Two years ago, in May 2008, I wrote “Fame, Popularity & Star Power” and then “Fame (Part 2)” two weeks apart from each other. The main point was that I was trying to figure out how to articulate my thoughts about fame in order to respond to an opinion my friend Dave had expressed about why I do what I do.

I never actually figured out how to exactly articulate the difference between what I’ve done for basically my entire life and what a lot of people do now. Today.. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I ended up watching a video where someone interviewed Melyssa Ford.

Melyssa was saying something about something… and then she goes “Fame used to be the by-product of success and now it’s the ultimate goal”. A few seconds later, I rewound it and listened to that line again and was like “HOLY ****!!!!! :D That’s EXACTLY The Point I Was TRYING To Make!!! :D”

Fame vs. Popularity

I’m not famous.. Though a lot of people will say that I’m MicroFamous or Internet Famous. I’ve been ranked inside the top 15 Google results for “Bill” (out of currently 377 million results) since February, 2008 (2 years and counting). I’m also inside the top 30 results (out of 264,000,000) for “Bill” on bing.com. I’ve been blogging for years, and BillCammack.com is currently serving 5,000 pages per week, according to Quantcast & Google Analytics.

Whatever infinitesimal amount of Fame, Popularity, Star Power or Personal Brand Recognition I currently enjoy is, as Melyssa would say, a by-product of my success. It’s a fringe benefit. It’s icing on a cake. It’s certainly not THE POINT of anything I do and it’s certainly not *WHY* I do anything I do.

When I post a video of something I did or somewhere I went..

It’s not so you or anyone else can go “OOOOOOOHH! Look at what Bill did! :O”.. It’s because I. ALREADY. DID. IT. and I’m trying to share an incredibly small percentage of my real life experiences with whomever might be interested. If I stopped filming things, I’d STILL be doing a bunch of cool stuff with a bunch of cool people. If I stopped blogging, I’d still be hanging out with a bunch of chicks and enjoying myself. I’m not performing or doing anything that’s out of the ordinary for me. I’m just trying to share so you have a SLIIIIIIGHT idea of what my life is like.

Sharing

Even that last sentence seems to be braggadocio. Who the **** cares what *MY* life is like? :D

Well… All I can say about that is that back in the day my friend Dan McVicar (a.k.a. Clarke Garrison on “The Bold and the Beautiful”) created and hosted a Social Media site called “The Late Nite Mash”.

My friend Marty Daniels, whom I met through Dan’s site, lived somewhere in the sticks where I was never going to visit and filmed a video while walking around at a county fair in his local area.

Was the video exciting and action-packed? Nope! :D However.. I got to experience something I never would have experienced, being that a) I wasn’t going to ever travel there to go to that fair, and b) it was being filmed through Marty’s “eyes” and experiences, so it was necessarily different from what would have happened if I had been there filming with my own camera.

I got value out of that, which I obviously remember to this day, so my goal in sharing is to attempt to pass that on to people that don’t live in NYC or don’t live in the USA at all or experience this city in a completely different way than I do.

Also, I get correspondence and blog comments from people that watch my videos or read my blog posts and got something out of it. TO ME… That’s what it’s ALL about… Sharing. Messages In Bottles. I send out the communication. If you received it, good. If you got something out of it, even better! :D

I couldn’t give a damn about serving 5,000 pages a week. I’m way more motivated by the 50 people that are currently subscribed to my blog by email. Thanks, y’all! :D I see youse out there! ;)

I’m also motivated by and thankful for my set of regular commenters, including recently Steve, Frank, Christine, Gail, C-Jay, Albert, Sophia, BM, Elly, Michele and even Fishingrod, who’s been SLACKIN’ lately, but I know she still loves me! :D

To Me.. It’s all about the communication. I post and output media in order to share, with you. If I stopped doing it, the events of my life would continue as they always have.. I’d just have more time to do them instead of taking time out to write long-ass blog posts like this one. :)

Fameballing

Going back to Melyssa’s point.. Now that so many people have access to expressing themselves via Social Media, a lot of them are doing what they can TO become famous, which has become an END instead of a BY-PRODUCT. The question for them is “What can I do to get more Twitter followers? O_o What can I do to get more Facebook friends? How do I get people to consider me a Fameball?

