These are my two big lessons from voice over land this week: 1.) Practice pays off. 2.) When we’re trying to develop a new skill, private classes help us move ahead faster than collective, generic classes.
A couple of years ago I took a group voice over class and it was fun. I learned some basic skills, general guidelines about commercial voice over work, and details about the voice over market in New York. What I didn’t get, and needed, was refinement. I needed specific feedback on my work. When I was in California this summer, I started to think about pursuing voice overs more seriously. I phoned my voice over teacher from the class and inquired about taking the next step. He suggested private lessons.
I hesitated for a split second because private lessons aren’t cheap. Neither is making a demo. I quickly realized that if I really wanted to make a go of this, or at least give it my all, I needed to think of this money as an investment, not a cost. So I bit the financial bullet and went for it.
So far, so good. In four private lessons, and with a solid number of hours of listening to commercials, transcribing them, recording myself performing them, and listening to the playback, I’m now ready to make a demo. My coach’s advice and attention in private lessons has been invaluable and my own investment of time and effort to listen, practice, and self-critique have helped me grow by leaps and bounds in a very short period of time. If all goes according to plan, a demo leads to an agent and an agent (along with personally pounding the proverbial pavement) leads to paid work.
I’m only at step 2 – I’ll record my demo November 11th with my coach and hopefully get this show on the road. Here we go – preparing for take off. Let’s see where this path takes me next. You’ll get the news as it happens…
Yesterday I sat up in bed before my early alarm, grabbed by iPad, and wrote down this post as it gushed into my brain:
“Snap your pictures. Get down these lines of text. Record history as it happens. Some day you’ll need this to see how far you’ve come, to bring you comfort when you feel like you still have so far to go, when you feel like everything is lost.
Time is a plastic surgeon. It does funny things to us, to our memory of yesterday. And all the yesterdays that came before. It covers the bumps and bruises and scrapes. It dulls the pain. It sands the rough edges and rounds out the sharp and jagged corners that were so hard to navigate. It makes everything soft. When we record our days as they happen, when we literally chart our experience, we get the real story.
And we need the real story. We need to remember what we’ve been through so we can fully appreciate where we are and all of the people who made the journey possible.”
I’m not sure where this came from, but I’m sure glad these words and the ideas they convey arrived.
“I know you’re busy but can I ask for your advice on….”
I get a lot of inquiries from friends and readers that start this way. They ask if they can ask me for advice about their project. My answer, always: YES, a thousand times yes. I want to help you and promote you and hear your ideas. A business idea, a product idea, a blog idea, a social media project. I am busy; everyone is. I make time to support others. It matters that much.
Over the last few days, I’ve talked about why social media is so important to me and how I think about and use my existing channels. Here are a few others that I use with less frequency and focus, though they certainly are worthy of mention:
LinkedIn – My account: Christa Avampato
I am active on LinkedIn in terms of accepting and sending connection requests. Though it’s making a lot of improvements, I still find it to be much clunkier than a lot of other platforms. Because it is a professional social network, I accept 99.9% of all connection requests. I don’t post personal information there and mostly use it when I am searching for a contact in my network at a specific company.
Tumblr – My blog: Born Into Color
Because I house my long form blog here on WordPress, I’m not 100% sure how to incorporate Tumblr into my social media strategy for my business. I certainly am having fun with it. The beauty of Tumblr is that it is incredibly easy to upload many different varieties of content. Ironically, the form of content that doesn’t seem to get as much traction on Tumblr is long-form writing like I do here on my blog. (Of course there are certainly exceptions to this!) On Tumblr, I post pictures, video, quotes, art, and I reblog a lot of content that I find interesting and intriguing. Re-blogging is incredibly easy on Tumblr. It also easily connects to Instagram so I do a bit of cross-posting between the two platforms.
Vine
Vine is Twitter’s video tool. When they launched it in January they described it as, “a mobile service that lets you capture and share short looping videos. Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity.” I literally just downloaded the app this week so I’ve not yet populated it with any original content though I plan to start doing some quick videos in the next couple of week. Once your download the vine app, you’ll find me as @christanyc, the same handle as my Twitter feed.
