Blog – Page 5 – Connie Terwilliger

I’ll take mine with a side of Convenience, please…

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that when I make something easier for my clients it usually pays off.

Convenience is defined as something that saves or simplifies work – or adds to one’s ease or comfort.

I make it as convenient as possible to do business with me. My website has demos up front and center on the home page of my website. I have contact information on each page. There are links to more demos and hopefully enough information about who I am and what I do to help them take a chance on my voiceover work. After that, it is up to me to provide value.

We love convenience. Savvy business people have always known that people will pay a […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:04+00:00April 8th, 2016|Categories: Business, Marketing|Tags: convenience, customer service, voice acting|

Smart Phones Mean Business

I love my smart phone. A Samsung Galaxy 5. It does everything – except FaceTime – but there’s Skype, Facebook’s talk feature, Google Hangouts and other alternatives if I need to spend some face time with someone across town or in another time zone.

My smart phone gets me out of my studio and I can stay connected with my business. You never know when an emergency voiceover will pop up. And if you are not in the media production business you might not realize just how often there actually is a voiceover emergency. Had one on Monday. The call came in at 2 for a 3 o’clock session with a client on the East Coast.

The flip side of having a smart phone is that it keeps me connected with my business. There are times when it is good to […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:04+00:00March 19th, 2016|Categories: Business, Communication, Life, Musings, Technology|Tags: eLearning, narration, online purchase, smart phone, voiceover|

Do You Have a Digital Media Production Tribe?

Many years ago when ITVA changed their name to MCA-I – people just didn’t know what to do. The new name was hard to say for one thing. And the change happened at a time when technology was evolving and the business climate was changing. It created sort of a perfect storm that sent the association into turmoil. Something not unique to MCA-I – many associations have been feeling the effects.

While MCA-I is still alive (www.mca-i.org), and remains strong in scattered chapters around the US, it is in regrowth mode.

The name MCA-I is still a mouthful to this day. Back then we tried to find a way to make it easier to say – so a few of us dubbed ourselves the “McEye” Tribe. That was the phonetic pronunciation. While it never really caught on, it worked […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:04+00:00February 25th, 2016|Categories: Announcements, Business, Life, Marketing|Tags: mca-i, professional association, SD MediaPros, video production|

Facebook as another top distribution channel for video ads

Just ran across an article discussing how to use Facebook as another area of distribution and why you should consider it. Apparently YouTube is still the king, but Facebook is gaining ground.

The folks at ReelSEO make the case for advertisers to use multiple sources with YouTube first and Facebook second. What strikes me is how complicated it is for advertisers to find any common way of analyzing the results. The technology is changing so fast that each new iteration brings new tracking metrics and ways of paying for your ads – clicks, time spent watching, what constitutes a view so that you know what you are going to be charged, etc. This article has links to explanations of current methods.

But the bulk of the article is on how to maximize the effectiveness of your video ads for Facebook.

Their first […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:04+00:00February 4th, 2016|Categories: Advertising, Announcements, Business, Marketing, Technology|Tags: ReelSEO|

T/V is the new TV

So, I’m reading my weekly MediaPost Online Video Insider column and ran across the use of T/V (television/video) instead of TV. It was in an article talking about the separation of content viewing and ad viewing – which will be the subject of another post.

This actually makes a lot of sense to me, but apparently the idea is so new that even Google hasn’t gotten hip to it. I did a search for T/V and nothing came up.

I did find a hysterical bit of education about when to say Tee-Vee, The Television, or the tele from the website Woodward English.

http://www.woodwardenglish.com/television-or-the-television/

But nothing yet on the new T/V.

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:04+00:00January 21st, 2016|Categories: Announcements, Musings|Tags: T/V|

Simply Simplify

Most of my adult life has been spent accumulating stuff – tangible and intangible. Lots of stuff. Cluttering up my physical, mental and emotional space. Most of us have stuff – lots of stuff. (I feel like George Carlin! If you have never heard this bit from him, check it out below. A little bit ‘o swearing, but pretty tame compared to most modern comics.)

