Virtual Assistance and You

We editors are a cranky bunch, always hacking away at misspellings and grammatical errors. Our rules, I’m sure, seem arcane to many.

As I’ve often pointed out, excellent written English is so far from the norm online that proper use of the language would seem to have lost all value amongst us.

There’s a core problem with ignoring good language, though: when ‘anything goes’ in language, communication is compromised. We could go so far as to say, the more tightly disciplined the language, the more powerful the communication. So when you start accepting any number of variations on the rules, you must also accept that you will not communicate as well.

Imagine saying something to another person and you really really care that the other person hears and understands. Do you speak differently than when you are not so intent on communicating something?

When representing your business in public, for marketing or any other reason, how much do you care that your audience (those who ‘audit,’ who hear) really gets your message the exact way you intend it? If you care much at all, then use of language is your central concern.

Communicating well is far different from merely spelling correctly or using complete sentences. It’s so much more than your spell-or-grammar-checker can catch that it belongs in another world entirely. The nitty gritty rules of writing are foundational, to be sure. But communicating well is where the pedal hits the metal.

Please consider these samples. Though well-meaning, each of these misses the mark the writer intended, and ends up instead conveying only a lack of careful proofreading or, it must be admitted, a lack of intelligence.

“With a Methodist mother and a Southern Baptist father, Clinton’s fiancé, who is Jewish, will invite another religious perspective into the family.”
What’s wrong: Clinton’s fiancé (subject of the sentence) is Jewish; it is Clinton who has the Methodist mother and Southern Baptist father.
Said properly: Clinton has a Methodist mother and a Southern Baptist father.  Her fiancé, who is Jewish, will invite another religious perspective into the family.

” … looking to ameliorate my skills and further my experience in the financial domain.”
What’s wrong: it would be very bad for you if you ameliorated your skills. Best to be sure you can state the definition of a big word before you use it – especially in any branding statement!
Better way to say it: “… looking to build my skills and experience in the financial domain.”

“I love Chocolate and it was just like , no better than most!”
What’s wrong: Was it really no better than most?
Better way to say it: “I love chocolate and it was like – no, better than most!”

” … he attributes Kurlan & Associates as a large part of his success.”
What’s wrong: ‘Attributes … as’ doesn’t make sense.
Better way to say it: ” … he attributes a large part of his success to Kurlan & Associates.”

“I’m in the business of helping independent professionals maximize their billable hours by handling their administrative support needs.”
What’s wrong: I hope you can see that though we might infer the meaning here, the language tries hard to obscure it.
A better way to say it: “I handle administrative support needs for independent professionals so they can maximize their billable hours.”

Note that in each of these cases, the best use is that which serves the reader’s understanding with most power and precision – and often the most simplicity.

Writing should be used to communicate, if you’re going to publish it. Do it with your reader firmly in mind. Serve his/her interests and nothing else. Create and polish your messages like love letters, because if you are selling anything, that’s what they have to be.

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.

While I mainly emphasize my work in inbound marketing these days, I also offer writing services; and in that light, this post focuses on business writing. Copy writing. The choice and configuration of words on the page that convey your business’ meaning.

Like a bus driver on holiday, I’m hyper-aware of the writing I wade through every day online. I can’t help but notice the rarity of decent business writing, and  the still more rare existence of excellent business writing.

I read a post yesterday that emphasized improving your writing skills. The best part of the post was its title (as is often the case, have you noticed?).  ”Copywriting with a Bite to Hold Your Reader’s Attention.” Just the use of that word, Bite, made the whole thing worthwhile.

So of course, I thrilled to read Jason Fried’s take on the subject in a post published more than a month ago; a post that’s still collecting comments. Fried says,

“In nearly all cases, a company makes its first impression on would-be customers or partners with words — whether they’re on a website, in sales materials, or in e-mails or letters. A snappy design might catch their attention, but it’s the words that make the real connection. Your company’s story, product descriptions, history, personality — these are the things that go to battle for you every day. Your words are your frontline. Are they strong enough?”

