Virtual Assistance and You

If you use the web for business, you surely know that building your opt-in list and sending email newsletters is the heart of your marketing.  For some time now, focusing on recruiting subscribers and increasing your inner circle fan club has been regarded as best practice if you want to grow your biz.

But, also for some time now,  the spam filters have been wise to email marketing software, summarily dumping many a well-meaning post. And, though you have ten on your list, who’s to say eight of them are not deadbeats who may open your post but never read it? Email client software that shows the top part of each email when you click on it in the list will report that the email was opened. But there’s no way to know if it was actually read.

The fact is, if one-third of your recipients open your email newsletter, you’re doing extraordinarily well. And if 20 percent click on your links, you might be on a terrific roll. Most stats are far below these levels.

Now, email marketing can be done very inexpensively, so we may as well keep doing it. But since we’re doing it, we should figure out how to do it better.

We want to be more effective, more compelling, closer to our clients than we are.  Yet email marketing, to be meaningful, has to have an enormous top of the funnel. The more people you’re mailing to, the more people are likely to actually read your messages. So you have to appeal to a wide base, while creeping closer to intimacy. It can be tricky.

But however we might frame things, in practical terms email marketing is perhaps terminally threatened by spam filters and pervasive ADD. So the question is, what can work better in its place?

The concept of the landing page, perhaps, begins to fill the bill; or micro-sites, as described in this article. In both these cases, the standard would be to send a short, plain text email, with a link to the online page.

Why is this better? While reserving the right to – eventually –  judge it not better, after all,  I might suggest that with such a system, you’re efficiently capturing those people who are most interested in your product. You’re not missing those whose spam filters would hide your html email; or those who have no time to read a lengthy post.

The subsequent online page, the link you provide in the text of your email, may include sub-pages, interactive elements, and other tools. It will contribute to your search engine optimization, and remain indefinitely in your website cache.

It’s a strong contender for html email replacement, IMO. What’s your take? Or are you successful enough with emailed newsletters, and not looking for alternatives? Sure would like to hear your comments.

It’s interesting that the internet is rising to such ascendancy during one of the worst times, economically speaking, that the world has seen. While we are struggling with everyday survival, the internet is taking us to unprecedented heights of thought and societal awareness.

Whether one is the result of the other, I don’t know and won’t attempt to explore here. But because the juxtaposition is so startling, it demands notice. Somehow, the technologies, practices, and cultures of the web are involved in our happy future. The omnipotent and largely free internet suggests possibilities for not only coping but succeeding in major ways despite our material and ecological woes.

But there’s no denying that establishing a strong presence online is an acquired skill, gained through patience and humble learning. The norms of the ‘net aren’t easy to describe to the uninitiated. How often, when discussing social media, have you heard someone sneer, “Reading what kind of sandwich you had for lunch is not interesting to me. What a waste of time!”

Yet, online branding being the multi-faceted dragon that it is, your lunchtime ham on rye can actually be a not-insignificant part of it.  That is,  internet protocols are a new mixture of work and play; and mastering the mix makes artists of us all.

As he so often does, Mitch Joel nails it.

From gossip and soap operas to professional wrestling and reality television, we love following and burrowing ourselves in the lives of others. So, why is it any shock that Facebook has over 500 million accounts?

(You’ll really enjoy Mitch’s post. Go ahead and check it out. I’ll wait.)

Mitch points out that the internet plays well to our natural propensity for being seen. We have a natural need to be recognized by others, and online participation allows that in a big way. Of course, if I’m to be seen, I must also see others; and it’s been observed that success online is proportional to your genuine interest in others. So the 80/20 rules applies here as in so many other places: 80% listening, 20% talking.

Amazingly, the internet takes us back, in a way, more than forward. It demands old-fashioned manners, and it judges a business more by its reputation than by its looks. Its terrain feels like a frontier, and its laws have yet to be created. It seems like an adolescent: lithe, pimply, emotional, self-righteous, hopeful, and ripe with all the glories of young adulthood.

But whatever else it may be, the web lets us share in enormous amounts compared to just 20 years ago. That’s what’s really new about it. And when we share this way, our ideas about work and play and  mission and branding and purpose are profoundly affected. Your ham-on-rye-ness may or may not be attractive to my grilled cheese-ness. Keeping this data in proper perspective and order is the challenge: but it’s data we need (even crave!) and use nonetheless.

If you’re still waffling, not wanting to tackle the internet’s challenges, consider how it is bringing us closer to our true selves. Why deny yourself, or your business, such a pleasurable profit?

