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.

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?

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.

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.

Image by Gale-Franey via Flickr

I came across a good article this week at Advertising Age: Stuart Parkin comments on the phenomenon that involves the lack of personal branding amongst marketing executives – who nonetheless insist on it for their clients.

The fact that marketing gurus hypocritically preach branding without practicing it makes us question its very worth. It would be a lot easier to continue in our accustomed anonymity, and not bother with laying a claim to a specific brand. Do we really have to take this stuff seriously, spending time thinking about values and all that? What difference does a brand really make?

Maybe we think we will enjoy a broader appeal if we don’t characterize ourselves too finely. But one of the coolest things about the internet and our global society is that you can be as eccentric as you wish, as long as you’re consistent about it. People love personality in all its quirkiness. Show that you are willing to consistently participate and be truly helpful, and your personal brand can be whatever flavor you choose.

However much we may wish otherwise, reputation is and always has been at the heart of business success. Small-minded, cheap, untrustworthy people may sustain an income, but they never experience success. There’s a big difference between sustaining an income and living a fulfilled life.

How you are perceived by other people makes all the difference to your business accomplishments. What do you do to paint an attractive image of your business in the mind of your market? Or, from the individual’s point of view – whether a solopreneur or an employee – the question may become, what do you do to paint an appealing image of yourself in the minds of people on your radar?

The challenge is to present and share yourself fairly and frankly with the world, or at least with your world. It may be relevant at this juncture to refer to Tiger Woods’ unfortunate dilemma in the current press. His insistence on closely guarded privacy could not protect him in the long run. Our tools, and our culture, now demand that we each own – and own up to – the business that is our Selves. Since ownership includes accountability, personal transparency is critical. To be caught with a brand that lies is a major offense in our culture.

Branding is the work of thoroughly becoming yourself while being authentically compassionate towards those around you. It’s taking responsibility for your reputation, and steering it with purpose towards the best you can be. Branding is articulating the value of  You to Other People.

In any service industry, for example in the virtual assistance industry, branding takes on even greater importance. More than people who sell only products, a service provider is selling their brand. You’ll have better luck selling ball point pens or Cadillacs, for instance, if you have an appealing personal brand. But you’ll have no luck at all offering a service like virtual assistance if your brand is unattractive or untrustworthy.

While reputation has always been a factor in adult life, the idea of branding is relatively new, at least on a widespread basis. We’ve not been schooled to develop personal brands, so we hardly know where to begin. If I may make a humble suggestion, you can start by realizing that every post, comment, picture, video, email, newsletter, and other tool you use online in your daily work is a place where your brand is shared. Every single communication you make manifests your brand. You probably want to be sure it reflects your value without compromise.