Throwing a party in the year 2010 isn’t what it used to be. We’re all virtually connected now, through Social Media.

Back in the day, it was all about “Come to my party!!! :D” and since nobody knew anybody else online, it was pot luck what happened when you arrived.

That’s over now.

With Facebook, eVite, and a bunch of other sites, you now have access to *ALL* of the information you need in order to determine whether you’re going to a party or not. You know when it is, where it is, how much it costs and who it is that claims they’re going to go. If you need more information than that, you can look up the website to the venue and see the menu, who’s DJing, etc.

Besides the obvious reasons, this is important information because as our Social Media networks expand, we get more invites and there are more overlapping events. As of today, I have 1,905 Facebook friends, which means that if they were evenly spread out throughout the year, it would be FIVE PEOPLE’S BIRTHDAYS, EVERY SINGLE DAY OF THE YEAR.

Not every weekend. Each one of 365 days, it would be FIVE PEOPLE’S birthdays and if they all decided to throw parties ON their birthday, probably three out of those five people are getting bumped… ASSUMING that I wanted to party every single day of my life.

To be fair.. I only know 475 people that live in Manhattan, NYC, 101 that live in Brooklyn, and a few more scattered around the Tri-State Area, so let’s call it 600 people that might throw a party in Manhattan any day of the week… Except… Nobody throws parties on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. Thursday is a maybe, with Friday and Saturday being definites, so mostly what happens is that the 10 people who celebrated birthdays this week *ALL* want to have their parties on either Friday night or Saturday night between 7pm and 4am.

That’s also not counting *ANY* of the networking parties that companies like to throw on a regular basis, holiday parties, housewarming parties, graduation parties, engagement parties, or even small get-togethers that you plan with friends. When you know a lot of people, there’s a tremendous overlap of Social Engagements.

There are a couple of ways that people deal with this:

Be Everywhere

The solution to this for some people is to attend EVERY party they’re invited to. I had seen this on television, but had never experienced it until a couple of years ago.

A homegirl of mine invited me to hang out with her and some of her friends at an apartment party, so I was like “cool”. We got to the party, everybody’s socializing and ‘getting they DRANK on’, and suddenly someone announces that we’re moving to a different party. I’m thinking “We already have chicks and brews. Why are we going somewhere else?”, but I was rollin’ wit da homies, so we geared up and rolled out.

We show up at some apartment building blocks away and the doorman doesn’t want to let 12 already-drunk people into the building, so we had to wait for someone to call upstairs and have one of the hosts ‘ok’ us. We go upstairs and it’s a MUCH nicer apartment than where we started, with MORE alcohol and HOTTER chicks, so I’m like “nice move, y’all! :D”. The entire group we showed up with dispersed into the crowd and we socialized for maybe an hour, then it was like “We’re going to the next party” and I’m like WHAAAAT? :/

We ended up going to either four or five parties in one evening, with the point being that the people I was hanging out with would be talked about by the people that saw them at each of the parties. It was like a public relations tour. The point wasn’t to socialize, but to Be Seen so their names could be on the tips of everyone’s tongues at the water cooler on Monday.

This is because in that society, name-dropping is where it’s at. First you want to say WHERE the party was or who the host was and then you want to say WHO was there, even if that person didn’t say a single word to you or notice that you were at the party.

Let’s Not, And Say We Did

For most people, that’s neither fun nor interesting. Well, actually, I guess for *MOST* people, they’re lucky if someone they know is throwing a party AT ALL.

I’m saying that for most people that get invited to a ton of stuff, more parties thrown = more parties *MISSED*, not ALL PARTIES ATTENDED for a fraction of the time so other people could say they were at a party with you. :/

It’s YOUR JOB to make your event as attractive to your target audience as possible, as early as possible and as transparently as possible so you end up with the Voltron effect of a buzz starting on the back-channel and multiple people encouraging multiple people that your party is going to be ‘the place to be’ and that everyone should converge in that place and time to REALLY get their party on! :D

Here are some tips on how to maximize attendance at your parties:

1. Make sure your guest list is available on the net

In the movie “Ronin”, De Niro says “I never walk into a place I don’t know how to walk out of”. The same holds true for parties. If you can’t see at least who CLAIMS they’re going to attend a party, you have to assume the worst. You have to assume that nobody you want to see is going to be there and that the party will be populated with people you DON’T want to see. That event automatically drops to the bottom of the list. Seeya!

