One of the things I find laughable about Social Media is that it’s sold to people that don’t know anything about Social Media.

This makes it possible for people who are ABSOLUTE GARBAGE at creating and maintaining their own online presence to make money telling other people how THEY should represent themselves or their companies online.

I’m not the type of person to knock the next man’s hustle, but that’s exactly what it is.. A HUSTLE. Smoke & Mirrors.

There are LOTS of people who are legitimate and present great solutions to their clients, but some people are just embarrassingly horrible at Social Media and still they’re heralded as gurus amongst their fans.

Presence Management

I was walking with a friend the other day and we were across the street from a store. I pointed the store out to her and she read the name of it from the letters that spanned the top of the storefront. I balked when she said the name, because something sounded odd to me. I knew it wasn’t her accent, so I looked at the store again and told her what the real name was…

The reason I had to tell her the name was that I had seen the store when it first opened and she was seeing it now for the first time in life. Between now and then, A. LETTER. HAD. FALLEN. OFF. OF. THE. BUILDING. AND. THE. OWNER. DIDN’T. HAVE. THE. PRIDE. IN. HIS/HER. OWN. STORE. TO. REPLACE. IT.!!! :/

There was no way my friend could have correctly pronounced the name without the missing letter. There was also no way she could have known the letter was missing from that distance. This is someone’s STORE that they want you to ENTER and BUY items from. That letter has been missing from that sign FOR YEARS, and regardless of how much income the owner receives, he or she refuses to replace the letter and restore the sign to its original quality. The NAME of the store!… The owner doesn’t care about the public’s perception of the store that they’re hoping to make money from.

This is what I see when I go to certain so-called Social Media Experts’s sites. Garbage. Eyesores. They have the nerve to tell you that they’re going to help *YOU* with your internet presence when their own presence is entirely unacceptable.

Conversion Of Cred

What’s laughable about this is that people actually need a consultant to tell them which consultants are doing the right thing. Since I knew what the sign was SUPPOSED TO SAY, I was able to instruct my friend as to what the store was actually called. Similarly, people approach supposed SMEs for help, consulting and guidance and they don’t realize that the people they’re hiring aren’t any good, but just happen to suck a little less than they do. They would be better off asking someone who they TRUST to point them in the right direction instead of hiring someone based on their number of Twitter followers or some other useless statistic that’s held up as an indicator of proficiency in Social Media.

It’s supposed to be a big deal and SO GOOD for your company if you have a bunch of Twitter followers. SO GOOD for your company if you have a bunch of Facebook fans. As of this week, SO GOOD if you have a bunch of followers on Google Buzz. The problem is that a lot of these people don’t tell you what you’re supposed to DO with your bunch of followers.. because they don’t know themselves. O_o

These SMEs have all these people supposedly in their pocket, yet they can’t convert them into ANYTHING useful. They don’t convert into video views. They don’t convert into blog post hits (CPM). They don’t convert into live stream audiences. They don’t convert into click-throughs (CPC). They don’t convert into actions (CPA). They don’t convert into sales (CPS). They don’t even convert into people that might sit down and have a beer with you when you come to their town.

The reason they can’t convert is that they have no idea what they’re doing with Social Media because they spend all their time name-dropping, reading about new technology, reading other people’s OPINIONS about new technology, blabbering about nothing on microblogging sites and shilling for companies while spending No. Time. In. The. Trenches. None. The same sites they’re telling you to be a part of?.. They’re not on them themselves. They don’t have any time to USE the technology because they spend all their time trying to make money with Social Media by telling YOU to do what THEY’RE NOT EVEN DOING! O_o

Do As I Say…

That person that told you to get on Ustream or BlogTV or Qik or Livestream or Tinychat or Tokbox?.. When was the last time you saw THEM do a live show? Usually Never. That person that told you you needed to be on Blip or YouTube or Vimeo?.. What have you seen THEM do with internet video? Usually Nothing. That person that told you they were going to build a website for you?.. What does THEIR website look like? Their business site? Their personal site?