Fried, founder of 37signals, nails it brilliantly when he later adds, “Remember: It’s not about telling a story. It’s about telling a true story well.”

Telling a true story. Not necessarily a factual story; just one that pierces the heart of your meaning. That is as close as possible to the truth you want your market to receive.

And telling it well, because a true story is a terrible thing to waste by telling it badly.

So to do your business copy writing really well, you have to chew and swallow two big chunks. The first is soul food: the intimate vision and understanding of your meaning in mundane as well as mythic proportions. The second is epicurean: the application of science and precision that will best convey that deep soul meaning, considering all the variables.

Nike’s tough-it-out, persist to the goal, indomitable athlete videos paired with “Just Do It” is a concise example. More complex is Fried’s exhibit from Saddleback Leather:

“All of our products are fully warranted against all defects in materials and workmanship for 100 years. If you or one of your descendants should have a problem, send it back to me or one of my descendants and we’ll repair or replace it for free or we’ll give you a credit on the website (be sure to mention the warranty in your will).”

- which I find hilarious. It’s hyperbole, of course, but that very exaggeration makes the company’s dedication to their warranty somehow more believable than the norm. The meaning they want to convey comes through with aplomb, and this is all that’s important.

What is the really true story that you want to tell in your business? And how can you improve your telling of it?

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.

Been having fun with the comments and all the uproar over at Chris Brogan’s blog, centered on the value of logo design. Precipitated by Brogan’s decision to work with 99Designs.com, a sort of designer sweatshop where graphic artists work for free until someone actually chooses their design, the discussion is all about the worth of things artful.

The Nike swoop, for example. When you understand the value that simple mark contains, the controversy is clear. Who can state unequivocally its worth?

A business doesn’t pay for the work it took to produce a logo; it pays for the years of practice it took the logo creator to be accepted as an artist. Just like we don’t pay for the sweat and muscle of a doctor or lawyer, but for their accumulated worth, their years of experience.

Funny thing, though. Every business needs a logo because every business must market itself and be quickly recognizable in the morass of commercial messages. So logos are a vestige of art that is firmly wedged into the fabric of practical concerns. And as Brogan’s post shows, we are extremely confused about how to live with it.

A solution such as that offered by 99Designs is brilliant on many levels. Nonetheless, it offends the professional designers who have worked so hard to achieve the recognition of decent pay for their labors. Art and expediency are mutually exclusive, as a rule.

To rail against the cheap alternative is a waste of breath, though. Whims of the market are no concern of the artist’s. The worth of artwork is entirely in the eye of the beholder; but that’s the case with the value we place on anything. In business, it’s always a question of what the market will pay, what the traffic will bear.

One commenter on Brogan’s blog made the comparison with job sites where writing is offered for a pittance, remarking that writers deal with this same cheapening of their skill that the logo designers deplore. But again, the purchaser sets the standard. As a writer, I don’t feel threatened by the $3 per article third world writers. I know there are enough discriminating buyers who prefer my brand of quality over the cheap imitation.

Perhaps your service or products will be rendered obsolete because the market for your excellence disappears. But when it comes to corporate logos and professional writing, there are still plenty of discerning customers. Will the lowest common denominator eventually prevail? My guess is no, simply because of our basic ambitious nature. Amongst the human race, there will always be those who seek distinction through excellence.

In any article providing tips on how to be successful with a blog, you’re likely to see List Posts figuring prominently. Want a bunch of viewers, want to spike those stats? Do a List Post.

It hardly matters what your subject is. You can have equal success with 5 Ways to Use a Screwdriver as with 17 Principles of Advanced Aero-engineering.

You may be a serious blogger, examining issues of global concern complete with scholarly research and heartful connections to the Dalai Lama and thousands of followers, but your “11 Tips for Using Toilets in India” is still your most popular post.