2. Do not select a venue with a “cover”

If there’s a cover charge to get into the place where you’re throwing a party, ASSUME that your party drops to the bottom of the list. There are too many places in Manhattan that I can walk into for free. I’m not interested in handing someone money to enter a bar. I’m way more likely to take my money 20 steps to the left and walk into a different bar for free and spend my money buying food & drinks. It’s just the principle of the thing.

3. Make sure the bar doesn’t discriminate against guys

Girls wouldn’t know this because they receive special privileges when they go places, such as not having to stand in line “because it’s cold outside”, but there are lots of places in Manhattan that will not allow guys to enter without girls on their arms. I understand why they do this, because they don’t want their bar to become a pick-up joint with guys hovering around the chicks all night, causing the chicks to select a different venue, causing the guys to select a venue with better chicks, causing the bar to shut down entirely.

If I suspect that a) there’s going to be a line to get into a place, and b) that even if I stand on the line, I might get jerked by the doorman because you invited me to a party at a place that doesn’t want to let “single” guys in, I’m not coming.

4. Make sure there’s no line to get in

Speaking of lines.. Nobody that’s been getting their drink on before your party wants to stand in a line for 30 minutes, sobering up. **** that. If you just HAVE to throw your party there, make sure there are provisions for your guests to skip the line by informing the doorman that they’re there for your party. Other than that, you can expect people to follow the path of least resistance and break north instead of waiting on a line in the middle of the night feeling their alcohol wearing off.

5. Sponsor the right things

A lot of companies throw parties and they get “sponsors” to give them money in order to attach their name to the event. If you throw a party that’s sponsored, be intelligent about what you’re allocating your money towards.

I went to one specifically notorious party about a year ago that had claimed to be sponsored and when I got there, the chicken wings were free and the small-ass bottles of beer were NINE ******* DOLLARS!!! >:/

As soon as I found that out, my friend and I rolled *IMMEDIATELY* to a different party that had advertised an open vodka bar for a full hour after we arrived there.

The difference between the two was that you knew you were going to pay for drinks at the second party AFTER the free drinks were over, yet the first party had advertised itself as “sponsored” and not informed you that the free stuff wasn’t anything you actually cared about. Obviously, the hosts of the second party received all the forward-extending feelings of goodwill and the hosts of the first party were never believed again when they advertises a party. Bottom of the list! Seeya! :D

6. Noise

If you’re throwing a dance party, fine.. Make sure the music is loud so people can enjoy themselves. Other than that, make sure that the venue is as quiet as possible (without trying to be a library… shhhhhhhh! :D) so that the people that show up can meet and greet each other and get to know each other without having to shout over the din.

7. Crowd

If you’re planning on having more than five (5) people attend an event, make sure you don’t select a popular location that’s going to be crowded. There are three problems with this. There’s noise, like I just talked about.. There’s the ability for your entire group to get and retain seating, and there’s the ability for your group to re-up with drinks.

Too many people in a bar means that the waitresses are going to be overextended. They’re not going to come around often, and when they do, they won’t be coming back with your drinks soon. There’s also a good chance they’ll get your order wrong, trying to serve so many people.. ESPECIALLY if the people that ordered drinks are now located in different places because you didn’t properly lock down your seating arrangements.

If there’s no waitress, too many people means that the bartenders are overextended or that you can’t even GET to the bar because there’s such a backlog of people that are clamoring to get drinks. Either way, the net result is that the alcohol isn’t flowing the way it’s supposed to and it’s going to put a damper on your party if not cause people to leave early to head to a better-functioning party.

8. Tab

Speaking of people leaving early, coughstevecough, Do *NOT* start group tabs unless you’re willing to eat the entire bill.

When people are partying, they’re not keeping tabs of who came and went or who ordered what, but the waitress is. Do NOT expect people to kick in their share before they walk out the door, because sometimes, they have to leave quickly and forget. Sometimes, they’re too drunk to remember. Sometimes, they’re just like “Let someone else pay for my drinks.. PAYCE!!! :D”.

