Bill Cammack

Please keep your eye on the ball, people. Wake up. Stop letting people tell you gibberish that clouds your minds to the facts, if you’re going to hire them to work for you or even associate them with your brand.

Some people in this space are always “Talkin’ LOUD, and Sayin’ NOTHIN’!”. The funny thing about this is that since for the most part, there aren’t real professionals in ANYTHING strewn across the Social Meda Expert world, the only thing that businesses have to make their hiring decisions on is what people tell them who know only marginally more than they do to begin with.

As an example, let’s look at the video aspect of Social Media. Basically, video on the net is an extension of the fad of emailing jokes to people in the mornings. You would come to work and turn on your computer and there would be several jokes emailed to you from people that thought the jokes were funny. Eventually, this style of passing an email from person to person was termed “viral”, and the goal became to make “viral videos”. Read the rest of this entry »

I was fortunate enough to attend a New Media Dinner last night which was hosted by Mr. Strauss Zelnick and featured a discussion moderated by Mr. David Remnick.

One section of the discussion focused on the print media and their online properties vs random bloggers….. (Like MEEEEE!!! *waves* :D). David asked the group [paraphrasing] “What do you see as the future for major media companies?”. I elected not to say anything, because as y’all know who read my material, I don’t like to throw in two cents and leave it at that. I wouldn’t have been content with throwing my idea out there and having the conversation just move on, so I saved it for this morning.

Basically, the point was that there have been major publications like the New York Times (NYT) and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and television networks like ABC, CBS & NBC that have had the media industry ON SMASH for, like, forever. That’s all going away now, because everybody has phones that either have still photo or video capability and everybody AT LEAST has a blog, and at most is hooked up to some sort of live-streaming site like Qik. All bets are OFF when Ustream releases their iPhone app. It’s going to be live video straight to people’s phones… crazy! :D

Anyway, the question was basically how people saw these Mainstream Media (MSM) groups evolving to keep up with and remain viable in these changing times. My prediction will be based on several things that guests brought up during that discusssion.

Fact vs. Opinion

In any situation, there are at least two elements. There are “The Facts”, and then there are people’s OPINIONS ABOUT “The Facts”. Read the rest of this entry »

Continued from “Time, Business & Handouts [Time, Part 1]“ and “Time, Part 02″

One of the by-products of this startup culture we live in is that people don’t know when to buzz the %*^& off.

I know this because I’ve been living that lifestyle for a couple of years now. The only thing that matters is that the job isn’t finished yet. Whatever you have to do to finish it and however long it takes, that’s what you need (and to a masochistic degree, WANT) to do.

No. I do not want to go out for a drink with you. I want to implement a new feature on my site. Going out with you is a waste of my time, *AND* it’s just pushing me further back in finishing the project that’s bringing me an actual ROI in the future.

The other day, I was awake @ 3 am and I thought about something I needed to talk to some company about. I looked their number up on the web and called them. I was actually ANNOYED at the fact that I was going to have to wait until maybe 7 am to speak to them! hahaha THE NERVE!!!

That’s the life we live. “There are four hours until I can do what I want to do”, as opposed to “You know what? Just because I’m awake and functional doesn’t mean anybody else IS or NEEDS TO BE”.

Social Media

All this connectivity makes it even worse. There are too many ways for people to monitor your online presence and think they have an opportunity to grab at your time. You ignore their phone calls and they text you. You ignore their texts and they email you. You ignore their emails and they call your other phone. You ignore their voicemail and the look for you on Facebook… or MySpace or AIM/iChat or Twitter or Pownce or Jaiku or on your website or in Ning communities or in forums or bulletin boards…….

It would be laughable if it weren’t so utterly pathetic. :) It’s like they’re going “How dare he post on Twitter when he didn’t return any of my calls? :O” “How dare he go out partying and post 35 pictures on the net when my project deadline is coming up? :O” Well… That’s just the thing. It’s *YOUR* deadline until you pay me to make it MY business at all. MY job is to have a good time. Period. If I elect to stop having a good time and help you accomplish YOUR goals in return for some of your money, then that’s business. Other than that, anything I tell you that helps you out is. a. FAVOR.

Another thing about this is that just because you see me on Twitter @ 4 am, that doesn’t mean I’m interested in or willing to discuss ANYTHING about your business with you. This isn’t the help desk. This isn’t live customer support from India. If I can help out and choose to, good for you. If I choose not to, that’s how it went. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Arrington is the founder of TechCrunch, a leading “tech blog”. This morning, he wrote “Some Things Need To Change”, in which he describes being at the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany and having someone approach him, spit on him and walk away in a crowd of people.

