Bill Cammack explains how to make a blog post using WordPress (or pretty much any other platform).

Topics include hypertext / hyperlinking, images, media & style.

Recorded as part of New in November 2009 (newinnov.tumblr.com)

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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

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New Year’s Day

I’m sitting here answering all of my birthday messages on Facebook. I appreciate them all and I personally feel that if someone took the time to comment on my Facebook page or on BillCammack.com or on my Twitter page, it’s the VERY. LEAST. I. CAN. DO. to reply to them directly and as swiftly as possible. I’m not a fan of people’s styles who post something and then have ZERO presence in their comments. That says to me that you’re talking AT people instead of talking WITH people. I’m not a fan of that.

This is going to be a calm year for me. I can tell already. My life goes in cycles… one year HECTIC!!! and the next year calm. I feel very “smoothed out” this morning and I’m thinking about the concept of “giving”. The birthday gift the cosmos have handed me this morning is a really good grasp on what I think about people giving things, even free things like blog comments or birthday wishes or even holding the door open for someone to walk through. I have a matrix I’d like to share with you, based on that enlightenment.

The Matrix

The elements of the matrix are:

• What you have
• Whether you WANT TO give it to me or not
• Whether you ACTUALLY give it to me or not

Each one of these elements is separately important. I know a lot of people, so I’ve been able to experience how all the different permutations feel, IRL. The end result is either FAKE or REAL. A lot of people think that so long as they end up conveying nice sentiments, that’s the best thing they could do for someone. I think that’s absolutely wrong. I think the best thing you can do is be REAL with people. That’s obviously easier said than done, but that’s what I’m going to strive for this year. In my calmness, I’m going to strive for REALITY and the chips will fall.

Here’s how the matrix works:

If you have something for me and you want to give it to me and you give it to me, that’s REAL.
If you have something for me and you want to give it to me and you don’t give it to me, that’s FAKE.
If you have something for me and you don’t want to give it to me and you give it to me, that’s FAKE.
If you have something for me and you don’t want to give it to me and you don’t give it to me, that’s REAL.
If you don’t have something for me and you want to pretend like you do, so you give it to me, that’s FAKE.
If you don’t have something for me and you want to pretend as if, but you don’t give it to me, that’s REAL.
If you don’t have something for me and you don’t want to pretend, but you give it to me anyway, that’s FAKE.
If you don’t have something for me and you don’t want to pretend and you don’t give it to me, that’s REAL.

Does that make sense? :)

Find The Real

You’ll notice that regardless of where you start or how you travel, there are only two potential outcomes… REAL and FAKE. Real, you can build on. Fake, you cannot. I mean, you can build on it, but you’re building your house on quicksand. In the long run, it’s worthless. Real is worthwhile, whether you like or dislike the person’s actual way of being towards you.

Let’s use the example of greetings.. Like when you see someone somewhere for the first time and have a natural reaction.

I showed up to a bar a couple of weeks ago with a friend of mine that I had been pre-gaming with, and the second I walked in, I found myself standing next to a booth where an acquaintance of mine was sitting who’s also an actor. He was sitting with several attractive females and was probably the King of the Hill in his area. When we saw each other, he got up and we greeted each other genuinely. That’s REAL. I appreciate that. There are lots of other people who in that same situation wouldn’t have wanted to give up their props and would have lamped in their seats like “Let the peons come to me!”. If that’s how you really feel and that’s how you carry yourself, that’s good. That’s real too. That lets me know what you think about yourself and what you think about me. Thank you for that information. I’ll utilize it in the future.

There are lots of different customs for greeting women as well. Depending on your culture, it might be a hug, it might be a kiss on the cheek or it might be both. It might be neither. It might be a handshake. It might be a wave from a distance with no physical contact whatsoever… Whatever it is, there are subtle differences between how a gal greets you that indicate how she’s feeling NOW relative to how she usually feels about you. You can tell a chick has a new relationship going when you suddenly get one of those “I’m still attracted to you, but I have a boyfriend now and I can’t afford for him to think The Kid’s tappin’ this” hugs. It’s no big deal.. She’ll come back online as soon as they break up and it’ll actually be better since she’ll be looking to reassure herself that she’s sexy & desirable = .. REBOUND!!!!! :D

Don’t Got It

Another form of fakeness is when people don’t feel friendly towards you but they’re scared to death of being talked about on the back-channel as a HATER, so they act friendly merely so they can stay out of the tabloids. There are two problems with this. #1 is that it doesn’t feel right. The smiles are fake. The greetings are fake. The conversation tidbits are fake. It’s obvious. #2 is that when someone has literally hundreds of acquaintances in the same town, the number of people you can spill the beans to without it getting back around to the person you’re talking about is incredibly small.

I’ve had the unique privilege of standing face-to-face with people that I know have talked about me behind my back. It’s an interesting experience, because you’re standing there wondering if they’re going to bring up the issue that they talked about so freely when they thought you would never find out about it.

To be fair, IRL is “the same, but different” when it comes to meeting me. Since you don’t know ANYONE like me, when you read what I write without having spent time with me, you formulate your opinions based on examples that YOU have from your past of people that said the same things or expressed the same sentiments. I say the exact same things IRL that I say online.. actually, I say MORE IRL than I say online because I make blog posts for general consumption and I really get down to the nitty-gritty with my close friends, usually over a long night of brewskis! :D

The difference, however, is that you get way more cues from me IRL, including vocal tone, eye contact or avoidance, physical contact, laughter (similar senses of humor), appreciation, acknowledgement, recognition, empathy… Lots of stuff that you wouldn’t expect to get from reading my blog posts. There’s a very good reason why I have over 700 female Facebook friends. Feel free to ask the couple hundred that have actually hung out with The Kid in person whether they had a good time or not. ;)

Sharing vs. Bragging

Having read what I just wrote, to a lot of people, that last paragraph is going to sound like braggadocio. It’s actually not. It’s just the truth. If I didn’t have over 700 female facebook friends (out of 1,690 total), I wouldn’t say so. If I hadn’t been in the top 20 Google results for the word/name “Bill” for almost the last two years, I wouldn’t say so. If I wasn’t in a YouTube video that’s approaching 2 million views, I wouldn’t say so. These are all checkable facts. I’m not saying “ha ha. Look at me, compared to you!”. This is my life, so this is what I have to talk about.

For instance, I don’t have any kids. Other people have kids and talk about them all the time. I don’t accuse these people of bragging that their reproductive systems work. (I wouldn’t know whether mine does or doesn’t, being that I’m a condom HERO) I don’t hate on people for talking about their successful startups or their real estate coups. It just so happens that most of what I do is HAVE. A. GOOD. TIME. because that’s what I want from my life. It just so happens that I’m not interested in only one female. It just so happens that I live in the center of the known universe, New York City. It just so happens that I’m a rather accomplished freelance video editor, so if you google Video Editor Resume, you get ME.

I talk about myself because that’s what I have to share. I don’t have anything else. :) No startup, no kids, no job, nothing! :D Just because the stuff I talk about is FUN!!! doesn’t make it any different from what those people share on their blogs.

Authenticity

So, this year (my year starts on my birthday), I’m going to strive for realness in giving & communication. I’m not sure how successful I’ll be, but I’m going to try. It’s a lot easier for me to say things that I don’t care about than it is to say things I DO care about. All I know is that the people who like who I am (or at least tolerate it, huh) have stuck around throughout the years and they’re greatly appreciated. The people who liked who they thought I was and then found out they were wrong have disappeared, which is also fantastic.

I decided to be authentic with one of my homegirl’s homegirls a couple of years back. It was late at night and I was bored with the chick, so I decided to inform her that although I liked and respected her as a person, her opinion of me didn’t matter to me one single iota because I was never going to see her again after that day. Of course, the gal took incredible offense at this, but I was speaking from an heavily favored probability. I had never seen her before that night. The only reason I was even hanging out with her was that my homegirl brought her out with us. She had already informed me she wasn’t interested in me, physically. There was no reason why I would ever contact her and there was no reason why she would ever contact me. As far as I was concerned, I was having a conversation with a ghost.. you know, like on the Sixth Sense tip. We were going to spend our hours together that evening and then she was going to cease to exist, entirely.

Of course she argued against this for her own self-esteem reasons. She tried to convince me that her opinion mattered to me, which was and IS entirely impossible. After she stormed out of the bar with her lackey / fanboi / human pet in tow, my homegirl and I had another hour’s worth of laughs at her expense because of how riled up she got over nothing. Just like I figured on that day and told her to her face, I’ve never, EVER come into contact with that girl EVER AGAIN in the couple of years since that conversation. Just like I said, she ceased to exist after she walked out of that bar. I still like her as a person and appreciate the fantastic conversation we were having, but I couldn’t possibly care ANY LESS about what a ghost thinks about me.

This is the ‘problem’ with authenticity and this is the path I’m taking this year. When your philosophy clashes with someone else’s, that person often chooses to bail rather than consider your point of view. I’m like that with horror movies. I don’t watch them because I don’t care. A lot of people get kicks from watching people run around in an abandoned hotel getting killed off one at a time. *YAWN*. No thanks. I’ll pass.

The way I feel right now, I’d rather have fewer acquaintances that are all down with the program than more acquaintances that follow/friend me because I haven’t said anything they don’t like yet. Spare Me. :/
 

Living in the limelight
The universal dream
For those who wish to seem

Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation
Get on with the fascination
The real relation
The underlying theme

~ Rush “Limelight”
 

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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• Class

I was walking down the street with a friend of mine one sunny afternoon as we were enjoying the day together. We had just come from the museum and were heading to one of my favorite places to eat and after that we were going to head to the movies. I was running my mouth about something and I noticed that there was a lady pushing an older lady in a wheelchair and she was attempting to enter a store, having understandable difficulty with the door.

Instinctively, and probably in mid-sentence, I hustled over and grabbed the door so the woman could easily push the other lady inside. They both smiled and thanked me and I smiled and said “You’re Welcome”. A few seconds later, my friend caught up, and I continued whatever I was talking about at the time.

She was smiling and says to me something like “That was really nice of you”.. To which, I replied “What was?”. I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about and started scanning my story for something in it that she might have been referring to.

When she told me she was talking about my helping the ladies enter the store, she was actually REMINDING ME that I helped the ladies enter the store. I had completely forgotten about it within seconds. That’s because I was acting instinctively and doing what I felt NEEDED to be done at that point in time. They were having trouble entering. I was trivially running my mouth. I was ABLE to help them and I hustled over to do that. Doing anything else would have been WRONG, to me. Watching them struggle to get inside and walking by with my companion like as if I didn’t see that they needed help would have been WRONG, to me. All I did was what I was SUPPOSED to do, IMO, so as quickly as it occurred to me, it was forgotten by me just as easily as I had forgotten whether I had stepped first with my left or right foot when I stepped off the curb to cross the street.

The funny thing is that it actually WAS automatic. Yes, it would have been a good gimmick to help someone in front of a chick to make her feel like you’re a great guy, huh but that’s not why I did it. I also didn’t do it to avoid looking like a chump. A lot of people do stuff that’s outside of their character because they know what’s Politically Correct at this point in time. They don’t do things because they WANT TO or because they actually FEEL they should be done, but rather in order to avoid public scrutiny or becoming a pariah on the back-channel.

Some things are automatic to people, such as making sure that a woman you’re spending time with gets inside her apartment building safely after spending time with you. Again, it’s not a gimmick. :D It’s not the old “Let me walk you home to make sure you get there safely…. OH… I need to use the bathroom” trick to get inside your house. :) If I wanted to make out with you, I would just do it wherever we are. There’s no need for me to be in your apartment. There IS a need, for me, to feel like as I’M heading home without incident, SHE got home without incident before I did.

That’s not to say I’m a nice guy. :D Everybody that knows me knows that I play by my own rules, especially when it comes to chicks. I am absolutely NOT to be trusted around chicks. I know it. Everybody else that knows me knows it. Women I meet for the first time in life can feel it. I’m addicted to women. I’m chasing a high. If being around her makes me high, it’s *ON* and ALL. BETS. ARE. OFF.

So, how do we measure class? How do we determine if someone is classy when they exhibit both chivalrous and treacherous behavior within seconds of each other?

Perhaps it comes down to a list of pros and cons? The greater good? The most good to the most people? More instances of chivalry than treachery?

When I was growing up, I was a bully. Yes, I was usually the smallest guy in a group, but I was always one of the best at sports and definitely one of the fastest thinkers and most caustic, abrasive ’snappers’ (contests between people to attempt to say things to make yourself seem superior to others or make others feel inferior to you or just make them feel poorly in general). I’ve also always had a crew, ever since I can remember, back in Kindergarten. I’ve always had lots of friends and followers. I’ve had a lot of haters as well, which were well deserved back in the day, because I used to play for keeps if someone tried to dis me. Especially if I felt your verbal attack was unwarranted, I would talk about you all day, every day, until you decided that you weren’t going to challenge me EVAR AGAIN! It just wasn’t worth it.

Eventually, my belief system changed up. My first reaction was to blame myself for being a jerk. :) I did this for who knows how many years and then I settled in the feeling that you can be as conceited as you want, so long as you don’t push your conceit on others. “I am GREAT!” doesn’t have to be accompanied by “You are WACK!”. They’re actually two entirely different sentiments and one can be expressed without the other. The trick isn’t in attempting to change how you personally feel, but rather in how you express yourself to others and mind their feelings when you interact with them.

Some people would consider this Class, and others would not. Some people feel that classy behavior is only to be found in people that are always nice to everyone and always PC and always exhibit traits that they personally consider to be classy. That’s all well & good. You can’t please everyone. This will be apparent in your Facebook Friends Count and your feed subscription stats.

It’s actually kind of funny that the first thing that occurs to me when I’m considering people disliking something I say or do in terms of online subscriptions! :D Anywayyyy…..

The way I feel about it, there’s no reason not to be cordial towards people. It’s like my man Swayze said in Road House… “Be Nice… Until it’s time to NOT BE NICE”! :D If you don’t have a bellhop’s outfit on, they’re supposed to smile at you and acknowledge you or say “Thank you”. Just in case you end up doing something nice for a jerk who doesn’t recognize that and acts like they DESERVE for you to hold the door for them, make sure you remember to say “That’s alright.. My dog doesn’t speak either.”

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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I wrote about EC in March 2008 and mentioned “the formula”, which was that whatever actual content you had, the way to get views for your show was to have an attractive female as the ‘front’ or the ‘face’ of the show. She didn’t have to know or understand JACK about JACK so long as she could look good and read her lines. I probably noticed this formula in 2007, since I got started in online video in 2006.

Regardless of the content, the most popular shows were headlined by a female that was nice to look at. Period. (with the one obvious exception being Ze Frank’s “The Show”)

It was even worse on YouTube, because everybody knew that YT took the picture that represented your video from exactly 50% into your episode. If your video was 6 minutes long, the still YT would take was @ 3 minutes. So.. Regardless of what the actual content was, people would figure out the final length of their show and insert a few frames of a chick in a bikini exactly in the middle. They’d upload their show, YouTube would pull the image of the bikini chick, all the boys would click on it expecting to see some ass, the video would get popular and then eventually ‘featured’, where it could really take off and get more views.

This worked, BTW, with videos that didn’t even have a female IN THEM, because guys couldn’t figure that out without clicking on the bikini-chick, by which time your ‘view’ was already counted. Thanks, sucker! :D

“The Formula” was so pervasive that I was discussing doing a show for these guys’ company and one of them actually said to me (verbatim) “We’d love to do a show.. but we don’t have a girl.”

Having a female headlining your show that guys would enjoy imagining having sex with was certainly the key to success back in the day, but at this point, if you look at numbers of YouTube subscribers as well as episode views, Content has clearly come into its own as guys and gals who are actually talking about something intelligent or providing some kind of actual entertainment value to their viewers have vastly outpaced the “Look at me and my tits” chicks.

