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Why No Business Should Be Involved In Online Social Networking

Provocative eh? See what marketing consultant Marc Goldman has to say about it at Biznik.

Pay Attention, Work Hard

My Sensei, Daniel Gobillot of Pine Forest Karate Dojo, wrote the Thought for the Week that just arrived in my inbox. So much of what we learn in any discipline has parallels in our other efforts, and this is a great example. There are no shortcuts to success. The best way to achieve our goals is to pay attention and work hard.

Sensei Gobillot's TFTW:

Life as a Kata

Kata, literally "form" is a Japanese word describing prearranged choreographed patterns of movements practiced either solo or in pairs. Kata is the single most important aspect in karate,(page 24, Red Book). While our individual techniques are all important to our art they can be viewed as limited and somewhat empty without kata to give them definition and purpose. Poorly executed technique can easily translate to poorly performed kata. A weak or misunderstood neko-ashi-dashi stance for instance can affect our entire karate world from yonkyu rank and up. We must always review all of our body movements and adjust to our current understanding and of course skill level.

Everyday life is also filled with moments and movements that we perform solo or with others. We wake up in the morning and maybe brush our teeth. This can be done with attention and purpose or without thought. When we relegate too much of what we do while we live to automatic action our lives, like kata with bad technique, become empty and bland.

Tomorrow our challenge is to select one (at least one) technique from our vast repertoire of movement then examine, define and expand it for use in our kata. For that hour and a half of class exploit and exhaust that one technique. Try this at least once. Then carry it to your personal life off the deck and use it for one of the many activities that you perform in your daily life. Answering the phone, getting dressed or just making eye contact.

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So pick something in your work or personal life that needs attention. Give it what it needs. I guarantee it will flourish.

Do you know how your clients feel?

A fascinating article touching on how humans make decisions came across my desk this morning. Research by Princeton psychology professor Danny Oppenheimer shows that decisions can be based on the ease of processing information – for example stock prices are higher shortly after the initial public offering when the ticker symbol is pronounceable (RAD for Rite-Aid compared with RDA for Reader’s Digest). In other work, Oppenheimer found that charitable giving rates varied according to what information was available about the charity’s efficiency rate (the percentage of donations that go to the actual cause versus what percentage goes to overhead). When people have a choice of giving to a charity with a lower efficiency rate, a higher efficiency rate, or no published rate, they will give to the charity with no published rate! Another of Oppenheimer’s studies shows that writing that uses a lot of big words detracts from the message. People will rate such writing as intelligent, but writing that uses simpler language is rated as more intelligent. You can read the article about Oppenheimer here.

These studies show that the decisions people make are based not simply on what they think, but also on how they feel while they’re thinking. It’s an important message for those of us who must market our business and we obviously need to design our marketing materials with this in mind. In fact with every appearance of our name/brand we should be thinking about how it might make our clients or potential clients feel. We want them to feel a certain way when they see us or hear us or think of us. How well are we succeeding in this? Can you examine your own materials and business practices and make an objective evaluation? Did you design your website with this in mind or did it just grow as your business grew? Did you hire someone to create a marketing campaign for you or did it just happen? In voice-over, probably most of us start out thinking we’re going to offer everything: audiobooks, e-learning, corporate narration, medical narration, message on hold, character voices, promo, radio imaging, the works. After a few years we find both that we excel in a certain genre and that specialisation is a key to success (at least in the U.S.). At that point we need to re-examine the way we’re presenting ourselves. Has this happened for you?

In today’s Actor’s Voice, Bonnie Gillespie writes about networking, and in conclusion she quotes from one of her own articles: People don’t remember you. They remember how they feel when they're around you. Think about it.

New TV Promo Demo for Mary McKitrick

My new promo demo is finished! Listen to it here.

The new website is here!

My new website, marymckitrick.com, has launched!

Marcia Yudkin gets it right – again!

When someone contacts me about my voiceover services and immediately focusses on price, I've learned to take a step back. It has been my experience that there’s an inverse correlation between the price they want to pay and the degree to which they will turn out to be a pain in the neck. So when I received Marcia Yudkin’s weekly Marketing Minute this morning that addressed this very issue, I was amazed at how well she nailed the problem and was very interested to read that there are actually statistics available about it. If you’re a voice actor or a business person of any kind, you owe it to yourself to walk away from this kind of client. With permission, I’m reprinting Marcia’s words verbatim – and I will be checking out Holden & Burton’s book!

