Social Networking Tips From Terry Daniel and Dave Courvoisier

Julia-Ann Dean: Welcome to Voice Over Experts brought to you by voices.com, the number one voiceover marketplace. Voice Over Experts brings you tips, pearls of wisdom, and techniques from top instructors, authors, and performers in the field of voiceover. Join us each week to discover tricks of the trade that will help you to develop your craft and prosper as a career voiceover talent. It’s never been easier to learn, perform, and succeed from the privacy of your own home and at your own pace. This is truly an education you won’t find anywhere else.
Now for our special guest…
Terry Daniel: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Voice 2010, my name is Terry Daniel and —
Dave Courvoisier: [sings] If you want to be a VO star.
Terry Daniel: — this is Dave Courvoisier. We are very honored to be up on stage to present to you —
Dave Courvoisier: Actually, Terry that was last year.
Terry Daniel: What do you mean?
Dave Courvoisier: We’re just doing a podcast today.
Terry Daniel: Oh.
Dave Courvoisier: Don’t start up the song again.
Terry Daniel: I hit my head really hard a couple of days ago.
Dave Courvoisier: Yeah, well it’s probably a couple of months ago.
Terry Daniel: [Laughs] Well, Dave, it’s good to be back with you and you know there’s a lot —
Dave Courvoisier: Always good.
Terry Daniel: I’d like to thank, you know, Stephanie Ciccarelli for always asking us to be a part of her expert series and you know —
Dave Courvoisier: Aren’t they great?
Terry Daniel: — you and I when people hear the names Terry Daniel and Dave Courvoisier, they immediately kind of associate —
Dave Courvoisier: They think pimple, yeah.
Terry Daniel: Well nerds, but yet, you know, associated with social networking sites so. There’s a lot of exciting new things that are happening in social media and if you’re a voice talent or you’re looking to get into voiceovers, these are — you know, instead of looking at this like, oh, that’s just a dumb social media site, these are free marketing tools.
Dave Courvoisier: Absolutely. And they’re ways to reach not only to new clients but to your fellow peers, to people in the business, in production houses, audio engineers. There is a huge community online growing every day.
Terry Daniel: I agree and, you know, that’s funny I read this comment the other — I don’t know if it was a tweet or whatever it was — how Facebook is going away. That could not be further from the truth. Facebook —
Dave Courvoisier: Oh, my gosh, I saw that rumor too.
Terry Daniel: [Laughs]
Dave Courvoisier: I went where did that come from. It is going, it is so strong. It’s stronger than ever before. It is the 800-pound gorilla in the social media stage and it is growing in ways that are making it easier and easier to find people and to reach out to people. We talked about this before the podcast, Terry, these new group pages are just so much fun and so easy.
Terry Daniel: It is. And you really learn a lot about the industry itself and, you know, there’s plenty of other ways that you can reach out to people in creative services. I’m talking about talent agents, production directors, audio/visual directors of major corporations, entrepreneurs. These are all people that could potentially need your voice for their project and they’re all over Facebook. What you really need to do is spend a pretty good amount of time on marketing everyday and that could mean like spending an hour on Facebook just searching for, you know, not only voiceover groups, but other business related groups that could potentially need your voice for a project. I mean the opportunities especially on Facebook are endless.
Dave Courvoisier: Well, it’s a great search tool. I mean just like never before in the history of mankind can you have so much information at your fingertips. Let’s take voices.com. Let’s say you just heard about them and you want to research them. Well, you can go on Facebook and look up their page, do a search for their page and read what their information is. You can go on Twitter and find them there. You can do a LinkedIn search, which, you know, Terry is my favorite because you can really dig in to the business end of things in LinkedIn.
Terry Daniel: Right.
Dave Courvoisier: And you can do a search for them there and find out who their principal officers are. They might even be listing a little bit of their history, where they went to school. You might find something in common with them there that you could talk about when you first call them. So for anybody you’re trying to research, maybe it’s an audio house, maybe it’s like SunSpots or somebody. You find out who are their main officers, who’s their audio engineer, see if you’ve got something in common with them so when you make the call to them, you’ve got something to go on.
Terry Daniel: Well and something that’s really important and we all know that Facebook likes to change their format literally at the drop of a hat and that can be kind of annoying, but the latest format —
Dave Courvoisier: Uh-hum.
Terry Daniel: — I really like because really under your Facebook name is the name of your business and whether you have a website put together or not, it’s really important especially for the search engines to put the word voiceover, you know, as many times as you possibly can at least.
Dave Courvoisier: Uh-hum.
Terry Daniel: You know, let’s say like for mine, I have owner/president Voiceovers by Terry Daniel. I mean it’s right below my name. So if people, you know, potential clients even and they go in the search box of Facebook and they look for voiceovers, eventually I’m going to come up in some sort of a search. You also want to write a little bit about your business in the info section of your page and you can also put a link to your voiceover website. So whether you’re a voiceover veteran or you’re brand new to the industry, these are all important factors as far as your Facebook profile is concerned.