That person that told you to get on Facebook?.. How often do you see THEM on Facebook? Did you notice that everything you see with their name on it has been AUTOMATICALLY. REPOSTED. FROM. TWITTER. and that they’re not actually on Facebook at all, except as another repository for followers? Have you noticed that they never comment on or even click “LIKE” on anything you or anybody else you know ever wrote? Have you noticed that they never respond to any Facebook responses they received from their auto-posted material? How is that a Facebook presence? How is that helping THEM? What do they know about Facebook that they’re going to turn around and instruct YOU to create an account there?

That person that told you to get on Twitter or Jaiku or Pownce or Buzz? What are THEY contributing to their community when they post? Usually Nothing.. Regurgitating links to other people’s posts or other people’s ideas with no ORIGINAL CONTENT whatsoever. How is it humanly possible that they’re following hundreds of thousands of people when spending only one second per update would mean they can only read 3,600 posts in an hour, FORGET ABOUT thinking about that post and/or typing a response. Do these people spend an hour a day reading Twitter? Four hours? Eight? When do they do their actual work then?

What does the discussion look like that follows what they write? Who cares enough to chime in? Do the commenters know anything about the topic, or are they just fanbois going “ME TOO!.. ME TOO!”? Who’s even paying attention to their posts? How many of their “followers” represent currently active Twitter accounts? What’s been the tangible result of any “Call To Action” they’ve ever made on Twitter? How many people watched their video? How many people arrived to watch their live stream?

That person that told you you need a blog?.. What does THEIR blog look like? Original content? Paraphrasing stuff they just read on Mashable?

What do their comments look like? Is the blogger even PRESENT in his or her own comment stream? O_o Do they even READ the comments they get on their posts? Do they respond intelligently or AT ALL?

Do they even CARE whether anyone comments on their page, or are they just interested in getting the retweets, shares and reblogs?

How much time do they spend interacting with their own community?.. The people that cared enough to read their blog and then bless them by joining in the conversation?

Do they even bother to check whether the comments they’re getting are from real people? How many times have you gone to a blog and there are 13 comments on the thread and 11 of them are obvious spam? Do you have your system set up like mine, where I get an email every single time someone posts a comment on my blog? Are you getting the emails from your blog, or are you just not reading them? Do you care what your blog looks like? Are you planning to fix the sign on the front? If not, you’re not the right person for SOMEONE ELSE to hire for Social Media work, are you?

Also.. If you’re a blogger and happen to be illiterate, instead of hiring someone to make you a custom theme and incorporate fancy pictures of yourself, hire a proofreader. I know this is slightly problematic because if you don’t know the difference between “there”, “their”, and “they’re”, you can’t very well tell that you need HELP in order to know that you should hire someone to fix that for you before you announce your level of education to the world.

Educated Decisions

The first thing you want to do if someone wants you to pay them to do ANYTHING is see examples of their work. If they’re going to paint, you want to see something they painted that’s similar to the job you want done. Social Media offers you the double-opportunity to judge someone’s potential worth to your company by a) seeing what they’ve done for others and more importantly, b) what they’ve done for themselves.

If you’re telling me that your company creates websites and YOUR website is garbage, you’re a clown. If you’re telling me you’re a video editor and there’s no tangible evidence that you ever edited anything for anybody in this lifetime, you’re a clown. If you’re telling me that you can bring crowds to your clients’ shows and you can’t bring crowds to your own live streams, you’re a clown.

The second thing you want to do when someone offers you a Social Media strategy is ask them “WHY?”.

WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY? Keep asking them that until you’re satisfied with the answer. If you know you’re not smart enough to know what the answer should be, hire a consultant to help you find the right Social Media group to hire for your project. Too many people ask me uneducated or perhaps MISeducated questions like “How much traffic will I get when we make this site?” and “How many people can I count on to watch my video if I put it on YouTube?” because people are running around pumping it up like you win some kind of prize just for creating a presence in the space.

