| Leveraging Social Media
for VoiceOver Businesses
Dave Courvoisier
November, 2009 |
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| The Info You Requested |
The Saturday, Nov 14th, 2009 Teleseminar on Social Media for VO's was fun for me, and I'm honored that you were interested enough to ask for additional resources to build on what we discussed.
I followed my outline for the teleseminar to re-cap most of those links, references, and factoids for you here. I hope it makes sense, but you know I'm always available to offer a little help if you need further. My contact information is below.
Dave Courvoisier (aka CourVO)
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| Why Social Media? |
 You can succeed in VoiceActing without Social Media...this is true.
But do you want to be using a cassette tape for your demos when everyone else is emailing theirs? Keeping up with trends is part of what we do as voice-actors. That doesn't mean we have to be on the vanguard, but neither should we ignore new paradigms that seem to be capturing the vision and capability of the future. 'Think Social Networking is just a trend? Watch this, and then ask that question again: The Social Media Revolution
Your already-established, reliable, recognized, quality brand and body of workcan be translated easily to, and becomes magnified across the many virtual media platforms. Most of it can be done for little or no dollar cost.
The idea, then, is to raise the level of your brand awareness to its highest potential by consistently being more and more visible in the most popular online sites.
You do this by contributing...offering something of value for free, being consistent in your message, and creating relationships through honest sharing and engaging others in the conversation.
This is not something you create, post, and then walk away from, hoping everyone will see eventually. The best SEO (search engine optimization) guru will not be able to sustain traffic to your site unless you keep it fresh and worthwhile.
Caution: Doing this is no ironclad guarantee of endless voiceover jobs (read on, though, there is good news).
One of the greatest ongoing success stories in Social Media has so far admittedly failed to come up with a revenue stream. Twitter. That doesn't mean they aren't hip-deep in venture capital..it just means that no one has the magic monetizing formula yet. But it also means Social Media is a vast uncharted territory of pioneering spirit.
Stake your claim!
Dave C |
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| The Big Points |
- Create accounts in TWITTER, FACEBOOK, and YOUTUBE (maybe LinkedIn too)
- At a minimum, build your profile with a pic of your brand or your face, and write a bio
- Post often, meaningfully, with a friendly attitude, and remind people of what you do
- Join VoiceOverUniverse, the VO-BB, or Julie Williams' Voice-over forum. Participate.
- Contribute, offer links, help, pictures, conversation, and insights.
- Get a SmartPhone (iPhone, BlackBerry or Droid)
- Be professional. Seek excellence. Have consistency in your brand.
- START A BLOG and make that the centerpiece of your Social Media presence
- Google is your resume (have you Googled yourself lately?)
- Be fun, but don't be consistently frivolous...people will tune you out.
- Spell check. (also take typing lessons)
- Don't be rude or contentious.
- Use cross-posting tools like Ping.fm, Posterous, Tumblr, and Utterli
- Follow those who follow you (within reason)
- Unfollow those who are not following you (after a time)
- Utilize the Search function of Twitter...it's a second-by-second database of what's trending
- Re-tweet great posts
- On Friday, suggest to others on Twitter, your favorite people to follow
- Use hashtags as a way of flagging important topics (above would be #FF, for Follow Friday)
- Get an RSS reader (Google's is good), and subscribe to your favorite sites. Use it!
- Read Mashable once in a while
- Read CourVO's blog everyday. (heh)
- Visit VoiceOverXtra.com everyday
- Comment on people's blog articles if they'inspire you in some way
- Be agile, adaptable...change is the only constant.
- Follow my list of VO's on Twitter HERE
- Join the TwittGroup for VoiceActors HERE
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| The Tools |
 OMG, there are so many. I'm not kidding. I'm probably missing some good ones, but as I mentioned above, RSS (Really Simple Syndication)as signified by the icon you see over there on the right is absolutely one of the best ways of keeping on top of trends on the internet.
For Twitter, you can see the entire exhaustive compendium of 3rd-party applications build upon Twitter on Twitter's own fan-wiki. Click HERE.
I'm not a big fan of FaceBook's interface. It's not that intuitive, but it is feature-rich, and you should take the time to check out all the applications they offer. You might also want to consider launching a FaceBook "fan" page to further publicize your business/brand/logo.
Check out SocialOomph for a handy suite of tools that include auto-replies, timed tweets, and lots more.
Try the following interfaces to access Twitter...many have helpful features:
BingTweets.com is a fun website that combines the strength of Microsoft's BING search engine utilizing the data generated endlessly by Twitter. Useful. Surprising. Timely.
SKYPE is used by many voiceover artists as an extremely inexpensive way to create a phone patch, but it's also got new functionality as a social networking tool that's effortless and easy to configure. |
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I've been richly blessed by others who have mentored me along the way. I offer the insights in this newsletter in that spirit.
If you've been helped in any way by these tips, pass 'em along freely.
Sincerely,
CourVO
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ISDN and SourceConnect
Skype: COURVO
Twitter: @courvo
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