I mean, VASTLY, like left them in the dust. I didn’t think it would happen, but it has, and there’s no end in sight. I think what happened is that the early adopters enjoyed success at the time, because they were the only ones doing it. Now that everybody and their sister has a YouTube channel and is doing the exact same thing, it’s tough to gain new followers / subscribers. As a matter of fact, an annoying trend has developed, where people actually ASK YOU not only to subscribe to their channels, but to rate their episode “5 Stars”. :/ … Um… How are you going to TELL SOMEONE what to rate your episode? wow. “Please rate my episode” I can understand. “Please rate it 5 Stars” (Top Rating Available)? Come on. :/

So.. If you don’t have any girls (or, no *attractive* girls), do your show ANYWAY. *THIS* is your time! :D Eye Candy is OVER!

You have as much chance of your show becoming popular as anyone else. So long as you have a good topic that’s sustainable (you can consistently release episodes ad infinitum), the viewing public is willing to accept, watch, listen to, follow, friend, subscribe, rate and virally pass your show on to their friends & relatives.

If you don’t believe me, go check out the current Revision3 lineup, including my friend Anthony Carboni’s show, “Bytejacker”.

Blog about what you’re passionate about in text, audio or video.. Be consistent, relevant, informative & entertaining and you have a shot at becoming popular in the ‘online video’ game.

Content, at this point, truly *IS* King, so the only things limiting you are your own imagination, creativity and determination.

Make It Happen! :D

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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21 minutes into this video, Kevin Rose asks Google’s Vice President of Search Product and User Experience, Marissa Mayer “Is Google Skynet?” on behalf of someone who asked the question online and 182 people who voted for that question.

Her first two words are “Uhhhh.. Well…. :D”

There are a lot of people that think Google is SkyNet. What’s SkyNet?

Skynet (Terminator): In the fictional Terminator universe, Skynet is a computer software-based defense system created by humans in the late 20th century.

In the Terminator storyline, Skynet gains sentience shortly after it is placed in control of all of the U.S. military’s weaponry. When they realize that it has become self-aware, and what the computer control is capable of, the human operators try to shut the system down. It retaliates and believes humans are a threat to its existence, it then employs humankind’s own weapons of mass destruction in a campaign to exterminate the human race.

The obvious parallel with Google is that every time you turn around, Google’s acquired another company or created or announced a new product. The bottom line is data. Information. Evidence of connections. The attempt to predict patterns… purchasing tendencies… communications networks… social trends…

Why is data important? Because we have moved from interpersonal conversation to Pony Express… From letters to phone calls… From phone calls to email… From email to text messages… From text messages to instant messages… From instant messages to transparent communications via apps/sites like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook… Now, we’re moving into audio and video communications via Oovoo, Skype, Ustream, LiveStream… It’s all data. It’s all information. It all says something about us and the people we interact with and the products we buy or avoid. Someday, it will be aggregated into a meaningful report which will be used by whomever figures it out to make a lot of money.

An example of how this works is Facebook. Instead of hiding my status, I’ve declared myself “single” on Facebook, so they use that information to send me an endless stream of “dating” and “meet women of such and such a type” advertisements on the right side of my screen. I can look forward to at least 60 such ads on any given day, being that they fit 3 on a page. How did they know I might be interested in women available for sex? Because I clicked “single” for status and “women” as far as interests. Elementary… Peep it for yourself:

The reason this is useful is that in order to sell things to people on the internet, you need to be able to prove demographics to a reasonable degree. You have to be able to say to a potential advertiser “I can place your ad for single women in front of 40,000 guys who are looking for girls [who are looking for guys] in this amount of time, for which you will owe me this amount of money”. This is why they want you to use their services, so they can collect data on what you like, what you use, what you endorse, what you dislike, who you follow and who follows you. The “following” part indicates social networks as well as potential spheres of influence.

To go off on a tangent for a second… This is why some people were really hoppin’ mad over Twitter’s “Suggested User List”. At the time that I checked out this list, there was a CAT (like, somebody’s actual pet) on this list, and President-Elect Barack Obama was NOT on this list (Though Al Gore was). People were (and probably still are) mad about this because they weren’t chosen to be ON this list and their standings as influential people on Twitter plummeted faster than people’s bank accounts who had invested money with Bernie Madoff.

Suddenly, people who had ZERO standing in the fishbowl whatsoever were getting thousands and in some cases TENS OF THOUSANDS of new followers on a daily basis. The people who used to be able to press their chests out at having 60,000 followers had to sit there and watch as people raced towards 1 Million followers and beyond. What difference did this make? The people with tens of thousands of followers were looking forward to leveraging that and being seen as influential people in the Twitter space. They’re still way more influential than I am, with my current 2,604 followers, but they’ve been entirely eclipsed by the people that get followers almost as quickly as Twitter gets new users.

I wanted to bring this up because I was having a vigorous discussion today with a friend of mine who’s a rabid conspiracy theorist and she really sparked me to talk about this stuff. The fact of the matter is that the price of admission to any of these sites is giving them direct access to information about the people you know, products and sites you use and your likes & dislikes. When you click “like” on Facebook, that’s recorded. When you click “favorite” on Twitter, that’s recorded. When you follow someone or someone follows you, that’s recorded. The real question here is whether you can afford to be involved or you can afford to NOT be involved…

There’s an easy way not to have your information collected and utilized… Don’t do JACK on the internet. For some people, this is the solution. Don’t put the data out there and you won’t have to worry about it. That’s not the solution for me, personally. According to Google Analytics, Google was responsible for 6,291 of my visits last month, which is 65.48% of the 9,555 total visits to my site. I am fully entrenched and willing to sink or swim on the internet with SkyNet. :D I even went out and bought the G1 Google Phone as the picture to the left just so happened to catch rebooting… even though that was more because of the Android platform and physical keyboard than my stellar Google search result standings.

Ultimately, conspiracy or not, it’s clear that we’re trending towards MORE information being available about everyone rather than less. We’re all communicating with each other more through digital, collectable means. We used to use tokens, now we use MetroCards. We used to have bank books, now we have ATM Cards. We used to write checks, now we have Credit Cards. We have data plans on our computers AND our phones. We socialize with each other more ON the internet than off. It’s way easier and way more efficient than getting on trains and planes and actually going to other states, countries and continents where our friends live. More and more socializing that was done OFFline is now being done ONline. Same thing goes for business. For example I can now share my computer’s screen with clients via the internet instead of having to travel to edit for them or train them on-site.

With or without you, SkyNet’s on the move! :D The decision YOU have to make is whether you’re going to get with the program and go with the flow or keep your information to yourself and do things the old fashioned way. When I traveled to Delaware… (Delaware), I met a bus driver who was also a prize-winning Chicken Farmer. I guarantee you that he’s not interested in SkyNet AT. ALL! :D However, his business doesn’t depend on the internet. People need to eat. People like to each chicken. People like eggs. He’s going to get paid regardless of what Google does…

Can you say the same thing?

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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Here’s the video of the entire panel discussion. My section begins @ 2:40.

This panel, featured distinguished content creators and arbiters offering audiences a primer on the best approaches to producing your Web series. Should you produce it yourself or wait for production money? How long should the show be, and how frequently should it appear? Do you syndicate, or offer it exclusively. Lastly, how do you get people to watch it? Panelists: * Paul Kontonis (Moderator) – CEO, For Your Imagination * Bill Cammack – Video Editor and Consultant * Kirby Ferguson – Writer/Director/Producer, GoodieBag.tv * Marc Hustvedt – Editor-in-Chief, Tubefilter News * Brett Wilson – Co-founder and CEO, TubeMogul

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A while back, my friend Flo typed either “Frenemies” or “Frienemies” to me in a conversation and I was like “um.. What’s that?”. Once she explained it to me, as a combination of the words Friend and Enemy, I was like :/

As corny as the term is, it really DOES accurately describe the relationship that many people have with other people. According to Wikipedia:

“Frenemy” (sometimes spelled “frienemy”) is a portmanteau of “friend” and “enemy” which can refer to either an enemy disguised as a friend or to a partner who is simultaneously a competitor.[1] The latter can describe personal, geopolitical, and commercial relationships both among individuals and groups or institutions. The word may have appeared in print as early as 1953.[2]

Before I got involved with Social Media, most people that I knew don’t have time or energy for this type of relationship. They also weren’t interested in it. We were on the same team or we weren’t. We felt positively, neutrally or negatively about each other or we don’t know or care that each other exists.

There are, apparently, some people that either enjoy living this kind of life or find it to be necessary because of what they do to get money. An example would be the film industry. Everybody wants to be selected to act in something, or direct something, or film something, or work on the crew. What’chagonnado when someone tells you they got a job YOU wanted? You can either congratulate them and sulk behind their backs (if that’s how you feel), or you can tell them how you really feel and risk alienating them.

The Tabloids

Going the direct route doesn’t work so well in Social Media. People aren’t so quick to tell people with 40,000 Twitter Followers what they really think of them. So, bedsides IRL pressures, there are online pressures not to make yourself a pariah on the back-channel.

Jill & Flo

The back-channel is where authentic conversation goes on between people that know each other online, except it’s private. It’s where true opinions of people are passed around and propagated, which never end up “in print”.

You can’t find these opinions on Twitter or Facebook or in blog comments, but they’re commonly-known positions and a lot of people have discussed them and agree with them. As a video game player, I find it quite interesting to go to parties and see the different factions hanging out together, commiserating about the other team(s).

I’ve also been the victim of ‘guilt by association’, where people know that I’m friends with someone they don’t like and automatically place me on the opposite team, when, in fact, I’m absolutely neutral, and the issues they have with each other have nothing to do with me, whatsoever.

Usually, I don’t say anything about this and just let it slide. When you know a bunch of people, there’s always going to be someone that has a problem with someone else that you know. Trying to be involved is like keeping several plates spinning on several sticks… You’ll never finish maintaining the situation, there’s no value to it, and in the end you’ll have wasted a bunch of time.

One time, I decided to get involved. I have a friend that I was a fan of way before we became IRL friends. At some point, I felt that she had become “meh” towards me, which is perfectly fine… ish happens. I can’t possibly count the number of people that I used to hang out with throughout the years that I’ve lost contact with. The issue was that due to the fact that we have a bunch of mutual friends and see each other on the circuit now and then, I wasn’t sure she’d tell me if I had been annoying her or she just wasn’t interested in socializing with me.

Instead of jumping to conclusions, I decided to ask her directly whether we were cool or not. She was like “yeah.”, naturally, hahaha what else is someone going to say to a question like that? :D I explained my position to her, that I don’t do the Frenemies thing and it was cool with me if she didn’t want to socialize. She insisted she didn’t have a problem with me, so I accepted that and that was the end of it.

Fear & Loathing

People in general have become scared to death of voicing their opinions about personality conflicts. Back in the day, when there was no such thing as Social Media, there were people that liked each other, people that disliked each other and people that didn’t care about each other or know each other existed. The system works very well that way. Everyone knows where everyone stands. You know which crowds not to mix when you’re planning events. You know which people not to recommend to work together on business projects.

I wrote this article weeks ago, and since then, we’ve seen the perfect example of what happens to you when you say what you REALLY think about people. Some guy decided he was going to shout “YOU LIE” at The President of The United States of America while he was trying to speak. There was an IMMEDIATE verbal reaction from a lot of people in the crowd. According to Keith Olbermann’s comments about the situation, the guy wasn’t even RIGHT about what he was screaming about, on top of being rude and disrespectful to President Obama as a person and to the office of the POTUS as well.

Regardless of how many people agree with what the guy said, HE was the one that interrupted The President, so he gets to be the poster-boy for the situation. This is what people attempt to avoid by keeping their opinions flowing on the back-channel and not airing them in blogs or in audio or video clips where people are going to share the media with everyone they know. This is what I call a transparency loop, or probably more accurately, a transparency SPIRAL, because the more people you know, the more people you have an opportunity to offend with your media and the less honest you’re willing to be when you’re creating media. Everyone loves to claim that they’re transparent, but in fact, they’re 100% transparent about whatever way-smaller-percentage of the facts they’re willing to talk about.

Anyway, politics is an excellent example of frenemies, because people have to pretend they like and respect each other in order to come to agreements about policies. Meanwhile, every time it’s time for someone to get elected, they come up with all kinds of GARBAGE to talk about the other candidate. Then, when it’s all over and somebody won, people want to act like “heh heh… Nah man… That was all business, heh heh. We’re COOL! We’re COOL!” :/

Keeping Up Appearances

The problem with Frenemies is that everyone appears to be friends.. at least to those people that aren’t connected on the back-channel and don’t know the actual scoop about what person X and person Y have been saying about each other.

This means that it’s really tough to tell who’s serious and who isn’t about being someone important in your life. The people who are trying to USE YOU act exactly the same way as your actual friends. On top of that, when people know who you know, they try their best not to speak honestly about you when any of those people are present, which leads to even more dilution.

I liked the good old days… Agree, Disagree or Agree To Disagree. Period. If you have a beef… Settle it… Or Don’t. Make the teams. Decide which team you’re on or decide to remain a free agent. Some people are going to hate you for choosing sides. Other people are going to hate you for NOT choosing sides. There’s nothing you can do about this.

It’s a much easier life and you can socialize and do business way more efficiently when you have friends, enemies and people that don’t care about you one way or the other instead of a bunch of people that you just can’t figure out who the hell they are or what the hell they want.

~ Bill Cammack

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Here’s the video clip. Dude flips out at 1:28…

Now.. The Kid don’t care about politics AT. ALL. Not AT ALL! :D However, are several lessons to be learned here.

Hold Your Head

First of all, what you want to do in any situation, especially a situation where you’re in public, especially a situation when you’re around people you do business with, especially in a situation where you’re around your superiors, especially when you were PRIVILEGED enough to be sitting in the same room with the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, hahaha you don’t want to forget who you are and what your station is in life.

If you’re a member of the House of Representatives and the President is talking, STFU.

If you’re a Private in the armed forces, and a General is talking, STFU.

If you’re an employee and the CEO is talking, STFU.

This is known as RESPECT. If people begin to believe that you don’t know how to respect your superiors, you will be shunned. Beleedat. Your superiors will see you as an insubordinate. Your peers will see you as a liability. Nobody wants to be the man next to the man that can’t control himself. Nobody wants to suffer guilt by association.

If you were selected for or elected to a position of privilege, it’s because people believed that you could handle the pressure. People believed that you could do the business without becoming so emotionally wrapped up in the situation that you lose your cool and make your whole team look like JERKS. If you let it slip that you aren’t able to handle that responsibility, you will receive Das Boot… Quick, Fast, In A Hurry, Flava’s Vision Ain’t Blurry.

Mob Mentality

Also, don’t play yourself by aligning yourself with people that will murmur when they’re in a crowd of murmurers, but will STFU when it comes to individually expressing their opinions. There’s nothing wrong with (or illegal about) thinking that the POTUS is lying to you. There’s something wrong with you running your mouth when nobody offered you a chance to speak. There’s something wrong with you challenging someone you don’t have the authority or rank to challenge. Regardless of how many people agree with what you said, they STILL wouldn’t have done what you did. To them, that’s what separates them from the savages and you just marked yourself as a savage.

A lot of people go out like suckers in this fashion. They feel like because everyone else is hooting and hollering and saying stuff under their breaths that they wouldn’t dare say out loud, in public, in a business environment, in the presence of their superiors and ON VIDEOTAPE, SO THE WORLD CAN CHECK IT OUT ON YOUTUBE that if they scream out something that they know that they and their team believe that their team is going to back their play.

Nope.

Your team will back your play as long as you play your position. If you’re a benchwarmer, you don’t get to substitute yourself into the game for the star running back. You don’t get to request the ball for the last shot instead of Michael Jordan. You don’t get to tell Tiger Woods how he should putt. You get to STFU and be happy that people think you’re up to the challenge of being in the game without being the best player. If you want to scream on people, get elected President so EVERYBODY ELSE needs to STFU when YOU’RE speaking.

Damage Control

Next thing you know, your boys give you a SHELLACKING for making them look uncivilized. That’s the point here. It’s not that they disagree with you.. It’s that you expressed yourself like a savage and made EVERYONE ON YOUR TEAM look bad so they send you out to the reporters so you can fall on your sword with some statement like:

“Well, I, uh… Last night, uh, heard from the leadership that they, uh, wanted me to contact The White House, uh, and state that, UHHHHHHH, my, uh, statements, uh, were inappropriate. I did. I’m very grateful, uh, that The White House, in talking with them, uh, they indicated that, uh, they appreciated the call, and that we needed to have a civil discussion about the Health Care issues, and I certainly agree with that.”