Michael: Yesterday as I was leaving the DLD Conference in Munich, Germany someone walked up to me and quite deliberately spat in my face. Before I even understood what was happening, he veered off into the crowd, just another dark head in a dark suit. People around me stared, then looked away and continued their conversation.

* Normally, I wouldn’t Ambulance-Chase something like this, but comments were turned off on the actual post, so I’m writing about it here.

Of course, there’s lots of speculation about WHY this occurred. Most of the blogs I’ve read so far label the guy (I assume, being that it was a tech conference, and as far as I can tell from the pics from these things, females are few and far between) as someone who was upset with TechCrunch’s coverage or LACK OF COVERAGE of their startup. Of course, we’ll never know ANYTHING about the perp until someone takes responsibility for spitting on him.

I think we can safely assume that the guy knew who he was spitting on, assuming this happened inside the conference and not outside. According to this post, Arrington is 6’4″ (six feet, four inches tall), so he must be pretty easy to spot in a crowd.

Michael: “Yesterday I was battling the flu, jetlag and little sleep, and had been battered for three days straight with product pitches from entrepreneurs desperate for press. The event was over and I was on my way back to my hotel. The last thing I wanted was another product pitch as I hurried to the car that would drive me to Davos for the next event. So when I saw this person approach me out of the corner of my eye, I turned away slightly and avoided eye contact. Sometimes that works. But in this case all it did was make me vulnerable to the last thing I expected.”

So, again, we can assume this was a guy, because it wasn’t stated otherwise. We can assume he knew who he was spitting on and we can assume that he wasn’t concerned about consequences & repercussions, because he apparently blended in with the crowd instead of running away. One person running would have been easy to spot.

I think these points indicate arrogant behavior, so I wouldn’t be surprised if someone stepped forward to take responsibility for this within the next couple of days before it all blows over on Google Blog Search.

I also find this to be an extremely bold move because I would assume that a conference like that would have lots of Social Media people there with cameras snapping and video cameras rolling. What are the odds that NOBODY caught this on tape? Also, the crowd appeared to be observant, yet disinterested. It seems like nobody pointed out the perp as he calmly walked away. I don’t know “how they do” in Munich, so it may be a common practice for people to spit on each other, so, to them, it was no big deal.

On top of that, you have to wonder what made the perp think he was going to get away with this scot-free. It doesn’t sound like a good plan to walk up to a guy who’s 6’4″ and spit in his face. It’s an ESPECIALLY BAD PLAN when that guy’s in a crowd and you don’t know who he’s with. So, it seems to me that whomever did this won’t be able to contain themselves and should be blabbing to their friends soon enough… Either that, or maybe someone DID catch it on tape…….

~Bill Cammack

Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
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What exactly *IS* a Social Media Expert?……

Over the last year or two, the terms Social Media Expert and Social Media Consultant and Social Media Strategist blah blah blah has become a staple in people’s bios. I had SME on my Linkedin profile for a while and then I removed it.

I removed it because too many people were using it and it didn’t mean anything anymore. I decided that I’d rather have people recognize me as a video editor, which is a concretely-defined craft, instead of one of the millions of SMEs that suddenly permeated the online world.

Recently, there have been a couple of situations that have caused people in the Social Media community to band together and point fingers at people and say “You’re a bad SME!” :D Unfortunately… In order to call someone out for doing the wrong thing, you have to have a DEFINITION of a Social Media Expert to begin with.

Vaporware

The problem with nailing down a definition for SMEs is that it’s actually an umbrella term. What I mean is, if I say I’m a video editor, and then you think to yourself “What does Bill Cammack do?”, your mind returns “He edits video”. If I say I’m a SME, your mind returns “…………………” because that term by itself doesn’t mean JACK. Read the rest of this entry »

Adrienne & Bill

So I’m chatting with Adrienne Brawley the other day, and we’re discussing web shows since we’re both shooters and editors. We were talking about my post Personal Brand? No Crossover, and the topic of internet show hosts came up.

I “matter-of-factly” mentioned how several female show hosts either ACTIVELY HIDE their boyfriends or whatever and some of them merely omit the fact that they’re in relationships, to which Adrienne replied something to the effect of “But the guys don’t have to say who they’re dating.”

That’s where I lost whatever point I was about to make, because all main & auxiliary mental power was diverted to attempting to recall even ONE instance where a guy was asked about that.

