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!

Any virtual assistant will tell you there’s an art to developing virtual relationships.

I wish virtual meant the same thing as virtuous, but it doesn’t. Yet virtuousness can take you a long way in the virtual universe.

I wish we had a better term to apply to those activities and relationships that come about because of the internet: specifically, the relationships that are not likely to involve face-to-face encounters. All those peeps we know and love but have never seen in person – our friends, followers, fellow social media hounds, online business liaisons – those folk with whom we now co-exist, digitally speaking: they’re our virtual communities, and they each have their own virtual quirks and eloquence.

Your online communities are as full of peculiarities as any local networking group, corporate unit, or sewing circle. A key to skillful use of the internet is to constantly perceive the person behind the words, and to respond / speak to that person. No matter how imposing a facade they present, every business online is still made up of real people, and it must bend to the transparency rule or accept eventual failure. Your design may be sleek or sloppy, but really it’s you that matters, you whom we seek and with whom we become virtually acquainted.

The web may be digital, but on the other hand, it’s eminently humanist.

Being ultra sensitive to nuances and hyper-tuned to ways you can be of assistance is the skill of an online community builder. (Note: everyone using the internet for marketing purposes is an online community builder.)

• Have you ever worked with someone who needed you to complete their project, but simply never read your messages to them?
• Have you encountered the type who pushes you with deadlines but refuses to tell you what is expected?
• What about the cohort who passionately exchanges ideas with you one day, and then disappears for a week?

There are a million ways we fall short in the demands of virtual relationships, because the web is a harsh master (mistress?) Each of us must conceive the extent to which we will become involved in these relationships, and then stick to our convictions. But there’s no doubt about it: the more constant your presence, the more valuable your return will be.

However, it takes more than constancy. If you’re always there, but full of spite and venom, that won’t work either. So being there, with both passion and compassion are required.

For a virtual assistant, the process is intensified, since we forge such new virtual relationships all the time. We learn every day to listen more acutely, speak more responsibly, react more judiciously, and to be more sensitive to our client’s state of mind and being, through the tangles of cyberspace.

I’ve become more patient, and I have increasing confidence in my ability to navigate the delicate get-to-know-you process when it’s digitally-based. While I have a long way to go still, it’s good to know how warm, alive, and real-life the virtual world can be.

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.

Here’s a potentially controversial subject. Your opinion in the comments is eagerly encouraged.

To wit: A fellow said he’d reached astronomical numbers in his daily web traffic, and he was very happy about this. But he would not tell us where to find these wonderful sites he had created (there are, apparently, more than one). He would not reveal URLs because:

“- People copying my niche
-  People copying my content
-  People copying easy keyword phrases I rank for which I’ve discovered from years of gaining specialized knowledge on my niche
……  ”

I responded swiftly, and far too emotionally. This whole situation seems wrong, wrong, wrong to me. But I must not assume others feel the same way. I should look at things more objectively.

There are, after all, swarms of deluded people, spammers, cyber criminals, blackhat operators, and page sculpting creeps who are seeking to game the system however they can. The interactive web lays itself wide open to their shenanigans. And if you’ve worked hard creating content, it’s a burn when someone steals it.

And I know pride of keyword discovery can be enormous. The search engines churn along in a ineffable cloud of unknowing, one that every would-be superhero wants to pierce. Success with keywords can be directly translatable into big cash and big renown.

Especially if your methods can be easily replicated, you probably suspect from the get-go that anyone could do what you’re doing. You know your ideas will probably be stolen. And once it is out of your hands, your system will go to work for the thief, returning the same benefits to the criminal as to you. The bad guy’s easy ride enrages you.

What you’re overlooking, though, is your audience’s intelligence. A person who launches online businesses based in such easily-replicated system-gaming techniques is loudly demonstrating their lack of respect for the individual souls who make up their market. They are happily making lotsa bucks from faceless masses. They’re using an industrial/corporate model; one in which sensitivity to the individual customer makes no sense.

The internet model, though, does an about face (pun sort of intended). Its technology and venues allow building your client base with utmost individual attention. Specific targeting is easy. Connect with a few key people and watch your network bloom. End up with a tailor-made, ready-and-willing opt-in list who will remain loyal for a long time.

When you build a list with care and passion, you bond with your market for the duration. When you game the system, you rent your market, short term.

It’s as if you invented and then tried to hold the patent on dancing the rumba. All of a sudden, there are a zillion rumba teachers, making money off your invention.

The smart rumba inventor is thrilled to death that the invention has received such popular approval, and encourages teachers and students of the dance form wherever they may appear. The deluded rumba inventor is offended, and wants to keep the rumba for himself only.

I’ve tried to look at all this sympathetically, understanding the stresses and strains that many an internet marketer will undergo. But in the end, I’ve failed to produce a conclusion any different from my original gut reaction.

Building an internet basis for business that’s founded in manipulative structures and techniques is going to be problematic.

Building an internet basis for business that’s founded in sincerely helping people is going to be sustainably successful.