UMMMMM…. NO. #*$&%^@. DUH! Are you kidding me? What?… NOW, you feel like you agree that you need to have a civil discussion instead of BLURTING OUT HOW YOU FEEL when The President of the United States of America is speaking? :D HAHAHAHAHA oh. nice.

This is known as Damage Control. You’ve already made yourself a laughing stock and a poster boy for your entire team. You’re like that chick that gave it up and then fell in love when the dude was on to the next chick already and forgot what your name is… IF he had ever asked you in the first place. Discretion is the better part of valor. There’s a reason why these pundits go on television and disagree with each other and make sure they show a big toothy grin when they’re finished. It’s all part of the game. The reason you made it to the position you made it to was because people felt like you understood the game and could handle it. NOW, your job is going to be HANDLING taking all the blame yourself so the rest of your team can try to play you off like keyboard cat.

Insult To Injury

Next, you get to look like even MORE OF A CHUMP when the guy you interrupted with your outburst calmly, rationally and intelligently accepts your apology:

See what happened to you? He didn’t even need to address what you said. Now you look small, and it sounds like you FEEL small by the way your voice was cracking when you were trying to memorize and regurgitate that fake apology like Chris Brown.

Nobody wants to hear about “The Heat Of The Moment”. Nobody wants to hear that you were acting spontaneously. You are not a freestyle rapper. You don’t get your money from record labels. You get your money for ACTING CIVILLY and FOLLOWING THE RULES. If you can’t do that, someone else will be sitting in your seat after the next election/selection period.

The Point

The point is that once you achieve a certain level in society or business, you can’t afford to act “common”. You can’t afford to throw popcorn at the television. You can’t afford to throw shoes at Presidents. You can’t afford to get caught up in your emotions when you’re supposed to be sitting still and SHUTTING THE %&$^ UP when your superior is speaking.

If you can’t follow the rules, you get demoted or ejected. There are lots of avenues available to you to express your opinion in a civil fashion. It’s not like this is your ONE CHANCE TO SPEAK, when you’re sitting in a crowd of hundreds of people that are following the rules. It’s bad enough when the General asks for a volunteer and you don’t step forward but everyone else steps back so you get caught out there. It’s even worse when you call attention to yourself, not for your beliefs but for the fact that you weren’t able to control yourself, which makes you look bad, makes your teammate next to you look bad, and makes YOUR SUPERIORS on your team look bad when they’re trying everything they can to make it look like they deserve to sit at the grown-ups table instead of the kiddie table.

Play your position and your team will back your play. Strike out going for a Home Run when they told you to Bunt, and you’re going to find yourself on the bench, traded to another Major League team or demoted to the minors.

~ Bill Cammack

*EDIT*: It turns out that Keith Olbermann finished this same guy off with a 36-hit combo. WoW! :D

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The last I had paid attention to her online presence, she was living in California, so I figured this was my opportunity to meet her and tell her I enjoyed her work (on-air talent / hostess / reporter) before she flew away again.

So I’m at this event, and someone I don’t recognize walks up to me and says “Hi. You friended me today! :D”. Looking more closely, I realized who she was, greeted her and we started chatting.

Come to find out that a) she’s moved here to NYC, and b) I thought she was “only” on-air talent, but she’s actually a producer, a complimentary position to mine as a video editor.

Her Side

So, what happened here?… Because she was doing what she does naturally, I became aware of her as online talent and someone who’s connected, however vaguely, to what I do as a hobby as well as for work. Personally, I like to give credit where credit’s due, and I’m actually a FAN of very many of my friends who do what we do. So, I was glad to meet her AT ALL. Next, she had a friendly disposition. There are lots of people who are good in front of the camera and horrible in f2f conversation. Third, she was now a New Yorker, which is like when a player gets traded to your home team… you’re suddenly MORE INTERESTED in her career, etc. Fourth, I find out that professionally, we’re in the same field as well as having mutual friends via Social Media that can vouch for her professional talents (or lack thereof!) as well as what kind of person she is, socially.

Therefore, having chatted with her in person for approximately 20 minutes on one day out of my entire life.. Combining that with her “online resume” and the relationships / social capital she’s built via Social Media gives me a very well rounded concept of who she is, what she’s about and where I can immediately get more information if I need it. All of a sudden, I’m much more likely to recommend her to someone who’s looking for a producer on a project. So, while she hasn’t directly monetized her Social Media, meaning I didn’t click on any ads on her site and I didn’t buy any goods or services from her, she’s converted her social capital into professional recognition plus a positive social experience.

My Side

Looking at it from the other angle… Because I’m interested in online video, I became aware of her and a fan of hers. Because I socialize via SM, I found out that she was on the list for a party I was planning to attend, so I “Friended” her. Without those two, I would have been at the same party with her, but wouldn’t have met her. Generally, when I go to crowded events, there are lots of women I don’t meet. There are actually lots of women I don’t even SEE, because I probably know between 20-60 people in that location and never stop interacting with them.

From my conversation with her, I found out even more things I have in common with her socially and professionally, so I also achieved what I’ll call an accidental conversion. I didn’t go to the party to meet a producer that might need an editor for projects, but that’s what happened. I didn’t give her a business card, but I didn’t need to because we’re already connected via Social Media. I don’t carry cards anyway. If people don’t know how to Google “Bill”, I really can’t see what kind of business relationship we could possibly have. :D

Your Side

This is why I was saying I’m a special case when it comes to this. What I do is NECESSARY in the realm of Social Media. People have to make videos. People have to record audio. People have to blog. People have to make connections with other people. Everything they need to do, I do every day, in a quality fashion. My conversion occurs when someone decides to hire me to do what they don’t want to do or can’t do as well as I can. If you don’t know how your conversion occurs, there might not BE one.

SM is for communicating, listening, learning and sharing. Unless you get paid for one of those things, you probably won’t make money directly FROM Social Media. There are lots of people that make money by teaching other people how to use SM or by using the knowledge they already have to become the Media Department for several clients, but that’s the same process I’ve already described.. using SM to demonstrate your proficiencies in SM and attracting people who would rather pay you to do something right that it’ll take them much longer to do as well as doing a much poorer job, making their business look low-budget, thus attracting fewer customers and having their corner-cutting directly affect their bottom line.

Businesses use the search capabilities to find instances of people talking about their brands or products. They make communities or groups or pages so that people can have somewhere to find out about current events or promotions they’re offering. Some of them hire ghost-writers to be their internet presence for them. Any way you look at it, Social Media is a MEANS and not an END. Amassing an audience is only the first part. It’s like booking a theater and advertising your play. If nobody cares about your production, you won’t sell any tickets. If you sell some tickets and your production is garbage, word of mouth will work AGAINST you instead of FOR you. If you add everyone in creation and then you don’t have anything to say that’s useful to them or informs them of why they should use your company for something instead of the myriad others that provide the same services, you’re not going to see much return for the time, energy and money you spent setting up your network.

Social Media is basically a light that you can shine on yourself. It’s where the game STARTS, not where it ends and you get to relax and watch the profits roll in. It’s your opportunity to reach a global audience or a local audience that might be looking for a company that does what you do. Before you shine that light, you want to figure out what your endgame is, what you’re offering and how you’re going to express that to people without shilling and making yourself a pariah.

Your primary opportunity here exists in socialization… getting to know people and letting them know things about you so they can make educated decisions about whether they’d like to include you in their social or business plans. This is why it’s called SOCIAL Media.

If it had been about everyone trading commercials about themselves and amassing a bunch of people you can sell stuff to and make money, then it would have been called BUSINESS Media… and personally, I wouldn’t even be involved.

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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I wasn’t supposed to go out last night. Thanks to Facebook’s style of reporting the dates of events, I had misread an event ending at “Midnight on Friday” as BEING on Friday as opposed to being on THURSDAY and ending after 11:59 on Thursday night. However… I had made plans to return my friend’s camera to him on Wednesday, because another friend of mine had told me she wanted to hang out and then completely flaked on me. This meant that I didn’t give him his camera at all on Wednesday, because my reason for going downtown evaporated.

So I made plans to give him his camera on Thursday evening, but due to those plans falling apart, I decided to ask him where he was going to be later that evening, to which he replied that he was going to be at a mutual friend’s birthday party… About which I was wondering “How the hell is he going to that party tonight, when it’s on FRIDAY night?”.. So, Lo and Behold.. I checked Facebook and my friend’s party (actually, my friends’ party, since it was a dual-birthday event) was actually on Thursday and not Friday.

This was a good thing and a bad thing. It was bad because I wasn’t prepared to go partying tonight. It was good because since I had already been getting ready to go downtown earlier to return my friend’s camera, it only took me a few minutes’ more maintenance to be party-ready.

So I break out around 8pm and get the subway downtown without incident…. oh… So the way things are in NYC, there are trendy areas and not-trendy areas. Normally, if you know you want to throw a party and invite a bunch of people (in my case, “a bunch” would equal around 60), you look for a dive bar… You look for somewhere where nobody actually wants to go on a Thursday night, so that a) it’s not noisy and you can hear people talk, b) it’s not crowded, so you can get to your other friends as well as THE BAR!!! and c) it’s not prohibitively expensive or has some kind of dress code that will keep your friends from getting in since they normally look bummy and why should they dress up to come to your birthday party?

So when I had checked the Facebook invite, the location was just about all the way West in Manhattan and just about all the way South = The Meat Packing District = very trendy. Off the bat, I was like oh-kayyyyyy… and I was expecting to see the type of people that I saw. I was completely willing to endure this to go see my friends for their birthday, but under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have set foot in that part of town.

Here’s the problem with real estate in Manhattan, NYC… If one place becomes popular, for dining, drinking, shopping, whatever… Fine. If two or three become popular, fine. Once an entire area becomes popular, people get greedy and stupid. As soon as they find out that people have given them the seal of approval and they start getting traffic into their establishments, they start changing rules. You can’t get in without a collared shirt (for guys). You can’t get in unless you look a certain way. You might have to stand on a long line to get in. There might not be a line at all, but you have to stand in a crowd and hope that the doorman (I refuse to call these people “Bouncers” who are only going to scream into their headsets for help if someone bum-rushes the front door) SELECTS YOU to enter their establishment.

You might have to wait on line while people that the doorman knows walk right in, having just freshly stepped out of a cab 12 seconds ago. You may have to wait on line while people bribe the doorman with handshakes with palmed money exchanges so they can get 12 people in, causing the line to stall until another 12 people exit the establishment… providing that more bribes haven’t been offered.

This causes the people that go to these areas and deal with this nonsense to be certain types of people. It becomes a game of “I’m important and you’re not”. I’m important because I can walk right in. You’re not important because you have to wait on line. I’m important because I’m an attractive and well-dressed female. You’re not important because you’re a guy trying to pull chicks… oh… I forgot a couple… You can’t get in because you don’t have any chicks with you. That’s historically happened to my friends and I that doormen will tell you to your face that they’re not allowing “single guys” into the bar/club. Once that happened a couple of times, we got hip to meeting girls in the street so they could come with us to the bar. There’s also “You can’t get in unless you’re buying bottles or a table”.

“Bottle Service” is this elaborate scam that someone cooked up. What they do is they tell you that there’s no more room for regular customers and the only way you can get in is by buying a bottle or buying a table, which normally consists of several bottles. The reason they want you to buy this service is that they’ve put an extreme markup on the alcohol they’re selling you. The same bottle of vodka you can buy in the store for $20 costs you maybe $80 in the club. The same bottle of champagne that you can buy for a fraction of the price in a store might be $150 or $200 or WHO KNOWS how much.

So it’s a double-scam. The first scam is to relieve you of your money. The second scam is to keep people out of your club unless they agree to these exorbitant prices. You win both ways. You can’t be said to be discriminating because everyone who agrees to pay has a chance to get in. Everyone who gets in pays you tons of money over the actual worth of the alcohol you’re selling them.

Once you experience this, you either say “$&%^ THESE PEOPLE!” or you come back for more. That’s why I was dreading going to The Meat Packing District, because it’s densely populated with people that are coming back for more. They like the game. They like being able to say that they spent $150 on a bottle of champagne. They like being able to say that they bribed a doorman. They also like interacting with OTHER PEOPLE who enjoy this kind of stuff. That’s another problem I have with the area.. The chicks are often fine as hell, because they need to be if they’re going to get a guy to buy their drinks, but they’re there to play the game and I’m not.

So anyway, I get to this area without incident. As soon as I get far enough West, the people change from local Manhattan residents to people strictly enjoying the NYC Nightlife. Who knows where these people come from, but they all alight on this one area to see and be seen. So I get to the bar, I thought. The bar was in a hotel. I walk towards the door and I see that there’s a doorman asking people if they’re there for dinner or drinks. I tell him I’m looking for the beer garden, and he tells me it’s on the corner. I’m like “Thanks”, and I head for the corner.

I wasn’t prepared to see a line to get into a BEER GARDEN, but “When in Rome”, right? Off the bat, I’m thinking “This was a really dumb idea, having a birthday party in a place where people are going to have to wait on a line (plus regulars, plus bribery) to get in. On top of that, the way it was looking, they might have been rejecting people for style of dress, which I had guarded against by bringing a collared, long-sleeve shirt, but you never know. Worst-Case Scenario, I was going to have to text my friends to come outside and get me once I got to the front and the shenanigans started.

So I’m waiting on line, and it barely inches forward every 5 minutes or so. Barely. There are a couple of fine chicks in front of me babbling about nothing… Shopping or something. There are some people behind me babbling about something. I’m not into smalltalk, personally. I can’t deal with it. I just don’t give a #%$&. I need to be doing something constructive with my time or I’m not going to be saying anything at all. Eventually, the guys in front of the girls in front of me start up a conversation with them by going “You’re not from New York, are you?”. hahaha That was very cute, and I’m sure they read that somewhere, except *I* knew that THEY weren’t from here either, because none of us call NYC “New York”. New York is a state. NYC is a city. More importantly, Manhattan is a borough. Asking a gal if she’s from New York means nothing at all, because she could be from the sticks upstate, from a family area in Queens or a dot-commer that lives in Manhattan… Besides, with those obvious Jersey accents, they CLEARLY weren’t from Manhattan. It was still a good intro though and the guys got conversation as the line inched forwards.

Meanwhile, here come the regulars. It’s so funny how you can see them coming. You see how self-important the person feels that’s leading the group to the promised land. You can tell how much he’s hyped up the place and his friends are looking forward to walking right in and enjoying themselves. You watch these people allllll they way until they get too close to the velvet rope and realize that the doorman isn’t unlatching it yet. Their eyes sink and they start wondering what’s happening. You don’t have to be in the front to understand the conversation. :D The leader is shocked and embarrassed that this doorman that always lets them right in is telling them to get on line with everyone else. Then you see them appealing to friendship. No dice. Then you see them saying that they have six people with them and are going to spend a lot of money. No dice. This is where you tell who are the “ballers, shot-callers”. The ballers huddle up and decide how much they’re willing to bribe the doorman to get in. Everyone else turns a little red and starts leading their group to the next best place, meanwhile saying as loudly as possible how this particular place isn’t “worth” standing in line at, etc, etc, then they disappear down the block, never to be seen again.

So I finally get near the front and a homegirl of mine shows up and gives me a hug. That’s how you play it off in NYC like you’ve been waiting for this person the entire time, in case the people behind you try to complain that someone just skipped the line. We’re juuuuuust about to get in this place that I’ve been waiting about a half hour (blogging on my g1 the whole time) to get in, when she notices from Twitter on her iPhone that the birthday boy has announced that the party was moved down the block. I initially told her to go check and text me if that was the case, but he showed up in person to see who was waiting on the line, so that’s why I was willing to leave. It was kind of funny watching people watch our conversation. They had been standing on line just as long as we were, and were kind of astonished at the conversation we were having. I guess they thought that we cared about this establishment, which has the same alcohol as everyone else does, when, in fact, we were there to see our friends for their birthday and as soon as we figured out they were somewhere else, we skated.