If you don’t have a “sponsor” picking up the tab, or it’s not a house party where you’re providing the liquor yourself or suggesting that people bring what they’d like to drink, let people know on the invite that you’re getting together at a specific place and that they need to bring cash or their own cards to deal separately with the food and drinks they order.

9. Timing

Plan your parties when other parties aren’t happening. Plan your parties when people aren’t normally partying. Stop feeling yourself that people are going to select your event over all the others. Having your party at 7pm and making sure that the venue sells good and inexpensive food might get a lot of people to show up that would have written you off in the 9pm slot or the 11pm slot or the 1am slot, due to more compelling engagements.

10. Location

Make sure your parties are centrally located within the group of people you’re inviting. If you live in Jersey and your guest list lives mostly in Manhattan, throw your party in Manhattan. If you live uptown, throw your party in the Lower East Side.

Do NOT expect people to come to you if you live somewhere out-of-the-way. When the party’s over, your guests will either have to spend an hour or two in the subway, waiting for and riding the train, or they have a $20 cab bill to look forward to. Not cool. Lots of people would LIKE to attend parties, but because of the location and travel issues, skip it for the path of least resistance.

11. Expense

Do NOT throw parties in expensive places, unless you’re “Ballin’, Shot Callin’” and you’re planning to pay for other people to drink.

When people have to pay $15 for drinks that should cost $5, they don’t spend three times as much.. they become only 1/3 as drunk. That’s no good for your party because people drink more slowly, have less of a good time, bring less energy to your event and are quietly scheming on LEAVING so they can go somewhere with affordable alcohol… Including HOME! :D

On top of that, if people know ahead of time that your venue is expensive, they’re liable to stay longer at the dive bar with the cheap alcohol where they started the evening. The longer they stay there, the more chance they’ll meet someone they want to hang out with for the rest of the night and suddenly, your party takes a dive into the dead pool.

12. Be Reliable

Make sure that when you host an event, what actually happens is congruent with what you advertised in the invitation. Do not have people show up to one bar, only to find out that nobody there has heard of your group because you changed venues and didn’t use your Social Media reach to announce that. Do not advertise that there are going to be a bunch of girls at your event and then there are a bunch of dudes. Do not advertise that it’s free and then there’s a cover. Do not say “Meet me inside” and then the doorman doesn’t want to let guys in without female accompaniment. Do not run up a group tab and then ask the people that are left at the end of the night to chip in for the extra amount from people that left early without paying their share. Do not say you’re sponsored when the alcohol isn’t free. Do not ambush people with hidden guest lists. If you’re charging for the party, make sure your guests know exactly what they’re going to receive for their money.

Nobody’s the only host or ‘draw’ of their parties anymore. Party attendance is viral. Groups of people come to a place to hang out with groups of other people. The number of individual groups you attract to your event determines the overall size of the party.

You might have the free alcohol, but someone else has a visible guest list where others are willing to pay for their own drinks to enjoy those particular people’s company. You might have the fancier venue but your guest isn’t willing to dress up. You might have the trendier venue, but a guy isn’t willing to shell out $30/round for him and his companion for the evening to drink, when it should be $12/round. You might have a party during the exact same time slot, but the other party’s much easier/faster for your guests to get home from…

There are really too many variables in today’s hypernetworked society to assume that YOUR event is the top draw of the evening. It’s in your best interest to make your party transparently as attractive as possible as soon as possible so the buzz gets out there on the back-channel between people checking with other people what they’re doing on that particular evening. Your guests are as important in publicizing your party as you are, if not more so.

The days of “One event per evening” are OVER. You’re not only in competition with the weather, but events going on the same evening, the night before AND the night after, depending on how much time out of the week a person has allocated towards publicly socializing. It’s on you to do the right things so you can maximize your event attendance, expand your sphere of influence and build your rep as a party promoter or connector.

If you have your own party tips, post them in the comments, below. :)

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If you’re going to make television shows, or at this point, shows for the web… SOMEBODY on your team needs to KNOW. HOW. TO. MAKE. TELEVISION. SHOWS!!! :/

If you cut this corner, your productions will look like trash, and deservedly so. Now you can’t say no one ever told you.