Google+ – My account: Christa Avampato
Google pretty much runs my life – my calendars, my contacts, my email for all of my accounts, my smart phone, and my shared documents. It keeps track of where I need to go, who I need to see, and what I need to do. So it’s with a little surprise that I just can’t seem to figure out why Google+ should be important to me. I’ve read oodles of article on it and spent a fair amount of time playing around with its capabilities. It still seems rather shallow to me and not up-to-par with the steady stream brilliance that flows from Google. If you have advice on this platform, I will gladly take it!
And now…a word about Klout
On Monday I wrote an article on Klout in preparation for the ad:tech conference. (It’s already received almost 6,000 views, which is a testament to people’s curiosity about it!) Klout is a social media tools that traffic’s social influence of individuals. It’s becoming a powerful tool for brands, agencies, and individuals alike. Given its success, we are likely to see many more tools like it in the coming years. You can read my post here on Klout: http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/15788893-got-klout-the-meaning-behind-your-social-media-numbers
I hope this series on social media has been helpful in thinking about your own social strategies and channels. I’m always glad to answer questions, offer advice, and hear suggestions so feel free to ping me at christa (at) chasingdownthemuse (dot) com. The social media world is a lot like the lottery – you’ve gotta be in it to win it. Let’s connect!
Lately I’ve had unexpected opportunities to talk about yoga and meditation in the context of the health challenges I faced following my apartment building fire. Yesterday my eyes were closed but I could feel the hush of the whirling, swirling minds as I taught meditation to a room full of community aid workers who continue to assist people affected by Hurricane Sandy. My job was to give them a set of tools to use in their work.
After a few techniques, I opened up the floor for questions. One woman asked me how to help people who are in throes of heavy anxiety. In the moments when we need it most, access to our breath as a tool to calm down can fail us. It’s also true that in the deep dark moments of my own PTSD if someone had told me to “close my eyes and just breathe”, I would told them to F- off. And then I would have apologized profusely for being so rude and then explained that I couldn’t help it because in a state of high anxiety, my mind and body are not my own.
In the aftermath of my fire, I would run long distances, working my body to the point of total exhaustion. I would do 20, 30, 40 sun salutations on my yoga mat until I collapsed in a heap on the floor. Only then could I access my breath. Only then would that awful continuous loop of “what if” scenarios stop playing in my mind. I needed to be worn down to the bone, laid bare to the world in order to give myself the help I needed, to find my breath.
I wish this wasn’t true. I wish we could somehow sit ourselves down, invoke our inner Cher a la Moonstruck, slap ourselves across the face,and say, “Snap out of it.” It doesn’t work that way. Anxiety is a strange mistress. It consumes you, tries to destroy you, and then becomes an odd kind of comfort because it does chase away something far worse – the numbness that follows a traumatic event. That lack of feeling, the void, the shock, is worse. It leaves you hollow. And you’ll do anything to keep that at bay.
Here was my advice on breathing and anxiety: give people a way to work with the frantic energy. Help them work it out in the body. Give them a safe space to do whatever they need to do to physically process their grief. Let them talk and say whatever they want to say without fear of being judged. That is a part of moving through it. It cannot be asked to sit. It cannot be asked to breathe. We must allow anxiety and grief to just be for a while. We must recognize it as legitimate. Only then can we move past it. Only then can we find a way to move on. The breath is a tool, but it must be used in the proper place at the proper time.
You oughta be in pictures, and that includes on social media. My Pinterest account is christanyc. My Instagram account is onefineyogi. These channels are important to me for one main reason: 65% of the population is composed of visual learners so it pays to learn how to communicate with pictures. I am not a naturally visual personal. I am one of the oddballs who is almost entirely an auditory learner so communicating in visuals is very difficult for me. Pinterest and Instagram have greatly enhanced my visual abilities and they are fun to use. This is the big difference between Instagram and Pinterest for me: most of my Pinterest pins are pictures that other people have taken that I find interesting and Instagram is composed of photos I take.
Pinterest Think of this as a visual bulletin board that is neatly organized by topics that you choose. I’ve created boards that include Inspirational Words, Healthy Food, and Yoga. Some key points:
You can either upload images you’ve created or you can upload images from just about any website. When you upload from a website, you can click the uploaded image on your board and it will take you to the site where you found it. I mostly use this latter type of pin to help me bookmark websites that I want to be able to quickly refer to for recipes, visual inspiration, and new product ideas.
