the time, that’s what people remember. There’s no way around THIS EITHER, other than never posting anything to the internet and ‘keeping your business out the street’.

Relationships

Relationships change. I know LOTS of people that used to date each other in ’06, ’07, ’08 and even ’09 that aren’t dating each other now. That’s not my problem.

Friendships change. I know lots of people that used to be friends and at the time of this writing, they are not. That’s not my problem either.

I have pictures with couples that are no longer couples and friends that are no longer friends. Regardless of how they feel about each other NOW, they don’t get to change MY history, which includes ALL OF US sharing good times together.

Regardless of what you say NOW (and you may very well have perfectly legitimate problems with your former SO or friend), y’all were rather happy with each other at the time and that’s the spirit in which the pictures were posed for, taken and posted. Up until you achieved a problem with the other person, you derived as much pleasure from the pics as I did, if not MORE.

What about The Kid?

Ethically, Morally or however you want to categorize it, I don’t get to have special privileges when it comes to revisionist history simply because it’s my camera. COULD I? Certainly. DO I? No. It’s all in the game. If you’re not going to play it the “right” way, don’t play it at all.

I currently have 1,887 Facebook friends, about 900 of whom I’ve hung out with at some point IRL. This means that every once in a while, someone I’m visually associated with is at least accused of and at most proven to have deviated from the norm.

Let me make this perfectly clear…

I. Will. Not. Adjust. My. History. To. Fit. How. You. Feel. About. The. Present.

If someone that I’ve spent time with falls out of favor with you, that’s YOUR PROBLEM and not mine. I don’t care. I’m not interested. You’re a grown-ass-man or grown-ass-woman so act like it and deal with your own problems.

If you decide that you don’t want to do business with me because I’m friends with someone who’s been accused of doing something stupid or has been PROVEN to have done something stupid, good for you. Between my own freelance work, Tribe Nine Creative, and a company I’m about to go on retainer to, I don’t have any more work-hours to assign to people that *WANT* to work with me, much less people that are concerned about who I hang out with or what it would mean to their company’s image to be associated with me, being that I’ve been visually associated with someone else whose internet presence they don’t like.

In fact, the whole concept is RETARDED because other than for television credits,

my name doesn’t even APPEAR on people’s video projects. The people in my Client List are there because I PUT them there. There are lots of companies I’ve worked for that are NOT listed, such as News Corporation / Fox News. So, if you don’t want to do business with me because of people I socialize with, enjoy that life. :)

Porno Chicks

In an attempt to see how it would feel to be embarrassed to be Facebook Friends with someone, I sent a friends request to this porno chick chick that I HEARD was a porno chick, hehe :) Fortunately, she declined my “friendship”! HAHAHA because I regretted it almost as soon as I pressed “send”. :D Facebook doesn’t have any facility for you to retract friendship requests, so, similar to pregnancy, I knew that once it was in there, there wasn’t much I could do about it.

I wanted to know how I would feel knowing people had some tangible evidence that I had associated myself with a porno chick. Pretty much, that was the only controversial-type person I could think of to add and since I know a few sex-bloggers, I actually have mutual friends with her. It was a weird feeling. I’m not sure it was sustainable. On the one hand, it’s clear that it’s not YOU that’s being a freakazoid and on camera, to boot. On the other hand, being “friends” with this person implies some sort of endorsement of her lifestyle. That shouldn’t be a connection that’s made, but it’s made all the time, whether people mention it transparently or on the back-channel.

I needed to go to this extent because being that I’m an independent person and not a drone, I’m not interested at all in what people do or get involved in that has nothing to do with me. I didn’t have anyone on my current roster of almost two thousand people that I felt like I might be able to say “Oh, that’s just the last straw!.. I can’t believe he/she did that! :O”. Meanwhile, I know chicks that are upset that I call chicks “chicks”. :D I just wanted to see how it felt to be SOOOO interested in someone else’s business that I would elect to terminate my social media contact with them because of something they did or said.. ESPECIALLY something they’ve been doing I was told that they’ve been doing for years.

AAAAAAAAAAND STAY OUT!!! :D

The bottom line is that media has now been removed from the hands of the newspapers and television stations and placed firmly in the hands of common folk. That chick pointing a phone in your direction on the subway is taking a picture or video of you. There are video cameras watching the streets and the sidewalks in front of places of business. People are shooting video with their smartphones or their video cameras or still cameras or even their iPods now. Your best bet, if you don’t want to be involved in the Social Media game is to STAY. OUT. OF. IT. ENTIRELY!

If you’re not the subject, you’re going to end up in the background of someone’s picture or video. It might be someone you know or someone you don’t. You might be tagged in the media and you might not. If you know damned well that you’re not supposed to go to a certain party, DON’T. GO. TO. THAT. PARTY. instead of going and HOPING you don’t get discovered. That ended in 2008.

Even if you don’t show up in images, you’re going to show up in text. Someone’s going to post your name on Twitter or mention that they were hanging out with you on Facebook and then Google’s going to pick up that mention of your name or your handle and you’re gonna get busted.

Even if they don’t type your name onto the net, they’re going to TELL PEOPLE who they hung out with at the party. Even if they don’t post a picture to the net, they’re going to show it to their friends. The only way for you to attempt to regulate your online presence is to hang out with people that don’t post media to the internet.

Same thing goes for relationships. If you think your relationship might EEEEEEEEVER break up and you might feel sour about that, don’t go all over creation in 2010 posing with your current girlfriend or boyfriend. Save yourself the anguish and keep your relationship(s) to yourself, stop announcing them on Facebook, stop making lovey-dovey videos that you’re going to have to tear down from the net as soon as y’all fall out of favor with each other. It’s way easier to deny information that was never published than to try to reel in media that people have been looking at for YEARS already and were privy to anyway because they were standing right there when y’all were very happily showing off your friendship or relationship by posing for pictures together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what about Ian Jenkins?

“Who?” :D

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do you think?

~Bill

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