If you'd like to sign up for Marcia's free newsletter, Marketing Minute, go here.

According to Reed Holden and Mark Burton, authors of Pricing With Confidence, 79% of business-to-business companies serve any customer they can get.

What's wrong with that? Typically, they explain, 20 percent of the customers account for 225 percent of the profit, with 80 percent causing the firm to lose money. And that statistic doesn't take into account the extent to which the unprofitable customers increase your worry wrinkles and gray hairs.

Being choosy about customers benefits both the bottom line and your sanity. Consider sending away those who:

* Always press you for discounts

* Need or demand an exorbitant amount of handholding

* Previously requested refunds

* Are unpleasant to deal with, nitpicky, abusive, frenzied, uncooperative or irrational

* Threaten to go to the competition

* Never pay on time

* Represent where your company used to be rather than where it is going

"It's simply better for you that unprofitable customers are served by your competition," say Holden and Burton.

After shedding the undesirables, develop a clear picture of who you want as clients and pursue those. You'll then have the positive energy needed to land them!

From The Marketing Minute, 18 February 2009, by Marcia Yudkin. Reprinted with permission.

Snark: It’s Mean, it’s Personal, and it’s Ruining Our Conversation

This is the title of a new book by David Denby, New York Times film critic. I became aware of it when an interview with Denby was aired on Morning Edition on NPR this week. Although the book doesn’t get stellar reader reviews on Amazon, his point got my attention – that there is a lot of mean-spirited, anonymous prose on the internet these days, posing as meaningful journalism. His thesis is well summarised in a [more favorable] review in the Los Angeles Times.

The interview got my attention because I was recently the target of a somewhat oblique snark attack myself. I received an email from an anonymous person asking if I had done any voice-over work for a certain radio station. I wrote back that I hadn’t yet, and I asked the identity of the emailer. He/she wrote back with only a link to a blog post he or she had written (anonymously). I read the post, which was about the person who reads the sponsors’ ads on this public radio station, and how robotic she sounds and how much the blogger hates this voice and wishes he/she knew who it was. A lot of commenters piled on to agree. Then one of them piped up, “I watched Forgotten Ellis Island this week and there was a voice in it that sounded just like that woman. Mary McKitrick’s name was in the credits – maybe it’s her voice on that radio station.” The blogger agreed that it might be, and then came back later with “No, I spoke to Mary McKitrick, it’s not her”.

By “spoke to”, this blogger meant that he or she had emailed me under cover of anonymity and then went back to his/her audience to report.

Of course, it isn’t worth a minute of my time to lament having my work on Forgotten Ellis Island compared to the voice of an announcerbot, but I admit it took my breath away. I mentioned the incident to some of my voice-over colleagues and was gratified that a number of them raced to the schoolyard and confronted the bullies – rather relentlessly actually – to the point that the blogger finally pulled the plug and ceased accepting comments. I thought it was amusing that they allowed so many mean comments but couldn’t handle the ones that sang my praises (admittedly, my colleagues were kind of rough on the anonymous blogger :).

In an earlier life, I was a biologist, and writing reviews of other people’s work was a constant part of my life. Book reviews, reviews of articles that had been submitted for publication, reviews of grant proposals. In the case of grant proposals and some of the reviews for journals, anonymity was required. In those cases, I always wrote as if I were going to sign my name, and in cases where a signature was allowed, I always added mine. I have never allowed the cloak of anonymity to affect my writing, never wrote anything in those reviews that I wouldn’t have said to the person’s face, and I don’t understand people who hide behind that cloak. I think David Denby is right – it ruins conversations and it’s spoiling the internet.

At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly – what in the world has happened to people’s manners?

Note: if you'd like to hear one of the passages I read for the documentary, Forgotten Ellis Island, go to the shockwave Flash part of the FEI website, click on Patient Stories, and click on the right arrow twice to get to the story about Ormond McDermott.