I joined Twitter a little over two years ago, around the time of SXSW 2007. I was already about a year behind its launch. I wrote Twitter Has “Ruined” My Life in June 2007. This picture is on that post, and includes Mike, Justin, Anil, Kenyatta, Debbie, Grace, Eric & myself and was taken by Jared. I fully expect to see 5 if not 6 of these same people later today at an IRL get-together.. two years later:

Photo Credit: Jared Klett

The reason I joined Twitter is the same reason I joined any Social Media site. There were people that I ALREADY KNEW that started using a new site, app or tool and I wanted to be involved in this new (and hopefully BETTER and INNOVATIVE) way to contact them or keep up with what they’re doing. What that did was give Twitter a particular flavor for me. It was the place where I went to receive up-to-the-minute information about people that I was keeping in contact with anyway via newsgroups or forums or email or their blogs or whatever.

The first thing I did was stop looking at the public timeline. Some people are fascinated with what random people have to say about random topics. I’m not one of those people. It’s very nice that someone in France saw a bird. I was interested in ‘hearing’ about who was trying to find a cab in Austin Texas to get from one SXSW party to another or that someone had a question or answer about videoblogging or editing or some other topic I was interested in. This is because I joined Twitter following certain people, meaning they were going there, so I wanted to be there too. Granted, it was about 50 people, but I already knew from prior experience with them what I was going to hear from them, and that’s what I was ‘buying’ into.

I remember standing on a line at nighttime, waiting to get into a party (which I normally don’t do, but this was extenuating circumstances), and I happened to be standing behind a few civilians (people not deeply involved in the internet) who started talking about what they had Twittered. One of the gals had announced that she went shopping. Another one had announced that they were going to be coming to this party that we were waiting for. I remember thinking “ah… THESE are public-timeline-people” and considering how all of us standing there use the same service but will never be in contact with each other, because they’re talking about NOTHING! Or, I should say, all the rest of THEM will never be in contact with ME. They’ll have their little pocket of people to communicate with and share stories about ice cream parlors and the mall. I remember being glad that everyone has their own set of people they Twitter with and having absolutely ZERO INTEREST in any of them becoming a follower of mine on Twitter.

Fast-Forward to July 2009 and all the civilians are running around trying to get more Twitter followers. Huh? They don’t care who you are. They don’t care what you do. They don’t care what you said… or IF you said anything at all. Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow. The clear focus is quantity over quality… like as if you get a prize for having a certain amount of Twitter followers.

I understand why this is, to a degree. For a lot of people, Twitter is their first opportunity at feeling what it’s like to be popular. The concept of one-to-many communication is fascinating and enticing. People can send a message from their phone on a bus somewhere and be heard all over the world, or at least by all of their followers at the same time, even if they’re all locals. You can tell a joke and 10 people might “lolol” at it. You can be the first one to break news about a bridge falling down or a plane landing in water. Normally, the only people who would hear you are people who you could physically tell, or people who read your blog after the time it takes you to post it and the time it takes them to check it and read it. All of a sudden, you get to feel like thousands of people care what YOU have to say. I see why people have become addicted to that feeling.

Personally, while I fully APPRECIATE the fact that randoms read my material, I’m most interested in what the people who know what I’m talking about and go through the same things I go through think and have to say about what I post. Right now, I have 2,586 Twitter followers and I’m following 895 people (which is STILL too many people to follow and actually read what everyone has to say). I know people with TENS OF THOUSANDS of followers who are also following that same number of people back! :O … Obviously, they’re using Twitter for a different purpose and experience than I am, but at those numbers, it’s clear that the vast majority of those people being “followed” are actually being IGNORED due to so many posts coming through on each refresh that most of them are flooded off the bottom of the stack before ever having a chance to be seen. Also, if someone COULD read thousands of posts a day, that would mean that they weren’t WORKING and were about to get FIRED from their jobs.

So this is what’s fascinating and annoying to me about the evolution of Twitter, or maybe it’s not evolution, but that the lunatics are now running the asylum. Every show you turn on, some civilian is talking about Twitter and trying to sound intelligent when they’re reading off of the teleprompter and don’t even know the proper inflection to put on words. They SHOULD be embarrassed, but they’re not, because they know that nobody else watching their report knows anything more than they do about the topic.

