My thanks to everyone who voted, who advised, who hated and who opined. I appreciated all of it at its universal root: the desire to help me when I asked.

You can see it all in use here.

Whether we are friends virtually or on terra firma…we are friends.

Thank you.

Thanks for reading.

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Tags: advertising, audio'connell voice over talent, blogs, commentary, international voice talents, internet, logo design, marketing, social media, social networking, voice casting, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover advice, voiceover blog by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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If you’re running a newspaper or working for one, there have been many times in your career where you’ve felt your job may be threatened.

The two biggies, it would seem to me, would be when television became popular and then in more recent times with the advent of the internet. If I’d worked on a printing press for any amount of time, I think I would have had or be experiencing some sleepless nights when considering the impact of those two communication channels.

And if you are graduating as a journalism student this spring, I’m guessing you also set yourself up with a pretty strong minor in case the writing and reporting thing doesn’t work out.

To wit: the editors of the trade magazine Editor and Publisher report the following major newspapers all lost circulation in daily and Sunday subscriptions: The Washington Post, New York Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle and Boston Globe. Of the top 25 newspapers only the Wall Street Journal and USA Today gained daily circulation.

My uneducated guess would be that paid advertising in those papes might also be down as well.

We all still crave content but as consumers we seem to be caring less about packaging, more about convenience and still more about the delivery system. And oh yes, free is still better than not free. The internet is free. Paid internet subscriptions to news sites has pretty much failed as a business model with certain business publications like the Wall Street Journal being a notable exception. Even the New York Times is now free on line (it’s one of the best web layouts and I subscribe to it, for free).

In spite of the proliferation of gossip as news, most adults still want news…we want to know what’s going on in our cities and states and our nation. We have families to raise, homes to protect, knowledge to gain and print media plays a big role in collecting and sharing that information. They’ve just been slow in updating their delivery system from paper to electronic.

That switch is a game changer for the financially troubled newspaper industry. Some jobs will no longer be needed (pressmen, delivery truck drivers) and new jobs will be created (web programmers etc). All thru the change, these publishers are still responsible for getting the news out. Aren’t you glad you don’t have their business problems?

But we have a responsibility too, as news consumers. We are adapting and forcing the new delivery system of our news but we’re also blurring the news content lines.

What is news? Is your news the same as my news. If it’s not, how is a publisher to know what to publish and who to publish for? With the web, we can be very specific about what each of us decides is real news.

That’s a problem because we’re not all terribly judicious in our selections. According to a quick search today on Alexa.com, globally the top print-based news site on the web is the New York Times…coming in at #97! It was beat out by a ton of Google sites, You Tube, CNN, porn sites and ESPN.

We need to check (or install) our personal news filters (internal and external) to make sure we’re not keeping out hard news by focusing only soft topics we like (hobby sites, gossip etc). The internet and its tool can seduce us into stupidity if we let it (just as TV can and has). We WILL dumb ourselves down to the point of submission if we completely embrace our freedom of choice in news gathering to only the stuff that doesn’t trouble us.

We need to know some stuff we’d rather not know about (wars, crime, finance) too.

Thanks for reading.

If you really like this post (of course we hope you do), please feel free to bookmark and or promote it by clicking the buttons below on your preferred services.

Tags: advertising, commentary, internet, media, technology by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
Comments Off on print isn’t dead, it’s just not as papery

Via a post early today from CC Chapman and his communication from holiday founder Gary Vaynerchuk (who likes the vino) April 3rd is now Good People Day. Your mail will still be delivered and banks are open.

The concept is simple: use the power of the internet and the strength of social media to let “people write and talk (and) blog and twitter and just flat out SING about people that are AWESOME and GOOD.”

Crap, this another one of those simple ideas that I always miss and say “I wish I thought of that!”

I know a ton of awesome people but my especially my wife and children and basically anyone in my family. That’s a given. CC and Gary came up with the idea and/or communicated it to me so they are now also good people.

The problem with a list like this is names will be omitted who should be highlighted. Know that if your not on this list but you are reading this blog I think YOU ARE GOOD PEOPLE.

I’d have to write a book on each person to do justice to how great they are….I won’t cause I know my posts are too long anyway. Know that there’s a great story behind each name and probably a great story associated with you too.

So just off the top of my head (links where available)

Peg Keane -best person in the world and everyone who knows her knows that
Frank Frederick
Bob Souer
DB Cooper
Mary McKitrick
Toni Silveri
Voxmarketising subscribers
Ann Hackett
Msgr. Francis Braun
Fr. Norbert Burns
Fr. David LiPuma
John Crupe
Jack LoCastro
Michele Krollman (well, all her family too)
The Haleys
Jeanne Hellert
Everyone at Greenwood Group
Leesa Barnes
Kara Edwards
Everyone at Rare Earth
Everyone involved in Podcamp Toronto
My clients (really not sucking up…I’m lucky to have only nice clients)
And you.

Thanks just being around and for being who you are. I’m grateful I have you in my life.

Now please, post your list today. Do it, twitter it, podcast it. Today’s Good People Day. It’s an internet reminder to say thanks and that you’re important. Then just try and remember to do this everyday.

Tags: commentary, GPD08, internet, social networking, technology by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
7 Comments »

People look at me funny for many reasons, one of them being my preoccupation with Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Optimization. I personally understand about only 1/16 of the rules of SEM, most of the content being like Sanskrit to my brain. But I get its importance (both to web sites in general and my business particularly) and I hang on every word of the experts I know personally to try and derive some nugget of information that will help my web site perform better on search engines. That’s a big chunk of my marketing focus, always has been.

