Brindle Media

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I received this info from voice over talent Lance DeBock and thought I’d pass it along.

It’s a scam that’s been around for awhile, but has just recently been applied to voice talent and the talent sites they are listed on.

Here’s the scam. The voiceover talent is contacted via email for a project (scammer claims to have found you thru an online voiceover talent service). Script is sent to you for a price quote. Once quote is given, scammer wants to pay with ‘cashiers check’ or Western Union and asks for more detailed mailing information about you.

You then receive what looks like a legitimate check for a $1,000.00 or more than your quote. Scammer then claims that his client made an overpayment to you and asks you to cash the check and send him or her, the balance due via Western Union.

If the bank cashes the check and later discovers that it is counterfeit, they will hold you responsible! So the scammer gets paid and you get caught ‘holding the bag’.

Here are some of the ‘Red Flags’ to look out for.

Scammer is from United Kingdom or somewhere out of the United States.

Scammer doesn’t seem to have a grasp of voiceover terminology, but they do have enough terminology to make you believe there might be a language or translation problem.

Counterfeit check is from a ‘legitimate looking’ company here in the United States.

Western Union and/or Cashiers check should always be a warning.

Here’s an attaching a link to this email which will give you more information about what to look out for. This scam has been around for awhile now but has just recently been applied to voice talent and the talent sites they are listed on.

http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams

If you watched the Triple Crown races this year, you may remember the story about a nice older gentleman who bred a filly and named her after his granddaughter, Rachel Alexandra. He later sold the horse to billionaire Jess Jackson, of Kendall-Jackson Wines fame, who is a controversial figure in the horse racing industry because he believes that the way horses have been bred over the past decade have led to more injuries.

Calvin Borel, who became America’s jockey after riding Street Sense to victory in the 2007 Kentucky Derby, is her jockey.

(Rachel & Calvin at Saratoga Race Course)

http://tinyurl.com/nx8oks

Just when I’m getting ready to get into a summer frame of mind, it’s all over.

So, this afternoon while the sun was shining, the sky was blue and the temperature hovered near 80, I took some time off to spend an hour at one of my favorite spots in Saratoga Springs, Victoria Pool in Spa State Park and as I listened to Toby Keith warming up in the distance for tonight’s show at Saratoga Performing Arts Center said farewell to Summer 2009.

And I don’t feel guilty!

How do your peers, supervisors, employees, friends, and family members see you? What do they think are your strengths, weaknesses and most valuable skills? What is your personal brand? Does their assessment correlate with yours?

If you’re like me, it’s probably a lot easier for you to develop a strong sense about the value that other people bring to the table but your self-evaluation is a little fuzzy.

The folks at Reach Branding Consulting (www.reachcc.com) offer a FREE analysis tool named 360 Reach(tm) which allows people who know you to anonymously provide feedback and help provide focus. Over the past month, I took advantage of it and I thought you might find the results instructive.

I felt pretty good that the response rate for my personal 360 Reach assessment tool was 10% higher than the average response rate of all people who have used the tool so I’m grateful to everyone who took the time to participate and to share their opinions with me. Here’s a summary of the assessments of my personal brand by colleagues, peers, managers/supervisors, employees, friends: (71% of those who participated were colleagues & peers, 12% of those who participated were either former managers/supervisors or employees):

My Top 5 Brand Personas:

1. Expert
2. Rock (reliable; I do what I say I will)
3. Truth-Teller (honest, trustworthy)
4. Structurer (organized, methodical)
5. Visionary (I see the Big Picture)

My Top 5 Leadership Competencies:

1. Relating (meeting/connecting with colleagues, employees, customers; build trust & respect)
2. Expressing (clear & consistent 2-way communication)
3. Inspiring (nuturing, empowering, developing others)
4. Visioning (developing & executing strategy)
5. Developing (personal development, growing professionally; staying fresh, adopting new & relevant habits)

