My friend and bilingual voiceover talent Liz deNesnera recently achieved one of her written goals from Faffcon 3 which was to redesign her web site and rebrand her company.

Take a look for yourself but I think she did a very nice job.

January 1st is not my birthday.

But those social media outlets that demand a birth date in a profile have January 1st listed – I decided to make that my Social Media birthday.

I’m not big on putting a lot of vital personal information out on the web, a birthday being just one example of a person’s personal identity puzzle that those will ill intent could use in a nefarious way.

So thanks for your thoughts and wishes and I accept them in the spirit of kindness and friendship that they are offered.

I hope your new year is blessed, happy and safe.

If you’re looking for expert advice in this post, you ain’t gonna find here today…nah.

Today you’ll just find some observations of how social media and voice over are intersecting and maybe some thoughts on if any of it is still useful.

How do you like Google+ so far? Have you hitched your wagon to that social media train yet?

Me? I’m not feelin’ it. I’ve tried….I’ve got circles and connections and posts, oh my. But so far it feels too much like work to keep up with another network. I’ve got lots of connections…many from people I have NOTHING in common with (I’ve been trying to do something different…learn from people outside my normal circle). But I’m not finding much of it interesting. Again…this could all just be me…for others it may be a panacea. And I’m not trying to insult the network…I don’t think it’s bad or difficult to use or anything. I just don’t find myself wanting to check it out.

Oddly, I’m feeling the same about Facebook. I certainly read it more often than Google+…and yes I get drawn into silly chats, and try and make funny comments that probably amuse me more than any other readers…but I also find myself internally cursing myself when I go on it for wasting my time. I feel I should be doing something either more productive or constructive. It’s almost like I can feel part of my brain melting away, never to be thought from again, when I’m on Facebook.

For the purposes of helping my business, I post blog post links on Facebook (and Google+ and Twitter and LinkedIn) just so I can bore a broader audience, but even this gets tricky (the post part is tricky, not the boring part…just think how bored you are right now after reading only THIS far and how easily I was able to manage to elicit that reaction from you).

On Facebook, there are personal profiles and “Like” pages, on LinkedIn and Yahoo there are Groups or Boards, on Twitter there are hash tags -all with the imagined purpose of allowing you to share your thoughts among the widest audience possible and with whom you share some common interest…in this case voiceover. Conceptually, that’s awesome but operationally…oy!

Well my friend, who is both talented and lovely and a great voice talent with whom I have shared a microphone on more than one occasion, Connie Terwilliger pointed out on a forum (it might have been FB but to show you how mind numbing it has all become, I can’t remember which forum) recently how she wished that all these groups would just merge because of both the duplication of information across multiple channels (and some people are artists at managing this, Paul Strikwerda being my idol on managing all these channels to get his message out) and just the sheer volume of channels to keep up with. I’m paraphrasing here and if I’ve inadvertently mis-quoted Connie, she will right my wrongness without malice (I hope).

What was interesting was that another friend, who is both talented and lovely and a great voice talent with whom I have never shared a microphone on any occasion, Terry Daniel made the observation, as one of a group’s moderators, that he wouldn’t want to merge his particular group because it’s a niche voice over group – many (but not all) newbies to the field of voice over join his group. OK, makes sense from his perspective too.

All I kept thinking was: more niches, more channels, more work.

But are there more readers? I bless those with the time to sift and digest the multitude of voiceover groups, posts, tweets and twhats…they hurt my head. I gotta work, it’s more relaxing.

Where do you stand on any of this? Is my brain just shutting down early? Or might we be approaching a turning point in people’s reaction to and interaction with social media…especially as it relates to voiceover?

I can’t remember how many years ago I “met” my friend Jodi Krangle on-line on the VO-BB but I first saw her in person at a Deb Munro Voiceover Class in Toronto…one of those great surprises when you get to the class and don’t know who is attending. Jodi is a super nice person (as are most Canadians), a really talented voice over talent and singer; to boot, she’s a social media smarty pants.

With all that talent she has hit one out of the park with her newly refreshed branding on her “Piece of Cake Voiceovers and Voices” web site. From the minute you see the awesome new logo, then the updated graphics and brilliantly worded copy, they all almost overshadow her amazing voiceover and singing demos.

Almost…but not quite.

The commercial demo sounds new to me and Jodi sounds better than evah!