Well recently, it wasn’t so much for monitoring progress and Google rankings (though I do check my key words) as it was adding to my Google bookmarks the web sites of some of my fellow voice talents whom I know, respect or can otherwise learn from (no, not steal from, but sincerely learn from). The bookmarks are placed on my Google toolbar which has become a very handy resource for me because it’s available to me on any computer in the world. If you don’t have it or something like it, boy I sure would recommend you drop your Explorer or Firefox tool bar and use Google’s.

I thought an easy way to find my friends’ web pages would be to just Google my own big generic keywords for our industry and my peers would show up in the first ten pages of any one of 4-6 keywords. Those keywords didn’t include Peter O’Connell or anything regarding audio’connell as I search those keywords only when I need a significant ego boost (less than I used to, now it’s only daily instead of hourly).

Most of my peers didn’t show up. Gulp. 10 pages (or the top 100 sites) on keywords that most should show up on. Not there.

It’s extremely possibly that their marketing objectives for their web sites are different than mine. I know there are a few that use their sites solely as a web brochure and have really no interest in keyword search. For others, their brand is only their name and their city. For still others, it’s their specialty like radio imaging or promo voice. I’ll leave it to them to know whether those words are popularly searched by their target market or whether they’re just hoping they are popularly searched. God speed on that one.

But to my mind, if you’re not aggressively working on keywords in your web site’s text – first knowing the best ones (a herculean task, I’ll admit) then second, using them effectively – I don’t understand how your web site can be truly effective/found. If people can’t easily come upon your site (because let’s assume they don’t know you or your company exists) they aren’t going to find you on page 20 of Google. They won’t go that far. And you’ve lost a sale…oops, there goes another one right now.

But, maybe I’m wrong.

Tags: commentary, google, internet, marketing, search engine marketing, technology, voice talent, voiceover advice by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
7 Comments »

A gentleman who I’ve met a couple of times at podcamps (Toronto/Boston) named Christopher Penn did a very kind and unexpected thing a few months ago.

As a way to say thank you for everyone who supported his blog and podcast, he posted a list with links (where possible) of every person who left a comment. How brilliant for what poster shouldn’t be made to feel appreciated (well, maybe the 3,000 spammers whom I’ve filtered out but everyone else is great).

Well its taken a little time (600+ comments) and some of the records have been lost but most everybody who has visited and left a comment on voxmarketising – the audio’connell blog and podcast will be on the following list. If you’ve been here before, you’re probably on the list.

If you didn’t leave a web site, I at least included your name. If you have an updated web site since your last post here, let me know.

To my brief visitors, I hope you’ll subscribe and come back more often. To my subscribers, I cannot thank you enough and I hope to continue to provide content on voiceover, marketing and advertising (in blog and podcast form) the you find both informative and entertaining.

Thank you all for enjoying the ride with me.

And don’t for get to say hi!

Liz de Nesnera

Louis Trahan

Tags: blogs, commentary, google, internet, social networking by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
17 Comments »

The meteoric rise and fall of internet companies is something almost all of us have witnessed. Names that just a few years ago were household names have evaporated.

Netscape? That browser doesn’t even get updated anymore.

Pets.com? Remember the doggie hand puppet. Turns out that sock was the most valuable asset the company had.

Go.com? Disney bought it and it, uh, went.

South.

Fast.

As in $790 million write off.

Well, what got me thinking about all all the social networking sites that are out there now. As you can see in the column on the right, you’re welcome to friend me up on any number of them. –>

But only 2-3 years ago, social networking sites that seemed hottest then have either faded or become geographically biased (which is a term I just made up and will explain as I go.)

The first social networking site I ever joined was called e-cademy. It was then and I’m guessing still is now very euro-centric in its membership and popularity. There was a weird vibe I got off the site (which I guess goes to their branding and the attitude of their on-line presence). I decided it wasn’t for me and I stopped paying. It wasn’t a bad site, it just didn’t seem to fit me.

The second social networking site I joined was RYZE. This had a different vibe which I preferred and was pretty active in it. What made this especially attractive to me was that they had semi regular meet-ups of RYZE members in Toronto.

Well I love Toronto and the idea of making new contacts up there thrilled me to no end so off I drove for 90 minutes each way for months. I met so many wonderful people in a great setting, like Leesa Barnes, Faith Seekings and others that it was a blast. And oh yes, I closed deals and made money.

But these groups are delicate (if that’s the right term) and when some of the member leaders changed, the meetings became infrequent. Word came down that RYZE wanted the Toronto group (the largest of all the RYZE meet-up groups) to stop meeting. My interest in the group lagged, the voice-over community on the site increasing consisted of Indonesian voice talents who spoke of a market I knew nothing about and felt ill-equipped to break into and I dropped my paid membership.

Well I have gone back to Ryze in the past couple of days as people have indicated they wanted to network with me. With my unpaid membership, such access had been limited. But when I signed in this week and last, I noticed I’d been given a “free week” (or “weeks” based on the time frame).

I updated a few things on my pages and added a friend. I also looked at the network pages where I had belonged in Ryze. Last posts in these networking groups ranged from 2006-2007. Not a good sign. Maybe THAT’S why I was getting the free week.

Have you or are you an active Ryze member? What have been your observations? Don’t you think that for Social Networks to really have value they need to have regular meet-ups?

Tags: commentary, internet, social networking, voiceover, voiceover advice by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
3 Comments »