I wonder how many web content producers are old enough to remember personally the experience that was the Grateful Dead. Now that David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan (I’m not sure they can count themselves amongst the elders – ?) have exhumed the Dead’s philosophy in their soon to be published Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, perhaps we can all begin to appreciate the legacy of the 60s/70s as productive in many ways.

After all, half a century later, we are realizing the marketing brilliance of those musical prophets. We have even developed technology to facilitate their ideas. Though we may have thought that the internet itself forces change, perhaps it’s more true that soul and society have changed, and the internet was created in response to those transformations.

It’s evidence of his superior intelligence that 26-year-old Dan Schawbel celebrates the coming launch of the Scott-Halligan book on his Personal Branding Blog, providing an excerpt for his audience.

The given chapter celebrates the Dead’s love for their work.

“We are taught as children that work and play are opposing forces in nature. This teaching is incorrect—it is possible that your work can be like play! In fact, if you do what you love the way the Grateful did, you’ll never ‘work’ a day in your life.”

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re undergoing an enormous re-calibration of work, all over the world. All facets of employment and career are being renovated, morphing because of pressures from the economy, society, and acts of God and mammon. Mine is the first generation in a very long time to believe that life should be personally fulfilling, and work should be more than drudgery.

The Dead shocked us with their simple being-ness, no excuses, no pretending. They gathered their following through happy sharing. A micro-economy still revolves around their heirs, descendant bands, and ever-living fans.

The most famous Dead takeaway for marketing:  let your customers sell for you.

The Dead invited fans to record their concerts, rather than fight costly battles over copyright. This meant that their fans were the record producers, and thus they were the marketing department as well.

I don’t know if this was sheer prescience on someone’s part; maybe Gerry Garcia thought it up. But it’s certainly likely that the Dead’s tactics were a result of their conviction that going with the flow is the right way to live. When you run into brick walls, go around them. The Dead, in an ironic sense, gave us a new way to live. Heroism transformed, through their culture, from monster bashing machismo to loving peacemaker.

So now we’re experimenting with inbound marketing, because

• the establishment of relationships is clearly so much more profitable than yelling at crowds;
• erring on the side of generosity brings our customers closer to us and gives them the tools to become our advocates;
• giving equal value to work and play in our lives allows us to become the best we can be, instead of trying to fit in molds.

I thank Scott and Halligan for paying this tribute to the Dead; and also for reminding us that the internet did not spring full grown from the head of Google or anyone on our current cutting edge. Rather, it’s been a long strange trip, and its origins go back 50 years, at least.

Working in inbound marketing can be frustrating because its precepts – which work so well, when applied conscientiously – are foreign to traditional business practices. They’re the opposite of marketing tactics we grew up with. They sound suspiciously soft-hearted, on first encounter. Therefore, very few people know and hold to them.

It’s frustrating when, as  an inbound marketer, you consider warm responsiveness to be basic to good business, for example, but you realize that very few of your vendors and colleagues hold that value.  Unless you serve an immediate need of theirs, you won’t get a response from them at all.

Or when you work hard on good listening skills, and then realize the other person’s awareness doesn’t extend any further than the end of their nose.

Or when you generously give, and then suddenly see that your gifts are taken for granted or even resented.

Or how about this one: you realize the person you’re talking to is completely possessed by fear of identity theft, not to mention AIDS, drugs, crime, terrorists, and Bigfoot, and can’t hear a word you’re saying about sharing and openness on the internet.

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I’m involved in an ongoing campaign to spread the good word about inbound marketing in my local area. But sometimes the gap in understanding leaves me gasping.

• Be open about who you are personally?
• Give things away?
• Forget privacy paranoia?
• Mix business and social life?
• Publish my journal in a blog?

These things are anathema in the American South. Still.

So I get disheartened, sometimes, like the Congresswoman yesterday who remarked that philosophical differences between the sides were so great in the immigration discussions that no meeting of the minds seems possible.

On the other hand, I know inbound marketing is here to stay. How do I know that? Because it works, and the old invasive techniques increasingly do not work.

There’s one fellow I know from local networking, whom I have seen at meetings for a couple years now, though we haven’t spoken personally much. I regarded him as a master with the elevator speech, and an accomplished socializer, definitely part of the glue keeping the groups together. Not until today did I learn that he considers himself a student in, as he puts it, “learning how to talk to people.” He’s probably 55 or 60 years old; was a firefighter all his career; only recently turned to selling. There was a look in his eye as he spoke, and the spellbinding clarity of his intention. He is curious about “how to talk to people,” and that means he listens, and gives, and serves, and keeps an open mind. Awe-inspiring.