What should I do? Make a Twitter account. Why? So people can follow you. Why? So you can look popular and sought-after, speak to people and listen to what they say back to you. What people? Any people. Why would I want to talk to random people about my business? So you can make them aware of your business and then advertise your goods & services to them. How do I specifically advertise to Twitter people local to me who need my Elite Lawn Mowing Services? You have to advertise to everyone and hope word gets around. For that, why don’t I spend my money on flyers and hand them out around my town? Good idea.

Time, Money, Energy, Resources

Social Media is a vehicle. It’s an opportunity for you to express yourself to people that otherwise would never have heard of you or your ideas or your business.

What they don’t tell you is that HAVING a presence isn’t enough. You have to MAINTAIN your presence.

If you’re going to make a blog, you have to POST CONTENT on your blog. Photo set? Post photos. Social Media community (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Ning…)? Get involved.

You can spend as much money as you want on a car, and it won’t be too useful to you or your company without a driver. That driver has to be YOU or someone you hire to.. Oh… I forgot the ever-useful INTERN! :D

It’s another Social Media staple to get interns to do all the work for your supposedly-professional company. If you hire interns to do the work, your company will output intern-quality work. If you don’t hire video editors to edit video, you get what you pay for. If you don’t hire illustrators to customize your website, you get what you pay for.

Anyway… No. You’re not going to get any traffic just by having a website created for you. You’re not going to get any views just by uploading a video to YouTube. You have to create the presence, create the content, properly post the content, advertise the content, start the conversation and then maintain the conversation while simultaneously creating new content, beginning the cycle again before the first cycle ends.

Social Media is extremely time-consuming. It’s not “Set it and forget it”. SOMEBODY’S got to maintain it, keeping your internet presence fresh and relevant. A Social Media strategy doesn’t END with creation any more than the Indy 500 ends when a driver’s mechanics BUILD his car. Don’t let these people gas your head up that if you pay them to create accounts for you on Facebook, Ustream, Twitter and YouTube, your company’s going to be on the road to the riches.

Ask them WHY?… What’s going to happen AFTER you create your accounts? What’s necessary as far as time, money & resources to MAINTAIN your internet presence? If they can’t tell you that, either hire someone different to handle the Social Media for your company or get ready for the letters to fall off your store.

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Yesterday, there was an horrible earthquake in Haiti that measured 7.0 on the Richter scale‎. We won’t know until the sun comes up how horrible it was, because electricity AND telephone service was knocked out.

My long time friend and college homeboy, Pascal Antoine is Haitian. He founded and has been maintaining a website called HaitiXchange.com for a lot of years now.

I normally don’t watch the news at all, but I’ve been fascinated by the recent trend of channels showing 3% news and 97% punditry (people giving their OPINIONS about what the news means instead of showing us a bunch more news stories). So I turn on the television around 8pm and flip to CNN, where the slot says “Campbell Brown”, so I’m like “*yawn* Here we go!”, and she has a different look on her face and the marquis below her reads something like “Hospital Collapses In Haiti”.

The fact that I randomly flipped to a channel and they were DELIVERING news instead of GIVING THEIR OPINIONS about the news told me this was something serious.. On top of the fact that there are only three news stories that any of the channels are talking about at any given time. ‘Matter of fact, they just brought back the White House party crashers! :/

So anyway, I was like “I need to make sure my homeboy Pascal heard about this! :O”. So I punch up his number on the cell, and he’s like “Hello?”. I’m like “Yo. It’s Bill”. He goes “My friend Bill just called me…” and I’m like WTF is he talking about??? :D

So I’m like “Listen man. I’m watching CNN and they said a hospital collapsed in Haiti..” and then I’m listening to what he’s saying and I realize he’s got to be broadcasting on the air, live. hahaha I thought I was offering him a SCOOP and here he was already broadcasting the latest information to his HaitiXchange viewers! :D

Realizing what time it was, I hustled off the phone with him and pulled up his site on my computer where he was using Livestream (formerly Mogulus) to embed live video & audio on his homepage like I do on http://billcammack.com/live/. I was like “SWEET!!!”….. until the embed informed me that he had already reached the maximum number of viewers on his stream…..