People want people to follow them… They want *ANYONE* to follow them. They just like how it FEELS to be followed. It doesn’t matter what they have to do or how bad they make themselves look so long as someone new subscribes to their channel or RSS feed.

This is the difference I was trying to explain to Dave, but failed until now. I’ve been popular since my earliest memory I still have available to me, around 5 years old, in kindergarten. I have *ALWAYS* had crews my entire life. I’m currently Facebook friends with guys and gals I knew in Elementary School, JHS, High School, College and from work & social environments after I graduated.

I meet new people every single time I go to an event, which is several times a week here in NYC. I’m popular FOR REAL, as a by-product of who I am as a person. I’m successful in business FOR REAL, as a by-product of how I conduct myself when I work for clients and their passing that information on via word of mouth so new prospective clients call or email *ME* asking if I can work for them, not the other way around.

This is exactly the explanation I was looking for, so Thank You, Melyssa Ford! :D

Who are you, again?

Lots of people these days are putting the cart before the horse. They want to be famous, but there’s no reason why they should be. They want to have successful blogs, but they don’t write ANYTHING ORIGINAL. They want people to follow them so they can enjoy the sensation of people seeming to give a flying **** about anything they ever thought about.

To me, that’s completely empty and worthless, which is why I’m finally getting to put this topic to rest two years later. I’m popular because I’m supposed to be.

Anywhere you put me, I’m going to make new friends & acquaintances. I’m MicroFamous because of who I am and what I do… EVERY DAY.

I did it yesterday, I’ve been doing it for years, and I’m gonna do it again today because being popular is natural to me and not something I hope to be, wish I was or would like to convince other people that I am.

I just spent a couple of hours writing this post because it’s worth it to me. I get my own kicks out of it, my email subscribers are going to receive it a few hours from now. My RSS subscribers are going to receive it right after I press “Publish”. Eventually, I’ll run into someone that will mention this post to me f2f, IRL and then I’ll be fascinated, amazed and appreciative that the current wonders of technology afford me the privilege of speaking to whomever feels like listening to, watching or reading my content.

So now I’m fully self-expressed on this topic. :D I’m fully prepared to explain to someone why I’m different from people who output content to get attention and collect followers, yet whom under careful inspection are clearly exposed to be attention-whores and who are, in reality… Famous For Nothing.

Related Posts

• Thoughts about the “Fast Company Influence Project”
• Guide To Dating The “Internet Famous”
• CNN Presents “Black In America: Silicon Valley”
• Blog Subscribers, Commenters, Lurkers & Passers-By
• Deleting People From Facebook

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.

Contact
@BillCammack
Facebook
Linkedin
MySpace
Tumblr
blip.tv

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

Related Posts

• Social Media Smoke & Mirrors
• Why Are You Doing A Live Show?
• 297 ReelSolid.TV s03 ep015 – Live Show Plus 4
• CNN Presents “Black In America: Silicon Valley”
• Email. Not Facebook. Not Twitter. Not Phone. Not IRL…

ok.. *NOW* I’m completely over this video and y’all never have to hear about it ever again! :D hahaha

Thanks again to Erik Beck for inviting me to participate in the “Harry Potter vs. Voldemort Rap” video, which just passed 2,000,000 (two million) views! :D

An amazing experience for me. :D I can’t express enough how much fun it is to be a fan of my own ultra-talented friends! :D

Erik, J-Rad & Bill

YouTube Link: Harry Potter vs. Voldemort Rap
 
Behind The Scenes clip:
 
Mobile version: iPod Video (.mp4)
 
~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

Related Posts

• 1 Million YouTube Views!!!
• Bill Cammack HPvsV
• Indy Mogul “Harry Potter” Shoot
• “Harry Potter vs. Voldemort Rap” Indy Mogul Test Film
• Harry Potter Rap Battle on G4′s “Attack of the Show”

* The text below is the beginning of the video. If you can’t see the video embedded on this page, click here to watch “Safe Sex Tutorial (Big Willie Pockets)” on YouTube. *

Big Willie Pockets

Alright, y’all. New in November, 2009. Today is November 4th and what we’re going to do today is we’re going to talk about Safe Sex, but we’re going to get into some more interesting topics than what you normally hear about.