Please check her new site out and pass that message along….

I met Natalie Stanfield Thomas at Faffcon 2 but I knew of her work before then.

She’s a wonderfully creative voice talent who brings alot of life experience to her voice over work and it make her audio great.

We were talking one day (as we New York State neighbors often do) and she mentioned how she felt how she was upset with herself and her faux communication skills. She said she’d been using social media as a way to communicate with her friends and family more than actually speaking with them.

I said you’ve got a blog post in that idea and you need to write it. She finally did. Here is my friend Natalie Stanfield Thomas:

In the past six months, I’ve witnessed the birth of my friends’ grandchildren on one side of the country and children of another within days of each other on the other side of the country, I’ve been there to offer support when a marriage fell apart a continent away, crashed a wedding and reception I didn’t even know about until some friends told me, gave moral support to a friend who was dealing with a child with emotional/behavioral struggles, cheered from the sidelines while another friend launched her book deal, drooled over the latest cuisines and tastings some of my cohorts saw fit to share, and witnessed countless career-making deals be made between friends in the entertainment industry.

I did all of this, and never left my desk, in fact, for the most part many of these exchanges occurred without any real human contact at all. I had all of these interchanges with my close personal friends and family members, through Facebook and Twitter.

It suddenly occurred to me that I have been lulled into the false sense that I was actually cultivating my relationships.

It was so astonishing, as a matter of fact, that one of my friends remarked in an email exchange that he too had just realized that since we often comment on one another’s pictures or status updates on Facebook, he had not realized until that very moment, in that very email, that this was the first intentional contact we’d had with one another in SIX MONTHS.

Our job is communication, it’s what we’re supposed to be good at, so why then am I sitting here making a ‘to do’ list of intentionality?

I am reminding myself that PERSONAL contact with the people important to me, friends and clients is something I have to cultivate. The electronic media that makes networking so simple, also has an insidious side. It has the ability to afford a false sense of connectivity, to make you believe you are staying involved, when in reality you are on auto pilot. Remember, the only time you can coast is when you are going down hill. So I’m awake now and pedaling forward. I’m making personal contact with the people I interact with in my social media.

So how about you?

When was the last time you had a real conversation with the people in your network? Think about it, and do me a favor will you? If you see yourself in any of this, don’t ‘tweet’,'plus’ or ‘like’ it until you’ve first called someone and told them about it.

I thought I had a lot of work irons in the fire.

I’m a rank amateur compared to my friend, female voice talent Trish Basanyi, who I got to see on my trip to Cleveland.

Not only does she have her own freshly re-minted voice over web site cruising along, she also has her VoiceTweet site going and her new Spanish language voice over venture Voice Casa on line now.

Plus, she and Terry Daniel and Dave Courvoisier are hosting webinars on Social Media dubbed The Voice Over Super Socials. (Actually, the webinars will be in plain English, and will not be dubbed).

After listening to all that work, I need a nap.

Something monumental (not really) happened recently that shook the social media world to its core (ha!).

My Twitter follower count went over 1,000 followers and my “Likes” on Facebook for my Peter K. O’Connell – Male Voice Talent page went over 100. My friends on my Peter K. O’Connell Facebook page is somewhere around 700 with a total of over 800 on LinkedIn. I’m just getting started on Google+.

So if you are in there somewhere, thanks. If you’re not, that’s OK too. And if you said “who cares?!”, I understand that too.

But it made me think of a question that has been asked before but I think still plagues folks…in Social Media, does size matter?

Nope. It does not.

It’s about the “who” not the “how many”.

I have a VO friend and a Social Media maven who has well over 1,000 LinkedIn friends (these all-welcoming connectors are called Lions). This person is actually feeling overwhelmed with all the connections. Many of the connections are not terribly applicable to his voiceover business. He was thinking about purging his list a bit…nothing personal, just practical, I think.

This person didn’t make a mistake per se in being an Open Connector, I started out as one too. And who knows where some of those currently inapplicable connections could lead someday.

But with time a precious commodity for all of us; it seems to me that making connections with people who are current friends, industry contacts or people who might be a prospect or a contact to a prospect make the most business sense for social media.

If you just want to be pals for the sake of being pals on Social Media, that’s OK. But if you are using Social Media as a business tool, as I am, connecting with people who can offer you an opportunity someday and to whom you (me) can offer help seems to me to make both business and social sense.