Anyway, we all have a lot of stuff. We go through our stuff at times, weeding through our stuff and donating it to our favorite thrift store. Sorting through data stuff – deleting or archiving. All of this activity opens up space for more new stuff to gather.

Sometimes we don’t have a chance to decide which stuff to get rid of. Like when your external hard drive crashes and all the stuff on it is gone for good.

Yeah, that […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:04+00:00January 12th, 2016|Categories: Business, Life, Musings, Technology|Tags: accumulation, George Carlin, hard drive crash, Stuff|

Eyeballs! How many eyeballs are seeing your video?

How do you know if the video you just created is getting seen and (probably even more important) getting the results you want? View count? Reach? Engagement?

First you have to know what you want your video to do and who you want to see it. When I was producing videos for General Dynamics, we had to be the sanity check for so many of our internal clients who came down to our “hidden film factory” wanting a video. After a detailed conversation to establish the what and the who, many times the client didn’t actually need a video to get their message to their particular audience. But when a video was produced, we spent a lot of our pre-production time hashing out these details.

This was in a time period before the Internet, so collecting data on the effectiveness of the video (or film) […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:04+00:00December 12th, 2015|Categories: Business, Marketing|Tags: measuring effectiveness, metrics, voiceover talent, Wistia|

Yes, we have no bananas…

“Yes, We Have No Bananas” (the Louis Prima version here in this link) says…

He just “yes”es you to death, and as he takes your dough He tells you
“Yes, we have no bananas
We have-a no bananas today
We’ve string beans, and onions
Cabashes, and scallions,
And all sorts of fruit and say
We have an old fashioned tomato
A Long Island potato But yes, we have no bananas
We have no bananas today”

How does this apply to our business? Bananas = Time.

While I don’t have empirical evidence of this, most voiceover people can usually balance all the projects that show up on their “doorstep” and meet client deadlines. Particularly if you are doing self-directed short form work.

However, there are times when you are actually too busy to take on another project on any given day or week. In most cases, the client can wait for you to work it […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:04+00:00November 15th, 2015|Categories: Business, Communication, Negotiating|Tags: bananas, running your business, time allocation|

Careful What You Ask For

WoVo is an association of voiceover professionals (both union and non-union) seeking to inform and educate about best practices, standards for ethical conduct and professional expertise. It has an online casting engine that features ONLY vetted professional voices, unlike the company being discussed in this blog post.

Remember the commercial actors strike in 2000? Pay-per-Play was one of the big things the union was asking for. The business has never really been the same.

According to a white paper published by Villanova University the convergence of TV and the Internet was the “core” issue. The unions were aware of the technical tsunami approaching, that the distribution of the content was forever changing. Not the actual work, but the delivery of the product.

It is hard to predict the future, but being responsive to changes so that you don’t get so far […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:04+00:00November 6th, 2015|Categories: Announcements, Auditioning, Business, Marketing, Technology|

Are you an Independent Contractor? Maybe. Maybe not.

Early radio days – KCOE-FM. Their tools, their schedule. MY MIX!

If you are not being paid W2 wages, then you may fall into the category of self-employed, freelance, or independent contractor. Or, you may simply be being paid incorrectly. If this is the case, then don’t be surprised when the red flag goes up and the IRS comes knocking.

The Business Dictionary defines independent contractor this way…(I added the bold.)

Self-employed person (architect, consultant, engineer, etc.) who provides certain services to a second-party called the principal (or client or owner), or to a third-party on behalf of the client. An independent contractor is not under the control, guidance, or influence of the client and, unlike an employee, does not owe a fiduciary duty. The client neither deducts the payroll (or the withholding) taxes from payments to the independent contractor, […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:05+00:00October 24th, 2015|Categories: Business, Marketing|

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