When I saw this, I first thought it was some kind of Fail Whale, like Twitter loves to do, so I refreshed the page and it gave me the exact same message. Now, I was like WHAT. THE. ****?!?!?!?!?!?! I couldn’t believe it. What the hell is a maximum amount of viewers to a ******* live stream? :/

I found the answer in the Livestream FAQ:

“My channel is limited to 50 viewers, why is this?”
When you create a new Livestream Free channel, it is by default unverified,which means that you can stream to a maximum of 50 concurrent viewers at a time, and that your channel is not listed in the Livestream Channel Guide. Verification is designed to give all of our best producers maximum exposure, and to ensure consistent quality and compliance, throughout the Livestream Network.
To apply for verification first, make sure your content complies with the Livestream Terms of Use
Next, log into the Livestream Account Center. In the channels tab you will see the Verification status of each of your Livestream Free channels. To Verify a channel, click on the link and fill out the Livestream Free Channel Verification Application.

So, at least this was Pascal’s fault and not an imposed limitation by Livestream (disclosure: I have friends that work for Livestream). I used to use the service lightly when it was called Mogulus, but I pretty much stick to Ustream because it’s simple, reliable, I can broadcast to it live from my g1 (google phone) at any time, and relevant to this topic, I’ve seen HUNDREDS of people able to simultaneously watch a stream.

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So anyway, I kept hitting ‘refresh’ until someone’s connection dropped and I got in. Pascal was sitting there on camera, laptop open, cell phone in hand, taking calls from people who had LITERALLY the latest information. A friend of his, Francois, I believe, was there in Pascal’s studio speaking to his sister in Haiti who suddenly reported that another aftershock was just starting. Another guy was calling from Peru, I believe, and he was in touch with ham radio operators who were broadcasting information from Haiti. I put in my two cents by typing hyperlinks into the meebo chat that was embedded under Pascal’s live video and letting people know via Twitter & Facebook that we were getting up-to-the-minute info over @ HaitiXchange.

I stayed tuned in because this was really fascinating. This was FOR the people, BY the people. No spin. No Executive Producers. Purely people that were concerned about the situation and trying to do whatever they could to get a handle on the situation. Telephone service was basically nonexistent. Some people were able to communicate because they were down @ the Red Cross where they were able to share an internet connection with potentially THOUSANDS of people looking for refuge or aid. The chat room was buzzing. People were calling in from all over the place with the exact same story that they weren’t able to contact their families in Haiti. Rumors went around that Hotel Montana had been destroyed and that a rapper associated with Wyclef Jean named “Jimmy O” had died in the earthquake. People were concerned about their friends from the HaitiXchange forums that currently live in Haiti and that they hadn’t heard from since the earthquake hit. Pascal’s pops called his cell phone to make sure he was ok and see whether Pascal was in Haiti or in the USA…

This was international community coming together, communicating, brainstorming & consoling each other when it really counts. Instead of people being absolutely alone wherever they were, they had a site where they could get information they didn’t have and share information they did have. To Me, that’s one of the best things about Social Media. Yeah, it’s all cute that people get to shill for their businesses and try to make some money *yawn* but way more importantly, you don’t have to sit around watching some television channel that has zero interest in a situation other than the fact that it’s “breaking news” and they know they’re going to get ratings by talking about it. You get to be there when the people that are being affected reach out to each other and come together for the common good.