Dave Courvoisier: Yeah. I’m no SEO marketing pro or anything, but what Terry said is exactly right. You’ve got to get those words in your tags, —
Terry Daniel: Yup.
Dave Courvoisier: — in your titles, in the name of your business because that all comes back to search engines and they will pick up on that. Do you want to talk about the Facebook groups a little bit Terry that we both started?
Terry Daniel: Yeah, let’s talk about that. Why don’t you go ahead and I think probably by the end of the month, there’ll be about 340 of them but…
Dave Courvoisier: Well at the end of last year —
Terry Daniel: [Laughs]
Dave Courvoisier: — Facebook has started integrating a new group format and it’s so easy. You can start a group yourself for song and a dance, it’s all free, and you start inviting people into your group. And that’s — you know, it could be anything in common. I was just telling Terry a minute ago that I started a group for my old high school class reunion from last year and then we got like 50, 60 people on there already. But Terry and I have both started voiceover groups and these are places where you can go and interact privately off the Facebook grid with your people from Facebook. It’s all in the Facebook interface.
Terry Daniel: Yeah.
Dave Courvoisier: But it’s private from everybody else.
Terry Daniel: Well, why don’t we go ahead and promote some of these groups starting with the group you started, Dave, Voice-Over Friends?
Dave Courvoisier: Voice-Over Friends, we’re about 285 strong. We’ve got great interaction every day. People just log on and share things about their business or about their personal lives and we come to get to know each other and help each other. It’s a friendly interaction, that’s why I called it Voice-Over Friends. Now you’ve started a couple though, Terry, talk about — you’ve got Voice-Over Pros, right?
Terry Daniel: Voice-Over Pros and that’s exactly what it is. If you are a part-time or full-time voiceover artist, this would be another great group for you to be a part of as well. Now, I also started on called Voice-Over Camp and this group is designated just for those who are either interested in the field of voiceovers. Or they’re kind of — you know, the old cliché, I’ve been told my entire life that I have great chops to do this, well this is a great group page to pick up on some tips and some success stories from others about the industry. So that one is called Voice-Over Camp.
Dave Courvoisier: Right. I also want to underscore one of the products that both Terry and I have found here recently, amplify.com.
Terry Daniel: Yes. Hot.
Dave Courvoisier: Check it out. It’s another thing that’s just you sign up, you give them a username and password and you’re in and it’s free and boy, it allows you to literally amplify or broadcast whatever message you want to, to all these different social media things in one stroke.
Terry Daniel: It’s a lot like ping.fm and I really like the interface. The best thing that I like about amplify.com is you can also use it. You can use your profile as a blog site. You can post —
Dave Courvoisier: Uh-hum.
Terry Daniel: You know, and there’s no — I love this too. There’s no character limit. You know, sometimes on Twitter I get a little frustrated because there’s a 24-character limit, but of course if there wasn’t I would probably still be writing something on Twitter right now so.
Dave Courvoisier: Uh-hum.
Terry Daniel: There is no character limit on Amplify. You know, if you don’t have a Tumblr account or a Google blog account, you can use your Amplify account for all of your blogs as well. The one thing I really like about it Dave, is you can post links, you can clip articles from pages and you can post those on your Amplify account and then with a couple of clicks, you can also post it to your Facebook, Twitter account, and also Goggle Buzz and Google Reader as well. So you now —
Dave Courvoisier: Yeah. I’ve got Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Flickr, Posterous, Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Ping, Plurk, FriendFeed.
Terry Daniel: Oh my god.
Dave Courvoisier: All those —
Terry Daniel: Help him, somebody stop him! He’s out of control!
Dave Courvoisier: [Laughs] But here’s the deal. Here’s the best part is you can get the Amplify bookmarklet for your bookmark menu at the top of your browser.
Terry Daniel: Yes. Yeah. And the toolbar.
Dave Courvoisier: You can just click on it and whatever page you’re on, wherever you’re browsing, you see something you like, you click on the amplify bookmarklet, it brings up a little dialogue box. And you just click on something else and all of a sudden the page that you found that you like so much is broadcasted to all those different social media sites under your name.
Terry Daniel: It is really hot. It’s kind of the new Twitter of 2011.
Dave Courvoisier: Yeah, it really is nice. And Amplify, you know, makes it easy and you’ve got to be careful though not to over clutter.
Terry Daniel: No.
Dave Courvoisier: You’ve got to be careful not to over post and that can be one of the issues with these social media sites is you’ve got them linked and configured so that they kind of regenerate themselves to other places. You’ve got to be careful not to do too much of that.
Terry Daniel: Yeah. You know, it’s the same thing as just going to a party and not shutting the hell up.
Dave Courvoisier: [Laughs]
Terry Daniel: You know? It’s like all right, you’ve had enough, can you go in back of the room, we’d like to get to know —
Dave Courvoisier: Yeah.
Terry Daniel: We’d like to get to know these other people.