So we go to the next bar, which is more laid out like a frat bar. Large screen television with the game playing on it. Lots of loud people cheering over top of the loud music. It just looked like the kind of place where a lot of beer is spilled on the floor by sloppy, drunk people. Nice place though. So we go to the roof, and there’s everyone we wanted to see. Unfortunately, this place was really crowded also, for the reason I stated earlier. It’s one of those places that didn’t have a line and DID have alcohol, so it was an overflow location. This was more my speed because it had regular chicks in it. Unfortunately, due to how crowded and loud it was, I ended up trying to text my friends to come see me when they were close enough that I could have hit them with a paper plane. I actually started texting friends that were STANDING NEXT TO OTHER FRIENDS to see if I could get them to send people over.

Eventually, someone had the good idea to move our group to an empty location. We went back past the hotel/bar with the line in front of it (still), and I saw a friend of mine waiting on line. I asked her if she was looking for the birthday party and she wasn’t. She was heading to meet other friends that were actually inside. My group crossed the street and entered this Thai food place that had an empty upstairs section. THIS is where the party should have been from the beginning! :D Lots of space, not very loud music, people could sit down or socialize and meet each other. Easy access to the bar as well as to the birthday boy and girl. So that part was fun and useful and I met people that I’ve followed online, via Social Media, but had never met IRL (in real life) or f2f (face to face), so, up until that point, that was the totally best part of the evening! :D

So then, someone decided to move it back across the street to the same doorway that I had first approached with the doorman asking people if they were there for dinner. When we get there, there’s some kind of holdup at the door. Knowing this area, it could have been ANYTHING. Still too crowded inside to seat our party, people not dressed a certain way, who knows? So I get closer, and there’s this drunk guy arguing with two bouncers for the place. These were actual bouncers. Like I said earlier, the doorman was nowhere to be seen. :D Bouncers are dressed differently from doormen because they might have to get their hands dirty. No point in fighting people in a suit and shoes. So this is really funny, because the drunk guy gets off a couple of choice snaps about the fat bouncer, saying something about weight watchers or Jenny Craig (this guy was CLEARLY off his rocker, drunk out of his mind, and if he had been in a different part of town would have been beaten up for 1/8 of the stuff he said to these guys). So that was that for that location. Our group was rustled out of there and several blocks down the street to a different establishment.

Meanwhile, this whole time, I’ve been texting and updating my Social Media location-based apps, trying to catch up with my homegirls that live in that area. There are so many bars in NYC that you can be within six blocks of a friend and never run into each other unless you carefully plan it. While my group was moving bar to bar, their group was moving through different bars nearby. Under normal circumstances, I would have skated and gone to see them, but I wanted to hang out for the birthday festivities, so I hung with those ’till the end….

So we arrive at the next place and it’s too crowded with people dancing, so someone that knows the neighborhood ushers us to yet ANOTHER location. This spot was suspicious from the giddyap. We had walked so far that we were no longer in the touristy area. This was a REAL dive bar. It was also about 1:00 am at this point. I bring that up to say that I had already been partying for ~5 hours and also to say that we were about an hour and a half short from when bars close in NYC, around 3am – 4am. So I just didn’t like how this place looked… AT. ALL. :/

In the movie “Ronin”, Robert De Niro says “I never walk into a place I don’t know how to walk out of”. I’m the same way, except I would say that AS I’m walking into a place, I’m creating my plans for walking back out of it. That starts with the bouncer. This guy was sitting down outside. It was odd. Bouncers are supposed to be standing, unless there’s a designated chair for them to sit in, which is normally a high chair so they’re on eye-level with incoming customers. This guy was sitting on a chair outside, like he was a customer, messing with his phone. There was ZERO air of authority about this guy. He reminded me of a friend of mine that used to be a bouncer for a bar I used to go to. He had ZERO credentials for bouncing other than he was ready and willing to get into a fight with someone and he looked intimidating. These people are dangerous because THEY know they’re nobodies, but while you’re inside their establishment, they get to ACT LIKE SOMEBODY, and that’s really not who you want to hire. However.. Most times, you can get people like this to work for cash, under the table, so it’s cost-effective, and in that part of town (far west, lower village area), they probably don’t get any fights anyway, so the guy’s just there for show.

I had been texting my girls, so I was the last one in the door. Because the bouncer was sitting down, I didn’t see him until I was standing right in front of him. He looked up at me with a bad look. It felt like he had thought his night was over and now he was going to have to work some more and he blamed us for being customers. So I look at this guy, give him the head-lift and say “What’s Up?”. He says nothing. Problem #2. You normally give yourself away as a CREEP if you can’t be courteous to people. That’s magnified if a) you’re a representative of a business, and b) I’m supposed to as YOU for help if a problem jumps off inside. There’s just about nothing worse than an untrustworthy bouncer.

So as SOON as I crossed the threshold, I’m checking out everyone in the place. There was one set of “outsiders” there, and the rest of the people were regulars or worked there. I walked to the back area of the place to make sure I knew how many people were here and what kinds of people they were. There was another bouncer placing chairs upside down on tables in the back. This was another probably-works-for-cash person, so this was even more of a problem than if there had just been one of them.

So, my friends, being oblivious to the situation, go ahead and sit down and start chatting. I stayed at the bar, texting my girls and updating my location while I’m talking to this guy I know that was part of our group. This particular guy usually gets VEEEEERY drunk when we all hang out. This usually isn’t a problem because of the places we normally patronize. This was not one of those places.

So this guy orders another drink, pays for it and then stumbles to the front door to go smoke a cigarette. Next thing I know, he comes back through the door and staggers over to his drink that’s next to me on the bar, mumbling something about (pardon my French, but it’s important to the story) “… that guy’s an asshole…”. Now.. At 1:20 am, in that part of town, the ONLY guy outside was the problematic bouncer dude. So now, I know there was some beef that happened between them. :/ Now, I’m looking for this guy, who’s nobody, to come in the door acting like somebody, and that’s exactly what he did.

So about 1:30 am, the bouncer comes back in the door, and with NO SIGNAL from the bartender (who may very well have also been the owner, because he was pretty ancient and the ladies there at the side of the bar seemed to be related to him), the bouncer goes “ALRIGHT!… LAST CALL!” … So I look at the time on my g1, and it’s like 1:30, so I’m like “ok… This guy’s rushing us out of here. We have a problem.”

So my group buys their last drinks. I already had my one drink I was buying from that place, so I was good. Probably about ten minutes pass after the bouncer’s announcement, and I’m looking down, texting to find out where my girls are and looking up their last known location on Google Maps, and I notice that the bouncer’s moving from the door towards my group “too fast”. When you’re keeping an eye on a situation, you allow people certain leeway… a certain range of actions or motions until they’re detected as actively hostile. The bouncer headed over and he was talking really loudly about something. Since he wasn’t heading for me, I looked for his backup, who was standing pretty far away and not heading over. The bartender wasn’t moving either, so the bouncer was making this move on his own…

He comes over barking something about smoking inside an establishment, and swiftly approaches my overly-drunk friend, screaming and cursing at him. Apparently, this guy had lit up a cigarette??? I don’t know huh :D I never saw it. I never smelled it. I wasn’t paying attention to him, though. In NYC, you aren’t allowed to smoke indoors, which is why bars with outdoor areas have gained in popularity/patronage since that law was passed. The way this guy came over, though, he had been looking for a reason to continue whatever beef he had had with my friend when he had gone to smoke outside. I was happy that when he arrived at my friend’s location, he told him to get up and get out and kicked him out of the establishment rather than attacking him in some fashion. Like I said, I hadn’t seen a cigarette at all, but my friend was like “ok, ok” and accepted being thrown out, so I can only guess that he at least had a cigarette in his hand?

What I WASN’T happy about was that right after he threw my friend out, this same bouncer goes “OK… THAT’S IT… WE’RE CLOSING!… YOU HAVE FIVE MINUTES TO DRINK YOUR DRINKS AND GET OUT!”. So now, I’m thinking “Who owns this place? What’s going on here?”.. Dude was clearly mad and only slightly still in control of himself. That was all my friends needed to start getting out, besides the fact that we weren’t going to sit in there socializing with one of us kicked out on the street. So I finished my beer and exited the establishment around 1:40 am, which is still at least one hour short of an honest “last call” in Manhattan, NYC.

So everyone was breaking out, so I said my goodbyes and started heading towards my homegirls’ last known location. While I’m walking that way, I’m texting them that I’m heading that way to meet them. Since I’m walking and texting, I can’t see that the sidewalk is uneven and I trip and stumble towards some chick that’s walking towards me. She grabs my arm, which is the only reason I looked at her face, since it’s one of those “hostile maneuvers”, and it turns out that it’s the gal I’ve been trying to meet up with all night. :D Just like I hadn’t texted her until I was already walking to say that I was coming to see her, she hadn’t texted that she was coming to see me, and we happened to walk down the same block and run into each other.

So we head back to the corner I had just left and go to a bar across the street that’s obviously still open and running because it’s only 1:50 am at this point. She texts the other gal to come meet us and goes to the bar to pick up drinks. The bartender says that he recognizes her because she’s friends with the owner’s wife. When I ask her what happened, she says the owner’s wife’s name, and I’m like “I interviewed with her for a job back in the day! :D”.. So the other gal shows up and the three of us kick it ’till 3-something, with the bartender NEVER calling “last call” and no bouncer necessary to hire for this place that’s on the very same block as the last one I was chillin’ in.

Thursday Night Damage Report:
Got to represent for my friends’ birthdays.
Made three new Facebook/IRL friends that I’ve never met before.
Met several people IRL that I had already been following through SM.
Caught up with 20-30 people I haven’t seen in a long time.

So now, I’m totally hating the fact that it’s Friday, because I’m all socialized out. Meanwhile, I’m totally loving the randomness and fun of last night.. Especially since it was a Thursday.. an off-brand evening that should have been nothing out of the ordinary. Instead, I left the house @ 8pm and got back home @ 4am, 8 hours later, having enjoyed tons of fun, fellowship and camaraderie!

Thanks to everyone involved!.. I had a great evening, thanks to my Social Media friends. I think I’m taking tonight off, but it’s only lunchtime… There’s another 6-8 hours left for me to figure out a reason to hit the streets and do it all over again! ;)

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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• Bill on NYC Nightlife
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• Running Dogs
• Big City Dating (Meet The Parents)
• Dramatic Hitha

“So how do you make money with all this stuff?”

So I laughed a little, because I knew I had a long, LONG explanation ahead of me. :D

Special Case

Before I get started with this, I need to mention that I’m a special case. PART of what I’m about to say will be useful to someone else. Most of it’s only useful to me.

My entire life is a special case. I’m very used to being the only… whatever. :D I’m usually the only non-white around in business situations. I’m normally the only MIT graduate in ANY situaton. I’m normally the only guy that’s messed with and quit more girls than most guys ever get to even TALK TO THEM ABOUT SEX in their entire lives.

I’m normally the only person that’s been videoblogging STEADILY since 2006 and put over 600 episodes on the net in that time. I’m normally the only Emmy Award-Winning video editor in a situation.

I’m normally the only person in the room that you can find on page 01 of Google if you search just my first name. On and on and on, so if you’re looking for some sort of “This will work for everyone” advice, this isn’t the article for you. :)

Why I’m Involved With Social Media

I’m involved with Social Media because that’s what I do. Period. Social Media is how I live my life. It’s how I interact with my friends. It’s how I do business. It’s how I learn about the world and meet new people. It’s how I express myself in a one-to-many fashion instead of a one-on-one fashion. It’s the reason I have friends in England, Hawaii, New Zealand, Japan, France, Mexico, Canada and all the way across the board in the United States of America. It’s the reason I’m in a YouTube video that’s been viewed one and a quarter million times…

Social Media enables us to be way more than we could be if we had to depend on physical interaction with people. It’s my own personal video game and I rock it to the best of my ability.

How Social Media Works For Me

Social Media’s about conversation and communication. The by-products include familiarity, endearment or infamy, and, in general, *ATTENTION*. Once you get that attention, you want to direct it somewhere so it can be useful for a purpose. In my case, I direct the attention I’ve generated to my blog.

Why my blog? Because I own it. My name is on it. Bill Cammack Dot Com. My name is not on Facebook (meaning not in the base address). My name is not on Twitter. My name is not on Tumblr or blip or YouTube. It’s on BillCammack.com.

Why does it matter that my name is on my blog? Because that’s what I want to show up in Google. Why do I want it to show up in Google? Because that’s what everyone on the planet uses to find people and topics they’re interested in. 67% (2/3) of my traffic comes from Google. So, to recap… I interact with my friends via Social Media. I use a bunch of 3rd party sites to communicate with people, but they all point back to MY website. Because of that, my site gets (relatively) a lot of hits and becomes more “popular” or perhaps relevant on Google. Good standing in Google makes more people show up at my site, because I rank higher in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Ranking higher makes my site get more hits and the snowball keeps rolling down the hill, getting larger with each revolution.

How Do You Monetize Website Hits?

This is where the “Special Case” kicks in. :)

It just so happens that what I do for fun and self-expression is the same thing I do for business. The media that I put on the net stands as a consistently-updating resume of what I can do for you or your company. I’m constantly demonstrating to people that I can film, edit, compress, upload, tag and blog videos in a quality fashion. When someone sees this and wants that same quality for their business or personal site, I receive an email from a new potential client.

This is why it wasn’t going to be easy to explain to my friend how I make money from Social Media. I use my sites as loss leaders:

Loss Lead describes the concept that an item offered for sale at a reduced price and is intended to lead to the subsequent sale of other items, the sales of which will be made in greater numbers, or greater profits, or both.

So, What my sites do is a) demonstrate personality and b) demonstrate proficiency.

What my sites do *not* do is attempt to hook people into buying something in return for whatever entertainment or education they received from watching my videos or reading my blog posts. This is why my friend was confused. He couldn’t figure out how I convert people coming to my site or how I convert any of my other Social Media interactions into $,$$$.

My game is *awareness*. If you google Emmy Award Editor, you get *me*. If you google Video Editor Resume, you get *me*. If you google He Doesn’t Care, you get *me*. If you google Avoid Pregnancy, you get *me*. on and on and on and on and on. So what happens if you come to my site? My video editing demo reel is in my sidebar in an embedded flash player as well as a clickable link directly to an .mp4 file you can watch on your iPhone or gPhone right now. :D There’s also a direct link to my resume, if anyone felt interested in checking it out.

Is there a high rate of conversion to this situation? No. :) The thing is, there doesn’t have to be. It’s passively-generated attention. I go to sleep and people visit my website. I go out partying and people visit my website. I’m working, making money, and people are visiting my website. I put out ZERO EFFORT other than site maintenance, which I have to do anyway, and I’m advertising myself all day and all night, which my quantcast badge in my sidebar will attest to, which currently reads “7,687 Monthly People”. ==>

So, if only one person out of a thousand plays my demo reel or checks out my resume or watches videos I’ve filmed, edited or participated in, that’s seven people per month or 84 people a year that become aware of Bill Cammack without my ever having to go knock on their door and attempt to sell them an encyclopedia.. Capisce? ;)

oh….. And that’s assuming that that one person out of a thousand doesn’t tell AAAAAAAAAANYBODY they know about me or my site. Once you consider that someone might post a link to your content on their favorite Social Media site and start an entire conversation about it, where everyone they talk to can come back to the same site and see the same content they mentioned, you start to see how the viral nature of the internet works in the favor of he or she who makes his or her own site and populates it with quality content…. Who comes up FIRST when you google Dating Women NYC ?… Facebook? Twitter? FriendFeed?… Nope. *I* do. :D

So, if sidebar content is low-percentage for conversion, where does the real action take place?….. On the back-channel…

The Back-Channel

In Social Media, there are interactions that go on in front of everyone’s eyes and then there are interactions that only occur privately, which I refer to as “The Back-Channel”. As much time as I devote to public media output, I devote way more to back-channel conversation. On any given day, I’m doing 16-20 hours of private online interactions with people, which really translates more to ~35 hours a day, because, since I don’t use the telephone, I get to hold several conversations simultaneously.

This is why I don’t have to do my wheeling & dealing in public. The public side is for me to explain to people what I can do for them. The private side is for people to contact me about their projects, and for us to decide whether we want to work together.