Twitter addresses are becoming like phone numbers to the civilians. They’re treating this like as if having 2,586 followers means that I have 2,586 people’s phone numbers or 2, 586 people’s ear when I want to talk about politics (which is never) or sell them something or have them all tune in to one of my live broadcasts. Not only is that completely untrue, but with all these people running around trying to get followers by adding everyone in creation, your list of followers is incredibly diluted by people seeking that virtually anonymous fame / acknowledgment. I think the funniest / most pathetic part of this is when people add you and then you delay checking their profiles for a few days, and by the time you do, they’ve already UNFOLLOWED YOU! :D This is completely ridiculous and shows you who only added you in the hopes you would add them back and inflate their fake popularity ranking of Twitter followers.

Is any of this a problem? No. I still follow the same core of people I’ve been following from 2007 to 2009. I’ve added people along the way whom I’ve found to be interesting online or that I’ve met IRL and shared good times with. :) I add some people because their bios look interesting or indicate that they might have something to say that I might want to hear or that they might have an answer to a question that *I* have, should they choose to follow me back. It’s just interesting, seeing people coming to the table these days with ZERO sense of community, looking to win a blue ribbon for having the most people follow them in the least amount of time or gaining people that they can peddle their wares to online. *yawn*

There are lots of interesting new people showing up as well, diving into Twitter head-first with valuable, RELEVANT information. Hopefully, they’ll be able to separate the wheat from the chaff and find good groups of people to interact with efficiently & productively. I used to subscribe to the concept of “follow everyone that follows you”, but as I said, that became too many people to honestly follow, so I pared it down to ~700 and now it’s back up to ~900. I’ve been using apps to set up groups, which helps.. but I think I need another subdivision so I can sort people by RELEVANCE and attempt to get back to the essence of what I loved about Twitter when I first started using it.

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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I was talking with my friend Remo last night and he asked me about Twitter. I’ve been on Twitter for over two years at this point. I posted about it back in June 2007 [link].

At some point, he asked me about its usefulness. As I travelled back mentally to when I first joined, I reconnected with the essence of Twitter’s usefulness to me.

At the time I became aware of Twitter, we were all hanging out on the Yahoo Videoblogging Group. South by SouthWest 2007 was in effect, and I got to follow along in essentially real-time as my friends couldn’t get cabs from one party to the next. From my command centre, I could keep up with things going on hundreds of miles away. Actually, I probably knew more than the people ‘on the ground’ did.

The value of Twitter for me was an acceleration of the interaction that was going on in the Videoblogging Group. Instead of sending a post, which was essentially an email, to a bunch of people and then waiting for them to be notified of it, read it, think about it, respond to it and then having to check back to see if I got an answer.. Suddenly, I could get responses to my queries immediately, if not sooner. Everybody that I was following was from our group, so everything I read was relevant and interesting to me, either on an educational or social level.

Flip Da Script

As we discussed the “right & proper” ways to utilize twitter, two camps evolved: “Follow people you want to hear from” and “Follow everyone that follows you [minus spammers]“. I basically joined the second camp. This had two important effects. My timeline had too many entries for me to follow because there were too many updates in each refresh, and the Twitter posts I was looking at were decreasingly relevant to anything at all. This meant that I had to search through MORE posts to find LESS relevant material, because there were only 10 pages of Twitter “archives” you could look through at the time.

So I made a second account, specifically to follow local NYC people. That was all well and good until everyone I was following stopped using twitter to announce where they were going. This was because there were no Twitter groups, so everything you said was available to whomever was following you, whether you wanted them to show up where you were hanging out or not.

Spammers

Meanwhile, people started spamming Twitter with “follows”. Some users would follow everyone in creation, hoping for a “follow back”. This was obvious, because the number of people they were following would be twice the number of people that were following them, or worse. These people continued to play the numbers game until they had spammed enough people to look like people actually cared what they were talking about. In reality, the people they spammed were happy to have someone follow them and followed back either out of courtesy or because they were in that second camp that I was in at the time of following people that followed you.

Useless

This is why your number of twitter followers doesn’t mean ISH! :D

You are being followed by people that have no idea what you do. You are being followed by people that have ZERO relevant information to contribute to your education or entertainment. You are being followed by people that flood the potentially relevant information off of your screen before you can possibly read, think about and react to it.

This is why people who claim to be following 60,000 people are full of ISH. I *guarantee* you that they are, because my timeline updates too quickly while I’m currently following 705 people. Even my group that I made specifically to listen to on TweetDeck moves too quickly, and that’s probably only 200 people.