Yeah OK, I get that a new Twitter background is NOT that exciting a topic for a blog, what with everybody using TweetDeck and the like; nobody ever sees one’s Twitter home page.

Well somebody might and if you click on my page you’ll see it now.

Why is it important? Well I had my last Twitter background page designed JUST before Twitter switched to a new page layout (bast—-!). So I went a year ignoring the ill fitting background page just to spite Twitter.

Twitter called me recently and asked if I would update my background page and apologized for changing the page layout right after I’d gotten the design done.

So being the forgiving type, I said sure and now alls right with the world.

Please Tweet to everyone about this exciting news. Why? Because you can!

There are two or three voiceover coaches who post so much on Facebook, Voiceover Universe and Twitter et al about their latest seminars in Tupelo, Mississippi or where ever that I’ve simply unfriended them. Social media for them is an endless informercial, I guess.

Oy.

Evidently so many voice talents have sooo much new business – based on all the Facebinkedinwitter posts I read from them – that there may be no voice over jobs left for me (or you for that matter) so we all should just quit. It’s like an accountant in April posting “I just completed another tax return!” Um, pal, that what you’re supposed to do.

The debate over the best microphone has become so intense that two voiceover talents will duel to the death tomorrow morning– their weapons of choice will be a Neumann TLM 103 and a Sennheiser 416. It begs the question if two voice over talents die in the forest, who will announce it?

And it will surprise you to learn that voxmarketising is NOT the only blog on the topic of voiceover – at last count there were 14 billion voice over blogs, all of them debating whether breaths should or should not be edited out of narrations.

Obviously I’m being silly but the truth is: in the voiceover business, we talk a lot.

When it’s not on mic, it’s on line.

The trouble is we’re ALL talking about the same things…over and over. And I think I’m getting burnt out.

That’s a bad thing because while I thought I was contributing to the conversation, I wondering now if I’ve simply been contributing to the noise.

Paul Strikwerda, my Double Dutch voiceover friend, recently wrote about this issue, which I have been bandying about in my head for a while. He’s felt tad bored by what he’s read.

My concern is not that I’m bored (I know how to fix that – change the channel, hit the off switch) but rather that I’m the one being boring. I’ve actually cut back a bit on my social media and blogging because I didn’t feel I had anything interesting to contribute. I’m not sure “my perspective” is always enough.

Thinking about it that way made me feel a little better because at least I was thinking before typing. I think when it comes to Social Media, that’s not done a lot (and it’s not an issue exclusive to voice over talents, believe me). I’ve also been guilty as charged so don’t think I’m casting aspersions (so please, no emails from aspersions looking for voice work).

It seems we’re now all (and that “all” was a lot smaller when I started in Social Media) talking about the same voice over topics and from where I sit (just one man’s opinion here) the individual perspectives don’t always seem unique enough or even thought-provoking…and again, myself included.

I know we all just want to be heard and we all enjoy freedom of expression and that’s great. I don’t want it stifled but shouldn’t we all consider a little self-editing? Just a little?

I don’t know about you but I do NOT want to be the “oh not THAT guy again” brand. The line between frequency and obnoxious gets thin fast in social media; brands are now suffering (and not reaping).

SEO and marketing opportunities available through Social Media are so enticing (based on cost) that I think we all forget sometimes that for Social Media to be effective, we have to be maybe less frequent but certainly more interesting. And that’s not always easy.

Nor should it be.

What do you think? Or are you even paying attention anymore?

For voiceover aficionados, there are a ton sites offering information about voice over (I’ll address that informational abundance in a future post).

But a newer service called Scoop.it basically allows people to pick a topic and then cull their favorite blog posts into a daily email that people sign up to receive. It’s kinda like RSS wrapped up in a prettier bow.

FM Voiceovers & Dave Courvoisier put together one on voiceover that features posts from a variety of sources (today all three stories in their daily email were from this very blog which is a synonym for “slow news day”) and it’s a great read.

There’s probably a billion pages on VO out there within Scoop.it but the ones I quickly found were:

George Washington III has a collection of his voice over posts here.

David Houston has corralled his posts on this page .

Sirenetta Leoni has a nice selection of blog posts here.

You should check them all out and sign up for the ones you like.