This also occurs IRL. You might see me standing in a bar, having a brew with someone, but what you don’t know is that we’re talking business. When you walk over, the conversation suddenly changes, because *YOU* aren’t involved in our business dealings. This gives you the impression that I’m always frivolously socializing, when, meanwhile, I currently have 431 Linkedin connections and almost four times as many Facebook connections (1589).

So the blogging, which I do for my own entertainment, satisfaction & socialization, serves to populate the back-channel and also to give people an idea of who I am, what I’m about and the level of quality I can bring to their productions. I don’t have to make money directly from my sites. In fact.. Other than clients I already had before I got involved with Social Media in 2006,*EVERYONE* I currently do work for found out about me on the internet or was introduced to me by someone I was connected to online.

Could I make a few dollars with Google Ads? Probably… A Few…. I found that it wasn’t worth it (to me) to have random ads incessantly littering my pages. I’d rather endorse companies that I believe in or that I’m affiliated with or that are clients of mine. I’ve run ads in the past and I’m not saying I’ll never do it again. I’m saying I’d rather offer my audience a quality reading experience, which IME causes them to read more and feel like finding out more about who Bill Cammack is, which adds more people to my back-channel and eventually more $,$$$ to my bottom line.

What If I Don’t Have A Marketable Skill?

A lot of people that have websites don’t actually *DO* anything… They just REPORT about stuff that other people did. If that’s your game, and you can’t put the attention you garner from the internet to work for yourself, you need to put it to work for someone else. The best way to do that, IMO, is sponsorships. Look for people that believe in what you’re doing, believe in your content and believe in you as a person and find out from them what they would like to receive in return for funding you to do your site.

Let’s say for instance that your game is aggregating information you read on Twitter & Facebook and regurgitating that to your viewers/listeners/readers. You may very well be able to get someone (or several “someone”s) to sponsor you, because they would rather read what you selected than search for it themselves. It might be worth a couple of dollars to them to enable you to do what you already do, except better and more often. I you didn’t have to go to work so much, you could spend more time aggregating content and repackaging it for your fans & followers.

Other options are affiliate ads or Google ads.

Another route you can go is to align yourself with blogs that will pay you to blog for them. Dunno how lucrative that is, but it might be better than flippin’ burgers @ McDonalds…. Maybe.

Shilling

The opposite of what I do is what I refer to as shilling. This would be when every time someone contacts you, there’s something they’re hoping to get out of it. To the uninitiated and uninformed, this seems to be the way to go, which is why everyone’s trying to figure out how to get more Twitter followers. They think that having more people supposedly reading their twitter posts gives them more influence, when, in reality, it’s as low-percentage as my sidebar-game.

I have 2,595 Twitter followers. I’ve seen people with TEN TIMES AS MANY followers host live streams and have exactly the same amount of people in it that I can pull, if not WAY FEWER. Twitter is not some kind of walkie-talkie. People aren’t waiting for your post so they can jump into action. Unfortunately, a lot of people act like that’s the best utilization of their “voice”, and turn their “channel” into 100% infomercials and advertisements.

What do *I* do with these people? Ignore them. If I see an email from them, it gets skipped. If I see a twitter post from them, I don’t bother to read it so I can have something advertised to me again. They’re like television commercials in the age of DVRs (digital video recorders), easily fast-forwarded.

This is what people expect to see when they come to your site. They expect you to try to SQUEEEEZE some money out of them for what you’re offering. Don’t play yourself. If what you’re offering has value which you can demonstrate to them, that’s all you need.

Why Bill Cammack Gets Pizaid

Ultimately.. I get paid because I can do things other people can’t do. Period. I do it better. I do it faster. I’ve spent time learning things that people don’t know, so if they don’t want to pay me to do it for them, they can pay someone else or take the time (if they have enough time) to learn it for themselves, buy the proper equipment and DO IT FOR FREE (minus equipment purchase costs) on their own.

Most people don’t have time to waste, learning skills that they’re never going to be able to use again. If they teach themselves how to edit, they’re never going to get a steady job editing. Also, the time they’re spending learning what I already know is time they’re *not* spending making money for themselves. This is why I don’t need to convince or persuade people that they should hire me. The reasons are obvious and there are more reasons every single day.

This is why I don’t need to directly advertise myself to people. I don’t get PAID from my websites. I get ATTENTION from my websites, and then I do whatever I want with my Social Capital. I’ve also built a foundation for any business endeavors I choose to become involved in. Whatever I want someone to pay me to do, I have at least two years’ worth of examples of my being involved in internet website and content creation. I have over TEN YEARS of experience editing videos, including several years of being an Emmy judge and an International Emmy judge.

I don’t have to convince anyone of anything. I don’t have to sell anybody anything. I don’t need to monetize my websites. I don’t need to get money for the hours that I spend writing articles like this. I build my community through Social Media so that when I come up with an idea for business, I have THOUSANDS of people that I can inform about my idea RIGHT. NOW… TODAY!, and if someone’s interested, we can definitely make this happen.

Interestingly enough… NOT SELLING THINGS TO PEOPLE works so well for me that I often have to AVOID business conversations with people, because I really, HONESTLY didn’t approach them to try to get some money from them. :) I have to actively steer the conversation away from what I do so I’m not associated with the people that only walk up to you, shake your hand and give you a hug because they’re trying to get paid. Let’s have fun when it’s time to have fun and do business when it’s time to do business. ;)

~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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This is important because I like to keep it simple when I eat. I normally stick to your garden-variety American food, Hamburgers, Hot Dogs, Pizza, Shrimp Fried Rice, you know, regular food.

So, if I had picked the spot, none of this would have happened to me. :)

So, I’m like “uh-oh” off the bat, because the place she picked had an Italian-sounding name, and it wasn’t Sbarro’s or Olive Garden. So I knew I was about to be outclassed. That’s what this post is about. Grace Under Pressure. How to carry yourself when you’re that proverbial fish out of water.

Be Punctual (on time)

So when you’re going somewhere to meet a gal, it’s extremely in your best interest to be AT LEAST on time, if not EARLY. I covered this base by exiting the subway 15 minutes before meetup time and lounging within striking distance of the restaurant. I needed to not get there first, because the reservation was in HER name. I needed to not get there LATE, because The Kid is courteous to his lady-friends *bows* :D So I kept my eye on the clock on my G1, while Twittering, eMailing & AIMing to pass the time.

Two minutes until my mark, I was standing across the street from the restaurant doing a final systems check on my smartphone. Let me switch my usual wallpaper of me licking some chick’s neck to a sunset or something. Check! Let me delete this text message thread from this other chick. Check! Let me terminate all processes so the wrong website doesn’t come up if I choose to show her something on my browser. Check!!! I was ready.

So I walk in the spot, and it’s this really nice (to me, anyway, hahaha) Italian place. I look at the bar and don’t see her. I walk a little further into the place, looking for whomever’s paying attention to me, which means they work there. This cute blonde chick starts walking over and I can tell she’s one of the greeters. I give her my friend’s name for the reservation so she can see if she’s here already and she goes over to the computer to check…. This is when I notice…….

This. Chick. Is. Fine. Than. A. GOOD-GoodGoogeleMoogela…… DAYUM!!! O_o

Keep Your EYES On The PRIZE

So, all of a sudden, I have a problem. I was cool, calm and suave until I noticed that this chick had more bounce to the ounce. I mean DAYUMMM!!! :D JEEZ!!! :D So now, I don’t want to meet my friend for lunch AT. ALL., because all energy from the dilithium crystals have been diverted to my only goal in life, which is hooking up with this chick I just saw 20 seconds ago for the first time in my life. DAYUM!

This is where GAME has to kick in. This is where experience has to carry you to irrational decisions. This is that playoff situation where the ballplayer is really good during the regular season, then chokes when it really counts. Experience is the only thing that will keep your eyes on the prize. I mean, my eyes were SQUARELY. ON. THE. PRIZE… but that wasn’t *THE* prize, dig?.. I was there for a specific reason, so I had to get my enjoyment on, mark it down for future reference and get my act back together… NOW! :D

INexperience would have placed me at my friend’s table completely out of my mind and unable to function as a gentleman. Not acceptable. Ain’t Goin’ Out. Like. That! Ain’t Goin’ Out. Like. That! (WE AIN’T GOIN’ OUT!!!)

So, my future ex-wife leads me to my friend’s table and I’ve cleared my head out and I’m back on point by the time I greet her with a nice kiss on the cheek. I thank my beloved and she leaves me a menu and breaks north as my focus remains directly on my friend instead of the greeter-chick’s ass.

So we’re chatting about this and that from sneakers to hats, and here comes the… I don’t know what his title is. He’s the guy that announces what the specials are, but he doesn’t actually bring you anything, and he isn’t the greeter either. So there’s the greeter to bring you in from the door to your seat, this guy, then the runners who actually bring you stuff and then the waiters?… Anyway…

So he asks if we’d like anything to drink. Anybody who knows The Kid knows he asked THE WRONG PERSON if I wanted something to drink! haha

Meanwhile, you don’t want to come off like a Cro-Mag, like “I’mma drink REGARDLESS, SUNNNNN!” :D So, beside the fact that you always have the ladies order before the men, I had to place the ball in her court, because worst-case scenario, I would have suffered through a non-alcoholic beverage for the sake of the hangout. I didn’t WANT TO, but I *would* have! :D

Play It Off

Fortunately, even though she wasn’t “drinking”, she didn’t mind if I did, so I asked dude what the beer list was. This is where I realized what my next obstacle was going to be. He rattles off a list of beers, and I can baaaaaaarely understand what he’s saying. I mean, I know what the names of the beers are, but I need to decipher his accent. Apparently, they hired a SPANISH dude to work in an ITALIAN restaurant, :/ so now, I have a big problem, because I can’t even understand when he says Heineken or Blue Moon. I *KNOW* I’m gonna be TOAST when it gets to the MENU! :/

So there was only one beer that he named that I totally had never heard of. It was an Italian beer, so I said I’d have one of those. When in Rome, right? :D So he disappears and we keep chatting. At some point, I realize she had already retrieved her napkin from the table, which meant it was sitting in her lap. I followed suit, ASAP. I normally wait until they bring the food, but it’s usually a good idea to mirror the sensibilities of the lady you’re sitting across from. BTW, for those of youse that don’t know, this is another courtesy issue. It’s not like you actually believe you’re going to spill something on yourself, it’s just what you do… like not having your elbows on the table and not eating as soon as they bring your food if the other people at your table haven’t been served yet.

So the beer was good and the conversation was good, and then it came to the moment of truth. Dude comes back and is like “Would you like to hear the specials of the day?” So I refrain from asking if the blonde chick could tell us instead of him, and he starts talking.

Act As If

Now, I probably know about 12 different foods, Hamburger, Steak, Shrimp, a couple of different types of Fish, Hot Dogs, Pizza and all those weeds that they call Thai food, etc. OH, and I’ve heard of Tofu. So this guy proceeds to rattle off all these names of expensive-sounding Italian dishes with a Spanish accent and even if I had ever heard of the food-types he was talking about, I wouldn’t have been able to decipher what he was saying, so I kept nodding as if I knew what was going on. Every once in a while, I would smile and then look at her, like “Oh! Doesn’t THAT sound delicious? :D” I had no. I. DEA. what he was saying.

So he leaves the menu, which, fortunately, had English subtitles under each dish description. Now, I’m looking at the section that says “Specials”, because the Spanish dude had asked if we’d like to hear the specials, right? So it’s like the lowest-priced item was like $18. Now, before Frank starts jumping up and down… She had already told me lunch was on her. So I was playing the reverse role and tryin’na Keep It Cheap! :D

So I decide I’m going to have the $18 Salmon (which is *NOT* pronounced with an “L” in it….. SAAMUNN. Just like how there’s no G in SANDWICH). So dude comes back and I have her order first, and she says blah blah blah which I didn’t understand, since she ordered in Italian, so I wasn’t EVEN gonna play myself by trying to say the Italian title, so I go “I’ll have the salmon and pointed to it on the menu. So, the dude looks at me funny, like as if *I*M* the one with the accent :/ So I’m like “The salmon… This one, right here”, and I hold the menu up so he can see what I want. So dude looks confused and I’m thinking JEEZ, what’s the problem now? So then he goes:

“um……….. That’s an appetizer.”

So now, I’ve played myself, due to the fact that since I don’t speak or read Italian, I had no idea where the appetizers ended and the actual meals started. Of course, with my TGI Friday’s-going-ass, I didn’t imagine that it was possible that an APPETIZER would cost $18. :/ I mean, damn… Once you get in the double-digits…. Anyway… So, instead of doing a Fonzie, and going “I knew that.”, I stuck to my guns that I wanted salmon, and my friend suggested that I get the actual meal that included salmon. I allowed the announcer to go BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH as if I understood what he was saying was going to be surrounding the salmon when he brought it, smiled, nodded at him, said “That’s great. I’ll have that.” and thanked him whilst handing over the menu.

Hold It Down

Now.. The key to navigating that very embarrassing situation is to remember who you are.. That is.. if you ARE anybody. That’s a loss I was perfectly willing to eat, because I never claimed to know anything about menus written in Italian. I also don’t know anything about soup. I also don’t know anything about wine, other than it comes in the color red and a clearish color that they call white. They both get me drunk, so I couldn’t care less which one is available to me. That’s who I am. I don’t hang out with the Duke & Duchess of York at their castle (or wherever Dukes live) with the long, 18-person dining tables. I don’t go “Skiing in the AspenS”. I couldn’t give a flying &@#$ about stuff like that, so there are going to be times that I’m just going to have to take a loss and look like I don’t know what I’m doing. :D

So, There were more mishaps, but I’m sure you’re already bored. The bottom line is that everything isn’t always going to be rosy in The Game. There are going to be situations that come up that are going to throw you off. How you deal with those situations is going to determine whether you correct yourself and succeed or spiral out of control, crash & burn. One of the WORST issues, IMO, is feeling dumb or stupid or outclassed. Your only refuge in situations like that is reminding yourself WHO. YOU. ARE… WHAT. YOU. DO… and how well you do it.

It’s like when someone was snapping on you back in the day, and the only thing that kept you from losing it was you knew that after he finished talking ALL KINDS OF GARBAGE about you, you were gonna go “That’s not what YOUR *MOMS* said last night!” and the whole crowd was gonna ERUPT because you just pulled out the stops, and his only recourse was to try to throw the hands with you and catch a critical beatdown.

You have to have that mental location where you take refuge when the going gets tough. You have to be able to retreat from the reality of embarrassment and dwell in the realm of your own ultimate flyness until you can stand to get back in the game. It’s ALL about Crunch-Time… Grace under Pressure. Those bad situations feel like a ton of bricks at the time, but if you make it through with poise, you’ll gain more cool points for that then what you lost for ordering the equivalent of calamari when you were supposed to order steak & eggs.

Character & Distinction

Anybody can come off fly when things are going well for them. When you can still “hold your head” in the midst of adversity, that’s where your character shines through and you distinguish yourself from the masses. Conversation over your head?.. Play it cool and then bring it back down to a level you can kick it on. Chick’s talking about places you’ve never been (and really don’t have any intentions on ever GOING? :D), tell her about being on 125th or the L.E.S. or Central Park in the middle of the night. She hasn’t been THERE, for sure.

Focus on *YOUR* strengths and good qualities. List them mentally, if you have to. Over and Over. As the walls of reality close in on you and you feel increasingly embarrassed and inadequate… remind yourself of how WELL you would be ROCKING THIS if it were in YOUR arena. Remind yourself how WELL you’re gonna rock it if/when all this Bourgeoisie $*#& ends and it comes down to you vs her, one on one, in PRIVATE… YA HEARD? :D

Hold your head and weather the storm… Knowing that regardless of how far behind on the count you are, you’re gonna keep hitting fouls until you get that one pitch you need to smash it out of the park! :D
 
~ Bill Cammack

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I already know to avoid *ALL* areas of Social Media between the time that something happens that I recorded on my DVR and the time that I watch it. For instance… If I intend to watch an episode of “24″ and it airs at 9pm EST and I don’t want to hear anyone spoil it for me, I’m not going to look at Google, eMail, Social Media sites, Instant Messenger programs, my own blog or ANYTHING ELSE until I watch the episode.

