MCM Voices Newsletter: Volume 2 Number 1

MCM Voices Newsletter
Volume II No. 1 - January 2008

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Setting Fees. If you're running your own business and setting your own fees, the following thoughts will be of interest. They're from a weekly newsletter by Marcia Yudkin of Marketing for More:

Governor Deval Patrick's proposal to eliminate tuition for Massachusetts community colleges recently received a thoughtful response from the president of Greenfield Community College, Robert Pura.

"We want to really deeply explore what the word 'free' means and conjures up" before we implement such a proposal, Pura said, suggesting that increasing financial aid might be a better way to make college more affordable.

The effective cost might be the same for state residents with both proposals, but "free tuition" might encourage "a wave of students who take their education lightly, over-enroll and drop classes without much thought," Pura told the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Beefing up financial aid communicates responsibility rather than entitlement and may encourage a more serious approach to education.

Likewise, business coach Mark Silver says an acupuncturist he worked with found her patients getting well faster when she raised her fees. It seemed that patients were more likely to do as she suggested between sessions, to get their money's worth, when they were paying more.

Because prices influence perceived value, prices also affect client behavior and their results.

Marcia Yudkin, The Marketing Minute (quoted with permission).

If you have personal stories about the relationship between perceived value of your services and client behavior, I'd love to hear them.

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MCM News

a few highlights...

PBS Picks Up Forgotten Ellis Island. Lorie Conway reports that her film Forgotten Ellis Island has been selected by PBS "as a prime-time national special for late spring or early summer broadcast". Elliott Gould narrated this documentary, and Bruce Miles, Drew Hadwal, Fred Keeler and I provided historical voices. You can read more about the film and its grand premiere in my blog post of October 2007. In addition, the Smithsonian Institution plans to create a traveling exhibit using clips and stills from the film and excerpts from Conway's book. I will be sure to let you know when I learn the date of the broadcast.

MCM Voices Goes Deutsch. I did my first paying voice-over job in German last month, for a new client in the U.K. The product was the XPS M-1330 notebook computer from Dell. I have to admit, it was quite thrilling and fun. I hope to do more German work in the near future. In the meantime, I'm taking a one-week course in medical Spanish next week, and at the end of the month, I start a semester-long course on Contemporary Culture (in Spanish) at the local college.

The key to a busy week is to decide to take time off. I thought the week before Christmas would be quiet and planned to spend it getting ready for the holidays. Instead I was inundated with work - including a commercial that called for a very proper teacher-type British accent, a bank presentation and a commercial for a spa, among others. Yes, I do seem to get a lot of spa commercials - love them! I guess it's the next best thing to being there...

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Avian Bloopers.

MCM Voices' never-ending quest to get the right bird sounds into the soundtracks of the world

I coined the term "avian bloopers" for the inappropriate bird sounds that frequently turn up in movies and television sound tracks - the wrong bird for the habitat or time of day or location. This is human error: a sound designer has chosen a bird song at random, not realising or not caring that the >9,000 species of birds on the planet do not all occur everywhere and at any time of day.

Sometimes, however, birds make mistakes too. This morning's paper reported just such a blooper: a white pelican turned up in western Massachusetts yesterday. Even non-birdwatchers were amazed to see this bird, which normally winters in the southern United States, so far from its usual haunts. This can happen when a bird is blown off course, becomes disoriented and takes a wrong turn - we don't really know all the reasons for it, but when it happens, birdwatchers notice. And if it's a large "charismatic" species like a pelican, everybody notices. More people notice a bird's physical presence than its auditory presence, admittedly. But just because you can get away with it is no reason to keep putting the wrong birds in your sound tracks! You wouldn't deliberately put a white pelican in western Massachusetts, would you?

If you need help avoiding avian bloopers, just ask.