How to exit a Zoom with no awkwardness
Plus: sharing content in an algorithmic world, robbing banks
:::Issue #25. Why are you receiving this? You’re friends with Cam Houser or you just joined the Minimum Viable Video waitlist. This is where I share uncommon stories about video entrepreneurship, and psychology:::
🎟 Welcome Scott, BP, Nick, Sam, and A 🎟
Greetings, rulebreakers-
What I’ve been up to:
🎞️ Watching Tenet. I’m hooked. This film is close to Christopher Nolan’s best work. If you like high concept scifi with complex plotting, this is for you. Note: it’s so dense I recommend watching twice and with subtitles.
🚀 Lots of plotting and planning for how to make Minimum Viable Video’s next cohort (starting in April) mindblowingly good.
👨🏫 Prepping for a short talk I’m giving to college students about networking. Have any of y’all experienced anything particularly brilliant or awful in regards to networking lately? Would appreciate examples of what to do and what not to do.
For anyone who posts online: we live in an algorithmic world
For better or worse, we live in a world where what we read and consume is dictated by algorithms. From Netflix recommendations to your Linkedin feed to Kindle book suggestions to the entirety of social media, code influences what we see.
If you’re someone who posts things you want others to see—from a full-time writer to someone who occasionally puts content on Facebook—algorithms play an increasingly large role in who sees what you share.
If you’re thinking about audience-building, here’s something important.
Because advertising is the business model of most of these platforms, onsite engagement is the metric that matters most. It allows the platforms to charge advertisers more.
Given this, the algorithms running these platforms favor content that keeps users around. Content that directs users offsite (a competing social network, for example), operates against the business model.
When you post content on any of the social media sites, they will “punish” content that keeps users onsite and reward content that keeps them on it.
For example, if you make videos, upload a video file directly to the site rather than just pasting a Youtube embed. Embedding a Youtube video on Linkedin will cause a video to perform worse than if you just upload a file.
This is the correct approach, even though Youtube is a far superior platform in almost every respect when it comes to the UX of video.
So even though it is easier to post a Youtube embed on Linkedin, for example, your chances of people seeing what you post, go up when you post content natively as opposed to embedding.
The implications of our lives becoming increasingly algorithmically mediated are big, and I’ll be exploring these ideas more in the future.
Zoom Tip: How to Exit a Zoom Call
A question for the ages.
How do you exit a zoom call with minimal awkwardness?
Simple:
10 minutes before you need to leave, give people a heads up in the chat
When it’s time to leave, give folks a warm wave and exit the call
I go deeper on this in this video:
"Bankrobbers have great status in prison"
My name is Tom Justice. I robbed 26 banks in three different states. I served nine years in federal prison. Now I'm out.
This is a podcast about a rulebreaker who broke one of the biggest rules—the societal contract of obeying the law—and struggles to escape his past, much less find the meaning in the mistakes. Interestingly, the narrative ends on uncertainty and unknown instead of closure and resolve.
From the Love and Radio podcast (Spotify, Apple)
See you in the Zoom grid,
Cam
Web: actionworks.co
Twitter: @cahouser
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Just for fun: our cat Pinky. Cue Prince’s “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World”…