I also frequently pin pictures and quotations that I want to use for future blog posts and for the Compass Yoga and One Fine Yogi Facebook pages.
I use Pinterest to say hello to friends whom I share interests with (Hi, Sharni!) and to trade ideas back and forth with my sister, Weez, who is even more passionate about Pinterest than I am!
I am not too focused (yet) on building a following or following a lot of people as I mostly use it for my own reference and utilize keyword searches to find images that relate to what I need. As I begin to make more of my own products within my business, I expect that will change.
Instagram
I was very late to the game on Instagram, mostly because I was a bit freaked out when Facebook stated they would begin selling Instagram images for their own profit with no attribution to the people who created the images. After many people, some quite famous, abandoned and closed their accounts, Facebook quickly changed its tune.
I got into it about 2 months ago because it did seem like a fun platform to use and I wanted to share with the world more of the pictures I actually take. (Admittedly, I have just a *few* photos of my adorable pup Phineas!) It’s kind of like a visual diary of places I go and things I see. I mostly use Instagram mostly for fun and not much for work, but that could change in the future as I get more familiar with the platform and Facebook provides new functionality.
Putting it together
With these two platforms, I’m really trying to improve my visual thinking and visual explanation skills. So far, it’s been fun to play around with these and I have seen vast improvements in my design work as I spend more time with visual content. If you use these platforms, I’d love to hear what they’ve done for you!
“How dare you settle for less when the world has made it so easy for you to be remarkable?” ~ Seth Godin
I’m about half way through my series of posts on my social media strategy. Yesterday I came across this quote by Seth Godin and it crystalized for me why it’s so important for us to use social technologies. Several years ago, it was impossible to put our experiences, points of view, and concerns out into the world. Connections to individuals whom we admire were difficult to make and difficult to maintain. There was a lot of knowledge pent up inside of people’s heads and hearts. Social media has liberated information, connections, and our ability to share what we know and how we feel. It’s democratized information on an incredible scale. It’s a gift.
You are remarkable and unique. You are living a life that no has lived before and no one will ever live again. And that life is worthy of contemplation and consideration. You have a contribution to make, a gift to give, with your point of view. The world needs your perspective. Social media gives you a way to broadcast it to anyone and everyone. Yours is a voice that needs to be heard; social media is your microphone for your message.
This is why these tools are so important and why your participation is crucial. This world has a lot of large-scale problems that need attention, that need massive amounts of brain power, care, concern, and action. Social media is one way to rally us together, to help us unite our energies so that we leave this planet a bit better than the way we found it. That’s the mission for all of us – to let our light shine, collectively and individually. Are you on board?
Twitter is one of my favorite social media channels. You can find me at @christanyc. I use it in a number of ways personally and professionally.
1.) Connect, connect, connect
Twitter has liberated connections. If someone is on Twitter, they want to be found. With a simple @(their Twitter handle), you can reach someone to ask a question, give a shout out, or tell them about something you think they’d find interesting. By connecting, I’ve turned Twitter contacts into offline friends, mentors, and business partners. On a personal note, I’ve even dated a few great guys that I initially met via tweets.
2.) Learn and stay up-to-date with breaking news
Twitter is a great source of information. People constantly post interesting links and breaking news is now often first reported on Twitter rather than major news outlets. If you are an information junkie, Twitter is the place for you to indulge.
3.) Share
The flip side of learning is of course sharing out things that matters to you. I often tweet about charities I support, products I love, people who inspire me, and places I’ve been that deliver great experiences.
4.) Find your pack
This is a big one for me. Twitter is a wonderful place to find people who care about the same things you care about. You can find them and they can find you based upon hashtags, keyword searches, and common followers.
5.) Promote
Because I talk about my professional projects via Twitter, people who are interested in the same kind of work can connect directly with me about it.
6.) Get help
I often ask questions on Twitter when I need help with something – advice, referral, or general curiosity. My favorite Twitter help story is about JetBlue. I was in Florida visiting my family and my flight was cancelled due to a snow storm. I couldn’t get through to Jet Blue customer service on the phone so I tweeted them. I had a new flight booked in under three minutes – confirmation number and all.
