June 2009

by Andrew Begnoche’

Join the Conversation

You are invited to HOLDCOM’s first monthly Social Media Mixer Thursday June 25th at 8:30 am. Have you tweeted, posted, or blogged lately? Or are you wondering what people are talking about when you hear these terms? If you’re just interested in learning more about Social Media or want to share what you know, we’d like you to attend our Social Media Mixer. It’s a great opportunity to meet like-minded people searching for the same answers and learning from others who are having success with Social Media.

The first meeting will focus on sorting through the clutter of social media options and determining which are right for you and your company. With so many options it’s easy to get discouraged. Have you signed up for LinkedIn or Facebook and then wondered – “Yeah, so now what”? Have you contemplated starting a personal or company blog, but don’t know where to start? Learn about these and other pressing topics.

Come join the conversation. Whether you have questions or answers we want to hear what you have to say. The Social Media Mixer will be hosted at the HOLDCOM offices at 955 Lincoln Avenue in Glen Rock, NJ. This is a free event that is open to all HOLDCOM clients and friends. Please RSVP to socialmedia@holdcom.com if you are interested in attending or have any questions.

by Stacey Caropresso

HOLDCOM participated in the American Cancer Society's Relay for Life in Glen Rock, New Jersey on Saturday May 16th. We would like to thank all of you who generously donated to this cause & helped Team HOLDCOM meet its goal; The 2009 Glen Rock Relay for Life helped to raise over 166 thousand dollars for the American Cancer Society. Donations can still be made until August 31st by visiting www.relayforlife.org.

In addition, thank you to everyone who enrolled in CPS-3, we are excited to say we had 205 people enroll. If you were unable to enroll, please be an advocate for Cancer Prevention Study-3. Encourage those close to you to take part in this potentially life-saving study in your honor. Spread the word to everyone you know and encourage them to enroll. The Cancer Prevention Study-3 will be enrolling 500,000 people at select Relay For Life events throughout the country over the next five years. Visit the Cancer Prevention Study-3 website www.cancer.org/cps3 for enrollment information and other enrollment locations, or call toll free 888-604-5888.

CPS-3 Photos

It's Not Just For Your Television

June 12th will mark the day television viewing will jump into the twenty-first century with digital transmission of the signal. For those of you who have been using a cable box or satellite system, this day will come and pass with no notice or interruption of service. But for millions of households, June 12th may come as a big surprise when they sit down to relax and watch their favorite television show or sporting event.

The digital bug has bit many industries over the years. Record companies who never thought people would want to buy one song at a time quickly came to an abrupt reality and started negotiating deals with online suppliers like Apple, Rhapsody, and others. Other companies like Kodak were quick to embrace the digital revolution and created on line solution for sharing, storing and ordering prints on line.

Here at HOLDCOM, we’ve always embraced new digital technologies while also being sensitive to our end-user’s technology comfort level. Although many of you have upgraded to new technologies including remote load systems, internet based systems and flash drive & CD based equipment many clients have chosen to stay with their cassette based systems. Although these units are still functioning and working fine, the digital conversion that’s sweeping the country has forced the cassette tape into extinction rendering them obsolete.

Unlike the firm date of June 12th for your television system, we don’t have a specific date that cassette tapes will cease being available. With analog cassette tapes in short supply they will soon be obsolete! Since your Message-On-Hold Autoloader system relies upon cassette tapes for program loading, it is now in jeopardy. Now is the time to protect your program and keep it running before cassette tapes become unavailable. To help you make this equipment transition, HOLDCOM has an exclusive offer for our clients still utilizing Cassette Tape load equipment. Join the digital conversion and upgrade your Message-On-Hold equipment. Contact your Client Relations representative at cr@holdcom.com or call us at 800-666-6465 to learn more.

Welcome to summer 2009 Holdcom Voice readers! We’re going to kick off this season with a “behind the mic” chat with Katrina – one of our authentic British Voice Talents.