All the people who participated in this survey were also asked to describe my strengths and weaknesses in their own words. Here’s what the had to say:

My Strengths (verbatims):

-Ability to manage
-Ability to cover chaos with calm
-Being methodical
-Business knowledge
-Community-mindedness
-Forward thinking
-Intelligence (2 mentions)
-Seeing the big picture, managing any situation, always has a goal in mind
-Speaking
-Vast knowledge & experience
-Wisdom
-Analyzing (2 mentions)
-Caring professional and encouraging to others
-Experience (2 mentions)
-Market knowledge
-Imagining what needs to be done and getting the job done
-Knowledge
-Knowledge of industry
-Likeability
-Media smart
-Problem solving
-Strategic planning

My Weaknesses (verbatims):

-Being methodical
-Difficulty selling himself
-Occasionally opinionated
-Probably overqualified for a lot of available jobs in the area
-Talking over people who are already talking
-Too nice
-Delegating
-Irritating people
-Making quick decisions
-Not following through
-Organization
-People skills
-Speed of learning or change
-Stubborn
-Too fast to respond. Needs to listen more.
-Too formal.

Being human, I immediately focused on the weaknesses and felt a little hurt or dismayed by some of the comments but I’m still grateful for the honest evaluations. It’s also interesting to see how some people perceive me as having weaknesses in certain areas while others see me as having strengths in the same areas.

You might want to try this yourself. The initial analysis is free although you can get more granular by upgrading with paid options. Find the 360 Reach Personal Branding Analysis at www.reachcc.com

My First Video Podcast

Last weekend, I was one of more than 300 people who attended Podcamp Boston 4 at the University of Massachusetts campus near the John F. Kennedy Library along Dorchester Bay.

The original Podcamps were specifically focused on the creation of audio and video podcasts but these events have evolved to encompass a wider range of new media tools. For a Baby Boomer
like me, all this youthful energy, intelligence and enthusiasm can be daunting but I also find this collection of people sharing their insights and knowledge to be inspiring and invigorating.

Of course,like any even of this type, Podcamp Boston had it’s share of interesting characters…

And there was some nice scenery, too…

One of the challenges I heard presented over the weekend was to describe your purpose in two “tweets” or less. If you’re new to Twitter, a “tweet” consists of 140 characters including the spaces between words. Here’s what I came up with:

Buzz4Boomers’ goal is to help Baby Boomer adults adapt to today’s rapid changes in information flow and media options by sharing the knowledge and insights I learn from people I meet in new media and experiences I encounter.

By my count, that’s 230 characters, 50 under the maximum allotted 280 tweets.

One piece of advice which I heard frequently at Podcamp Boston was that the most important thing a person can do when they’re planning to create a podcast is to just do it. So I decided to take their advice and create my first video podcast using my Flip Ultra camcorder. You can tell that my camera work needs a lot more practice but in the New Media spirit of “authenticity”, here’s the first Buzz4Boomers video podcast:

http://buzz4boomers.blip.tv/

Well, the way I see it things can only improve.

“Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who get their news from the Daily Show!” exclaimed an acquaintance I saw at a BBQ this weekend.

Yes, I admit it. I get a lot of my information about what’s going on in the world from Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert along with Google News, daily email updates from our local Hearst Corp. newspaper, a weekly business-focused paper and CNN, our local Time-Warner Cable all-news channel, the local NPR affiliate, Don Imus’ morning show on WABC-AM, New York (online) and the CBS Sunday Morning show. Rarely, if ever, do I watch a national or local TV newscast. To be honest, they’re not even on my radar.

I also read the local Hearst newspaper on a daily basis, TIME magazine, Business Week, The New Yorker, U.S. News & World Report and Esquire.

I like that on Jon Stewart’s show nothing’s sacred. He mocks all hypocrites whether or not he’s on their side. Stewart will also engage in intelligent discussions with guests with whom he disagrees politically. William Kristol, Bill O’Reilly and John Bolton immediately come to mind.

