Virtual Assistance and You

We had a discussion recently about targeting your market; about how it’s important to be as specific as possible about who your market is and how they act. We noted how the more specific you are about this market segment, the better for your business; but that does not at all mean that you only do business with your target market. To the contrary, you’re likely to serve many different kinds of people. Nonetheless, if you deliver your message with a certain, finely-etched individual in mind, you’ll attract the returns you seek.

I’ve often wrestled with this phenomenon. Defining your target market means envisioning your ideal customer in every detail, and keeping current with the experiences of that individual, so that your conversations with them are vital and effective.

During that recent discussion, though, I had a realization: defining your target market is a tool for you, as the seller, much more than it is a way to get customers. That is to say, in the end, the exercise is likely to give you increased business. But going through the process of imaging and defining and following your target market is not about knowing who to court, it’s about knowing who you are.  It produces for you a much sharper picture of your product/service; a much more clearly defined idea of the value you offer.

Let’s consider an example. A cake maker wants to boost her sales, but getting past the gatekeepers to reach decision-makers in her industry is proving troublesome. Then she takes some time to flesh out a picture of her ideal customer. With this information, she realizes that the associated social venues, connection points, and networks are suddenly definable as well; and from that data, she can design communications that speak intimately to the viscera of her audience.

The process she sets in motion then renders the gatekeeper problem irrelevant because her communications are so precisely targeted.

But our baker’s new clientele may, in actuality, be a mish-mash of a multitude of types. All sorts of different people may resonate with her targeted messages. If, for instance, she targets women 40-60 years old, income $100,000+, USA and Canada, she might easily attract women outside that age or income range, men who appreciate the female sensibility of her messages, or people from France or China.

They all come to her, though, because her message is crafted with careful specificity. It’s deftly branded. Its integrity captivates.

This is an ancient rule in fine art: that great art exists in the specific, not in the general.

The baker is speaking from her heart to a certain person in her imagination, a flesh-and-blood vision of someone who could be real. She speaks with respect, passion, and generosity, and her message hits the spot.

Defining her target does not necessarily deliver those exact customers to the baker. What it delivers is her own self-knowledge and ability to express. And with those skills come profits.

People are at their best when using their native gifts. The fat person who dances beautifully; the gentleman who becomes a farmer; the introvert who inspires millions: these are examples of the deliciously contradictory nature of personality. One’s native gifts are not defined by others because they can often contradict outward appearances. We each must find our own core skills.

Always, my thinking stems from the assumption that every sentient being has something to offer by way of helping others. To be alive and whole is to share and empathize.

But identifying your core skills is not easy. A great many of us forever remain blind to the best uses of our energies.

Those who do identify their native gifts and use them for the benefit of others have the opportunity to live harmoniously and with relative ease. Examples might be a someone who loves cooking and writes cookbooks; or someone who is a natural public speaker and delivers speeches for a living. Or perhaps someone who is an expert housekeeper and works cleaning houses.

A large portion of the workforce have no idea what their core skills are, or never consider the question. They’re just glad to have a job. Generally, no one questions it: individuals fit into job descriptions; job descriptions do not change to fit individuals.

Increasingly, however, alongside disillusionment with corporate careers, many are copping a new paradigm. They are responding to a new imperative, one that echoes from inside their deepest dreams as well as down the canyons of social need today. It’s a sort of desperation, maybe: finally we turn to our inner selves for answers, all else having failed.

Creating a job means you have done all the homework of self -and-other research, consciously building a livelihood from your core abilities.  It means you have approached the challenge of making a living from the perspective of compassion, as opposed to the perspective of self-protection. You  have figured out how to translate your talents into gifts.

But what are your talents, and how can they be configured as gifts? It worries me that discovering your answers may take most, if not all of your working life. But perhaps, if you start searching right now, you’ll find the answer just around the corner.

I would be honored if you’d share your story about defining right livelihood in your life. Please comment!

Personal branding – a concept generally recognized as a recent invention, product of the post-corporate world – is really an old idea, of course. What could be more ancient than the repercussions of reputation in the experience of homo sapiens? Since Cain and Abel, since Heck was a pup, what we are in the minds of others in large part determines our happiness and comfort.