This is because this is 2009. People are LIVE-BLOGGING events at this point. I’m sure you could have hit Google ten minutes after the fight concluded and found the results, the exact time the fight ended, how it ended, who won and people’s opinions about the entire thing. By the next morning, you can see pictures of the event as well as video from the post-fight interviews.

So, I DVRed the fight just like Keith did… The difference is that the *FIRST* thing I did when I woke up was watch the fight, because I couldn’t possibly have started my Social Media day in good conscience without clearing my desk of things that I didn’t want to be prematurely made aware of.

Also, Keith asked me about a spoiler warning. Technically, he’s right about that. In reality, the Cyborg/Carano fight ended sometime before 1am EST. I posted about it at 10am EST, nine (9) hours later. In fact, that was THREE HOURS after I commented about it on my own blog post on my site. So, while I considered myself deliberately delaying discussing it on Facebook, Keith felt like I discussed it too early, and I understand why he feels that way.

Unfortunately, this very situation is why newspapers are going out of business. The time it takes them to report the news is too long. I found out via Twitter from a woman who speaks French and lives in NYC that there was an earthquake in Tokyo and emailed my homegirl Masami who lives over there to see if she was ok.

That’s how we’re livin’ now… In real-time. So, while *I* felt like I was sitting on information for AGES and AGES before posting about it to Facebook, Keith, who lives some kind of normal-person life, was counting on everybody that he follows on every Social Media site he’s a part of to not talk about Carano/Cyborg until he got around to watching it, OR to have the courtesy to put the word “spoiler” in media they create an entire 1/3 day after the event actually occurred.

So the question becomes.. How long until something’s no longer a “spoiler”?

How long after Chris Brown kicks his girlfriend’s ass are you supposed to wait before you discuss it on Twitter or Facebook without calling it a spoiler? How long do you wait after finding out that an EARTHQUAKE hit your homegirl’s city to check to see if she’s ok? How long do you wait to say “I told y’all this chick was going to kick this other chick’s ass” when the information had already been available on the internet for NINE HOURS before you no longer need to label it ***spoiler***?

~Bill | @BillCammack

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Lindz & Bill present 10 Warning Signs That You Should Dump His Ass!

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Morning-After Conduct

Lots of times… Sometimes evidenced in this very blog, hehe.. Women stay in relationships that they would be better off getting out of.

In some cases, it’s not obvious to them what’s going on, but in others, their Significant Other is waving these gigantic red flags at them that they either refuse to see or are unable to recognize for some reason.

As usual, it’s Lindz & Bill to the rescue, with ten warning signs that should make y’all go “HMMMMMMMMMM…..”. Let us know what you think in the comments section, below…

Lindz

1. He books a trip home to see his parents and when he calls you, he says “Actually I’ve decided to stay… um.. indefinitely.”

To me, this says, “I don’t really give a $^#% about you, or what you think. All I care about is myself.” He doesn’t even bother to discuss it with you or see how you feel. Mind you, it IS his decision ultimately, but come on, man… be respectful and courteous. I’ll give it to him that he may be stressed or frustrated over something, which may or may not have something to do with you, but is that how he deals with his issues? Just ups and leaves? Well, do yourself a favor and leave this loser.

2. He’s too self-conscious or insecure to meet your friends or introduce you to his.

If even HE thinks he’s a loser, then why would YOU want to waste your time on him? He obviously has more issues than just being insecure – He has low self-esteem and doesn’t think he’s worth meeting your amazingly cool friends. And you’re way too awesome to have to deal with this baggage. If he doesn’t think he’s worth it, then you definitely shouldn’t either. DUMP HIS ASS.

3. He forgets about your Birthday / Anniversary / Valentine’s Day.

A good guy will never forget about these holidays. Whether you care about them or not, he should show that he appreciates you for who you are. If he forgets them, someone better have died, because otherwise it just shows that he doesn’t prioritize his relationship over other things in his life. What? Is he too into playing WOW and forgot that it was your birthday IRL? In the future, how is he going to show his appreciation if he can’t even remember what day is your birthday? LOSER.

4. He never has money to pay for his share when you go out.

Note: I said HIS SHARE, not even the whole bill – I get it that we’re in the 21st Century, and a lot of the times, it’s common for guys and girls to go 50/50. I’m talking about those guys that expect YOU to foot the bill. EXCUSE ME? This is the first warning sign of a loser who isn’t financially responsible for himself and chooses not to take care of himself. Last I checked you weren’t his babysitter. You better dump his ass before he starts asking you for his weekly allowance.

5. He treats his family like $^#% and makes up excuses as to why they don’t get along. I.E. He’s too good for them.

If he believes that its OK to treat his family – his own flesh and blood – like crap, how do you think he feels about treating you? He obviously doesn’t think there is anything wrong with that and with the right situation to piss him off, he’s like an atom bomb waiting to explode. Just make sure that you’re not around to reap the repercussions.

Bill

6. Having a girlfriend isn’t as important to him as having a boyfriend is to you.

Lots of times, dudes are just getting laid. Period. It doesn’t really have anything to do with YOU, personally. A girlfriend = guaranteed sex, and that’s about it. If it’s not personal with you, you can be easily replaced by any OTHER chick that wants to have sex with him on the regular and isn’t going to be too much of a PITA in the meantime. Keep those lines of communication open so you can tell whether he’s having the same relationship to you that you’re having to him.

7. He doesn’t consider any of your opinions to be valid.

Do you ever get that feeling when you make suggestions that your man’s playing you off like Keyboard Cat?

That’s a beauty pageant, not a spelling bee. That chick wasn’t selected for her mind. She was selected for her looks and her body. Similarly, if that’s why YOU were hired, and your man really doesn’t give a damn what you say or think, don’t expect to have MORE respect in the future. You’ll most likely have LESS, being that you’re no longer in school, your brain isn’t getting any exercise, because nobody discusses intelligent topics with you and the education you DID receive in school is now outdated. If this is you… get a new boyfriend who respects you or at least is willing to pretend that he does.

8. He’s always getting numbers / still active on that dating site you met him on.

Remember when you met him and you shut down your account and you stopped returning emails from dudes and you stopped checking how many winks you got today? :D hahaha Well, Keep an eye on your man’s account, because if it’s still active, you might not be “all that” and he might be preparing to trade you in for the next best chick. If you’d like to know for sure, make a fake account, send him a wink/message and see if he takes the bait…..

9. He doesn’t treat you differently from any other chick.

If you’re REALLY his girlfriend, you should be able to list the perks that you get for having that title. If you can’t differentiate between how your man treats YOU vs. how he treats other chicks, you might not be Ms. Right. You might be Mrs. Right Now! :D Ask him for something that should be easy for him to do, like… I don’t know….. kiss you in public?….. hehehe If you can’t get that, he may very well be preserving his game with the next chick, since her friends might be in the same room with you, or maybe she’s there herself.

10. You have access to his ex-girlfriends and knowledge of how THEIR relationships ended up.

Ladies… Please… Seriously… :D If you see how some dude dogged females in the past, PLEASE use that information to make educated decisions about messing with him or trying to be his girlfriend. I’m sure that every single one of them thought that they were as fly as YOU think YOU are right now. Every one of them ended up as *EX-GIRLFRIENDS* too, so get a clue.

Lindz|@LindseyChen & Bill|@BillCammack

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Now, I’m not much into making predictions on blogs, but I thought I’d throw in my two cents here ahead of time so I can compare it to what happens during the actual fight.

Unfortunately… (or, fortunately, for some of us :D), American media, and probably media everywhere else in the world puts a lot of value on physical, visual attractiveness. I think that’s a good idea when it comes to commercials and modeling, but a VERY BAD IDEA when it comes to fighting.

Every time I hear about Gina, they’re talking about how cute she is and how she’s “The Face of the Sport”, yadda yadda…

Every time I hear about Cris, they’re talking about how she’s a savage and has been mauling every chick in her path.

Unfortunately, the way the fight game works, as I’ve watched through Boxing and now Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), it’s a ladder-based system where you make sure the best avoid the best until you can make a superfight and make a lot of good money from it. Because of this, I haven’t been able to see Carano & Santos go up against the same calibre fighters in order to attempt to accurately judge what should happen when they meet on Saturday.

Of course, this issue is exacerbated by the fact that there just aren’t very many women that are allowed to fight on television. As far as I know, there are ZERO women in the UFC, ZERO women in the WEC (which appears to be the minor leagues of the UFC?), I saw some rarely when Bodog used to have a show, and you see women fight now and then in Strikeforce, where this fight is going to take place.

Therefore… Basically due to a lack of female fight promotion, this is about to decide the female MMA WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP, very much in the same way that the World Football Champions are decided by the NFL, because there’s no viable competition anywhere else in the world.

The other question is “Where do they go from here?”. What can Strikeforce do to top themselves after this? I think they’d better hope that the fight’s really competitive so that people clamor for a rematch and they can drag this “rivalry” out for a couple of years.

Hopefully, what’s going to happen is that more people will see female fights as entertaining and request more women in the fighting organizations. Any decisions made are going to depend on how much money there is to make from female fights, so we’ll see how things turn out.

As far as my prediction for Saturday……. I’m rooting for Carano, because I’ve been following her longer.. Except I’ve been fully impressed with the ass-whippings that Cyborg Santos has been handing out to any chick that would like to step up and receive one. :D I haven’t been able to see them fight the same quality women, so I don’t have a good handle on this, but it appears to me that Cris is just too strong/brutal for Gina. I’ve seen Gina battle with other chicks. I haven’t seen Cris in trouble AT. ALL… Not that I’ve seen all of her fights.

I would love to see Gina win an unanimous decision over Cris, but realistically, my prediction is referee stoppage in the 4th round, declaring Cris Cyborg the winner, TKO via strikes.

Another issue here, though is that this fight is going to be five 5-minute rounds. For some odd reason, they’ve been forcing women to fight 3-minute rounds, which is obviously going to make this fight tougher to predict as far as stamina. Non-title fights are 3 rounds, meaning that men get to fight 15 minutes, while women only have 9 minutes to make it happen.

The obvious problem here is that when you decide to make a championship fight where women are going to fight five 5’s.. They now have to last for 25 minutes, or almost THREE TIMES AS LONG as their normal fights (3×9 being 27 minutes). The guys in the same situation don’t even have to fight TWICE as long (15×2 being 30 minutes), so this is really pretty retarded and they need to make it so that women are fighting 3×5s in their regular fights just like the men.

So this could throw a major wrench in my prediction, depending on which one of the ladies shows up with better cardio on Saturday. If Cyborg gasses out, I’m changing my prediction to Carano by tapout due to Rear Naked Choke late in the 4th round! :D

Either way, I’m about to enjoy my ass off! :D

Pass The Popcorn!!! :D

~Bill | @BillCammack

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Bill Cammack congratulates Baratunde Thurston at the premiere viewing party for Baratunde’s new television show, Popular Science’s “Future Of…”

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Well… That was fun! :D Thanks again to Erik Beck for inviting me to participate! :D

Bill, Lindz & Erik

YouTube Link: Harry Potter vs. Voldemort Rap
 

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By no regulation, I mean we’re all dependent upon each other’s sense of decency and self-awareness not to end up invading someone else’s personal space.

The layout lends itself to people moving chairs around and reconfiguring the layout of the small tables. It’s not like a rigidly set up rank and file of seats and tables.

Setup

So I’m sitting in a corner spot. Nobody’s going to get my space unless they sit down right next to me, which isn’t going to happen. One of the gals is sitting to my right on a corner bench space 90 degrees to my right, so it’s the same deal for her. The other one’s sitting to my left in a chair which is perfectly lined up with our small table, so basically, we’re perfectly lining three of the four sides of a small square table.

There was space between us and the next table because a) the tables are so small that people would be IN your conversation if they were placed together, and b) people need to have space so they can get out to hit the bar or the bathroom.

The table next to us had a chair that was directly lined up with it and left space for a) the walkway between the tables, and b) the chick who was sitting in the chair lined up with our table to have a comfortable amount of space between her and whomever might have sat down at the next table.

Situation

So this group shows up, which I believe was two chicks and a dude, and they decide to populate that particular table. The gals sit on the bench, and there’s lots of space between them and my friend sitting on that side. Fine.

On the “chair side” of things… Right before these three had shown up, the gal to my left had gotten up to pick up the next round from the bar. The guy that sat at the next table over failed to account for the personal space of whomever might have been sitting in the chair at my table and naturally and effortlessly slid his chair over right next to her chair, sat down and started talking to his girlfriends…..

So I tell this guy “Excuse me. Someone’s sitting right there.”, pointing to the chair that was going to be re-occupied by my friend. He thought I meant HIS chair and said “sorry” and was getting up, but I told him “No, you’re fine there. I’m saying that she’s sitting in THIS chair right here.”, pointing to the chair at my table. He slides his chair over and makes the curious statement “Oh… I’m ok”. ????? This is when I knew this was going to be a problem in the near future. Nobody asked him if HE was ok. The point I was making was that he was encroaching on MY FRIEND’S personal space, and it was clear that he didn’t understand what I was saying, but I wanted to see how it played out.

So she comes back with the drinks, and I see her give a look like “How come this guy’s sitting so close to my position, but she doesn’t say anything, and there actually was space enough for her to comfortably sit where she had been this whole time before these people arrived. The three of us pick up our conversation and everything’s cool, but I’m keeping an eye on this dude, who hasn’t moved his chair, but his back is angled towards my friend…

Event

Maybe 30 minutes later, another guy shows up to hang out with that guy and the two girls. This turned out to be what I was waiting for this whole time, because there CLEARLY wasn’t enough space for him to fit between the guy sitting next to my friend and the people at the table on the other side of them. I KNEW, automatically, that the guy I already spoke to was going to have to move over. He had two ways to do it. He could have LOOKED, like an intelligent, aware person, or he could have decided to move without looking. Of course, this is what he did.

So, looking in the direction of his homeboy, AWAY from the direction of my table, he picks his chair up, scoots to his right, slams himself literally shoulder-to-shoulder with the chick that’s sitting at my table, and is smiling and talking to his friend that’s starting to sit down in the space he’s created as if everything’s lovely.

Since I had already known this was going to happen, I was ready to view my friend’s response, which was a look of horror, then a realization that he was perfectly comfortble being shoulder-to-shoulder with her, an assessment of what to do, and then she moves her chair towards me so she’s now taking up 3/4 of our table and he’s taking up 1/4 of OUR table, and she makes herself ok with that and continues our conversation.

Nope.

So I’m not really sure what I said to this dude, because I was really pretty HEATED at this point, but it was something to the effect of “HEY!!!” :D

At that point, it was like the record scratched and everything went dead silent. The two girls at his table had stopped running their mouths and were staring at me. He turned around and looked at me and his homeboy that had just showed up was looking at me. I don’t know what the chick to my left was doing, but my friend to my right was tapping away on her Blackberry, because she knows ‘how I do’.

So, these four people are now in suspended animation and I’m staring at this dude that I had already explained the situation to during the very SECOND that he sat down, and I go “See that?… I TOLD YOU she was sitting there!”

This is where it was completely silent again, because I was giving him the opportunity to recognize what I had said, recognize that he was now a member of *MY* table, and say something to the effect of “Sorry” or “My Bad” and move back over where HIS space was. Nothing. Suspended animation. So I had to continue…

“NOW, you’ve invaded her personal space!” I pause again, because I’ve relayed all the information he needs in order to make the right decision.

So now, dude looks at where he’s sitting, looks at the fact that my friend has had to MOVE in order to get away from his encroachment, says that kind of “sorry” that means “I’m sorry you’re SUCH A JERK” instead of “I’m sorry I lost track of my own personal space and disrespected your female friend”, and moves back over where he’s supposed to be so my friend can take her proper position at our table.

I tell him something like “Thank you. I appreciate it”, which I did, because he could have gone the “**** you! I’m gonna sit wherever I want” route, which isn’t what anybody wanted to happen. Also, his homegirls could have started running their mouths and started a beef FOR him as chicks are prone to do. That didn’t happen either.

