I was thinking yesterday I should write a blog post only because I hadn’t in a while and I’m sure someone is keeping score and if I don’t write something I’ll get blogger’s demerits or something.

Assuming such things exist.

Anyway my idea was to write about how public relations’ companies often pitch bloggers about their clients’ products or services in hope that they will write about them on their presumably popular blog. These rock-star bloggers often complain (well “bitch” is the proper term for all the whining I read) about how these pitches are often impersonal and dull. The bloggers have a point – personalization while time consuming often pays great dividends.

But then I realized I am not a rock star blogger. I don’t think I even know any rock stars although I did have a nice conversation a few years ago with the Goo-Goo Dolls Robby Takac (who by the way has great pipes for voice over and has done some VO work). Tangent aside, I don’t get pitched a lot. So then I thought why should I write about it?

Then lo and behold I get an email today from Mahmoud Taji in Cairo, Egypt who asked if I might take a moment to review and write about his new site Taji’s Voice Over Directory. Well that seems simple enough.

The site is hosted through the voiceover-casting.com site but Mahmoud is not directly involved with that site. Mahmoud’s pages contain an ever-growing list (about 140 listings as of this writing) of voice over casting resources from around the globe including voice talents, agents and resource sites. It’s a very nice collection and I believe he welcomes submissions so check it out.

As for his pitch, it could not have been more personalized and pleasant in his approach. The kind of introduction/request that I assume most PR folks are not making to other bloggers on a daily basis.

The morale of this story then is if you have an idea for a blog post but are not sure what to do with it, wait 24 hours or so…the blog fairies may drop a little bloggers magic on you to help you finish your post.

Tags: blogs, commentary, marketing, voice talent, voiceover by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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“The handsomest man in voice over”, Dave Courvoisier has finally answered my grown-up Christmas wish and updated the look and feel of his blog. If you’ve not yet subscribed, don’t admit that publicly but immediately rectify the situation by subscribing to his blog now.

I steal many blog ideas from Dave (and Bob Souer (“The nicest man in voice over”)) so you’ll always find rich content on voice over, social media and gadgets on Dave’s blog all on an easier to read and faster to load page.

For those of you wondering, I’ve been voted “The shortest man in voice over”. And I’ll take whatever lame kudos I can.

Tags: announcers, blogs, voice talent, voiceover by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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Sorry there hasn’t been a post or two for a little bit but there was this giant bug with a thousand legs and beady eyes with puss dripping from them and giant gnarly teeth attacking the blog…it was sooooo scary. 🙁

But I killed the bug with my radon gun and nuclear explosives and now there will be no more blog problems.

Unless the bug laid any eggs.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled postings, already in progress.

Tags: blogs, commentary by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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When I read this blog post from Dave Fleet up in Toronto I thought to myself, I wish we could corral all the top 5 social media tools lists that are out there so we could see if there was some consensus on which ones were best (this week…ha!). Or even better, if there were some hidden tools that I hadn’t yet heard about. My guess is that list is out there somewhere but I am not feeling that motivated to go on the hunt for it. You do it and report back 🙂

If you use the tools of Social Media in your daily routine as I do, I think you’ll like this list. Some of the tools I have used and some I am toying with (some quite frankly I don’t immediately understand which is why I will always fall under the category of Social Media “active user” as opposed to “expert”).

I have met Dave and find him to be a very straight up guy whose professional opinions I trust. If you don’t subscribe to his blog, well that’s your problem 😉

Tags: blogs, commentary, social media by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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We’ve all heard tell and maybe even personally experienced the kindness of strangers in our lives and it often gives us hope for humanity. We usually quickly get over that hope but it was ours for a minute to savor. Kind of like hitting a great golf shot: reality usually sets in on the very next swing but we had that moment.

So finally after months of nit-picking the text to death (I formally requested nit-picking and damn near personally picked the thing to death) I published The Voice Over Entrance Exam yesterday.

Now obviously just posting a web site page isn’t enough to let people know it’s out there, besides, my marketing sensibilities wouldn’t let that happen so I relied on the kindness of weirdoes.

weirdo (weer*doh)
n. pl. weirdos Slang
1. A person regarded as being very strange or eccentric.
2. A deranged, potentially dangerous person.

To be clear, I refer to definition 1 not 2 here. As an example, I am a weirdo as are all my peers in the voice over profession. It’s really one of the qualifications for getting in the business, actually.