Among artists, personal brand goes without saying. You can’t achieve success in the art world unless you courageously and skillfully present your brand. Eons ago, I worked in the theater quite a bit, mostly because I was fascinated by the power of human expression. I learned about the voice there and that’s the aspect of personal branding that I’ve taken as my subject here.

It repeatedly strikes me that people do not brand themselves with much awareness when they say their own names. When intoning your name, as a first-time introduction or speaking on the telephone, or in any of the other numerous instances in which you are called upon to state your name, do you do so clearly, proudly, powerfully?

So often people mumble their names. If it’s an appropriate time to utter your name aloud, believe me, your listeners would prefer to understand you and even be able to repeat what you said. You are not asked your name frivolously; the questioner really wants to know. Do you wish to be branded favorably by that questioner? Then please say your name with clarity and confidence.

What if your name is difficult to pronounce, or otherwise distinctive? Present it with full good-natured knowledge of the way it generally is received. Give explanations that are brief, kind, and appropriate. Do not take offense at the world because your name is not easy to get or remember. Help us out a little, because we want to like you.

I’ll say that again. We want to like you. Often, when I hear people say their names over the phone or in a group, I think they’re so afraid they won’t be liked that it’s impossible for them to present themselves clearly. This is wasted fear, though, because your listeners have no reason to dislike you and every reason to see you as a potential friend and ally. Not everyone, but most people will view a new acquaintance from this positive vantage point. We’re looking for friends, not enemies.

So please be aware of how you say your name to introduce yourself in every situation. Consider how you can present your Self with more generosity and genuine compassion. How can you say who you are in a way that truly complements the personal brand you hope to impart?

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.

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.

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?

Ouch. I’m wounded, and need to howl a little.

An ostensible VA, whose name I will not reveal though perhaps I ought to, took multiple posts from my blog and pasted them on her site, without permission or attribution of any kind.

This theft came to my attention when the pingbacks were emailed to me.

I experienced all the usual creepy feeling that accompanies being ripped off. The revulsion, the indignity, the pure yuckiness of knowing someone else has your stuff.

Of course, the contact information on the burglar’s site didn’t go through. I used whois to grab another email address, wrote a self-righteous cease and desist, and next morning got a reply that a mistake had been made (uh-huh) and the situation would be corrected immediately.

Which it mostly is. The pages are live, still, but not in her current navigation. I’ve asked her to remove them from her server. We’ll see.

During all this, a slowly encroaching under-thought spread in a trickle through my consciousness. After a while, it became a puddle I could no longer ignore.

The thought was: who cares? So what if this desperate person has stolen my blog posts? What is the actual consequence of her action?

I might fear that my writings will earn her respect and recognition that do not belong to her. Yet no one who actually worked with her would believe she was one and the same as the author of those posts. The contrast was sharp between her site copy and the language of the posts. By using my writings, she was only endangering her own reputation.

A brand is in the eye of the beholder, and really can’t be faked for any length of time.

So, in any practical sense, how did it hurt me that those posts were duplicated without their author box? I give them away for free on my site; it’s not like they’re for sale or anything. I write the posts as contributions to the ongoingness of business life, as a way to have a share in the conversation.

The reaction I had to being ripped off must be grounded in the lizard brain: that paranoid, primal animal brain that kept us from the dinosaur’s jaws millennia ago. It’s a stone age kind of emotion. Perhaps we can get past its reptilian fears, as we build a better society.

It’s true that I was raised to consider first and foremost the needs of the other person. So to take something that doesn’t belong to me without asking for it seems to ignore the needs of the other, who will be shocked, alarmed, hurt when the loss is discovered – n’est-ce-pas? I would certainly prefer to be credited with a legitimate author box each and every time my writing appears on someone else’s site.

Nonetheless, a breach of courtesy does not necessarily equate to a breach of law; and all my indignation and name-calling above is perhaps unjustified even if understandable. Since imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, the duplication should be a mild vote of confidence instead of an insult.

Maybe I should have just approved those pingbacks and forgot about it.

I’m really curious about your thoughts on the matter.