Bob Souer and Kara Edwards were so kind to join me for dinner last night as I stopped by Charlotte, NC. And I also enjoyed having lunch with Brett Mason who has a great story about how he started in radio.

In the voice over business, it’s rare you could go into a city and NOT have someone in your voiceover network who you would know. For such a individualistic business, our networks are getting stronger all the time. My thanks to Kara, Bob and Brett.

Tags: commentary, voice actors, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover advice, voiceover blog, voiceover meet-ups by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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I simply have no idea how the woman does it but Stephanie Ciccarelli at Voices.com has come up with another very niche and cool blog post featuring an interview with professional golf voice over talent David Cook (well I suppose the fact he’s a Voices.com member might have something to do with it).

Yes, I said professional golf voice over talent.

“What the…?”

Just read it, it’s a very nice short story.

Tags: blogs, commentary, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover blog by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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Well, it’s a blog and a podcast so you can’t really taste it but to say “see the difference” seem so ordinary and that’s nothing like what I want this blog and podcast to be about.

So, we look different.

The reasons for the design change were many:
• Finally inaugurating a podcast, I thought such a big shift in communication deserved a new look. Hey if CBS did it for Katie Couric and NBC did it for Meredith Viera, well I certainly play in those leagues! 😉

• The other look began to strike me as a bit cluttered and that was certainly my fault. I was adding widgets and elements that individually looked attractive, but when I stepped back seemed visually confusing

• Some of the newer blog templates had features the old one didn’t

So what should you notice about the changes here?
• A big change is the name. What was once called voiceover blog on! is now called voxmarketising. That name was conceived for the podcast because congeals my favorite subjects: voice over, marketing and advertising. Then I quickly realized:

a. Those are the same things I blog about
b. Why confuse readers and listeners with two different brands and if you add the audio’connell Voice Over Talent web site, three brands.

So it seemed to me branding them voxmarketising – the audio’connell blog and voxmarketising – the audio’connell podcast will be easier. Plus people will just call it voxmarketising after a while and know it’s a blog and a podcast. Aren’t you sorry you asked?

• Less graphic stuff but easier navigation (and more to come). This stuff is still being worked on but you’ll notice for example you can connect to me easier on all my social networks under the heading “social networks and links”. So if you haven’t connected with me, please do. Recent posts can viewed more quickly

• Better marketing for the podcast. By clicking on the ever present album art, people can immediately go to the voxmarketising podcast page

• Easier to subscribe. This is oh so important, especially as I build the podcast, and it will continue to get better, but be on the lookout for improved subscription tools

• Updated blog links. Boy had I fallen behind on this. Some links were old or dead (people just stopped writing for like six months so I dropped their blogs) and some new bloggers hadn’t been added. If you’re one of the new ones, return the love

So, it’s a fresh face with some new tools and some old favorites (me, I hope) still around. Let me know what you think. Thanks.

Tags: blogs, podcast, podcasting, voiceover blog by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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The great thing about being asked “what do you do for a living?” is telling people that I am a voice over talent which often times is followed up by “what’s a voice over talent?” I get to tell them about my business because they asked me…I didn’t force explaination on them. That is a sales person’s dream!

The bad thing about that scenario is how often it happens and how monotonous the explaination can feel after a while.

Well leave it to voice talent and teacher Bettye Zoller to spend the time to define it for all of us so we can just send people to a web site after they back up the Brinks truck with the oodles of money they’re going to pay us for our voice over talent.

I really enjoyed the part where she rattled off examples of the type of work we do because I often forget a few:

Voiceover talents today are hired to narrate audio books, anime, cartoons, videos, films, and cable TV programs. They are the voices of toys, talking picture frames, cell phone messages, talking greeting cards, your car’s GPS navigation system, and everything else that’s manufactured with a computer chip inside of it on which a voice track can be stored and played. Voiceover talents greet you (and annoy you!) on thousands upon thousands of those pesky recorded telephone messages and IVR systems. They talk to you through ceiling speakers while you shop in stores. You hear voiceover talents trying to convince you to buy cosmetics at your department store on a video playing over and over (looping) next to those expensive cosmetic products! The military uses voiceovers in training projects and the educational field also uses voice actors for educational endeavors. Nearly every classroom today, kindergarten through post-graduate study in universities sports a large TV monitor in a corner on which educational videos are played. Sometimes, it seems that a teacher doesn’t talk very much anymore. Rather, schools teach a majority of the time with videos.

Thanks Bettye for taking the time to slap that together. You can read the whole article here if you like.

Tags: announcers, character voices, commentary, narrations, podcasting, radio, tv, voice actors, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover advice, voiceover blog by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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