So there, I’ve now convinced myself that all is not lost, and I can go on preaching the inbound marketing gospel to the insurance agents and realtors in my local groups. If my fireman gets it, maybe many more can and will.

What do you think?

Recently, I parted ways with a contractor because we couldn’t agree on price. Though it was a cordial disagreement, it still hurts. I had hoped the partnership would be mutually beneficial, but her policies and mine differed to such an extent that an ongoing exchange was obviously not going to be possible.

In another case, a favorite client asked me to do some payroll prep work. It took a full meeting between us and an hour of reviewing the info on my part before I screwed up the resolve to tell him he should find someone else for the job because accounting is just not my bag.

I’ve gotten better at detecting such misalignments in my almost-three-years as a virtual assistant. Awhile back, I might have overlooked small or even not-so-small discrepancies and miscommunications in the interest of getting and completing the work.

Over time, though, I learned that it’s not worth the heartache. If you can’t trust your virtual relationships, or if you are not providing surefooted trustworthiness from your end, the partnership will not work. Period.

If you detect a glimmer of mismatch, which is not resolved speedily, you may as well say farewell. Virtual relationships depend on a few points of intersection that must be infallible. Your faith in the other is what makes it work and you can do nothing of value without that faith.

For anyone who has made a profession of helping others, for people who work as administrators, helping others to realize their plans, it’s just plain difficult to turn anyone down. The whole point is to be of assistance; it goes against the grain to say no. Virtual Assistants are ‘can do’ people, after all.

So VAs in particular suffer from can’t say no syndrome, but it’s common as well amongst people of all kinds who are in the start-up phase of business.

Come to think of it, it’s a phenomenon that appears in youth, whatever the context. Adolescents, for example, are famous for not saying no. An adolescent is usually far more in love with love than with the particular ‘other.’ Was your first teenage romance a solid investment, founded in well-placed trust? Or was it a crazy fling with no basis in reality? As you matured, you learned to say no to some of the many possibilities in the world of romance, right?

Similarly, when you enter the work force for the first time, you are anxious to take whatever job you are offered. It’s only later that you get picky.

So it’s no surprise that as a business owner, building your own clientèle entails the same discernment and selection.

I’d like to avoid having to be selective in person, in the moment, though. That is, I’d like to be organized sufficiently and communicate appropriately,  so that the people I interact with are entirely self-selecting, and already in full awareness of my policies.

Yes, that’s most likely the real challenge before me. The next step in the continuing saga; the rational growth of my enterprise. I must better ensure that my message attracts the right prospects for me. That way, no one’s time will be wasted and everyone’s potential will be maximized.

In life, in business, in relationships, we refine the definition and thus mature to reach a golden age of understanding, I do believe, don’t you?

I’ll let you know how it goes.

How extraordinarily fortunate I am! Every work day, I interact with people from all over the globe. And every work day, I also interact with local people, in person.

Please pause a moment and consider the awesomeness of that. I’m an everyday person, not a big wheeler-dealer, not a politician or celebrity. Yet my habitual work brings me in contact with the world; while remaining in contact with my immediate sphere. I live in a universe of the macro and micro continuously juxtaposed.

Predictably, the local world is far more personal and powerful in its effect on me than the global world. But it also tends to lag far behind in terms of self-awareness and technological advancement. So it’s with special pleasure that I’ve been observing lately a certain awakening on the local level. After more than two years of campaigning about inbound marketing and social media among networking groups in nearby cities, I’ve been noticing lately a definite, nascent glimmer of understanding. They’re beginning to ask questions, they’re getting this info from more angles than just mine, and they have decided it’s necessary to investigate.

Which results in business for me, of course. Hallelujah.

But more importantly, the same dual experience of daily life which I know as a virtual assistant- an interchange between the globe as a whole and the room in which you happen to ‘geo-locate’  right now – has become the norm for a great many more people than heretofore. Not so long ago, when I mentioned Facebook or Twitter, eyes would roll. As it is now, ears perk.

The technology allows for all the world to see itself in whole, and in part, at any given time.

To see itself both in a space and in space: both at a location and in relevance to all locations.

Whew. This is not to be dismissed as trivial. World view, never before so large as it is today, forms all responses to life, whether physical, metal, spiritual, or whatever.

No epiphany can soar without its symbol. Let this one be a symbol of hope, because we can only hope that the awareness to which we are privileged parties via the internet may be our strength and not our mere indulgence.