Once I realized I wasn’t going to be able to cite a single instance in the 2+ years I’ve been involved with internet shows, I started thinking about WHY I couldn’t come up with one. :) What I decided was,

Nobody Cares Who Guys Are Dating

According to my Quantcast demos, my site has a 65% female readership. BlogHer has 61% female readership. Rocketboom has 65% male readership. Digg has 58% male. Wallstrip has 56% male. Blip.tv has 51% male. The point is, that according to statistics, it’s mostly males that are watching internet shows (even though studies are saying there are actually more females on the net, they just don’t identify themselves in surveys as female).

So, basically, there are a lot of guys that watch these shows, and if you go to IRL conferences or at least look at the flickr sets from these conferences, you’ll see there are a ton of guys at these things as well. There really isn’t a lot of representation for the female population. So that’s one reason why there isn’t any pressure on guys to disclose their dating status. Nobody cares. Read the rest of this entry »

I just read this article by Sarah Lacy where she describes part of her journey into becoming a brand and then attempting to leverage her new positions. The pivotal paragraph for me was:

Sarah: That take-on-the-world morning, I was having coffee with Steven Levy, then of Newsweek, now of Wired, who challenged this whole idea of whether this “Sarah Lacy” brand was actually translating into things that mattered, like book sales, money, something real and tangible, or whether it was a just smokescreen of hype. And I granted his point. I’ve long been dubious of Internet celebrity’s staying power. It seems the Internet famous hit that moment where they’re on the Today Show, and just about to close a deal with ABC or HBO or pick the big money, you’ve-made-it acronym, but it never really materializes.

I’ve watched this happen several times since I entered the scene in 2006. Internet Celebrities attempting to take their game to the next level. The first, and most obvious example from the paragraph above being Amanda Congdon, formerly of Rocketboom fame, who went on to do Amanda Across America and then a derivative show for ABC where they attempted to emulate Rocketboom, but severely overproduced Amanda, stomping the life and fun out of the personality that she had brought to the Rocketboom anchor chair AND forcing 30-second pre-roll advertisements that had lots of people clicking off the site before they ever got to Amanda’s performance.

Another example would be Lisa Donavan (LisaNova), who went from YouTube to MADtv and then back to the internet. Then, there’s Ze Frank, who made up his own brand of show and viewer interaction, soared to immense popularity, deliberately quit his show after a calendar year and last I noticed, was on the lecture circuit.

So the question is whether the Personal Brand you’re creating “is actually translating into things that matter”. I touched upon this in August, 2008, in Conversion of “Cred”, but Sarah sums up my own personal experience here: Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 3:02 pm, I made a post about a client who didn’t pay me the money he owed me. Here is the Recent Visitor Map for just that one article, ~38 hours later (approximately a day and a half):

Click here to view 1048 x 857 image

This is Social Media in Action. “Reach” is now determined by how much time and effort you’re willing to put in to maintain your internet presence.

When it comes to determining “Reach”, the days of “who lives next to that person?” are OVER. The days of “Is he a radio personality or performer or some other type of celebrity?” are *OVER*. Connections are made and maintained virtually.

People are aligning themselves by values, aptitude & beliefs now, instead of by local territory and “Accident of Birth”. The “lines” are being re-drawn as people get to sample other people’s mentalities through reading their blogs, listening to their podcasts, watching their videos and selecting to find out more about people they feel in-tune with.

Jeff Pulver called it his “Social Media Living Room”. He was absolutely right. The people that you know live wherever they live, but we all come together, in various locations… virtual locations.

Sometimes, we meet up IRL, like @ PodCamps or BarCamps or SXSW or TweetUps or meetup.com or Gary’s Guide events. In the meantime, in between time, we’re reading each other’s blogs and communicating with other through social media sites like Twitter, Ning, Facebook, MySpace, etc etc etc. Read the rest of this entry »

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

Twitter > Bill

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

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

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

The question is: does it matter to the writer if the conversation takes place in other places? If the answer is no, the writer would have one strategy. If the answer is yes, it does matter and the preference is for the conversation to take place on their blog, well, that would take a different strategy, wouldn’t it?”

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

My friend Chris Brogan has inadvertently caused a stir. :D

From the little I’ve read about the situation, (you can read about it yourself, on Chris’ site) basically, he accepted a $500 gift card from Kmart to write a blog post about Kmart. He was completely transparent that he was writing a sponsored blog post. As part of the deal, he also received the opportunity to give away a second $500 Kmart gift card. Here’s what Chris says he did with the money:

“I realized really quickly that I could do two good things while satisfying the project request: I could give someone else a $500 gift card for the holidays, and I could use my shopping experience to buy toys for the Toys for Tots program. (My kids kept the jackets and my boy kept some pants.)”