If you’re the blogger, don’t despair. There’s nothing wrong with your intelligence or sensibilities. It’s the reader who’s warping the reality here.

Because, as surely any keen observer will admit, we have no time for reading these days. Or, to be more exact, we read in an entirely different way than we have in the past.

We look for keywords, we think in outlines. We fill in the details later.

I can say this, because I do it myself. A long, involved post or web page has lost me before I start reading. For me, even the best writers/thinkers/companies/institutions merit no more than a bookmark on long posts.

The bytes into which my day is divided just don’t allow for lengthy sessions of pure reading. If your post is more than 700 words, it will definitely be banished to a file. I say banished because, once housed there, it’s about 87% likely to remain unread.

When online, I skim the keywords and links; I can tell from these and the title, the ‘look,’ the style, and the attitude whether or not I want the details.

This means that the writing must be delivered in the same size bytes as I am ready to consume. If it’s not candied and ready-to-swallow; if there are long paragraphs of undistinguished prose; if the syntax doesn’t bother to enthrall me – then honestly, I can’t afford the time.

On the web, if you can’t tell me in 5 seconds, you can’t tell me.

Your content should also contain as much raw personality (i.e., drama) as daily in-person life and dialog may normally involve. It must evoke my respect and deference as if it were a flesh-and-blood person in the room with me. If not, why should it command my attention at all?

Writing online is not writing in any traditional sense; it’s speaking, tagging, and categorizing. It’s sculpting

• a motivating title,
• easily scanned text,
• lots of formatting and graphics,
• and brilliant labeling

into an instantly compelling (while informative) whole.

The written word is no longer a flat object: it has taken on a third dimension. To maximize visibility online, writing has be a living, squirming, wriggling thing; a tuned-in dialectic surfing the convo.

Today, I’m going to return to my foundation in copywriting as the focus of this post. For the most part these days, I work on and talk about inbound marketing. But despite my infatuation with how the internet works, old fashioned written communication remains my most true love.

There are two reasons I’m choosing this theme today. For one, I worked a long while yesterday on some editing and rewriting and was again reminded how much I love doing it. Some may consider it torture, but I love seeking the perfect word and rhetoric. For me, this is work that is fun.

The second and much more important reason to re-visit copywriting is the sad state of so many blogs and websites I visit, so many emails I receive. These are major vehicles for communicating the offerings of their respective enterprises, and yet the lack of decent written communication serves to obliterate the messages. Note, I’m looking for decent writing; not necessarily expert or brilliant writing. Just communication that accomplishes – however humbly – what it sets out to do.

Copywriting commands marginal respect, as is clear from any sampling of websites. Seems businesses consider it to be a luxury, something they can do without.

I’m not going to cite specific examples, because I’m not out to embarrass anyone. But if your readers have to go over your sentences multiple times to figure out what you mean, you’ve lost them before they even get a whiff of your offer. A misplaced or missing comma can totally confuse your reasoning. A there when it should be their, or a your when you really mean you’re can require careful dissection before the reader gets your point.

And we have neither time nor patience for such painstaking reading. There are enough choices: we simply move on.

Good writing is an invisible thing: we skip right over it and plunge into the soul of the message. Isn’t that what you want your readers to do?

Since the English language is so pervasive, those whose native tongue is something else are especially challenged in these internet times. So many wish to communicate with and sell to English-speakers; and though they may evidence great intelligence and creativity, if we have a hard time reading their thoughts, we’re off somewhere else at one click. And thus it is that potentially great resources, exchanges, and collaborations can be eclipsed, summarily pre-empted by poor communications. It’s a shame!

In the end, valuing good copywriting and other forms of written communication is a matter of respect for your reader. Especially in online marketing strategies, in which providing useful content is paramount, a key part of making content useful is ensuring that it’s easily consumable.