I guarantee you it’s impossible for people to follow tens of thousands of people on Twitter, for two reasons. Updates will force most of those posts off the bottom of the queue before you even get the chance to see them and the time that it would take to read all of those posts, even if you could, would require you to sit in front of Twitter all day, reading irrelevant information and parsing it for something you could use. These people would literally do nothing else all day other than sit on Twitter, aggregate other people’s ideas and regurgitate them to their own followers.

Defunct Accounts

You can go on Twitter Karma and see your list of followers sorted by date of most recent update. At the time that I checked, when I was following ~2,400 people, there were quite a few that hadn’t updated in a full calendar year. Granted.. Some of those people may have blocked their data from being generally accessible, but upon random sampling of these accounts, they had literally updated 200 times or fewer and never used that account again. Also, that doesn’t mean that they’re not listening. It just means that they’re not sharing. It might also indicate that they’re currently using a different account.

Either way, the point is that one of your “followers” most likely doesn’t exist. They’re either not listening to you AT. ALL., or if they’re listening, they’re not responding or RTing (re-tweeting). I would estimate that around 200 out of my 2,400 followers at the time hadn’t updated in 2009, meaning at least for three months. Feel free to speculate about the numbers of defunct accounts for people that have 24,000 followers and 240,000 followers…

Evidence

If you’d like to check what your actual reach is as far as people following you on Twitter, start asking questions. See how many answers you get. Announce a live broadcast… See how many of your tens of thousands of followers tune in. Recently, I’ve seen popular Twitterers doing trivia contests, asking questions and handing out prizes. DO SOMETHING that demonstrates that that number on your Twitter home page actually translates to something tangible and something that isn’t an horrifically-low percentage of the people that have “subscribed to your channel”.

While you’re at it, ask a question that’s relevant to something useful to YOU. Ask about digital video data rates. Ask about replacement blades for your lawn mower. Ask about ANYTHING that’s not some generic audience participation exercise and see how useful your thousands upon thousands of Twitter followers are.

Influence

Having said all that.. Even if there are 20,000 defunct accounts out of 240,000, that still leaves 220,000 active accounts :D It’s possible that you have influence over 220,000 people that have no particular skill set or purchasing power. Of course, this has to be multiplied by the number of people that will RT what you posted.

In a generic sense, this is much better than my personal 2,381 followers (which is probably more like 1,000 followers). You are 100 times as likely to reach out to someone who will accept what you’re offering them.

Unfortunately, when you’re just some idiot that doesn’t specifically have anything of import to say, your followers are a function of that. This needs to be calculated into “influence”. If people follow you because you have a sexy avatar, for instance, that’s not going to be too useful to most advertisers. It’s not that you’re an authority on ANYTHING, so people aren’t going to be very likely to take your product endorsements to heart and actually buy the product.

Similarly, even if you ARE an authority on something, like video editing, that doesn’t mean that your influence is useful at all outside of that realm. In fact, your number of followers isn’t even an indication of the number of people that see you as an authority in video editing, because they might have followed you for other reasons.

Tools & Platforms

Ultimately, Twitter is a tool which affords you the opportunity to broadcast to other people what you know and what you do. If you don’t KNOW anything and you don’t DO anything, the number of twitter followers you have is completely meaningless. All these follow-back schemes are useless, because there’s no point in having 15,000 people follow you who are just as clueless as you are. Nobody’s going to pay you to advertise to your “Clueless Nation’. Nobody’s going to see you as an authority and hire you to do something because you have X amount of Twitter followers.

Your best bet is to stop crying about how many followers you have or don’t have and demonstrate originality and usefulness to the community and get your props the old fashioned way…

EARN IT!

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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I’ve been tagged by Jane Quigley for this 4X4 meme. You’re given 4 questions and you need to give 4 answers, then tag 4 people. The list of people I’ve tagged and the list of questions are at the bottom of this post.

4 Jobs I’ve had
1) Video Editor: The Charlie Rose Show
2) Video Editor: Bloomberg Information Television
3) Video Editor: Full Frontal Fashion
4) Video Editor: Living It Up with Patti LaBelle

4 Things I’ve done in the last 4 years
1) Became involved in Videoblogging
2) Met new friends that currently reside in England, Japan, Hawaii and Canada
3) Bought a MacBook Pro
4) Experimented with live video apps and social media sites.

