Entries Tagged as 'the great voices.com experiment'

the great voices.com experiment – cancelled

Great Voices.com Experiment Cancelled

My choice and my decision, with no external pressure put upon me.

Why?

A reasonable question for the many who had been following this journey.

In my mind and in my heart, I thought this was an unbiased, even handed, thoughtful way to look at a voiceover service that I had once used, decided against using for many reasons a long time ago and then recently reconsidered following a special offer email from Voices.com.

I thought ‘maybe I should rethink this and try it again.’ Things can change and improve and I hadn’t recently used the system (Pay to Play) that I have been critical of…take a look with fresh eyes, I decided.

I wasn’t going to write diatribe against Voices.com nor would it be a commercial for them – it would be my experience as I went through it with the resultant thoughts and feelings I encountered.

I also knew it would be interesting blog reading and provoke discussion (one of the hoped for results of any blog). I monitored all of that so that comments were not antagonistic or personally insulting. None were and neither was my content.

One in-depth comment during this series, that I did not agree with, gave me pause this weekend. In brief summary, it was accused that the series and the comments directly and indirectly attacked Stephanie of Voices.com. That accusation was and is flat out wrong.

I’d tried to make it exceedingly clear that I considered Stephanie and her husband David my friends and that in my past criticism of the Voices.com and their competitors, my problem has been with the P2P business model only.

Further, (also stated) this experiment was meant to possibly prove me wrong; I committed to trying the new Voices.com with an open mind – maybe I could increase my voiceover revenue by booking business on Voices.com. (Note: I’ve also stopped auditioning on the site as well – the conceptual fun of it all is over for me.)

But to be sure this commentator was wrong, I sent an email to Stephanie last night explaining my point and making sure that we are all good.

We were not.

While noting that she fully understood that nothing was written with the intention to hurt or misrepresent anyone or anything, the sum of the series was (using my words here) a bit unpleasant for Voices.com.

I made an offer in that same email that if this series caused them any problems, let me know and it would be gone…poof!

She took me up on my offer and I am glad to comply.

Poof!

Most days I’m not sure what this blog is or what it is supposed to be about but I know absolutely what it is not supposed to be: hurtful. If anything in this series resulted in hurt, stress or agitatation for anybody, I’m sorry about that – it truly wasn’t the intent of the posts. I can be a fairly direct person so if that negativity was my true intent, I promise I could have done a much more effective job.

But I don’t want to be that kind of person. Yes, I have opinions, yes I can and will continue to offer them here (and some of those opinions may rankle David and Stephanie) but the format of a series of posts, as this was, obviously had a kind of “pile on” effect that in no way intended. Communication, I often remind people, is not so much about the transmission as it is about the reception.

I want to reiterate that at no time did anyone at Voices.com reach out to me with a complaint, a whine or even a whimper. I brought the issue to them, I made the offer and I killed the series.

Also worth noting, neither Voices.com nor anyone affiliated with it can have any impact on my business – so I’d no need to worry about repercussions from them had I completed the series. I could have easily carried on here through the end, complete with a wrap up post.

But my company has a code of conduct and I believe in it (hell, I wrote it, I better believe in it). And in this case, after I realized I’d unintentionally hurt some friends, finding the delete button wasn’t a problem at all.

Thanks to all who followed the series and who commented. Your intentions were as pure as mine and your contributions were sincerely appreciated for just that reason.