This kind of thing was discussed AT LENGTH exactly one year ago, when Cheryl Colan made a post questioning Steve Woolf & Zadi Diaz‘s sponsorship & advertising practices with regard to their show Epic-FU in her post “What Up, New Media?”. Cheryl posted a video on that page speaking about her issues if you want the background on that 99-coment-long saga.

The point in both cases was whether bloggers or content creators can GET PAID and talk about products with integrity at the same time.

While I personally don’t see anything wrong with Chris getting paid to blog about something, I see the problems that some people are going to have with the situation. Read the rest of this entry »

Bill & Japanese Tech, originally uploaded by Bill Cammack.

Bill Cammack with Masami’s Japanese phone.

Note how it’s broad daylight outside, and the phone reads 2:58 am = Japanese time.

A lot of guys are paranoid that they’re going to lose their women or that they’re going to cheat on them with the next man. Those days are over. There’s a new sheriff in town… A new menace, threatening the raps and relationships of guys across the country and throughout the entire world. This menace needs to be recognized and STOPPED IN ITS TRACKS before it’s able to take down all of human civilization….

Fellaz!!! Gather together in UNITY, against our COMMON ENEMY!!!

TECH!!! :(

Morpheus: We don’t know who struck first. Us or them. But we do know it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power. It was believed they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun……

Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony…..

Now, I know you’re probably laughing and you think The Kid’s trippin’, but hold on to your hats. I have evidence! :D

I didn’t think anything of it at the time… but NINE MONTHS AGO, back in January, 2008, I was at a TweetUp and tried to take this picture:

Now… Joyce, Julia, Jesse and myself are all looking right at the camera. That would appear to indicate that the photographer had called everyone’s attention to the fact that a picture was about to be taken… But Wait A Minute!!!… Where’s LAURA looking? That’s right… at TECH. Now, in case you thought she wasn’t AWARE that a picture was being taken, look how she has that “I’m about to be in a picture” smile on her face… YET she CAIN’T tear herself away from TECH to fully engage the photographer with everyone else. :/

Like I said, I didn’t think anything of it at the time. It was just a funny aspect of one of my myriad Flickr pictures.

So fast forward six months to June, 2008. I go to a NNN / Tumblr Rock Band party, and I’m trying to talk to Michelle:

BOOM! Look at that! TECH rears its ugly head again! See the disparity? A brotha’z gettin’ his DRINK on, and a sistah’z gettin’ her TECH on! You see where this is going? This is a serious problem, guys. :(

So a couple of weeks later, still in June 2008, (even though Mike jacked up the shot, and you can’t see the TECH), I’m trying to get Lux’s attention, but nooooooooo… TECH wins AGAIN! :(

So the last straw, and where I realized this post needed to be written, was three months after that, in September, 2008. I attended TechSet, and Bryan wanted to take a picture of Chrissie & The Kid:

Photo by Bryan Thatcher

Notice how I’m already posing, the shot is already framed and the flash is mounted on the camera and working properly. Meanwhile, Chrissie’s FULL ATTENTION is on TECH, except for the motor skills she’s siphoned off to tell me something that was probably “Right after I finish Twittering…” :/

Now, to all of my friends’ credit, I have great, non-Tech-cockblocked pictures with Michelle, Lux, Laura AND Chrissie, hahaha :D Still… The problem has been REVEALED and must be ADDRESSED!

If your girl seems distant, do NOT blame the next man… blame TECH! :(
If your girl is late to meet you somewhere, BLAME TECH!
If your girl doesn’t show up AT ALL, it’s probably because TECH changed the location in her calendar application.
If your girl doesn’t answer her phone, it’s probably because TECH is redirecting *YOUR* calls to her voicemail.
Every time your girlfriend “dialed you with her ass”, that was TECH calling you up to inform you how good a time she was having WITHOUT. YOU!

Get the picture? Guys, we have GOT to band together, before it’s too late!!!

If you STILL don’t believe me… Did you notice that the next big thing is called… ANDROID?

Check these guys out! hahaha “Hi ………… Wel Come To Moun Tain View California…… I Am Spea King Here At Goo Gle’s Headquarters” hahaha

I guarantee you the android phones will steal their women, ASAP. Watch! :D

Go ahead and keep sleeping, dudes, but when it happens TO YOU… Just remember that The Kid warned you to keep your girl FAR. AWAY. FROM. TECH!

If she wants to go to Cancun with her girlfriends, no problem. If she wants to get a new Tech Gadget, *VETO* that ish WITH THA QUICKNEZZ!!! :D

~Bill

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