7.) Live tweeting and Twitter chats
When I’m at an event – often a conference – I tweet interesting tidbits, soundbites, pictures, and links live from the event. This lets people who aren’t at the event get a chance to experience it and helps me to connect with people who are also at the event. Twitter chats are conversations around a specific theme with a wide range of people moderated by a single individual. Both live tweeting and Twitter chats can be discovered by their hashtags.
8.) Prospective work
I monitor my Twitter account closely for followers and people who favorite or retweet my tweets. I’ll often reach out via a direct message, follow-up tweet, or write to them via the email addresses on their websites. This has helped me discover great professional partnerships that I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to make. I recently did this after Advertising Week. I sent out about a dozen follow-up messages to people whom I had interacted with on Twitter in some way related to the event. I got a reply from almost everyone and a number of them led to meetings that may turn into collaborative projects.
9.) Sales, giveaways, and exclusive invitations
I’ve done a few different giveaways via my Twitter account. A lot of brands do this as well. If you have a brand that you love, check them out on Twitter. Many brands offer all kinds of exclusive opportunities that you can only get on Twitter.
As you can see it pays, literally and figuratively, to be on Twitter personally and professionally. In addition to my personal Twitter handle, I also manage the Twitter accounts for @CompassYoga and @OneFineYogi. Those accounts are less active than my personal account, though I use the same types of strategies for them.
Are you on Twitter? How have you made it work for you?
I stood on the corner of 11th and Bleecker staring at my email on a shiny screen through teary eyes. I found out that one of my sweetest and most dedicated yoga students lost his long battle with cancer. Today I’m going to his funeral to celebrate his long, happy, and bright life. I’ll be remembering his smile, laugh, and very kind disposition. More than anything I’ll remember the peace that washed over his face as soon as we began the meditation portion of our classes. I’m so honored that I had a chance to know him; my life is richer for it. And I hope in some small way his was, too.
In additional to my personal Facebook page, I also have Facebook pages for Compass Yoga and One Fine Yogi. It took me a long time to decide if this was a good idea. I wasn’t immediately convinced that brands could do something valuable with Facebook though eventually I came around to seeing the power of it for brands.
Compass Yoga Facebook Page
The Compass Facebook page includes inspirational images (and some with humor!), quick snapshots of yoga philosophy, links to our recent blog posts, updates on classes, event notifications, and gives students and supporters a way to connect with us quickly and easily to ask questions, give feedback, and make recommendations. I’d also love to encourage more fans to use it to interact with one another – we’re working on that piece. I used to put together a regular e-newsletter but I’ve decided to put more time into Compass Yoga’s Facebook page for several reasons:
1.) Facebook provides a two-way communication channels and is more dynamic. An e-newsletter is a one way communication tool that’s sent once in a while and many times goes unopened. By industry standards, if 20% of your subscribers open your e-newsletter, you are doing really well. Compass has always had 40%+, but that means that 60% of people never read it. 2.) Facebook gives us a way to connect people to one another. An e-newsletter just gives people a way to connect to us. 3.) The new Google inbox has all but killed email marketing. Many people have given up on email altogether in favor of social media. I will admit that I’m beginning to lean this way as well. 4.) E-newsletters are also difficult to share (meaning even when you click the share button, very few people ever open those shares) and time-consuming to create. A Facebook post is highly shareable and visible by a wide audience.
If you love yoga, or you’re just curious about it, I hope you’ll join us on the Compass Yoga Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/CompassYoga
One Fine Yogi Facebook Page
For a few months, I’ve been working on ideas and designs for One Fine Yogi, a line of yoga-inspired products in a few different categories. I’m still getting my head wrapped around this concept, and sorting through how I’d like it to take shape. Profits from the product sales will support Compass Yoga. While I figure out the direction for the product line, I post inspirational messages and images on the One Fine Yogi Facebook Page. If you need a boost in your day, I’d love to have you become a fan of the page: https://www.facebook.com/onefineyogi.
Facebook has been a great way to inspire people off the mat and to connect with supporters directly on a daily basis. It also helps people know that Compass Yoga and One Fine Yogi are run by real people who care about their health and well-being.
How do you use Facebook as part of your online presence and strategy?
Tomorrow, I’ll chat about Twitter – one of the social media channels I use most frequently.
Christa Avampato 