The sun still isn’t up yet, so we’ll know more in a few hours about the extent of the devastation. Good Luck to everyone that has friends, family & loved ones in Haiti and especially in Port-au-Prince that they’re safe but just without the ability to communicate. I’m sure that cell phones were left inside houses when people fled, phones and computers have run out of batteries, electricity’s failed to modems & routers… Keep the faith that they may be minus some material possessions, but they’re hopefully alive and as well as they possibly could be in this extreme situation.

Good Luck to the people of Haiti…

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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A year ago, on January 06, 2008, I wrote and posted “Do NOT Tamper With Your Comments!”. At the time, I offered “Turn On Moderation” as an alternative:

Bill: “Turn On Moderation – Make it so that NOBODY’S comments make it to personalblog or widgetblog unless YOU approve them. That way, when everything ends up positive, you just look like you spun the situation by only letting the comments through that you liked. This is DIFFERENT from changing people’s posts because there’s never anything negative for people to see in the first place, AND dissenting comments don’t become agreeing comments with the same person’s name on the top, posted at the exact same time.”

I wrote that line at a time when I wasn’t doing a lot of commenting on other people’s blogs. I hadn’t achieved a perception of the potential effects of “You *just* look like you spun the situation by only letting the comments through that you liked” on people who visit your blog and make comments that never get approved. Let me tell you about it.

Initial Perception

Initially, when I check out a blog for the first time, I’m thinking that the person who wrote the posts is looking for A DISCUSSION. I’m thinking that if they didn’t want A DISCUSSION, they would have turned off comments.

Actually, one of the very first times I ever posted on someone else’s blog, it was a dating blog and the woman had written flawed advice. With my naive way of thinking about blogs as sort of “personally-hosted forums”, I wrote a nice long comment about what was incorrect about her ideas. To her credit, she emailed me my words, when she could have just deleted them. Hats Off to her for that. :) My ideas could have been lost in space, because I had written them directly to her blog entry form. Last time I ever did *THAT*.

She emailed me my words and explained to me that she wasn’t going to host my ideas about her post on HER site, and if I wanted to, I should place them on MY site. At the time, I wasn’t hip to trackbacks and pingbacks. I had a short email discussion with her expressing my opinion that I thought she was lame for having a blog and ONLY approving comments that made her look good. Pretty soon after that, I found out that this is pretty much status quo. She represents the mainstream and I’m “odd man out” on this issue.

So I approach blogs that are new to me with the naive perception that what I’m looking at represents reality. I feel like the blog post itself is the same blog post that people responded to in the comments and hasn’t been altered after the fact, unless a note is placed there, saying what the edit was. I also assume that the comments represent the honest and factual response of “the community” to the post.

Moderation Experiment

This weekend, I got to experiment with the much-discussed faux pas (which many have termed *BLUNDER* or worse) which I’ve seen called “MemphisGate” (so funny!) or the TheKeyInfluencer situation. You can read about the actual events here, but the point is that A LOT OF PEOPLE felt like putting their two cents in on this situation, which meant I got to post on a bunch of blogs I’ve never heard of before.

Most of my comments went right through, without moderation. Some of them landed in moderation and were eventually approved. Others landed in moderation and then never saw the light of day.

When this happens… When your posts “disappear”, there could be several reasons for this:

1. It was the weekend, and the human moderator only pays attention to their site during weekdays = EPIC FAIL
2. The software never sent out the notification that there was a new comment in moderation
3. The human moderator gets too much email, etc to be able to handle everything = EPIC FAIL
4. The human moerator didn’t think they would LOOK GOOD with your comment on their page, OR they knew damned well that they didn’t have a rebuttal to what you said, so they chose not to approve your comment.

There are more possibilities, but let’s consider how someone might perceive you IF they choose to believe that you didn’t allow your post on their site because it makes them look bad or brings up points they never considered and have no counter-argument against….

All of a sudden, your site is now a show. It’s spin. It’s not an honest representation of “the community”‘s thoughts about what you posted. There’s no need to read your comments, because the best we can hope for is HALF of the story. It’s like reading the recommendations section on linkedin. The only comments there are going to be BENEFICIAL to that person.