Holdcom Voice: So take us back to how, where and/or when it all started for you as a Voice Talent.
Katrina:"Way, way back in the early 80s I was trained and worked as a voiceover but unable to take it up full time because professional singing was beckoning. After a lot of singing, jingles and station IDs, some day jobs, comedy and life experience, I came back into the voiceover fold in 2003."

HV: What is the most exciting/interesting aspect of working as a voice over talent?
Katrina:"Singing, acting and comedy involved repetitive acts night after night – with voiceover it's a fresh script every time!"

When she steps away from the mic, Katrina is proud to reside on a lovely island just off the East Coast of Australia. She loves to hand feed the wild birds who come to visit and sing with her.

Sample Katrina’s voice for your next project at www.holdcom.com/voices. 

by Aaron Kamphuis

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a hot button topic on the web these days. Everyone wants to know how to make their website appear at the top of the search engine lists. A quick Google search turns up thousands of articles from an array of websites with tips on how to improve your site ranking. Some people have even made a full time business out of being Search Engine Optimization Specialists.

The whole idea is to make your site as accessible as possible to search engine "spiders". Spiders continually crawl the web, looking for data contained in web pages. In the old Web 1.0 world, web pages used meta tags (also known as "keywords") to identify what content a page contained. Meta tags would be written into each page on your site, and when someone typed a keyword into a search engine, the search engine would then find pages that it had crawled with those keywords. Simple enough! Unfortunately, this led to the practice of "keyword stuffing" - hundreds upon hundreds of keywords stuffed into a page, many times with no relevance to the page itself.

Google has led the way in revamping how pages are crawled and how web data is found. Keywords are not completely ignored, but it does check that your page actually contains relevant content to the keywords in your page header. More relevance is given to the actual content of your page. You don't even have to include keywords; it's all about the actual text in your page.

SEO is an inexact science. There is no tried an true formula to increasing your page rank. The only rule is to write good content, and update it often. There are however, a few basic tips:

    * Make sure your pages have a title. If you look in the top of the browser and it says "Untitled Page" (or something else generically similar), that will count against you.

    * Use headings in your content. Your individual articles should have titles, and the titles should be in heading tags.

    * Use URLs that make sense and are easy to read. "Alloneword" is not seen the same as "All-One-Word" by crawl spiders.

    * If you feel that your site is in need of a professional, beware of anyone that "guarantees" top results. This is pure snake oil. Asking to be listed at the top of page one on Google is like asking for winning lottery numbers.

    * Update your content as often as you can, but don't update just for the sake of updating. Search engines are looking for fresh, relevant content, not just the same page with a few tweaks thrown in to make it look new.

    * Make sure to sign up your site with Google WebMaster Tools. It will give you info about how users find your page, and what search query they used.
 

by Ralph Gioseffi

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

Candlelight, soft music, and an expensive bottle of wine are all components gearing towards the main event - The Meal. Orders are placed and conversation begins. Behind the kitchen doors, however, chaos rages on.

Keeping with last months theme of food, we flee the supermarket and land in Kitchen’s of some of the top restaurants in New York City. Bourdain’s book steers us through the cooking calamities and dining debacles of working in the restaurant business.

18 hour days on your feet, working Holidays and Weekends, cuts, burns, yelling, screaming, sweating from head to toe, this book provides eye-opening insight to what goes on behind the doors. Never order fish on a Monday and generally stay away from brunches. Both are results of left over food that needs to go. Ordering a steak? Never, I mean never, ask for more than medium. Even that’s pushing it. Your meat with get dumped into a high temperature broiler and robbed of all its goodness, then put under the heat lamps while chefs prep the REAL food.

Bourdain’s book reads with a tough New York Attitude, a great ingredient to this highly entertaining memoir. I recommend it for anyone who eats food. He’s still firing out dishes at his restaurant Les Halles, so if you’re in the New York Area, be sure to check it out, even better after you’ve read the book. Then you’ll really know what’s going on back there.