Anonymity is a bore and frustration online. We want to know and do business with real people. We want to trust you, but we won’t do so unless you provide good reason. And without our trust, you are faceless. But worse, you can be replicated.

Do you want to establish a business that’s respected for being helpful, that has a steady and reliable clientèle, that will thrive despite the creeps who would rip you off? The only way to do that is through being true to yourself while deeply respecting your public. Then you need not bury your treasures for fear of losing them; instead, you trust and create and share, finding your riches in the largesses of these three.

Such a long post! Yet there’s more to say. You say it for me, in the comments …

There are many reasons why branding is an aspect of business that no one can ignore. One of the coolest reasons is that by considering our brand, we anchor our work in sustainable ways that are rooted in authenticity.

The importance of branding increases as we journey deeper into cyber space because it’s through branding that we are able to capitalize on the tools the internet offers. Without our avatar, our “About page,” our profiles, and bios we are nothing on the social networks. These articulations of brand are what constitute our identities.

Of course, these identities can be faked, and there are as well many users who hide the person behind a company name or other mask. An online profile is not automatically good branding.

On or offline, a brand can be deceptive. So how do you know when one is trustworthy? Perhaps more to the point, as a business owner, how can you tell your community that your brand is to be trusted?

You can learn to discern the difference between hype and authenticity in branding by sincerely working on your own process of branding. Once you’ve been through the process, you’ll be able to recognize the phonies right away. How? By their predictability. Pretend-brands are predictable; real ones catch you off-guard, amazing you in some way (Seth Godin’s Purple Cow), sounding in your soul like a summons.

When working on your own branding, you have to constantly remember that brand is reputation, and therefore ultimately out of your control. You work to shape it in the same way we plan and grow a garden, hoping it will turn out as envisioned.  We seek to affect, but don’t expect to dominate the end result.

And then, your process of discovery as you ferret out the nature of your brand must be couched in your most honest efforts, or it will lack the gut-wrenching value that makes all the difference.  Any modicum of inauthenticity in your seeking will spoil the whole crop. Look for the truth that is, the YOU that is, your particular gifts and skills that help the world go ’round.

Branding is so important because it’s a process that forces us to be brutally honest, matching up our insides and outsides to create something that helps other people. It’s a requirement of adult participation in society that demands that we increase our self-knowledge and become transparent to our communities.  It’s part of our evolution as we adapt to the cyber/global age.

Could you use a few ideas to jump start your branding inquiries? I invite you to read my mini-eBook, Discovering Your Brand.

Lately, I’ve been noticing many articles about unemployed people giving up on job hunting and deciding to start their own business.

Now, I certainly have experienced the humiliation and discouragement that often accompany job searches. Been there more often than I like to admit. Can’t blame anyone for giving up and inventing a new approach.

Actually, since I believe we should live first and make money second, I celebrate, applaud, and praise to the skies any effort to realize (make real) the most direct manifestation of your own personal gifts. Everyone should make a living by the strength of their best native capabilities.

There’s that one hitch, though. That one thing that no one can circumvent. If you’re going to start your own business, you have to learn how to do business, and then you have to do it. I am hoping that people who feel driven to self-employment understand what’s involved.

Make no mistake, doing business is a very different thing from being an employee (or an academic). You may have a product or skill, but you need business skills and capital as well or your endeavor will fizzle.

You trade the servitude of employment for slavery to business demands. If you don’t thirst for that kind of obsession, owning a business may not be for you.

Business is something it’s best to be passionate about. Someone in my networking meeting today said, “I’m all about marketing,” as if he was a car covered with stickers hawking widgets. When you’re in business, you’ll encounter many peeps who are born to the trade (as it were!). People with market savvy in their genes.

But another person in my networking group told his story of having a lifelong dream that now, in his retirement years, is at last manifesting. A traditional job took him for many decades in another direction, but his dream never entirely faded. Now, his return to authenticity makes his current enterprise eminently attractive to customers. So this fellow’s not only experienced in business, he’s operating from the heart. That’s the optimal combo.

(Perhaps ideally, we’d all be working in the best expression of our native skills from the start. We’d focus on identifying our dreams, and then assimilate the necessary business acumen to see them through.  Unfortunately, it usually works the other way around, if it works at all. People spend years just doing business, and only later on turn to focus on their dreams. To me, this is backwards.)

So what if circumstances have left you jobless, the search for employment has been fruitless, and you’re at your wits’ end, but you have no experience as a business owner? Learn, learn, and learn more through reading, networking, going to conferences, and any other opportunities you come across. Team up with others who do have business skills. And most of all, be patient with yourself. You can learn this stuff; it’s not rocket science, but it’s also not assimilated in a day.

Do what you love, respect and learn the processes and morés of commerce, and your new enterprise will surely prosper.

An inexpensive way to be supported in your new business is to work with a virtual assistant. Please contact me for a free consultation about the ways a VA can help maximize your business assets and boost your productivity.

(Image by rachaelvoorhees via Flickr)