Look out, here comes one of those writing posts. I didn’t plan this, but today I ran into such an obvious example of mindless writing online that I have to go there with you for a minute.

Because communicating clearly is what writing is all about. It’s not a bunch of rules to frustrate you. Good writing respects the reader to the extent that it strives to communicate as easily, as seamlessly as possible.

You would not prepare a soup and serve it without giving it a taste, would you?

If nothing else, good writing requires, demands, and mandates proofreading, absolutely every time without fail. Please take that statement as verbatim, irrefutable law.  Part of my living is made by writing, and it’s still necessary for me to proof at least once, every email, update, and other iota that’s published online or elsewhere.

Because if you want to communicate and not just waste your time and everyone else’s, you must take the time to proofread.

Consider this sentence, culled from a news article I browsed today:

They also predicted using genetics alone many of those among study participants would be a centenarian.

Go ahead, read it again. See if you can make certain sense of it.

This was an article on CNN.com. Official sort of piece. Completely lacking proofreading, and therefore incomprehensible. What a shame. The news is confounding enough in its own right. Must its communication to me be equally garbled?

Okay, here’s what I think the author meant.

They also predicted, using genetics alone, many of those among study participants would be a centenarian.

Knowing that the article was about how scientists are now claiming to be able to predict which people will reach 100 years old in their lifetime, I can hazard a guess that the sentence and its sense might have been far better served stated thusly:

Using genetics alone, they also predicted that many of those among study participants would become centenarian.

And we sigh with relief. Here is language we can understand, language that cares enough about us to make sure it communicates cleanly, language that discretely disappears behind meaning.

Nobody really cares about grammar and proper usage, but we sure do care about understanding. It’s a fundamental need that can be satisfied by dedication to proofreading.

Like slow food, taking the time to proofread is a lifestyle choice that can boost returns in every area of your endeavor.

It was fun reading through this case study by Inc. magazine about virtual working. The participants, on the whole (if you believe the article’s author), preferred the routine of going in to the office every day, vs. working from their homes. In short, they were creeped out by the virtual work experience.

Employees missed the office, saying they felt their lives became less dynamic; rather than clear delineations of work and non-work environments, they felt as though they were at work all the time.

However, the author of the article does admit that, given the right circumstances, virtual work can be entirely satisfactory. Allow me to quote him:

“… most virtual companies build their cultures from scratch, hiring the sort of people who want to work remotely, who don’t want to be friends with their co-workers, and who like being a long distance away from their bosses. Virtual companies are also, crucially, run by CEOs who are able to derive a sense of personal fulfillment from this arrangement. Many entrepreneurs speak of the flush of pride they feel when they walk into their offices and see the people they have created jobs for and the culture they have fostered; Matt Mullenweg gets that same rush from looking at a map and seeing his employees scattered across the world.”

I’m tempted to suggest to you that those who prefer the commute and the water cooler are simply afraid of change. They’re just sad lemmings rushing toward their demise rather than choosing new alternatives. But that would be entirely unfair. The workers in this particular case were located in comfortable uptown digs, and they clearly benefited from the social and intellectual rewards of their daily interactions.

So we have to face the fact that some will be nurtured by an brick and mortar office environment and others will live more happily in their home workplaces. Who’s surprised? The world was ever thus divided in two.

The dichotomy points to the need, however, to apply caution when hiring employees or when contracting for virtual assistance. Does the person you are considering have a well-developed awareness of their best working habits? Are they happiest when working as an employee, or are they more suited to independent work? Which type is most appropriate for your needs?

It pays to be aware of this burgeoning dichotomy in the business world, because confusion can be costly. Your in-house employees should naturally thrive on their routines, and your virtual contract partners should perform best via their chosen MOs. But when you cast a contractor in an employee position, or an employee in a contract job, you’re asking for trouble.

In the field of virtual assistance, some service providers approach the work from an employee mentality, even to the point of offering to spend set hours ‘in the office’ each week. On the other hand, a great many VAs are remote operators, and your relationship with them is that of a vendor or B2B supplier. Know which type you need when seeking a VA and you’ll greatly speed your process.

An especially savory triumph of the internet is that it allows us to expand our existence into a larger definition of self; it is a more expansive set of accepted tools for work and self-expression.  Whether office workers or independent agents, we can each choose our preferred way of working.

The web makes it more obvious than ever that we are authors of our own destinies.

