Stephanie Ciccarelli has posted on Vox Daily about the firestorm currently raging over the new opportunity members of the Voice123.com have to anonymously tag the demos of other talent. Lots of people are very upset. Many are concerned that giving other talent the ability to add tags (or keywords) to demos is a very bad idea. They fear that some unscrupulous talent may choose to add harmful or negative tags to the demos of other talent, knowing that these tags or keywords will influence the way those demos show up in searches on the site.
This is certainly a very real possibility. In theory, if everyone who does the anonymous tagging takes a professional attitude toward the process, there could be some value to the experiment. The idea, as Voice123.com presents it on their blog, is that both the talent doing the tagging and the talent being tagged are anonymous to one another. Here’s a snip from their blog …
This is currently a community experiment, giving talents the unique opportunity to anonymously tag a description of another talent’s demo, also anonymous.
Now, Stephanie, over at Voices.com’s Vox Daily, asserts this experiment is designed to add search engine optimization information to the Voice123.com site …
Why does [Voice123.com] want you to tag demos?
Simply put, they want their customers to do their search engine optimization for them.
I wanted to get the straight scoop on what this whole deal is about, so I clicked through the announcement email I received the other day to see how this tagging process works. Within a matter of minutes I could see at least 2 flies in the ointment that I don’t think the folks at Voice123.com thought through very well when they started this entire project.
First, not everything is as anonymous as the folks at Voice123.com suggest it will be. Why? Because many voice talent have slates on their demos. If you can hear the person’s name, he or she isn’t anonymous anymore. I discovered this because the third demo I tagged had a slate. So did the seventh.
And second, in the comments to their blog post, the Voice123.com team suggests that this community tagging experiment is analogous to StumbleUpon. I’ve been part of StumbleUpon for about a year and I can tell you the key difference is that there’s nothing very anonymous about StumbleUpon. If you’re a member, you can learn the user ID of everyone who has tagged or reviewed your sites.
But, at the end of the day, this is a big deal only to folks who see Voice123.com as one of the key components in their voiceover career. If you are a serious professional, I hope you’re not putting all (or even most) of your eggs in the Voice123.com or Voices.com baskets. I’m a Premium Member with both sites and make well more than enough to renew every year; but I am not counting on either site to provide most of my work. Some of my work comes through these online casting services. Some comes through my agents. Some comes from people finding me directly on the Internet. Some from existing client references. Lot of different sources. At the end of the day, it’s my responsibility and no one else’s to find my work.
I’m not going to get all that worked up over this latest move by the Voice123.com team any more than I get terribly worked up over a bad rating on an audition at Voice123.com (yes, I’ve actually had a one-star rating for one of my auditions there) because Voice123.com is not the be all and end of my voiceover business. (Nor is Voices.com.) Besides, if some malicious folks decide to put bad tags on my demos it can hardly hurt me. At present a search on Voice123.com for North American English speaking middle-aged male voice talent has me somewhere around page 114 of the search results.
As my friend Philip Banks says, there is a move toward quality among the people doing the hiring, as the great flood of new, inexperienced talent has washed through the Internet tides. Rather than expend a tremendous amount of worry and energy on what Voice123.com is doing, turn your energies and attention to honing your craft, your marketing and your work. The dividends those efforts pay will make all of this other stuff fade into obscurity.
Bob,
I know that I’ve not helped this situation, mostly in part due to what I know about the techniques used. While time will tell, past experience has taught me that these things rarely do more than generate additional hits on a search engine and that with the proper tools, nothing is truly anonymous. If someone is signed in when they leave a tag, it’s easy to track them.
We’ll find out in a few weeks when the tags hit enough sites. Ought to be interesting.
Greg,
We will indeed find out. Thanks for your insightful comments.
Be well,
Bob
NP Bob =o)
When we’re in LA, remind me about this issue and I’ll explain in detail how it works (though I suspect that you already know).
Cheers!
Greg,
I will do my best to remember to ask (you probably give me too much credit) and I look forward to seeing you again in LA.
Be well,
Bob
Great comments and observations, Bob! Thanks for digging into it further and sharing your thoughts.
Justin,
Thank you for the kind comments.
Be well,
Bob
Terrific post. I’m glad there are others as concerned as I am about this. V123 folks, via chat and email, actually told me that somehow not allowing tagging would stop job seekers from posting jobs on V123.
My reply “If it stops the job seekers posting the $10 for 3 page reads jobs, then that’s a good thing.”
My opinion is the same as expressed by others, that the tagging is for SEO rather than to help voice talents.
Frank,
Thank you for adding to the conversation.
Be well,
Bob
Bob,
now that they’ve been using the service for about a month now, the search engines have has more than a bit of a chance to see what’s going on.
1) despite statements to the contrary, the “hidden tags” are easily found. I’ve noticed that V123 is no longer making that claim, but that they replied in vitriolic fashion to paying members who also noticed what I pointed out hasn’t helped their cause any.
2) the assumption of using this technique as nothing more than an SEO strategy seems to be a valid one, as many of the new tags are specific to V123 in the profiles. It’s obvious that several of the tags were put across the board by V123.
They have a right to use these techniques, but I become less than amused with the tactics which V123 uses to justify and obfuscate their actions.
To each their own I guess.
Greg,
Indeed. I still plan to catch up with you when we’re both in LA next month to talk further.
Be well,
Bob