Communication is an exchange between people. You probably want your exchanges with others to be fair, clear, profitable on both sides. When your web presence is characterized by poor writing, you are not fully respecting the people who visit you there.

It seems a little thing, and it is! Especially when you take care to attend to it. When you neglect good copywriting, your business and brand eventually suffer. Eventually, that ‘little thing’ becomes an insurmountable barrier. But if you tend to the excellence of your copy, if you learn how to make the writing invisible, you’ll immediately find yourself at a new, higher level of opportunity and profits.

And if you think you might benefit from the services of an editor or ghost writer, please contact me right away.

“(A) weird thing about human psychology that you just need to accept for what it is and not complain that you wish it were different, is that people are motivated more by avoiding loss than by gaining benefit.”

I heard Brian Clark of Copyblogger say that.  It seems such a simple, stupid truth; something all grownup people have to swallow. No sense pretending we’re essentially noble as a species. Our reflexes are defensive, not compassionate, not productive.

So. Get over it. If you are in the business of persuasion of any sort, your tactics must center on your target’s fears, not on their hopes.

This is why social services are usually non-profits; they don’t sell protection, the way for-profit businesses do. Good Samaritan kinds of concerns are the opposite of protection. They expose you to risks and dangers.

Any enterprise that seeks to earn a profit must minister to some commonly-held fear.  As VAs, for instance, we must say we ensure that you won’t drown in a sea of overwork. Or we help present your brand so you will be seen in the best light, avoiding embarrassment and mistakes. Or we make your travel plans so you won’t agonize over the confusing schedules for hours.

We help to keep your fear at bay.

It would be more pleasant if we could say that as VAs we help make you successful; or we give you extra time in your day; or we make social media marketing a breeze. I have a whole string of such hopeful messages revolving on one page of this very site.

But that is going to change now. Time to stop wishing things were different. Time to get real and start selling to the gut. The pretty pictures I’ve been painting may satisfy some aesthetic; but it’s actually stark, repugnant need that’s called for, the dark mementos of terror.

Maybe I don’t have to feel slimy about it. Assuaging fear is a good thing to do. And business can be a building block for future altruisms. So, as they correctly claim, it’s all good.

A friend of mine says, “Communication, at best, sucks.”  Not a heartening statement. My friend is lovable, among other reasons, because he’s brutally honest. He’s right; communication – if we mean by that recordable interchange between people – is pathetically hit or miss 99% of the time.

But that’s the negative way to look at the phenomenon. More positively, we can say that human communications are complex, nuanced, loaded with meaning.

This has been true since the dawn of civilization, since the first spark of humanity glimmered. Yet now, in our own little lifetime, the suckiness complexity of communications has taken on even greater  sophistication. However else you might classify 21st century experience so far, there’s no denying that the leap from telephones and tv to the individual’s current ability to share anything and everything with the world at large on the web has been lightning fast and and inconceivably enormous.

All of a sudden, the potential for communications to mess us up increased exponentially. Out of nowhere, our risk of drowning in mis-understandings, mis-nomers, mis-spellings, mis-uses, and mis-communications of every stripe mushroomed out of control.

Before the internet, we were going along fine, increasingly independent of the written word. We had the phone, no need to write letters. Not much need to write at all, and with the 20th century love of science came a distaste for letters in favor of images (television) and the cold hard facts. (Indeed, the computer makes raw data accuracy almost infallible while the social web hugely increases the fallibility of inter-personal communications.)

But the millennium rolled over and this new challenge, this electronic miracle of the web is bringing us back to the dangers inherent in communications, whether written or delivered via another medium. How often have you keyed in to a webinar or teleseminar in which the speaker’s lack of organization belies her brilliance? Or ones in which the speaker’s so involved in the technicalities of the call that you get about 30 seconds of take-away out of an hour-long call?