I was minding my business one day and got a call from some so-called television production company to come in and interview with them to create a pilot for this show they were trying to sell. They had received my name from someone I had worked with before, so I decided (against my better judgement, haha) to go see what they wanted.

This was back in the day, so I show up to this so-called television production company with tapes. Beta tapes & 3/4″, just in case they were so primitive as to still be using 3/4″. Of course, it turns out that they had NEITHER. No Beta Decks in-house and No 3/4″ decks. So, that was that for my demo materials. Of course, at this point in time, my demo reel is right here on my site ===> (see sidebar), and companies are encouraged to check it out before wasting my time.

So then, this guy, who, by the way had ZERO air about him of knowing ANYTHING about television production… I’m guessing he was actually a secretary or assistant producer or something and that the people that actually know what they’re talking about weren’t there… This guy asks me if I’ve ever edited a reality show before.

Suppressing the instinct to ask “HAVE *YOU*???”, I eventually said “No, but I’ve seen a bunch of them and I know the formula”. I then proceeded to recite the formula to him. During the process, I happened to mention “confessionals”, made popular by MTV’s “Real World” series. When I said that word… “confessionals”… the guy choked up. Like he looked like he stopped breathing, like someone had suddenly grabbed his throat. So I go “You DID shoot confessionals… right?”… Then the guy looks all embarrassed and admits that they didn’t.

This is where I got REALLY suspicious, because television production is “garbage in, garbage out”. You can’t make up for footage people never shot, especially when you only had access to the people in your “reality” show for a small amount of time and they’re GONE NOW.

So anyway, I chatted with the guy for a while longer, then he said something to the effect of “I’ll let you know”, but he wasn’t even good at playing THAT off. Suppressing the instinct to say “Dude. Why don’t you just stop lying. You don’t want me to work on your so-called show”, I acted like I was going to expect his call, smiled, shook his hand and left.

Obviously, what was going on there was that these people had NO IDEA what they were doing and were looking to hire an editor to save the day and make something out of their NOTHING footage. That’s all well and good, and I’m sure they found someone. The problem with that secretary-dude’s line of questioning was that it’s not MY JOB to create the show. It’s MY JOB to do what the PRODUCER tells me to do. It’s the producer’s job to do what the EXECUTIVE PRODUCER tells him or her to do.

In general, the EP is the person who signs off on the final product. The EP knows what the standards are and whether what you’ve created is good enough to go on the air. The producer knows how the company likes their shows done, so it’s up to THE PRODUCER to determine how the show flows by going through the raw footage, selecting sound bites and video and putting them in an order that a) makes sense and b) is interesting to the viewer.

While it’s possible for the EP and the producer to be the same person, SOMEONE has to be in charge of both stations. Someone has to be the last word when it comes to quality control and someone has to be the person to determine the flow of the show. If it’s not the same person, the producer needs to have a very good idea of how the EP likes things or every time your video goes up for review, there are going to be changes. This is a waste of your time as well as your money if you’re hiring a freelance editor. If you’re working with a salaried staffer, feel free to waste time.

If you don’t have these bases covered, you end up with the blind leading the blind. You have people who have NO IDEA what elements create a good television show signing off on work that people who have NO IDEA how to make a good show created. This becomes obvious when it’s time for the average joe to sit down in front of the television (or at this point, their computer) and watch your product. Here are some of the problems you will experience:

Nothing of interest happening in your show

It’s the EP’s job to tell you that nothing’s happening in your show, that it’s boring and it needs to be fixed in order for it to be successful on television. The producer needs to pick up on this information and make it part of their mental database so they stop making the same mistakes in the future. The EP can’t afford to let a boring show go out the door, because if people don’t care what happened this week, they won’t be back next week. When people don’t come back, your ratings drop. When your ratings drop, you get cancelled. When you get cancelled, people get fired.

No story arc

The story arc is the reason people stay tuned (other than character development). There has to be a reason.. Something people are looking forward to seeing, or something that they are hoping the characters are going to avoid. Without a story arc, there’s no tension. Without tension, you can’t hold a viewer’s interest. It just doesn’t matter whether they see the rest of your show or the next episode because they’re not emotionally invested in the outcome of your show.

