Using Audio For Thanksgiving And Christmas

This piece is a guest blog from one of Voice Takeaway's favourite US bloggers, our good friend in Minnesota, Cory Funk. 

We have crested the spooky, candy-laced occurrence of Halloween and are now careering towards what is known here in the United States (especially in retail circles and office enclaves) as the one-two punch of Thanksgiving and Christmas, or The Holiday Season for short.

This 1/6th of the year is fraught with chaos. There are pitfalls and opportunities to be found lurking around every can of cranberry sauce and dish of stuffing. Tasks such as making sure you thaw out the turkey for Thanksgiving in time (hint: it takes longer than you think), bringing promised appetizer or desert to the office party (and not just a bag of crisps), making sure you get little Timmy the absolutely correct plastic figure of some crazy thing on TV you have never heard of before, and sending the Christmas Cards out in time (another hint: the Post Office is closed on Christmas proper), just to name some of the big ones, can provide points of glorious failure.

Yet there are chances to be the hero in these times of sturn und drang as well. If you are an office manager you can ensure that in the shifting timelines of this season that customers know not only the hours you are open but if you are closed altogether for one of the aforementioned parties. You can, in a retail setting, have a cheery and confident voice great customers on the phone to soothe the savaged nerves of Black Friday shoppers. If, while cleaning up the pumpkin smeared plates of your multitudinous relatives, your great Aunt shows off her new tablet computer, you might get the idea to do an audio Christmas card of slideshow this year that you can email to folks and thereby be assured that you will delight and surprise your friends and family with something dynamic.

So, before you end up in a turkey coma slipping in and out of consciousness on your uncle Ed's basement couch watching a sport you don't care about and wondering how you can avoid getting up at 5am the next morning to shop for a pair of jeans, remember that the devil is in the details and that the details of professionalism, preparation, and thoughtfulness go a long way and if you can't muster those things, you can hire a professional to cover the bases for you.

To read more of Cory's blog pieces, visit http://funkomatic.wordpress.com