Now.. Let’s say you’re chillin’, right, so here’s you, you’re hangin’ out. You’re having a good time. You’re Big Willie, You’ve got the big pockets, right? The big BIG pockets. DEEP POCKETS, Money for days…

Now, you’re chillin’ you go to the club and you meet a chick, right? So she’s smiling, like everything’s groovy, so you’re feeling like everything’s groovy too. So you decide, unfortunately for you, not to use safe sex, right? So, next thing you know, BOOM.. waah, waah… there goes like, little kid, you know what I’m saying?

Now, the problem is, here, that first of all, I mean you’re just hoping she’s a cool person, she’s nice and all that stuff, but the problem is, here.. that THESE are now going to get diminished, right? So now we’re going to go get our eraser for your Big Willie pockets, and we’re gonna do this, you know what I’m saying? So NOW, Your pockets look, you know, more like this.. It’s like half of the Big Willie…

Click here to watch the rest of “Safe Sex Tutorial (Big Willie Pockets)” on YouTube.

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

Related Posts

• Appreciate Your Girlfriend
• Buying Women
• How To Compliment A Woman
• Yeah.. My Boys Are More Important Than Some Chick.
• No Romance Without Finance

Requests For Action

I’m not sure what I think about Requests For Action (RFA)… What I mean by that is that for instance, I’m about to take part for the second year in a row in a videoblogging series that a few of my friends and I do called “New in November” (newinnov.tumblr.com).

Personally, what I would do regarding the site/series is INFORM people that it’s going on or that it’s available. What I would NOT do is request for them to do something about it, such as follow it, reblog it, RT it and DEFINITELY NOT “Please rate my video 5 stars!” :/

To me, that defeats the purpose of the viewer watching your material and deciding that your video actually DESERVED 5 stars and clicking on the meter to indicate that. If you tell people what to do, many times, they’ll do it because you asked them to, not because they give a damn or actually think your show, product or service is any good. Also, lots of times, it’s not even because you asked them to, but rather because they don’t want to be perceived as “not down with the program”. It’s like how I originally dealt with Twitter, following back everyone that followed me… out of “courtesy”. That’s something I picked up from friends of mine who were on Twitter for a full year before I found out about it two years ago. That didn’t work for me, so I don’t do that anymore. I follow whom I follow and whomever follows me follows me. Period.

OTOH..… There’s a very good reason to tell people what to do about your media. A lot of people aren’t aware that they can do things like click “like” on a Facebook post or leave a comment at the bottom of a blog post. A lot of people aren’t aware that they can rate YouTube videos or click the heart on Vimeo videos. It makes sense that you want to inform the uninformed about what they can do. I use a plugin for my site called “What Would Seth Godin Do?” which places a note at the top of my posts for the first five times someone comes to my site that says something like “You might want to subscribe blah blah blah” for that very reason. People come to my site and have no idea they can subscribe and get my posts in their email boxes or get my posts via RSS instead of having to check my site to see if I posted something new.

I also have “Share” links on my posts. That’s an opportunity, not a request. That saves people from having to go to actual websites like stumbleupon to add a post of mine. They can do it right from that link. I could also put “HEY! MAKE SURE YOU SHARE THIS WITH YOUR FRIENDS SO I CAN HAVE MORE TRAFFIC TO MY SITE!!! :D” on every single post, which I think would be incredibly obnoxious as well as ineffective.

Fishing For Compliments

I have the same issue with RFAs that I have with people that fish for compliments. When you fish for compliments, you look corny and desperate. People are more likely to tell you what you want to hear out of PITY than actually honestly feeling whatever they say. Also, people feel put on the spot when you fish for compliments. If you don’t deserve the compliment, you’ve put them between a rock and a hard place.