There were no more issues that evening. The guy was aware of what was going on and when my friend on the bench got up to go to the bar, he moved from blocking the aisle to allow her through without having to squeeze by. When we were leaving, the guy and I said “Good Night” to each other and that was that.

The Issue

Now, I didn’t have a problem with this guy at all. The issue was that his lack of self-awareness became disrespectful to me, as I had told him as soon as he arrived that my friend was sitting there, and he ended up bumping into her, staying there and not apologizing to her at all for screwing up. My goal was to MAKE HIM AWARE that he was screwing up so he could do the right thing on his own.

I never told him what to do. I’m not his father. I’m not the bouncer at that bar. At the same time, if a female friend is hanging out with me, I take the responsibility upon myself to ensure she has the best time possible. In that capacity, as long as the chick is behaving herself (not acting like an ASS and causing problems), if someone encroaches upon her space, he’s encroaching on my space. This is why I informed him about the situation as soon as he arrived. If he had a problem (which this particular guy didn’t), he could have said so right off the bat, before she even came back with the drinks. If his stance was going to be “Screw you and your homegirls, I’m gonna do whatever I want”, I needed to know that sooner rather than later so the situation could play itself out…

Chivalry

“Chivalry[1] is a term related to the medieval institution of knighthood. It is usually associated with ideals of knightly virtues, honor and courtly love. The word is derived from the French word chevalier, indicating one who rides a horse (Fr. cheval).

Today, the terms chivalry and chivalrous are used to describe courteous behavior, especially that of men towards women.”

Chivalry is Dead. You can either leave it that way or pick up the flag and represent it within your small corner of the universe.

I’ll tell you this much… If you don’t represent it, you’re gonna get lumped in with the vast majority of guys that have ZERO CLASS WHATSOEVER, and it’s gonna make it that much harder for you to distinguish yourself amongst the women in your life as well as the women you meet on the fly.

If it’s clear that valor isn’t a natural part of your genetic makeup, women are going to treat you accordingly. There’s nothing “wrong” with having no desire to make sure that women are comfortable when they spend time with you.. It’s just that you’re going to be regarded as one of the girls.

Decisions

Biologically, if you take it back to the caveman days, :) women subconsciously crave good genes, provision (food, shelter, etc.) and physical security. In 2009, you don’t have to provide the actual security yourself, because that’s what the cops and bouncers are for. They get paid to make sure people are civil towards each other. I guarantee you, however, that whether she consciously understands it or not, if a chick doesn’t feel safe when she spends time with you, it’s going to be incredibly detrimental to your rap.

OTOH… If you’re just not that type to do anything about it when you or a chick you’re with is disrespected, I suggest that you keep your mouth SHUT! :D Better than that, if you perceive a situation that you’re not willing to stand up for… Exit. Quickly. Check, Please! :D

Like I said before, there’s nothing wrong with feeling like if a chick’s with you, she’s on her own as far as whether guys want to step on her, push her around, harass her on the bathroom line and generally act like you don’t exist. Some women like that even better and would rather that you STFU while they handle their own physical business. I’m sure that guy got points from his speechless girlfriends for not saying something smart-assed when I told him what time it was. I’m not sure he was INTERESTED in what they thought, but my point is that how you carry yourself is on YOU.

You’re going to be judged by women on how you carry yourself. You’re going to gain or lose points by whether they see you as a barbarian, a troublemaker, a pacifist or a ***** and your ability to gain favor with them is going to depend on this. Meanwhile, and way more importantly… You’re gonna have to be comfortable and satisfied with *YOURSELF* when you look back on your own actions or lack thereof.

~Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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First of all, it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to be screwing more than three chicks at a time, so if you know four or more girls, SHARE THE WEALTH! This works out in your best interest because if your friends are gettin’ some, they’re WAY LESS LIKELY to do REALLY STUPID THINGS! Dag.

The first stupid thing they won’t be doing is interrupting YOU when you’re chilling with YOUR girls, Capisce? If you hadn’t been just looking out for YOURSELF ONLY, you would have passed your boy a chick to distract him. Do NOT let him sit around hating on you because you got all the girls, AGAIN. ‘Matter of fact (and I know this is a stretch, but bear with me), sometimes, you should even hook your boy up with the BEST chick in a group, just so he can feel special for once.

The second stupid thing they won’t be doing is acting all desperate around chicks and initiating police action. If your boy’s scraping the bottom of the barrel to get chicks, that’s a reflection on YOU. YOU should have used your props to figure out how to get him laid WAY before it got that bad. We went over this in Pecking Order / Play Your Position. Just like it’s your henchmen’s job to back your play and make sure you get on, it’s YOUR JOB to make sure that your boys get some play from the trickle-down chicks.

The third stupid thing they won’t be doing is AVOIDING YOU when they’ve got extra chicks. Henchmen are a really good source for meeting women because you don’t have to rap to them. You get to skip the whole “He’s just talking to me to try to get laid” stigma, because you were actually introduced to them by a friend (who’s only talking to them to try to get laid). The stigma only lasts one layer. If your friend introduces you, you’re automatically the friend of someone suspicious. YOU aren’t suspicious yourself. Your boys will NOT introduce you to chicks if you’re notorious for being greedy with chicks, so share the wealth and what goes around comes around.

Speaking of suspicious people… If you let it get to the point where your boy does something creepy, YOU’RE going to look nice and creepy right along with him. The one-layer rule only applies while your boy’s considered harmless. As soon as he actually screws up though, you’re going to experience GUILT. BY. ASSOCIATION. Otherwise known as “Creeps of a feather Creep together”. NOW, you wish you would have just hooked him up with one of your extra chicks so none of this would have ever happened.

YOU knew your boy couldn’t get girls.
YOU knew he was a desperado
YOU knew what lengths he might go to to get laid
YOU knew he needed help that YOU could have provided

So what did you do? Did you help him or laugh at him? Was it a big joke that he didn’t get on, AGAIN? Was it funny then? Is it funny now?

I had a friend that couldn’t pull chicks LITERALLY to save his life. We laughed our asses off at him for quite a while, but eventually we went out of our way to try to convince chicks that he was a nice guy and they should talk to him and get to know him yadda yadda regardless of what he looked like. It usually was a no-go, however, the times that they were down with the program, *HE* vetoed THEM! :O The Nerve! :D

If that’s the case, that you put your best foot forward and your boy refused your help, then you did everything you can. If he goes down the tubes, just hope he goes down by himself and doesn’t drag you kicking and screaming right along with him into internet infamy.

~Bill | @BillCammack

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Let’s say you’re a football player. Let’s say you have lots of IRL fans and it seems like a good idea to you to start utilizing sites/apps like Twitter, Ustream, Qik, Youtube, Livestream, BlogTV, Tinychat, Tokbox, Facebook, MySpace, etc etc to increase your numbers of “followers” and increase your international visibility. To a degree, this will work for you. If you overdo it, you won’t be able to spend the required amount of time to maintain your position in any or potentially ALL of your endeavors. If you don’t maintain your positions properly, people are going to start recognizing you for SUCKING at Social Media more than they recognize you for playing football.

Of course, this is infinitely worse if you’re supposed to be a Social Media Expert (SME). Do. Not. Get. Caught. Slippin’. in your Social Media if you want someone to pay YOU to handle THEIR SM for them.

Website

Your website is your home base. It either speaks to your ability to create and maintain a site, your vision in what you think makes up an attractive site (since this is supposed to represent YOU), or your ability to reach out to people that know what they’re doing and have them code sites for you. If you have none of these skills and your site looks like GARBAGE, nobody’s going to want to hire you to make a site for them, or do anything for them, actually. If you’re not an SME, but a football player, you MIGHT get some credit, being that you’re not supposed to know how to create your own website anyway. You’re supposed to know how to catch a football and run towards YOUR end zone. However, you still won’t get away with it because you supposedly made enough money during your career to hire someone to make you a decent site.

If you have comments, answer them. People aren’t commenting for their health. They’re attempting to communicate with you. Show them the courtesy of acknowledging that you read what they wrote, appreciate them and thought about their comments. If you don’t have time to do that, hire someone to admin your site. If you can’t do either, you might want to shut off comments entirely.

Don’t let people spam your site either, or else it’ll look like you “live” in a run-down tenement building.

Twitter

If you’re already a celebrity, you might get over with “I just ate a sandwich” as your Twitter posts. For the most part, nobody cares. Make sure you come up with relevant and current comments to share, or your list of followers is going to be mainly spammers who only followed you hoping that you’d follow them back.

Make sure you monitor your @replies and respond when you can, unless you want to be known as a broadcaster and not part of the actual conversation. The people who claim to follow tens of thousands of people are LIARS because you can’t get that many updates in any of the Twitter apps. They’re MISSING more updates in each refresh than they’re getting. If you’re not paying attention to your @replies either, you’re a tool on this app and people will figure this out relatively quickly.

Stop. Dropping. Names. Nobody cares who you know. Unless you have something CURRENT and RELEVANT to say about someone, save it. “I saw Omar Epps at the supermarket” is a waste of everybody’s time. If you have a link to a preview of something he acted in, let’s have it, and thanks.

Stop acting like your number of followers translates to anything at all. When you can get 80%, 50% or even 20% of your so-called followers to respond to one of your calls to action, THEN you’ll have something impressive. If you have 10,000 followers and you routinely do live streams where 15 people show up while you’re twittering it every 5 minutes, you’re making yourself look worse, not better. Focus on how well your network disseminates information that you send them, NOT how many people clicked “follow” and then never paid attention to you ever again.

Facebook

Do not make yourself Instant Pariah by hawking your wares 24/7 on Facebook. Do not send people messages every day about your new album that’s coming out. Do not invite people to your group over and over if they’ve declined to join. Do not keep begging people to check out your links or donate to your cause. This is what YOUR stream is for, on YOUR Facebook page. If people are interested in what you’re offering, they will see it on their home page and click on it. They might even visit your page or your group ON THEIR OWN! :O Be careful not to shill away your social capital.

The more you beg people to check out your content, the LESS it looks like ANYBODY’S checking out your content. Capisce? Make it easy for people to subscribe to your pages so they can OPT-IN to getting your updates instead of clicking delete every time they see your name in their inbox because they already know what you’re going to say, because it was the same thing you said yesterday and the day before…

Live Streaming

Do NOT live stream stuff that nobody cares about. Are you at the Football Hall of Fame? People want to see that. Are you walking to the store to buy a beer? Nobody cares.

‘Matter of fact, even IF you’re at the Football Hall of Fame… If you’re walking around doing nothing interesting or you have no skillz at verbally hosting a show, save it. Film everything you can all day and see if you can make an interesting video out of it for airing at a later date. Just because something’s LIVE doesn’t make it COOL *OR* GOOD. If you want to be known as the clown that live-streamed an event from the nosebleed seats where the performers looked like Lego blocks and you couldn’t even tell who they were and the camera was shaking around because you didn’t bring a tripod.. Go right ahead. I guarantee you it will detract from your brand’s props way more than it’ll add.

If you’re going to have co-hosts, make sure they know what they’re talking about. Don’t bring people on the screen just so you can drop names, because what’s going to get around is that they didn’t know that whomever was so boring and not worth watching ever again. Make sure you have an agenda and a topic. Most people aren’t any good at talking about stuff on the fly, so make sure they know what they’re coming to talk about and your viewers know what they’re coming to see.

Text Chatting

Similar to live streaming.. If you’re going to host a text chat, have a topic. If you create a topic, stick to it. Do. NOT. use “bait & switch” to get people to show up to your chats. Do not promise them one thing and then talk about something totally different when they arrive. The back-channel is alive and well and you will be talked about like a dog. People will know that you’re trying to game the system and cheat people into becoming viewers while duping potential clients that you can actually draw a crowd.

Make sure you can moderate your chat. Make sure you can kick people and ban them if necessary. It’s your party and everyone there is your guest. Act accordingly and regulate. If you have no skillz at being on video and moderating a live chat simultaneously, hire someone else to sit in and moderate your chat from a remote location.

If you run out of topics, shut the chat down. Don’t just sit there like DUHHHHH and turn what would have been a nice, short event into a long, boring event. Learn to recognize when the action peaks, plateaus and then starts falling off. Quit while you’re ahead. This is also why it’s good to set time limits on your chats. You can go longer if it’s still good, but when you hit that time limit, nobody can complain that you took your toys and went home.

Oh……. And if you can’t spell, stick to video.

~Bill Cammack

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Bill, I am curious… Knowing that you are the kind of guy who is very “here and now” wouldn’t that turn off someone that you possible “love”? So I gotta know… How do you treat a woman that you KNOW if someone you LOVE and want to be committed to? Or even possible married? Do you still treat her this way (as “here and now”? Or does she get “different” and “preferential” treatment.

I think that this highlights a fundamental problem in relationships. Unfortunately, it’s a sleeper, and people don’t recognize it until it’s too late and they’re already months or years down the road in their relationships.

The first thing you need to be able to do in a “relationship” is BE. YOURSELF!

What I mean by that is that being a “here and now”, “spur of the moment” person is part of my PERSONALITY. I can not give someone preferential treatment vs MY OWN PERSONALITY. haha It doesn’t work like that. When it comes down to a choice between my personality and some chick, the chick loses. Period. Every time. No question or doubt. Zero exceptions.

Any time I CHOOSE to do something that goes against my nature for the benefit of a female, I’m doing her A FAVOR. It’s not that I’m compelled to do something out of some sense of “She deserves this” or she gets some sort of “preferential treatment”. Nope. I decided it’s something I either don’t want to do or don’t care about doing, but I’m going to CHOOSE to do it anyway, as a gift to her.

People RARELY bring what they actually want to the table when it comes to dating. It’s funny how if you go read entries on dating sites, they all sound so vanilla and middle-of-the road. Nobody’s doing “nothing” out of the ordinary. Everybody wants the same thing….. Right. :/ What’s really happening is that everyone’s holding back the real deal, hoping to land the other person while suppressing what they really want and what they really like.

This is one reason why people seem to “change” down the line. They get tired of acting. They get tired of suppressing who they really are to get the other person to do the right thing. You know what? I’m done taking out the trash. I’m done mowing the lawn. I’m done babysitting your kids. I’m done taking you to the movies. I’m done going to your grandmother’s house on Sundays. I’m done having kids with you I didn’t ask for or plan. I’m done listening to your crabby girlfriend low-rate me to you. I’m done doing things the way YOU like them instead of the way *I* want to do them. Take it or leave it. I don’t care. Be Out. Peace. Don’t let the door hit’cha where the Good Lord split’cha.

It’s easy to be (not yourself) during a few dates or if you only see someone briefly. It’s not so easy when you start seeing someone regularly or get into some kind of relationship with them. This is why you need to consider YOUR PERSONALITY first and whomever you’re dealing with SECOND.

When people don’t do what they want to do inside relationships, they do those things OUTSIDE of relationships. Does that make sense? When was the last time Hillary was under the table with a cigar? Get the picture? These things have to be done and SOMEBODY’S got to do it. Faking it and suppressing it in a relationship doesn’t mean it’s gone. If you’re not doing it, it’s happening in some other way.

Same thing with how chicks want guys to throw out their erotica collections. Come on. Srsly? Can you mind YOUR OWN BUSINESS? hahahaha The collection was around BEFORE you and will be around AFTER you. He was already into this stuff at the time you married him and was into it steadily for years until you found it. Get over it, live with it or break North. I actually saw a television show where they sent some guy to a camp or something to try to cure him of his erotica addiction hahaha oh brother. Sorry. If he likes chicks that look like X and you look like Y, you’re not going to visually turn him on REGARDLESS. You’re actually better off letting him keep what gets him aroused and reaping the benefits yourself, Capisce?

Alexis asked (basically) if my personality would turn off people that I possibly love. The answer to that is “Most Definitely! hahaha”. The reason that’s funny is that I actually REQUIRE people to be turned off by things that I do that they don’t like. That’s the only way to go, IMO. If you can’t hang with me, don’t. If reading DatingGenius gets you upset, go read something else. If you don’t like the chicks I go out with, send me some that you like. Good Lookin’ Out, haha.. Email their pics to DatingGenius@gmail.com. If you don’t like the fact that I say “chicks” instead of “ladies” or “women”, don’t listen to me speak in person. This isn’t one of those “It takes a village” situations.. In this case, it only takes one.