Dave Courvoisier: Hey, real quickly too because I know we’re probably getting to the end of our podcast here, Terry. I want to mention LinkedIn has a new thing called Signal.
Terry Daniel: Yes.
Dave Courvoisier: Signal brings in Twitter and LinkedIn posts into kind of a serial presentation like Twitter and the thing about this one particularly is that you can filter out just anything you want. It’s very configurable, it gives you the exact post that you want to see and not the rest of the fluff. So I’d suggest to going to LinkedIn.com/signal and check it out. It’s in beta but it’s really cool.
[0:10:11]
Terry Daniel: Dave, I can’t believe that 10 minutes have flown by without us bringing up the words Ted Williams. [Laughs]
Dave Courvoisier: Well, you just did.
Terry Daniel: Oh my god, I did it. I did it.
Dave Courvoisier: You know, god bless him. He has kicked off 2011 for an unbelievable way in voiceover land. I mean it’s just brought so much attention to voiceovers. So for that I credit him.
Terry Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. And I really do hope he makes it and he’s all over these social media sites as well.
Dave Courvoisier: Uh-hum.
Terry Daniel: You know, it’s proof again that with the right story and the right niche anything can go viral. And between Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube–
Dave Courvoisier: YouTube.
Terry Daniel: –and now Amplify and you know this is just proof, if you record a really fun voiceover that’s kind of funny or you write a great blog, I mean it can spread like wildfire virally.
Dave Courvoisier: And there seems to be — you know, you think you might have the formula for something that will go viral and it just falls flat on its face.
Terry Daniel: Oh, yeah.
Dave Courvoisier: And then something like Ted comes along and it just boom, just explodes. And god bless him I think Ted’s really got a good heart and I think his heart is in the right place and people have given him so much help. And, yeah, I think what he’s doing now is taking a step back, taking a breath, going into some quiet time so he can get some help. When and if he comes back, it’s going to be great.
Terry Daniel: If you are a voiceover artist or you’re thinking about getting into voiceovers, you definitely need to stop what you’re doing and start up these free accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Amplify, LinkedIn and just start even if you don’t have demos completed yet. At least get your profile together with some information about you and what kind of — you know, you may not really necessarily know your niche yet, but what you think your specialty is in voiceovers and just start getting your name out there. Remember, these are tools we didn’t have 10 to 15 years ago where you really just had to rely on that talent agent to get booked for any kind of voiceover work. Here we are in 2011 with a multitude of free marketing tools.
Dave Courvoisier: I don’t care what industry you’re into, it might be something like extruded steel or something, you want to be part of the community. You want to get in the flow with those who are in that business, start making contacts, start making relationships, pretty soon they’re going to start noticing you. The same thing with voiceover, you just make contacts, you let people know nicely that you’re there, you start engaging in the conversation and pretty soon, you get acceptance and you’re part of the community and you’re in the know.
Terry Daniel: I will say and I know I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but a lot of these talent agencies and these production houses have Twitter accounts.
Dave Courvoisier: Oh, that’s good.
Terry Daniel: You know, not all of them are on Facebook. I’ve seen a lot more of them, Dave, and I could be wrong. I’ve seen a lot more of those types of companies on Twitter so Twitter is definitely the place to be as well.
Dave Courvoisier: Uh-hum. And if you go to people’s — if you do a search for someone, their name, their company name, you’ll find that on their Twitter page, they have a website link usually.
Terry Daniel: Yes.
Dave Courvoisier: You click on the website link and there you’re off and running.
Terry Daniel: Well, I think this is a really good start to 2011. I mean the opportunities are endless and, Dave, you and I have just kind of become the social networking dorks of the voiceover industry and we couldn’t be more proud to be labeled that.
Dave Courvoisier: I accept. I accept the label dork.
Terry Daniel: [Laughs]
Dave Courvoisier: Or nerd, either way. That sounds good. Terry, I’m in good company, man. You keep me on my toes and I really appreciate you sharing with me today.
Terry Daniel: No. And I appreciate you coming on this podcast. And again, thanks to the good people at voices.com for letting us blab for a little less than 15 minutes about social networking and the voiceover industry. Again, you know, these are all free tools for you to meet people in the creative industry and many of those might be looking for your voice for their next project. So, Dave, thank you very much.
Dave Courvoisier: Thank you. It’s always a pleasure and if you have questions for Terry or me, just give us a shout on Facebook. You can find us on Twitter. I’m always going to hope you’ve found something that you can us here in this little chat that Terry and I had.
Terry Daniel: Sounds great. Thanks, Dave.
Dave Courvoisier: Thank you, Terry.
Julia-Ann Dean: Thank you for joining us. To learn more about the special guest featured in this Voices.com podcast, visit the Voice Over Experts show notes at podcast.voices.com/voiceoverexperts. Remember to stay subscribed. If you’re a first time listener, you can subscribe for free to this podcast in the Apple iTunes podcast directory or by visiting podcasts.voices.com. To start your voiceover career online, go to voices.com and register for a voice talent membership today.
This has been a Voices.com production.