4 Movies I can watch over and over
1) Hard Boiled – Chow Yun Fat
2) Fight Club – Edward Norton / Brad Pitt
3) Gladiator – Russell Crowe
4) Road House / Point Break / Next of Kin – Patrick Swayze

4 Websites I visit every day
1) BillCammack.com
2) Stats for BillCammack.com
3) Google
4) Facebook

4 People I’d like to hear from:
1) Dan McVicar
2) Liz Burr
3) Paul Dateh
4) Jay Smooth

You can answer any of these questions: 4 Jobs I’ve had, 4 Favorite Foods, 4 TV Shows I DVR, 4 Movies I could watch Over & Over, 4 Places I’ve been, 4 Places I’ve lived, 4 Places I want to go, 4 Music Artists I’m listening to now, 4 All Time Favorite Musicians, 4 Shows I have been to, 4 Cars I have owned, 4 Things I have done in the past 4 years, 4 websites I visit daily, 4 places I’d rather be right now, 4 People I think will respond, 4 Things I look forward to this year, or 4 Underrated conversational topics.

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Raymond M. Kristiansen wrote a post on January 11, 2007 entitled “The Audience of Ten”. He also made a post with the same name to the Yahoo Videoblogging Group. They’re both good an interesting reads if you’re planning to do a “show” on the internet.

Basically, Raymond was making a distinction between having a few viewers and having many viewers. I understood TECHNICALLY, what he was talking about, but I didn’t have any IRL experience that would have made me really empathize with his points. His focus was on the HOW and WHY of doing a show being based on WHOM you were doing the show FOR.

I’ve kept Raymond’s concept in mind over the more-than-a-year since I read it. In the last month, I’ve had reason to revisit the concept to attempt to determine the “sweet spot” of “Audience”, as it pertains to me, personally.

My third and most recent “season” of ReelSolid.TV, my interenet video show, is entitled “Delusions of Grandeur”. This isn’t a personal statement, even though everyone that actually knows me IRL will tell you that DoG fits *me* PERFECTLY! :D The reason for the title is that as I contemplated WHY I would do a show, the reason is for the audience. I don’t have to do a show for ME, because I’m already living my own life. I already know what’s happening. I’m already getting laughs or education from what goes on around me. I’m enjoying NYC sights and sounds every day. So it’s not for me that I would make a show….. or, is it?……

Some people just enjoy being famous or internet famous. Some people enjoy being popular, even if they have to play themselves out to gain status/notoreity/fame/infamy. That’s of no interest to me, because I’ve always BEEN popular. I had a pivotal discussion with David Karp on June 10, 2007. I know what day it was because I shot this video:



As part of the discussion that day, David brought up the concept of “popularity”, and I insisted that that had nothing to do with my doing shows. At the same time, he sparked a question for me, which was “What’s the goal? Why do it?” which correlated with Raymond’s question “Who do you do it for?”

DoG is indicative of a cycle. In order to do an internet show, you have to delude yourself into the believe that someone, ANYONE is watching your show. Otherwise, by definition, there’s no point in putting you videos or audio or text ON the internet. It’s a beacon… A message in a bottle. You don’t know WHO’S going to get the message, but you’re hoping… BELIEVING that somebody will. So in order to do a show, you pre-fabricate your audience in your own mind, then you speak to that audience, and hopefully a REAL audience catches on to what you floated out there into the stratosphere.

Some people don’t have this problem. They just love to see/listen to themselves talk. :D That’s great for them, because they don’t need an audience. They just need to have a camera pointed at them to feel accomplished and happy with what they’re doing. More power to them! :D

When I decided on DoG, I wasn’t thinking about Raymond’s “Audience of Ten”. I was thinking about the audience at large. I was thinking about the people that randomly land on my site because of google searches. I was thinking about the people that happen to be looking for a topic that I happen to have had something to say about and just dropped in. I was NOT thinking about “core viewers” or “passionate viewers”. I wrote “Are You A Tech Elitist?” from the standpoint of someone that was focusing on the non-core and recognized a deficiency in my own core relations. With more and more Twitter followers and more and more Facebook and LinkedIn contacts, my time was being spent managing the social media masses instead of relating to the core. This is what brought me back to Raymond’s concept.

When I returned, however, I wasn’t focusing on the numbers being the difference. I was focusing on RELATIONSHIPS being the difference. The perfect example for me is my iTunes feed.

I receive stats on how many times each of my videos is pulled through iTunes. That number has never been higher than 30 within, say, 3 hours of a video release, and it’s currently sitting around 6 within the first hour. iTunes doesn’t give you any feedback about WHO IT IS that’s downloading your videos. Another thing is that when people use iTunes, they can take your show with them on their iPods or iPhones, so all you understand as the content creator is that there was one download of your video. That doesn’t mean that that person didn’t watch it 18 times and show it to their friends. So… In the mindset of focusing on the social media masses, I completely neglected my iTunes feed, meaning that as I redesigned BillCammack.com, mentally catalyzed by Tyme White, I broke my link from my video category to my iTunes feed and didn’t bother to check it because “in the grand scheme of things”, it was only 6 people anyway, right?