So now, we have to wonder WHY you’re only accepting SOME comments and rejecting others. Is it that you really didn’t think out what you posted, and you’re not prepared to intelligently debate it? hmmmmmm……

Like I said in “Social Media Experts? (SMEs)”, there are a lot of DERIVATIVE posters on the internet. Basically what they do is Ambulance-Chase and blog about whatever the current hot topic is in hopes that they might get some traffic. Apparently, we’re living in a “me too” culture, where people see a chance and then hop on the bandwagon and go ME TOO! ME TOO! without really having anything intelligent to ADD to the discussion. The problem with doing that is that when people bring up things you never considered and that you have NO REBUTTAL FOR because you stole someone else’s ideas in the first place, you can’t say ANYTHING without looking even worse, so the best deal is to make sure that post is never seen at all on your site.

What Difference Does This Make?

The reason this is important is that discussions jump off immediately on the internet, and then you have a small window of time to get your two cents in before people forget about it entirely and move on to the next instant scandal. If someone says “I don’t like X” and then you type “This is why X happened” and hit enter and then see “Your comment is awaiting moderation” and then your comment never sees the light of day, you’ve wasted the time it took you to think up and write that post… AND you may have lost the idea ENTIRELY if the comment’s never approved. Even if your comment shows up two days later… It’s too late. The conversation’s already over. People have already decided that you didn’t have anything to say.

So… While the blog poster gets to look self-righteous because he or she said what they said and gathered a bunch of comments which either agree wholeheartedly, offer neutral points or offer “softball” negative points which the blog owner can easily knock back out of the park, the person who the story was about and the people who don’t see things the way the blog owner does are SOL.

From the side of the blog owner, it’s important to note that you’re losing credibility when people realize you’re just gathering positive statements about yourself. We start to wonder how many OTHER people posted comments that disagreed with you and were deleted… Did they actually OUTNUMBER the positive comments you allowed through moderation? One never knows…

The Solution

Initially, I was going to write this post as a fruitless campaign to get people who moderate their comments to SAY. SO. ABOVE. THE. COMMENT. BOX. so we can avoid wasting time posting something that isn’t going to be seen while the point’s being hotly contested.

Personally, I would LOVE to have that warning so I could:
a) read the post,
b) NOT read any of the positively-skewed comments and
c) move on to the next blog ASAP.

Some people REALLY aren’t diligent about monitoring their blogs, and in fact, their blogs aren’t important to them, but actually something peripheral OR even merely an extension of their job. There has to be a better solution than WONDERING whether your post is going to be approved SOON or AT ALL.

The solution is to have your own Public Relations Machine well oiled and ready to roll at a moment’s notice.

This way, regardless of where or when something jumps off that you need to address, people who decide to Google your name can find out where you represent yourself on the net and go there right now to find out if you’ve made any responses to the current “tempest in a teacup” (hahaha What a great term! :D ).

A good combination of blogging, microblogging and videoblogging or perhaps live streaming would serve this purpose very well.

If the problem’s on Twitter, address it there, leaving “@-comments” for people whose attention need to be called to the fact that you’ve responded in a decisive and timely manner.

If the problem’s on someone’s blog, write your own blog post and make sure you include a trackback to their site. If their site doesn’t accept trackbacks, leave a comment on their site with a link to your site. Unfortunately, you run back into the same “I don’t want dissenting ideas on my blog” issue, but even if your comment and link aren’t approved, you’re still self-expressed and your ideas are still SOMEWHERE on the net for people to find if they care to search for more information about the situation.