I’ve always been terribly fond of almost all my fellow weirdoes but today my appreciation runs deeper than I can articulate.

That won’t stop me from trying to articulate.

Since the book was about the industry and for use by those in the industry or wanting to be in the industry, I went to the industry in my marketing. And since the book was free to download, I used Social Media tools as my primary marketing channels because they too are free.

The following maybe a helpful “how to” guide you can apply to your business when promoting your product or service. Obviously, you’d have to adjust the audience (unless it’s the voice over industry). Also, it helps to have some established credibility with your audience to get more immediate support as outlined herein. It only took me 27 years to establish mine, but your mileage may vary. As always, enjoy the ride.

THE BLOGGERS
Step 1 was to get to the bloggers before the release. It was like a public relations story pitch except not that cheesy cause it was from me. Basically I let all the voice over bloggers know the book was coming out on May 5th, gave them an advanced copy and said offer any comments on the book as they saw fit (or ignore it too if they chose). But my feeling was to respect the primary on-line voices of the voiceover industry by giving them a first glance.

On the day of the book’s release, the reviews began. Ah, symmetry!

As of this writing, regarding The Voice Over Entrance Exam, the mighty Bob Souer (weirdo of the nicest kind and highest order) wrote on his blog: “In my opinion, Peter has written an excellent tool that should be must reading for anyone thinking about trying to do professional voiceover work.” Thanks Bob but now I feel bad because I’ve become required reading and that sounds like homework and I “disliked intensely” (as my Mother would say, she being opposed to the word “hate”) homework!

Over on Joe Szymanski’s blog, he thought “The title is spot on.” Thanks Joe, I kind of thought the title was cool too. It felt perfect when I thought of it and I was surprised as heck it wasn’t out there already. Score one for original thought, I guess.

Russ Renshaw noted with the release of the book that “A very cool and rare thing occurred on the internet today.” He called the book dense by which I think he meant thick and stuffed with knowledge, I think. Now if he had called the author dense there would be no arguing the fact. I sincerely appreciate the pub, in either case, Russ, thank you.

Always supporting the voiceover blog community, Stu Gray’s blog promises a full review of the book and knowing him it will fair and honest…that’s all I could hope for.

And the always prolific James Lorenz noted on his blog that The Voice Over Entrance Exam had “tons of useful facts about what to expect and how to proceed with a career in voiceovers.” Cool!

TWITTER & FACEBOOK
Glide over to Twitter & Facebook for Step 2 where I “teased” at about 9:00 a.m. ET on May 5th “Fun voice over announcement coming up from the Voice Over Workshop at 12:00 p.m today. And the word FREE is involved.” (the time when I had scheduled my web tools to go public with the book download page and media release on the web site news section and blog). While Stephanie Ciccarelli was kind enough to be one of the consultants on my book (and therefore knew what I was “teasing”) I was still gob smacked by her generous tweet that she “Is proud of her pal, Peter O’Connell. You’ll hear more about why today. Awesome! @audioconnell”. Very, very kind!

When I tweeted that afternoon on Twitter and Facebook: “It’s live and seems to be a hit: The Voice Over Entrance Exam…oh and its FREE” the response was totally a surprise. I expected, as with most of my tweets, followers would click the link to see what it was about. That would have been plenty good for me.

As burgeoning Twitter expert Dave Courvoisier (also a consultant on the book) noted in his Twitter-centric May newsletter (also released yesterday), a retweet is praise of the highest order. And I must say in totally honesty I was not expecting the retweets and was truly humbled that these great talents felt strongly enough about the book to share it with their followers. So my thanks to (again) Stephanie Ciccarelli as well as David Houston, Joe Rodriguez, Kara Edwards, Liz de Nesnera, Voices.com, Jamee Perkins, Justin Barrett, Linda Ristig and Terry Daniel via Twitter.

Over on Facebook, Kara Edwards again, who likely used some FriendFeed-like aggregator, offered her retweet garnering a very kind response from Amy Snively. If women liked me this much in high school I might not have ever left! But if I hadn’t left I wouldn’t have met John Luttrell, a respected radio programmer (yes there are still some out there, thank God) and a friend from my WVUD-FM days who sent a nice note via Facebook as well. Erik Sheppard also plugged the book has his daily notice on Facebook.