Do you look fat in that dress? HELLS YEAH YOU LOOK FAT IN THAT DRESS! but who’s actually going to say that? “Nooo… Nooo… Not at all. You look great. Have you been working out? :D”.. You’re forcing people to be fake with you by requesting that they tell you something that they weren’t offering. Maybe you’re going to look fat regardless of what you wear, and the dress isn’t actually the issue. Maybe you also look GOOD to the person you’re asking, regardless of whether you’re slim and trim or not. Did you think about THAT?…

Having said that, I’m the type of person that doesn’t naturally say what I’m thinking. The question “How do you like my outfit?” may very well elicit a flood of natural comments an compliments that I was THINKING but not SAYING. However, that’s an open-ended question.. “How do you like X?” or even “DO you like X?”. It offers the listener the opportunity to give an honest opinion or no opinion at all. “This jacket looks Funky-Fresh, RIGHT???” puts the other person on the spot if they had just been thinking about how WACK your jacket looks and that they’re embarrassed to be seen with you right now.

Open-Ended References

So I guess I’m a fan of open-ended references. “Here’s this thing that’s going on” or “Here’s this new video or post I created” as opposed to “Go to my video, scroll down the page and click the meter to rate my video 5 stars”. For that, people may as well not watch your video at all, since all you want is the rating so your video can LOOK popular and appreciated when in reality it’s a bunch of your friends clicking 5-stars because you asked them to.

There are no ethics to this game, so I’m not suggesting what people should or shouldn’t do. If that’s how you get your props, by telling people what you want them to do and hoping they do it, good for you. How’s that workin’ for ya? ;) I personally wouldn’t be satisfied with telling people how I want them to react to my media. You lose the ability to separate the real compliments from what’s written by people that are simply following orders. If you can’t tell when someone honestly enjoys and appreciates your media, what do you actually have?…..

Then again, I do Social Media for fun. I enjoy expressing myself. I realize that other people are attempting to build businesses with this stuff and it’s important for them to appear to be popular and for their media to appear well-received, often-watched and usually rated “5 stars” in order to try to get a sponsorship or some kind of revenue-sharing deal or put affiliate links all over their sites or Google Ads or whatever they’re trying to do. Social Media for them is a means to an end instead of just being THE END. This is it. This is the expression. Tell me what you think about it VS Tell other people that you agree that my video is excellent. RATE THIS! vs RATE THIS 5 STARS! or maybe just Rate it if you feel like it…

I like pitches that offer the viewer/listener some kind of “value added” if they click on a link, such as “Click Here to learn how to make a Masquerade Mask! :D”

That kind of pitch tells people WHAT THEY’RE GOING TO RECEIVE if they click on the link. That’s different from telling them WHAT THEY CAN DO FOR YOU by clicking the same link. In the video, Corinne says “make sure to show us some love by subscribing”. That makes perfect sense. If you love the show, SUBSCRIBE, so you get automatic updates. Also, their show, TheadBanger is a business, so their goal is to amass viewers and create, sustain and grow a community. I’m sure a lot of their clips get passed around in emails, etc so it’s likely that there are a lot of people that see it that wouldn’t be aware that it’s an ongoing series as opposed to a one-off, so it’s a good idea to make people aware that they CAN subscribe if they want to.

Still.. The draw is the content, the hosts and their generous utilization of UGC (User-Generated Content). Their fans can actually be ON the show with them if they send in videos/pictures of their personally-created fashion items. It’s like “Here’s more of what you enjoyed in the past” as opposed to “Here’s another opportunity for you to do me a favor and click on my ratings bar”. It’s still too early in the game to figure out whether directly telling people what to do is effective at all. It’s also too early to tell whether people’s personal reputations are being sullied by their constant shilling for whatever company they work for. Maybe none of this matters at all and I’m oversensitive to the issue because I know so many people that create media and I watch so much media online every day. \o/

The way I see it, RFAs and fishing for compliments are both signs of desperation and they’re not pretty. :) If people think your video’s worth 5 stars, they’ll rate it. If people want to say something, they’ll comment. If people want to share your posts with their friends, they will. Make it as easy for them to do that if they feel like it and even though your community will be smaller, it’ll be much more passionate, dedicated and interested in what you have to say.

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

Related Posts

• CNN Presents “Black In America: Silicon Valley”
• Content is King, *NOW* (Eye Candy is Over)
• Freedom of Consequences
• Internet Blog-Influenced News Cycles
• Famous For Nothing [Fame, Part 3]