No good cliffhangers leading to the commercial breaks

The only thing that’s going to keep people from changing the channel during commercials is that you’ve set up something that they don’t want to miss. This is basically the same as story arc, but much more short-term. There might be 4 or 5 segments to a show. You don’t want to end your segments on a flat note, because that’s how many opportunities people will have to YAWN, change the channel and get involved with some other show that captures their attention.

No interesting character development

If you have someone that’s interesting, make them one of the main focal points of the show. If you have people that are NOT interesting, play them off to the side or preferably to the BACK, if not out of the show ENTIRELY! If you have interesting people doing uninteresting things, cut those parts out of your show.

If you don’t develop your characters, nobody will be emotionally invested in what happens to them, which means they won’t care about your cliffhangers, story arc or anything else. This is something that’s normally dealt with in the pilot stage, and lack of interesting characters plus potential for their development via interesting scenarios usually results in a “Pass”, meaning “Thanks, but No Thanks” and you get sent back the drawing board to dust yourself off and try again.

No passionate viewers / fanbase developed

If your show is wack, no community is going to develop around it. This means that you won’t have people DYING for next week to come around so they can see the next episode of Miami Vice (not the garbage movie… the really good television series). It’s your passionate viewers that will stop whatever they’re doing to go home and watch your show or make sure the bar turns it on. It’s your passionate viewers that make sure to DVR your show so they don’t miss out on the water-cooler talk the next day at work. It’s your passionate viewers that keep your ratings high so your advertisers feel like they’re getting their money’s worth…

No viral dissemination of information about your show

If your show is boring, there won’t be any buzz. There won’t be any Facebook groups made about it. It won’t be a trending topic on Twitter. Your website won’t have any comments on the posts. Nobody’s going to be telling anyone else about you, because everyone’s looking for something interesting. Nobody’s going to be blogging about your show on their sites. At this point in time, even a locally-based internet show can have fans all over the world. When your show is already garbage, it’s too late to convince people that it’s not. Make sure you hire someone that can tell you that this show isn’t good enough and can tell you how to make it acceptable if not EXCELLENT.

No advertiser, investor or sponsor interest

Without passionate viewers, community, viral dissemination or the appearance that you have any clue whatsoever about how to make a good televison/web show, you will either have ZERO advertiser/investor/sponsor interest from the giddyap, or if you had it when you started, you’ll lose it when it comes time for those people to renew their deals with you. This could be avoided, or at the very least, the chances of this minimized by hiring an EP with a reputation for quality programming. The EP is the General. People think that just because they have the money and paid to create the company that they should automatically have final say on what goes out the door. That’s called “hubris”. Get over yourself and do yourself the favor of hiring people that actually know what they’re doing when it comes to television. If you want to be successful, everyone needs to play their position. Your position might be getting money. Let someone else have the final say on whether your program’s “ready for prime time” or not.

These issues are normally dealt with at the pilot stage. If your pilot doesn’t convince people that you know how to make an interesting and well-received show, you normally don’t get a deal and get sent back to the drawing board. It’s similar to being a rapper. If you don’t have a good demo tape, nobody’s going to take the chance on you and pay for you to record “for real” in a studio.

This is why you want to hire an EP to let you know whether what you’ve produced is worth shopping or not. Believe me, it’s worth it to spend the money up front and save yourself the anguish and embarrassment of producing a show that everybody says sucks while you spend a small fortune producing something that never should have received a greenlight in the first place and simultaneously trash your so-called television production company’s reputation for quality and excellence in programming.

~ Bill Cammack
twitter.com/BillCammack
facebook.com/BillCammack

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Walt Ribeiro does a new video every single day… Like “Rejected”:

Meanwhile, I have at the very least *100* show ideas, and I’m not doing ANY of them. Not ONE of them. The last video I uploaded was “Social Media Observations”, almost exactly two months ago:

Granted, that was my 315th episode in two years, but still, I didn’t stop because I needed a break. I stopped because something that I couldn’t place my finger on wasn’t making sense.