I get concerned when people tell me that they only watch Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, read The New York Times and listen exclusively to NPR or folks who only watch Fox News and Bill O’Reilly and who listen exclusively to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity on the radio. Rather than developing a broader perspective,
these people intentionally limit their input to reinforce one political viewpoint and that can be dangerous in a democracy.

It’s an interesting paradox that when there were fewer media outlets and less choice, we were exposed to many different ideas which we considered irrelevant or with which we disagreed. Now, in this age of virtually unlimited information sources, we can narrowly control the information to which we are exposed and which can reinforce our prejudices.

You can subscribe to my blog at http://buzz4boomers.blogspot.com

As a political moderate and independent, I have concerns that a Democratic majority will let their biases override good sense and will create rules and laws which restrict freedom of speech on broadcast radio outlets. They seem to have some misguided notion that corporate edicts dictate the content of talk radio when, in fact, conservative talk radio replaced moderate/liberal talk radio because conservatives tended to be more passionate about and loyal to their favorite talk shows than did moderates and liberals.

Those in Congress who advocate the return of the Fairness Doctrine don’t seem to understand that when radio was deregulated during the Reagan era and there was an explosion of new frequencies on the dial each station’s programming had to become more focused and predictable in order to survive. Power was transferred from the programmers to the listeners who were able to get what they wanted when they wanted it and knew where to find it on their radio dials. Now, with streaming, podcasts, Twitter and soon WiFi distribution of Internet radio, there are abundant opportunities to hear different opinions for those who want to hear them.

Obviously, there is a liberal audience available and NPR stations whose programming tends to be more politically progressive than commercial radio boast large and loyal audiences. In fact, the success of public radio with listeners with moderate and/or liberal political views might be a reason why commercial radio stations have been largely unsuccessful in cultivating a significant audience base of those listeners.

With all the talk about Twitter, I decided to sign up several weeks ago. To be honest, I still haven’t found much value in it.

With Facebook, I can read someone’s post, respond to it and see the response. If I write something and post it on Facebook, I get a message in my email box when someone responds. Neither of those things happen with Twitter.

In fact, after several weeks of trying, I still haven’t figured out how to respond to someone’s post on Twitter. It’s just not obvious to me.

If you decide to join Twitter, you can follow me at www.Twitter.com/brindlemedia

I’m creating this blog to help those of us born between 1946 and 1964 to cope with the rapid changes that are happening all around us. Remember at the end of the last century when a big question was what we were going to do with all of our spare time? I don’t know about you but even though I left my last “official” job over two years ago, I don’t find that I have a lot of spare time.

One of the challenges I’ve encountered is that I don’t have a college degree. When I was 13, I decided that I wanted to be in the radio business. During my sophomore year at Northeastern University in Boston, I was offered a job in broadcasting and I was learning so much and having so much fun that I left school and pursued my career. Over the next 40 years, I had a successful communications management career in places like Providence, Albany, Washington, DC, Pittsburgh, Chicago and New York working for companies like NBC, SFX, AM/FM and MTV Networks.

Despite not having a college degree, I was also invited to teach a communications course at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, served as a faculty advisor at Siena College and was certified by the New York State Education Department as a licensed private school teacher. Nevertheless, I’m finding many organizations refusing to even consider me for employment because I don’t have a college degree. I’ve also noticed that many of the online job application forms that HR departments are using to screen candidates no longer include “Some college” as an option.

Have you encountered this problem? Have you figured out a way to deal with it?

Tell me about it.

Language is a great tool for making people feel either special or stupid.

If you’re feeling intimidated by the words being used to describe various aspects of New Media, try to isolate the definition to something that has meaning for you.

“Populate” basically means to add your database or contact list.

To “mash” means to combine dissimilar elements to create something new and different.

I know that I still start feeling overwhelmed when reading social media blogs and being confronted with a list of terms I’ve never seen before. That’s OK. Just think of the process as learning a new language and find a way to reward yourself for your continuing education.