I received my wake-up call when my friend Adrienne Brawley asked me “So… what happened to your iTunes feed?”

All of a sudden…. And I mean *ALL* of a sudden, I completely, fully and POSITIVELY understood WHY I needed to fix my feed, and WAY MORE IMPORTANTLY, I recognized the sector of the audience that’s important TO ME when I make videos or write posts. I suddenly realized that amongst the random hits I receive from people looking for dating advice or footage of snow in Manhattan, NYC, I have a few, VERY IMPORTANT hits that I get that are from people that are ACTUALLY INTERESTED in what I’ve said or done now. Interestingly enough, DoG glosses this over, because you delude yourself into believing that lots of people care, which makes everyone like fans in a stadium. It’s the opposite of not seeing the forest for the trees. It’s not seeing the individuals for the crowd.

What it’s about for me certainly isn’t “popularity”, as I told David. Popularity’s useful for people that just want to be admired by a bunch of people they have no relationship to. It’s about having a good conversation IRL with Kenyatta about a blog post we both commented on. It’s about Tim saying he enjoys my work. It’s about Lux being able to rattle off DatingGenius concepts to new people that hang out with us because she’s watched me DEMOLISH people with the DG Live Show so many times already and people always come up with the same arguments. It’s about instigating-ass Annie throwing me under the bus every chance she gets. It’s about Charles laughing with me over something I said or did on the net. It’s about Grace shaking her head when I break down “the real” to her. :D

So, finally, I understand Raymond’s concept, and I agree with it for the most part. As I do videos going forward, I’m going to do them for the audience that I know I have and that I enjoy receiving feedback from. I might do them for individuals or I might do them for groups. I am NOT going to be focusing outside of that, however I welcome anyone who finds anything interesting to watch, give feedback or join in the fun. :)

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Yesterday was a fantastic day. :D

I got to meet Kfir Pravda, who was here for a few hours in NYC Friday morning awaiting his connecting flight to Israel. I was familiar with Kfir from blogging as well as our involvement with the Yahoo Videoblogging Group.

We’ve had interesting discussions about the direction of online video and television, but I never figured I’d meet him in person, since I had no plans to travel to Israel.

Fortunately, our schedules and locations coincided, and I was able to enjoy the morning with Kfir, Kathryn Jones, Jeff Pulver and Keren Dagan.

One of the benefits of social media is that you can learn about people and their ideas at your own pace. If you see something interesting, you can bookmark their site or add them on a social network or follow them on a status update service. The effect is that you can gain a respect for someone without ever having met them in person, or if you’re a lurker, without them ever even knowing that you exist. I already appreciated Kfir for his ideas before I walked into “The Library” at the Regency Hotel. The intangibles of meeting him in person amplified that appreciation.

As much as you might be able to tell about someone from reading their blog posts or comments, there’s much more to be gleaned from having real-time, F2F conversation with someone. How do you greet each other? Do you have similar senses of humor? Is this person as sharp in a real-time, constantly-evolving conversation as they are in text, which they may have taken an hour to write, or in a video which they may have scripted or rehearsed many times before recording it? Is this someone with whom you would probably have been friends, had the “accident of birth” placed you in the same geographical location?

Previously, I asked “How Social is ‘Social’ Media?”. Yesterday, there was a ton of “Social” and a ton of “Media”! :D Jeff Pulver was broadcasting live to Qik utilizing his Nokia N95 and his portable hotspot (described/shown in the video below).

I recorded a Seesmic video with my MacBook Pro. So, not only did we share breakfast with each other, we shared ’sharing breakfast’ with our friends on other social media sites as well. :D

This time, social media came through BIG TIME! :D Fortunately Keren was keeping an eye on the clock, because our conversation had become three hours long with no end in sight. There really ought to be laws against having so much fun before 2pm! :D

It was a pleasure meeting Kfir & Keren. It makes such a difference when someone steps off of a blog page or computer screen and you get to experience them IRL. It was great to hang out with Kathryn & Jeff as well. I’m going to strive to sift through the QUANTITY of consistently increasing adds and contacts and have more QUALITY interactions like this one through social media. :D

Bill Cammack • Cammack Media Group, LLC

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