I met Walt on May 16th, 2008 @ MashBash NYC. He left the afterparty right before we took this picture:

At some point, I became aware that Walt is extremely enthusiastic! hahahaha He really seems INTERESTED in things, and PSYCHED! :D I then found out that he does a show about music, teaching people about music via the internet. Of course, one of my myriad shows was about music, so I watched a few episodes.

This is when I realized that Walt was outputting so much material. Doing a daily show is really amazing. I already knew how to do it, but at least three things were stopping me…

1) I wanted to make shows instead of, let’s call it, “video documentation of events”, which calls for a lot more production and a lot more time spent to output each episode.
2) I didn’t have consistent crew to do an ensemble show with, and didn’t feel like doing a show featuring mainly myself.
3) I didn’t have a reason at the time to do a show about myself.

Meanwhile, my site evolved from a work-based, Emmy Award-Winning Video Editorial site to a documentation of the NYC Videoblogging scene to its current form, which is simply a Bill Cammack fansite.

I used to do videos about stuff that I do, like visiting the World Trade Center (Ground Zero) with my friend Joey in the middle of the night, when we were on our way to the club:

 
… or hanging out with Masami, Masako & Laetitia:

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

So here comes Walt, :) Sitting down in front of his video camera or iSight or whatever, and just KICKIN’ IT. How simple is it? He doesn’t need extra crew. He has a goal (teaching people music). It’s something he’s enthusiastic about and something he does naturally. The show doesn’t revolve around gimmicks or graphics. The show revolves around what Walt has to offer to whomever’s interested in watching.

I named this season of my videoblog “Delusions of Grandeur” because you have to have them to assume that ANYBODY is watching your material. Meanwhile, one of my four (4) videoblogs on blip.tv recently surpassed 45,000 views:

WAY more importantly… I’ve become aware over the season of quite a few people that I know personally or that I’m related to that are subscribed to my blog in one format or another. I’m going to make a separate post about that, but it makes an immense difference when you personally know someone… ANYONE that you’re communicating to through your articles and self-expressions on the net. It makes a MAJOR difference, and now I know to whom I’m speaking when I do my “documentation of events”. I’m also glad when people that I’ve met IRL go back to their home cities, states or countries and “tune in” when I’m doing my thang. It’s cool and all that that people read some of my blogs essentially around the world, but a few of those markers belong to people I know, Like Rox in Hawaii or Phil in the UK or Masami in Japan.

Bill Cammack Recent Visitors Map – August 22, 2008, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

August 22, 2008 – Recent Visitor Map for Bill Cammack dot com

So.. What does all this have to do with Being Like Walt? :D He’s found what he wants to do, and he’s doing it. It’s Quick & Dirty and serves his intended purpose. He’s doing what feels good TO HIM and doing what HE wants to do. Would he love to have his own television show? Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t. Until that time, he’s doing HIS thing, and I’m gonna do MINE. :D

So what’s the Q&D show going to be about? Nothing. Everything. Whatever. hmmm… I guess that spells “new”. Anyway… Cheers to Walt for his enthusiasm and for leading by example, and let’s get this show on the road! :D

AIIIIITE?

LET ‘EM KNOW!!!

Walt Ribeiro & Bill Cammack

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I’m experimenting with Google Ads. I don’t actually LIKE them, so this experiment will probably be rather short-lived. :D

I used to use them a long time ago, but then I stopped. The general point was that they were poor-looking and at the same time generated close to *ZERO* revenue, hahaha. I think that when I went to reactivate my account, I had accrued like $10 or like $9.50 or something. Meanwhile, I could have stood in front of McDonald’s opening doors for people and requesting change from them as they left the establishment and made that much in one day…. well… actually in just a couple of hours.

The reason I decided to bring them back was that I get a lot of random traffic now. Most of the traffic I got before was from my posting links to social media sites, so it didn’t make sense to tell people “Come to my site to look at advertisements! :D “. At this point, most of my traffic comes from Google, and they tend to bounce pretty quickly, so if they decide to bounce to an ad link, that’s fine with me. :D

Still, I didn’t want the ads to show up to people who ‘normally’ browse my site, like actually going to my home page and seeing what’s on it. For that reason, I took Tyme‘s advice and implemented the ads in my single post code.