MEDIA RELEASES
Step 3 would be old school PR with a new media twist of an electronic media release to targeted outlets. It may be a day or before I see/hear any payoff from that activity but again – no tree or postal worker’s back was harmed in the use of this marketing tool (i.e. it was free).

PROFESSIONAL NETWORK
Step 4 would be direct communication to the voice over community that has reached out to me over the years and whose names have grown exponentially in my address book. Now there may be an oops in this one as the link to The Voice Over Entrance Exam web page doesn’t work for some but most I guess just copied and pasted the address in their browser tool bar and the page worked fine. Nice to hear from Caryn Clark, Tom Donahue, Chip Joel, Dan Hurst, Kitzie Stern, Bobbin Beam and Alexis Williams (“I’m so glad you did this book!”).

ON-LINE FORUMS
Step 5 includes communicating to lots of voice talent out there who I either haven’t connected with in real life or via social media. So I made sure to post the media release about The Voice Over Entrance Exam on Rick Party’s Voiceover Universe which in just over a year has taken on a life of its own. My voice over home away from home, D.B. Cooper’s VO-BB has a “Learning” section and I posted a link in there as well.

PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS
Step 6 involved uploading or emailing the media release to the web site of the professional association I have memberships with like MCA-I; they have news modules on their sites and some produce paper newsletters and they now have my information. Look, association newsletters and e-zines need content too!

SUMMARY
Was all of the effort worth it? My goal was to make as many people as possible aware of the book so that hopefully they will find it interesting and download it.

On May 4, 2009 I had 24 visitors to my web site.

On May 5 as of this writing I have had 148 visitors to the site and 105 of them went right to The Voice Over Entrance Exam page. So I’m guessing since it’s free, the book has had over 100 downloads on its first day. With all that link love and promotion, the book brand and the audio’connell brand got lots of web time too…the outcome of that has yet to be determined but I’m guessing much good can come from it. Stats for today won’t be up til tomorrow, I think they’ll be good too.

Not a dollar was spent promoting it (except for my time, which does have value) and hopefully lots of people benefited from what I (obviously) think is good information.

My respect for my fellow weirdos grows by the minute. Thank you friends.

Tags: advertising, blogs, commentary, radio, voice actors, voice talent, voices.com, WVUD by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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While an idea that has come to my mind is not original in the blogosphere, it is original to my blog as I have never invited guest bloggers to participate here with their thoughts. While comments and discussion are more than welcome always, I just never organized guest blog posts before.

Now that’s changing.

Those of you involved with voice over may have opinions on our industry that you’d like to flesh out a bit further. But you may not want to blog regularly or even have your own blog…so use my soapbox for a moment. I may act like I never get off it but I am truly interested in your opinions.

Here is what I am proposing and inviting any of you to participate in on voxmarketising.com’s latest experiment

• I will present a topic for anyone to submit their blog post on within a set time frame (likely a week).
• Depending on the response (hopefully not crickets) I’ll post them with your by-line etc. NOTE: If I think your post has no merit or is poorly written…I won’t post it. Know that now and don’t be mad/sad with me later. My house, my rules (just practicing that line for when my kids get bigger)
• Please keep your length to about 500 words or less if possible.
• Please include a one to two line infomercial about you, your company name, web site and something interesting about yourself so that I can include that as an “author’s information” tag at the end of the post.
• Be polite etc., if you’re rude or slanderous (or even rude and slanderous etc.) I won’t publish you. (again, my house, my rules)
• Make sure you properly credit any sources, especially if you include any audio or video clips (obviously include their embedded code etc)
• As it’s my blog I reserve the right to append your post for grammar, length or any other reason as I see fit. No I don’t intend to screw with your intent and if you don’t like my changes you may ask me to take down your post and I will. (MYMR)

Now here’s a cool twist (or what I think is a cool twist). Again based on responses, what I hope to do is take a few of the authors on the topic, Skype them and do a round table recording where they can chat (debate?) the topic with points from their posts. The give and take would make a cool VMT interview for my podcast….with added exposure for the participants.

>>> My first topic?

If you were advising someone at any point in their VO career how to produce a terrific commercial voice over demo – what would you tell them are the top 5 elements that they need to include in that demo and why?

This idea may be a resounding success or a dismal failure but I believe you miss 100% of the shots you never take.

Email your posts to me at peter at audioconnell dot com and let’s enjoy the ride together! Thanks.

Tags: audio'connell voice over talent, blogs, commentary, internet, podcast, podcasting, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover advice, voiceover blog by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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