When A Pen Name Backfires
Posted on January 14th, 2006by Michael Gray in Blogs
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When I am developing a blog one of the things I think about is giving the blog a “voice”. There’s always a little bit of me in it, but I try to find a voice that compliments the site and makes it more interesting. Quite often that “voice” happens to be that of a woman. I’ve done lots of different characters, like pretending to be your “Mom” or one of the characters who would fit in perfectly on “Sex and the City“.
So earlier this week I received an email from a producer for the show Take 5 on XM Satellite Radio. Turns out they wanted to interview one of the characters I play on the web live on the radio. Now as fate would have it, it just happened to be a female character. After considering doing my best Mrs. Doubtfire impersonation I decided I couldn’t pull it off. So I wrote back telling them she was out of the country at the moment but I coordinate with her on this website, am very familiar with the project, and would be happy to do the interview. However as I suspected, a thirty-something male who runs this particular website is not the story they wanted to hear about or tell, so I lost the interview slot … sigh.
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January 14th, 2006 at 10:53 am
Hee hee. SEOs are a funny & weird bunch.
You could look at that (I think it’s from IBM) experimental page where a male or female synthetic voice says what you write — it sounds incredibly real.
January 16th, 2006 at 8:28 am
[...] I’m sure there are plenty of other questions to ask about developing the voice for your audience. It’s certainly much more difficult to choose a voice that is outside of yourself, I’m sure it can be a rewarding experience that would improve your skillset. Thinking “as someone else” certainly lends to learning about and understanding different demographics more effectively. [...]
January 16th, 2006 at 11:22 am
Hi Wolf, I just came up from under the radar with a few sites of mine this weekend.
I had to pull my foot out of my mouth, a valuable lesson learned. From now on I use only my real name, that way I can sleep at night.
Frankly it feels better.
January 16th, 2006 at 11:35 am
It’s a difficult quandary, I’m all for being upfront and honest, but here we have a perfect of example of the same thing being said by “two” people that doesn’t have the same end result.
January 16th, 2006 at 9:11 pm
[...] When A Pen Name Backfires [...]