I decided to use link units instead of ad units, because I could get link units that were only 15 pixels high. The “thinnest” ad units I could get were 60 pixels high.

I immediately noticed a problem with relevance… Not that adsense was having trouble parsing the text on the page, but because I talk about so much different stuff in my posts. I don’t even TALK about cars, yet they were posting automobile links on my pages. One of my titles included the name “Nichelle”, so all the ads on the page were for “Helle” shoes or something. So, without the ability to specifically say “give me these type of ads”, there’s an incredible relevance ‘problem’. They would probably work better if my posts were only a couple of paragraphs long and about specifically one topic.

In general, I’m not a fan of random advertising anyway. I’ve been saying for probably a year now that product placement and sponsorship is the way to go. This is another reason these ads will probably have to vamoose immediately. :) I don’t enjoy seeing mentions of items that don’t have anything to do with anything on my pages. I also can’t imagine why anybody would want to click on the random words they come up with. Then again, I’m not aiming them at ME, I’m aiming them at people who randomly search through google for topics they want to read about at that point in time.

I guess part of the experiment is to gauge the worth of random google ads vs sponsored ads… which is practically ZERO since you’re guaranteed to get paid whatever amount by a sponsor by the nature of the relationship. Google ads are like a gamble. “I DEFINITELY show your ads, and I MAYBE get a couple of cents out of the deal”. :)

Anyway, it’ll be an interesting experiment. I’m up to 83 page impressions since this morning, with ZERO clicks and ZERO page CTR, hahaha. I’ll most likely be done with this experiment when I wake up tomorrow morning. :D

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A lot of shows and sites have been receiving the Fail Whale recently.

There’s nothing wrong with failing. Happens all the time. “Happens to the best of us”. Sometimes, it’s not actually a failure so much as an inability to meet requirements for continuation. You could have a perfectly successful show as far as getting the job done and delivering on time, but you’re just not getting the numbers of views or members or whatever your sponsors asked you for and your authorization to continue the show (or your funding) gets pulled, and that’s that.

More important than failing is what happens AFTER you fail… What happens to your media? What happens to your site? Did you think about this before you started your show?

I’m thinking about this today because I read Liz Burr’s post “Do Social Media Strategies Go To Heaven?”, where she talks about her WIRED SCIENCE Facebook app and the fact that the show itself was canceled and will not be coming back to PBS. She writes:

“The show’s cancellation has me asking myself, where do social media strategies go when they’re no longer needed? So far, the results of our most significant strategies are:

• a blog with over 200 entries and 600 comments
• a twitter account with 1200+ followers
• a facebook fan page with almost 600+ fans
• a facebook application with 12,000 installs

The Facebook application is especially interesting to me because it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Since launch, the application has been averaging 100 new installs per day. This is with no paid promotional activity whatsoever. I don’t expect this to stop anytime soon, because I don’t think we will reach a ceiling going at this (slow but) steady rate of installation (considering the number of users on Facebook). I designed the application to be viral enough for it to self promote. I suppose I could turn those activities off if I wanted to.

For the blog, we have decided to stop all posting, write our goodbyes and leave commenting open for a few weeks. We will then shut down all comments, and leave the blog up for the sake of Google and reference.  I am not sure what to do with the Twitter account. It essentially was a machine for the blog and site updates, but with no more site updates, what else is there? I suppose the Facebook fan page can stay in place, however we’ll probably put up a notice about the show and site saying farewell.”

So that project is ending, because the show it was supporting wasn’t picked up for a new season. However… The work that was done will remain and fans of the show will have access to it. Basically, it becomes “what it is”. A project that used to be active and is now inactive. C’est la vie. :D

There’s a Next New Networks show called Bride-O-Rama that went “on hiatus”. :)

I can’t find on the page when the episode I embedded was uploaded, but a) I happen to know this particular show was cancelled a long-ass time ago, and b) the first comment is from October 29 so let’s assume it was canceled in late October, 2007 which was 8 months ago. Similar to the pending status of the Wired Science blog, this show remains in suspended animation. The shows are there to watch. The comments are there to read. As a matter of fact, NNN’s still serving recent ads on those pages, so anybody who happens by to check out some of the Wedisodes is helping out NNN’s bottom line.