It’s ironic that we now have mechanisms for communicating with unprecedented ease, but we lack the subtle skill with communications that would give these exchanges their full weight. Speech and writing (at least in America) are both degenerate shadows of their former selves. Compare the eloquence – both spoken and written – of 1910 to that of 2010, and you will blush.

It’s not much discussed, this plethora of bad writing, bad speaking, bad selling on the internet. We don’t point out one another’s mistakes, for fear of causing hurt. If anyone can suggest ways I can gently tell fellow bloggers that they need an editor, I’ll be eternally grateful. But nobody wants to wait for an edit; the web is just casual enough to make such things seem unnecessary.

But what is our alternative? We create the miracle of  the internet, and then we’re stuck using old tools in the new environment. Like when you move to a new house and your old furniture feels shabby in it.

Bad writing, unorganized teaching, offensive selling: these failures in communications are rampant on the web, which is to be expected from a medium that is all-inclusive and global. Still, I yearn for more attention to this elephant in our collective room. Can’t we set higher standards, celebrate more loudly the best examples of great communications (there are a few of these), broadcast the efficacy of proofreading and planning?

By the way, the descriptive, ‘sucks,’ is one I almost never use. Except today, in this post. It’s way too suggestive for everyday application, IMO. I sure hope we can evolve to a better understanding of communications: what it is to express and what it is to listen. I hope my grandson and friends will be able to say, “Communication, at best, syncs.”

Image by ahisgett via Flickr.

As a VA, I’ve been working by the hour for most contracts. I’ve been offering services. But lately the effectiveness of selling products has been hard to ignore.

Yesterday, I was privileged to participate in a teleseminar given by Allison Nazarian. Exceedingly well-organized and articulate, Allison made many valuable points during the call, which was focused on improving business practices amongst copywriters.

One of the several aspects of the call that impressed me was Allison’s willingness to state her strong opinions, with total respect for others, but without apology. So many over-polite presenters tell you all about the options, but offer no actual guidance. Another cool thing about strong opinions is that they make sharing opinions something that’s okay to do. Peeps may disagree with you, but if you don’t share your beliefs, how can anyone benefit by them?

That said, I’m devoting this post to an examination of one of Allison’s opinions, because it’s an issue I’ve been pondering for my business as well. Most of my work centers on writing and editing or on social media marketing. So the question here is, am I selling products or services?

You may wonder what difference it makes. Often, the distinction is obvious. If you provide widgets, you sell a product; if you drive a taxi cab, you sell a service. But for such people as virtual assistants and copywriters, the definition blurs.

Take a look at this recent article from Dean Rieck, evangelizing the service term. The author goes so far as to say that telling people you provide a product, if you’re copywriting for them, makes you more like an employee than a contractor. I wonder if he would make the same suggestion to virtual assistants.

But a few days ago, I read an article by C.J.Hayden in which she made the opposite claim, saying that packaging your services as products will boost your sales and credibility enormously. (I’d give you the link, but after 30 minutes of searching for it, I’ve given up.) Allison Nazarian, in the call yesterday, shared Hayden’s viewpoint.

It’s difficult to sell your work by the hour, since that’s asking the client to take a risk, betting that you’ll deliver as you promise. Customers can kick the tires of your widgets before they buy, but services – by definition – don’t exist at all until they’re paid for, or at least under contract.

You can package your widget as a service providing happiness:  you don’t sell a bed, for instance, you sell a good night’s sleep.  On the other side, you can package your service as a product providing tangible returns:  for example, you don’t sell virtual assistant services by the hour, you sell newsletter production or reports from competitive market research as products for flat fees.

Lawyers charge by the hour; doctors charge by the operation. Artists get paid for their products; consultants get paid for their time. Hmmmm …. Does this issue tangle up your brain the way it does mine?

I’ve lately caved, and structured a few of my offerings as products on my websites. A hefty chunk of my work remains in the service category, however, for now. I’m really curious: whether VA or other business person, do you sell products or services? Have you thought about the distinction, and the difference it could make to your sales? Please comment!