If 100 chicks don’t want to hang out with me for whatever reason and ONE wants to hang out with me, having a decent idea “Who I am” from reading my posts or chatting with me in person, I’m GOOD! My time is being well-spent, thank you. Personally, I’ve already been down that road of acting like someone else so some chick will wanna spend time with me, and it always ends up with “Bump THIS!.. I’mma do what *I* wanna do!” and that’s that.

The trick to these situations is personality and getting to know each other. Women attempt to distinguish themselves sexually in relationships, and for the most part, that can’t be done. The only way you’re going to stand out is by your personality, demeanor, way of being, how you carry yourself, your intelligence, common sense… The things that make any human being great are the things that a guy is going to select YOU for over the next woman and want to be exclusive with you. The fact that you give it up the most isn’t going to get you any credit towards layaway on an engagement ring. ‘Matter of fact, that doesn’t even mean he LIKES having sex with YOU the most… it just means he’ll take it.

When a guy gets to know a gal and honestly likes and respects her as a person, he NATURALLY wants to ‘do for her’. “What do *I* want to do” is often replaced by “What can I do to make HER smile?”. That’s not acting, pretending or playing it off. It’s a natural urge that he gets that’s honestly as vivid and strong as his erotica collection creates. It’s a really GREAT thing to be able to do for a woman that you feel deserves your time and attention. It’s great because it’s your desire to fulfill HER desires and you get to accomplish both at the same time as well as letting her know that she’s loved and appreciated.

IMO, This is when things work out the best.. When the actual personality of each person compels them to have the best interests of the other person at heart. Unfortunately, haha, that’s not usually the case, and people come to the table trying to get what they’re trying to get and temporarily concealing differences between them that might cause them not to get laid (or whatever they’re looking for from the other person). So “preferential treatment” isn’t actually what you want to look for in someone to date… You’re looking for someone who naturally wants to be around you, spend time with you, be in contact with you and incorporate you into every facet of his life that he possibly can, if you’re thinking this guy has ideas about future plans with you.

As for the folks that are busy concealing idiosyncrasies, as long as you’re looking to get in and get out, that’s fine. Have fun with that. If your plan in to get into a LTR, my advice is to make sure that person knows who you are from the giddyap, ’cause when you get tired of acting, there’s the potential for the situation to become a complete mess. BELEEDAT!

~Bill

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“The legend of the brave Dutch boy – by others thought to be named Hans Brinker – who supposedly put his finger in the dyke to prevent a flood, was actually a literary invention by the American writer Mary Elizabeth Mapes Dodge (1831-1905), who was born in New York.”

I’ve been thinking about this story lately, because it’s all well and good if you can save the town by placing one finger in a dyke. Depending on which finger you use, you can still do a lot of stuff while you wait for help to arrive. You can play guitar. You can text someone on your g1. You can hold a knife and fork and eat dinner if someone brings you the food…..

However, things become more of a problem FOR YOU if you have to put TWO fingers in the dyke to stop the flood. It gets obviously worse if you have to put THREE fingers in the dyke, because now, you effectively only have one hand left to do what YOU have to do until help arrives to properly plug the holes and you can go about your business.
 
This is what happens to you when people JACK THEMSELVES UP and then ask YOU to get them out of it. People just LOVE to paint themselves into corners that they can’t possibly get out of on their own and then beg someone else to solve their incredible problem for them. On top of that, they still want to haggle with you as if YOU’RE the one with the problem and not THEM. They explain the issue to you, you inform them of what you CAN do and how long it’s going to take you and then they want to know how cheaply you can do it for them.
 
How about if it costs you ZERO and you DO. IT. YOURSELF? How about that? Meanwhile, I’ll have a brew, eat some pizza and kick it with some chicks and enjoy my time while you’re busy FAILING. Oh… That doesn’t sound good to you? That means we’re talking about regular rates PLUS “rush” rates. It’s a fascinating combination of amusing & annoying when people are in dire straits (the predicament, not the band) and they want to haggle over the price of a seat in the lifeboat while the Titanic’s sinking. My ship isn’t sinking. Yours is. Hope you can swim! *waves goodbye*
 
Unfotunately, it’s not always that easy for the person whom someone else is asking to stick three fingers in a dyke to save a town that they don’t even live in. Psychologically, for people that pride themselves on ALWAYS winning, this presents a real problem. This situation, which has NOTHING to do to them and wasn’t a result of their own mistakes or ineptitude/incompetence has now been dropped in their laps. This is a challenge which they are naturally inclined to consider, meet and defeat. Less than that would be admitting that they can’t handle the situation….
 
Well, the actual issue is a) It’s NOT *YOUR* SITUATION, and b) maybe you CAN handle it… but at what cost to yourself? O_o This is the middle ground… This is the mucus between her period and ovulation……. well….. never mind that. The point is that you REALLY have to consider how many fingers someone’s asking you to place in the dyke before you accept the challenge.
 
Another psychological burden is the fact that you’re doing better than someone else. They really need help and you’re about to eat pizza and hang out with chicks. Well… You know why I can do that? Because I HANDLED all of MY business PROPERLY. Had YOU done the same thing, you might be doing whatever YOU like to do right now. It’s very easy, however, to see the situation altruistically and see that it’s within your powers and ability to make this sacrifice for someone else’s well being.
 
Again.. That’s all well and good, so long as you’re not dragging yourself down in the process. I watched this REALLY, REALLY, REALLY STUPID MOVIE the other day about people that went out to the middle of nowhere on a yacht and someone fell overboard or something and then EVERYONE ON BOARD jumped in the water to save them and then NONE OF THEM could get back on the yacht. :/ Who did that benefit? Nobody. As is true for most stupid American ‘horror’ films, everyone died except for one person that survived to the end of the film and made it back on board.
 
It would have been BETTER for SOMEONE to retain a clear mind when the situation went down and say “You know what? If I help this person by jumping in the water, I can’t help MYSELF”. It would have been better if JUST ONE PERSON on that boat would have said “I’m going to make sure that I’m going to survive this, and AFTER THAT, I’m going to do what I can for whomever’s in the water”. This is what you need to think about when people are asking you to fix situations that they bungled on their own. It’s possible that even though you CAN help them, it’s too detrimental to your current position or your future plans to spend your time attempting to bail them out.
 
On top of that, it’s not always just one person. When you know a lot of people, you have a lot of people with their hands out, begging.
 
In a way, this is an even worse situation, because the things they’re asking you for seem like such a simple thing to do. However.. If you did all these small favors, whether you’re getting paid properly or not… All of a sudden, you fell behind on what YOU needed to do for yourself or your clients. All of a sudden YOU’RE in a hole you’re trying to dig yourself out of when you could have avoided that situation by letting them know you hope they achieve their goals, but you can’t be involved.
 
It’s also funny when people get MAD at you for not helping them with something that’s completely their fault and has nothing to do with you! What would you have done if I had never responded to your communication? That’s right. You would have failed anyway. You would have found someone else to do it, done it yourself or FAILED. Period. I listened to your idea. It wasn’t in my best interest. I passed. Bye! I’ll be eating pizza later and forgetting that you exist. Meanwhile, you’ll still be mad that you jacked up your position and thought you were going to get *me* to save you. Nope.
 
One of my favorite, FAVORITE signs when I used to be a 9-5er is:

Lack of preparation on your part
does not constitute an emergency on my part.

Learn it! Live it! Love it!
 
~ Bill Cammack | @BillCammack

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Also, I think I’m going to lose threaded comments using this theme, which will make some of the conversations look strange in the comments. I’ll see what I can do about that, but anyway, I wanted to make this post so you would know what’s going on this morning. I plan to be pretty well progressed by early afternoon.

Thanks for reading! :D
~Bill

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Check out Final Cut Pro 7! Very Nice! :D

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• Bill C.

It’s been rumored that Facebook is going to add a “Fan” distinction to regular pages. Currently, you’re a “Friend” of someone or you’re not. If they add Fans, that’ll make “Facebook Fan Pages” obsolete, IMO. It will also make people more likely to add other people to their regular page that they don’t consider to be Friends to the degree that they would add them at all.

I think this is a good idea, as it would centralize the database of people that are connected to one person instead of having at least two databases for at least two pages and most of the people being redundant anyway. I have 1492 Friends on my regular page and 109 Fans on my fan page, which are, AFAIK, *ALL* Friends of mine on my regular page. There’s no need for this redundancy, whatsoever.

Also, I would feel more comfortable, personally, adding myself as a Fan to someone’s regular page than as a Fan on their fan page. For some reason, that feels more representative of the facts to me, as it pertains to Social Media. For instance, I’ve Omar Epps & Michael Beach, but I *certainly* don’t qualify as a “Friend” of theirs. OTOH, I would appreciate a distinction that’s ‘more’ than “That’s someone I’ve seen on television and I respect their work”. Similarly, there’s a band that I’m a fan of, and I’ve actually hung out with them several times.. however we don’t have ANYTHING in common, and I’d feel more authentic demoting myself to being a Fan of theirs, assuming Facebook offers you the opportunity to change your relationship to someone when/if they add this Fan status option to their regular pages.

Since this whole thing is about data collection anyway, I think it’s in Facebook’s best interest to add the Fan distinction. They’ve already made groups, and you’re able to assign different qualifications and qualities to each group, however, it still doesn’t allow you to properly define yourself in relation to the people in the groups.

If I raise glasses with Joe C., Jim L. and Rox D. whenever we end up in the same place at the same time, I’d like to be able to mark that down separately from someone whom I saw in a web series that I enjoyed and respected that I’ve Friended and they accepted, but we’re not IRL friends. I’d also like to be able to accept Fan Requests from people whom I’d like to acknowledge for “Following” me on Facebook, but I have no connection to and no reason to add as Friends. Flickr has this capability and so does XFN (”friend, met, colleague”, etc). Arguably, you can create these distinctions using multiple groups, but it would be better to be able to do it off the bat… Better for the users and better for Facebook’s data collection and utilization efforts.

~ Bill Cammack

Twitter: BillCammack
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Social Media Category: billcammack.com/category/social-media
 

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Listen / Download => Audio Version (.mp3) [12:18]

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More Episodes: http://billcammack.com/category/datinggenius/streetgame/

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Personally speaking, my relationships to women aren’t “going” anywhere at all. We like each other or we don’t. We hang out together or we don’t. We’re messing with each other or we’re not. That’s about the extent of “progress”. Unless she has some kind of drastic personality change which makes her so interesting that I want to spend time with her over and over, to the exclusion of other chicks, it is what it is. We’re having fun, expressing interest, sexuality, sensuality and mutual admiration, it starts when it starts.. it ends when it ends.. we pick it up again if we pick it up. C’est la vie.

I find it best to state these things up front. For me, it’s way easier to meet a new chick that’s interested than to extricate myself from a relationship with some disillusioned chick. This isn’t normally the pattern, though…

Unfortunately, a lot of gals don’t actually become authentically useful until they believe your relationship IS “going somewhere”. Until you give them a title, like girlfriend or fiancee, they want to front on what they REALLY want to do with you. Guys know this, because this is an ancient female tactic, so what they do is FAKE being in a relationship with chicks so they can get them to give it up proppah.

All of a sudden, your girl is akkin’ right. All of a sudden, she’s being all she can be. That’s all well and good, except for when it gets down the line and she starts wondering when the relationship’s going to escalate… because… she’s gonna be with you FOREVER, right? :D Y’all are getting married and having kids, right? :D Guys are perfectly willing to let gals believe this up until the point where they’re pressed for the information about “Where is this relationship going?”.

In most cases, “this relationship” isn’t “going” ANYWHERE. It IS what it IS. The guy is perfectly content with how things are between you and isn’t thinking about adding titles that don’t have any bearing whatsoever on his personal satisfaction with you. Of course, this leads to another revolution of the cycle, because women figure this out and start holding out on sex and other benefits until they get some kind of action from the guy. She wants an engagement ring. She wants a date for the wedding. She wants to be actually married to you, etc etc etc.

The saying is “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”. For gals, this means to hold out on the milk in order to get the guy to buy the cow. For guys, this means don’t bother buying the cow, because you can get the milk and keep your wallet and freedom intact. This is also why a lot of women get cheated on, because they think the guy wants THEM when the guy wants SEX or some other thing you’re not providing. As soon as he gets what he wants from the next chick, you’re through.

I’ve always found it interesting that women are often clueless as to the state of their relationships. It’s like they don’t have enough information about their men or enough authentic communication with them to understand what’s currently going on, and that’s affecting their ability to attempt to predict the future. Without communication, you’re a back-seat driver. Go along for the ride or dive out of the car. The reason you don’t know where your relationship’s going is that you have ZERO say or control over where it’s going, and that’s the way YOU’VE allowed it to be.

Women seem to have a hard time reeling this situation back in. They get to a point where their curiosity about progression outweighs their ability to enjoy the ride from the back seat. The problem is, they don’t REALLY want the answer to their question, hahaha :D If they ask and he says “I have no intention of marrying you or having kids with you”, all of a sudden, she has to make the decision to remain in this relationship (which was ALWAYS this way, she’s just finding out NOW), or to bail out right now, and take her chances back out on the dating scene, now that she’s definitely older and potentially less attractive than she was when she started dating her soon-to-be ex.

Since neither situation is preferable, women are literally SCARED TO ASK, and keep going in these relationships that are never going to be different than they are right now. This is as good as it gets. Take it or leave it. Stay or bounce. It’s all in the game. Welcome to the real world, Neo.

Women are also pressurized by the progress of their girlfriends’ relationships. When your girl’s homegirls start getting married and having kids, WATCH OUT!!! :D HERE IT COMES!!! :D “What are we doing?” “Where is this going?” “Are we just wasting time together?” “Has this all been for NOTHING?” blah blah blah blah blah…

A typical defensive tactic for guys in this situation is to put the blame on the gal for the “breakdown” of the relationship. It’s pretty crafty, actually, haha… When she starts asking about relationship progression, the guy acts like all of a sudden, she’s given him all these things to think about that he can’t handle. This means that he needs to think about these “deep” questions that she’s asked him, which means what????? :D That’s right…. “I need some space”. “I need time to think about what you said”. “I need to figure out what I really want”. “It’s not you… it’s me”. “I don’t know if I’m ready to commit”… If what he’s saying is true, he wasn’t thinking about having a future with you in the first place. Either way, what it means is that you’ve just been demoted from exclusive girlfriend to “friend”.

There’s nothing you can say about it either, because YOU’RE the one that asked him all these questions that he’s admitting he has no answer for at this point in time. YOU’RE the one that introduced mental turmoil. You’re saying you aren’t satisfied with how the relationship currently is or that you want some sort of statement from him indicating that things will ever be different, and he can’t (or won’t) provide that, so the relationship necessarily has to stall until he can “figure it out”. Meanwhile, “figuring it out” often involves dating other women to be “sure that you’re the one”… Yeah. Right. :D

So this is why women are afraid to ask about the status of their relationships. They don’t want it to backfire on them, where they inadvertently end things instead of moving them towards the next level. At the same time, they don’t want to continue indefinitely in a relationship that might not end up with them getting titles, marriages, kids…. So it’s really a ‘lesser of the evils’ situation.

Meanwhile, it’s pretty simple for guys. You either have no girls, one girl or several girls. You’re having a good time or you’re not, and you’ll have a good time tomorrow or you won’t.. with the same gal or a different one. You’re messing with a particular chick or you’re not. You’re friends with a particular chick or you’re not. It’s pretty obvious whether she wants to be in a relationship with you or just hang out with you, and I think “Where is this relationship going?” rarely crosses our minds….. if EVER.

~Bill

Twitter: BillCammack
Facebook: Bill Cammack
DatingGenius Category: billcammack.com/category/datinggenius
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Listen / Download => Audio Version (.mp3) [12:18]

Send “Street Game” questions to @BillCammack or DGstreetgame@gmail.com

More Episodes: http://billcammack.com/category/datinggenius/streetgame/

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Bill Cammack in Indy Mogul’s “Harry Potter vs. Voldemort Rap” video

5 days = 478,874 views

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