OTOH… We have FastCompany.TV’s former offering “Global Neighbourhoods”, which as far as I know was canceled this very month, and immediately disappeared off the face of the earth as if it never happened.

Here’s what the “Global Neighbourhoods” creator, producer and host, Shel Israel had to say about it in his post Several Changes:

“That brings us to GlobalNeighbourhoods.TV (GNTV), my other online video program. Unlike WorkFast, GNTV is my baby, is an extension of not just the Global Survey, but Naked Conversations as well. As many of you know, GNTV was launched in March at FastCompany.TV, and–shall we say–had an inauspicious start.

When GNTV launched, I was not quite ready for prime time. If I was an actor, I would say I was prepared for a summer stock script reading. When the curtain went up, I found myself instead at center stage of an opening night on Broadway with some determined hecklers in the audience who managed for a while to distract me.

Most people seem to agree that I got better. After 14 episodes, I think GNTV has proved its value and professionals hungry for insights into how they can use social media in their businesses have found GNTV to have more than a little value.

A few weeks back, however, FastCompany granted my request to take back GNTV, to remove it from their site and to eventually relaunched it o a smaller scale on this site. Primarily, with FastCompany as a partner, the cost of sponsorship was too high for a new program. Here, I can charge a sponsor significantly less dollars and have great flexibility in the sort of deal I can offer. Here, I am the sole decision maker.

GNTV will go on a brief hiatus, until perhaps mid-August. I need to deal with the complexities of AV, production, storing, hosting, compressing, measuring, etc. Because some of these costs can be quite significant, I also need to have sponsorship before I restart.”

To be fair, Shel has posted a set of links to his 14 GNTV episodes he produced for FastCompany.TV on his blog. This means that assuming you knew he had a blog at all and assuming you saw that one post, you know how you can view his videos. I would guess that he Twittered the information and used whatever other publicity outlets he has at his disposal. However… Someone returning to FastCompany.TV will find that his show’s tab has been replaced with a photography show, and short of putting “Shel Israel” or “Global Neighbourhoods” in the search box, there’s no evidence that his show ever existed.

As far as his plan to relaunch his show on his own site… there goes his google juice. His videos will be available in the future at a completely different address on redcouch.typepad.com instead of fastcompany.tv. What’s the point? The point is that people are still hitting my Cory Lidle plane crash video from October, 2006, because they know where to find it from people’s bookmarks, forum posts and blog links.

If I had been moving that video all over creation, from domain name to domain name, people would hit dead links from the google searches and IME, *NOT* do more creative searches to try to find the same content… They just move on to other content that comes up easily under the google search for the same topic.

Similarly, maybe you have the same site… except your video host fell into the Dead Pool. Recently, VideoEgg discontinued its consumer video service and sent out a notice to people that had videos hosted by them that they were going to cease to host them shortly. Also, DivX’s Stage 6 streaming video site folded. The problem with this is that A LOT OF PEOPLE had videos on their sites which were actually embedded FROM VideoEgg or Stage 6. This means that they had to scramble to a) pull all their videos from those hosts, b) find a new host for all of their now-homeless videos, c) upload all their videos to the new host and d) go to every single post and change the embed code from the Videoegg or Stage 6 location to the new host location. If you happen to have over 300 episodes online, that could be a MAAAAAAAJOR DRAG! :(

So, that’s another thing to consider when you’re ready to make a show on the internet. While you worry about content and worry about being interesting and worry about being entertaining, and worry about getting sponsored and worry about your show being sustainable and worry about growing your audience and worry about creating surrounding social sites… you ALSO have to worry about what happens when your show lands in the Dead Pool. Do you have ownership of your own content after the fact? Do you have ownership of the site that it’s on? Are you going to have to uproot everything and start all over? If you get a new sponsor, can you easily swap the old one out and continue seamlessly creating content?

Believe me, you want to figure out / negotiate all these things UP. FRONT. and NOT when you realize your show that you thought was going to run forever is going down the tubes.

Welcome to the Dead Pool.

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