A few recent observations:

• I feel a strong urge to share with you this article by David Castro, an Ashoka Fellow, on the subject of social entrepreneurship, because it really took my breath away;
• I’ve been offended, lately, by the aggressive presence of political and religious representatives in business networking meetings, and feel like ranting on the trend;
• I remember that profound old maxim of creative production: weed out those parts you love the best, and then you begin to approach a worthy work of art.

These thought threads intertwine; and in describing how they do so, maybe some usefulness can be extracted.

•  Castro’s article is compelling and challenging. Social entrepreneurship is defined as establishing repeatable systems that create value, where value is defined as receiving more than you put in.

How is it possible to harvest more than you plant? The metaphor proves the point: what actual harvest is inferior to the lowly seeds that started the whole thing? The harvest is blessing beyond any discernable effort.

Even though expressly for-profit, as opposed to Castro’s focus on non-profit entrepreneurship, any business may benefit from understanding this natural law. What kinds of inputs will yield returns far richer than their sources? How can you organize in ways that realize surplus, and therefore ensure experimentation and growth?

•  My particular geographical region tends to be somewhat parochial, if not downright backwoods, when it comes to religion and politics. You have to expect a dominant contingent of redneck mentalities wherever groups are gathered here. I know this and generally manage it tolerably, but lately, it’s gotten out of hand. Preachers rail at us in their 30-second elevator speeches; Tea Party cavalry keep us hostage in their 10-minute presentations.

Certainly I will defend to the death your right to whatever convictions you choose. But this is a country where we agree that separation of Church and State is ideal; and where respect for trade supposedly levels all playing fields.  I come to these meetings for commerce, not to be sermonized.

•  An insidious force working against your forward progress may be your own sentimentality. Consider this scenario: you make something, anything, a creation that involves (and is intended to communicate) your imagination, self-expression, and choice-making. Included is a part of it – perhaps the original whim that gave you inspiration, or some other small piece that fell miraculously into place just when you needed it – there’s a part of your creation that you love especially, more than the rest.

When you come the point that you know that that very piece is the one that must be deleted, when you see that without that one beloved bit your creation will finally communicate with the greatest clarity, then and only then do you approach true completion of your project.

So there’s the pattern:

1. Surplus for survival.
2. Separation of trade and opinion.
3. Exile sentimentality.

• I like Castro’s article because it suggests answers can be found in working smarter, more holistically and more realistically.
• I dislike proselytizing in business networking meetings because it suggests answers can be found in what someone else tells you to believe.
• I use the teaching about throwing out the part you love the best because it suggests answers can be found when I get out of my own way.

Yes, just a few musings on business life. A motley crew of perceptions. But the whole is far more glorious than the parts; the harvest is far richer than the tiny seed.

How about you? What has possessed/obsessed your thought recently?

When you take on the challenge of discovering and articulating your brand for business purposes, there are many ways to go about the task.

Perhaps you make lists of your favorite things on all levels; or maybe you ask colleagues for feedback on who they perceive you to be. You go on a vision quest, or you call a meeting of the board. You listen to your friends, your customers, your heart. You form, through determination, hard work, and fateful experience, an idea of who you are in the eyes of others; an idea of your personal worth vis à vis your community.

Whatever that idea is, what happens if you invert your perspective on it?

By your perspective, I mean, the way you are accustomed to thinking. That is, your ideas and beliefs are acculmulated according to the experiences that have come your way. You apprehend that which you’ve been conditioned to recognize. You see what you expect to see.

But since you are one person on a large planet, what you expect to see, based on previous experiences, may not bear much relation to what it is possible for you to see.

So what if, instead of seeing your brand from the perspective of all you know, what happens if you try to see it from the perspective of what you do not know?

Consider what you don’t know. It’s huge, right? So what is your brand relative to all that?

• Sure, you groom dogs for a living. But in a universe where no dogs exist, what you do is care for underlings.
• You trade stocks on Wall Street every day. In a world with no money, you measure energy.
• You work as a virtual assistant, partnering with small business owners. In a reality without businesses, you weave threads.
• You’re a successful author of popular fiction. In a land of no books, you court imagination.

Try it. Does this brief exercise help to position your work? Is this a helpful way to think about your mission in commerce?

All the billions of people who are not in your sphere, who have different conditioning from yours: is this a good way to help them understand who you are? Is it even a pretty good way to define your offerings to friends and neighbors?

Is it even, perhaps, a useful perspective on your daily work? What happens if you approach every task from the viewpoint of what you do not know about it? How does this affect your attitude and mood?