There are lots of live streaming solutions to choose from. My current weapon of choice is Ustream (even though I hope they VASTLY improve their co-hosting setup), because it’s quick to set up, rock solid for signal reliability IME (several times, I’ve been “on the air” for six hours at a time without incident) and people don’t have any issues watching from The UK, France, Israel, The USA… AND they’re working on an app to make Ustream available on iPhones, which is going to be a game-changer, for sure. :D

The obvious benefit of being able to “go live” at any time is that anyone who’s interested can make their way on over to your site and hear your explanation “straight from the horse’s mouth”. Also, new posts will be popping up even as you speak, so interested parties can find them, link them in the text chat and the discussion can jump off onto that tangent.

That’s not a good solution for everyone, though haha.. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll probably end up looking WORSE instead of BETTER by live streaming, so if that’s the case, skip audio & video and stick to text where you can craft your ideas, PROOFREAD THEM and run them by assiociates or advisors before you post them to the WORLD. WIDE. WEB. :D

~Bill Cammack

Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
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Thanks *ENTIRELY* to becoming aware of Jonny Goldstein and his show Reinventing Television in October, 2006, I’ve been doing live shows for almost two years now.

At this point, doing live shows has become a fad. Justin.TV, LiveVideo, Yahoo Live, Mogulus, Operator11, BlogTV, Ustream, Stickam, is YouTube doing live video now? There are tons of people doing live shows now, but to what effect? For what purpose?

I streamed several sessions live from PodCampNYC 2.

I do live shows from my “Live” page:

I still follow and participate in Jonny’s shows on BlogTV:

IME, There are only two reasons to do a show live. 1) You’re broadcasting time-sensitive information, or 2) You want your audience to be able to interact live with the hosts & guests.

Time-Sensitive Programming

Time-sensitive information would be the new Apple announcements as they’re occurring or maybe a sporting event like a football game or an MMA event. Basically, it’s a replacement for people not being able to travel to that location and view it themselves, in person. This is why I was streaming sessions from PodCampNYC. There were people in other towns that I was in communication with that were interested in seeing what was going on in NYC *while* it was going on.

In this case, there was communication with me, but not with the people doing the panels. The idea was to give the experience of “being there”. Then again, *I* was the one doing the show, not the panelists, so there actually WAS direct interaction with the host.

Most of the services I mentioned will save your video for you as an archive. This means that if your information isn’t time-sensitive, more people will watch the archive asynchronously than will tune in at that particular day and time to watch your show live. The only incentive they have to tune in live is reason #2.

Audience Participation

The only reason to bother tuning in to an internet show at a particular time instead of watching it whenever you get around to it is that you’re going to have a different experience during the live show than you have watching the archive.

George Kelly did a live show on Yahoo a few months back that I thought was really enjoyable and well-done. George plays guitar, and instead of having people tune in to watch him play whatever he had already decided, he was taking requests from the chat room. Automatically, there was value added, because the show was being created on the fly. Meanwhile, the text-chatters were socializing amongst themselves. George was in and out of attention to the chat room and “a fine time was had by all”. :D

Jonny Goldstein‘s shows are fun because he does them consistently and has built up a “studio audience” that’s gotten to know each other via his show and maintained our relationships via other formats of social media. Jonny’s very attentive to the chat room, and he’s more of a facilitator of conversation than someone that just sits there talking to a guest as if there’s no live audience.

The reason I was thinking about this is that as stingy as companies are in trying to leverage pre-recorded video and UGC (User-Generated Content), I can’t see *WHY* they would turn around and waste their money making LIVE shows that are the exact same experience as the saved archive. Where’s the ROI? Are there really so many extra people tuning in to the live show that it justifies the expenditure? Isn’t it just preaching to the choir? For that, assemble the same hosts & guests, turn a video camera on, turn it back off, edit & upload that video and you’ll have just as many people watching it while retaining ducats in your video budget to create some worthwhile programming.

Perhaps ask yourself “What difference does it make if my audience watches my show live versus if they watch it later today?” or “What difference does it make if my audience watches this show next Tuesday, or next month?” If the answer is *NONE*, then save your money and focus on pre-recorded content.

~Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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