The Voice123 Team Blog: Trends: What's in a Name? Plenty.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Trends: What's in a Name? Plenty.

Since starting at Voice123 back in 2007, I have held the job titles:

QA Associate - July 2007
QA Manager - December 2007
PR Manager - December 2008
CS Manager - September 2009
Community Manager - March 2010

Now it is changing again:

“Community Development Manager” aka "CDM"

You may wonder why a business would change a job title several times. This trend is something every voice talent, or brand, should consider: There are ways that your name can appear online that can impact the way another business will think of you, positively or negatively, before they think to work with you. Consider this video on the ‘Baloney Detection Kit’:

What you may be doing by the way you describe yourself to buyers, is creating a pattern of belief or claim about you that may be negative; a pattern that requires overcoming a ‘hurdle of proof’. The end result: You will make buyers skeptical before they know you, and when they do hire you, if the smallest thing goes wrong, you will have validated their fear. Titles also need to change because sometimes you discover that the job title appears to be a ‘claim of status’, that leaves one feeling you have exaggerated.

Finally, web trends change very quickly, so you need to keep a sense of humor about it. Your title does not determine what you are, but your quality as a business will. Below, I would like to share some descriptions/titles that have been described to Voice123 customer service as 'exaggerated'. Keep in mind this applies to working online: