Virtual Assistance and You

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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 helpful visual

Created by Online Education

What was that recent commercial that showed a bimbo groupie saying, “I dunno what it is, but I want it”?  I thought it was an especially funny image, a parody of hype and at the same time encouraging that kind of fan-atic behavior.

Makes me wonder: how much does business depend on hype and how much does it rely on authenticity?

The measurement varies for every enterprise, I suppose. How about your biz? Do you build hype or trust?

What makes hype so pervasive?

How does authenticity become trust?

Is it better to build thrilling suspense or to cultivate security? Does it serve small business purposes to approach markets as if they’re looking for entertainment?  Or are mundane, concrete  solutions for practical everyday living more profitable these days?

Should you latch onto the glitzy affiliate program, selling flashy products from your internet heroes? Or should you carry on the campaign to get your personal brand established, slowly building your own highly select audience, one by one?

I’m a relationship-oriented type, so the slow build is my obvious preference. But honestly, I can’t say which approach is better in terms of making money for you.  Small business marketing is rather like college athletics: mysteriously unpredictable.

For some, the extravaganza is the natural modus operandi; for others, the routine is the only trustworthy way.

Some can produce spectacle upon spectacle, dazzling their public with unflagging celebrations. At higher corporate levels, this is the only way to survive. Others of us in day-to-day commerce feel most productive when establishing solid personal connections that are well positioned to strengthen over time. We like customers that directly dialog with us; we seek clients of a well-defined ilk who will stay with us over the long run.

As much as the gurus would have us believe that authenticity reigns in social media, it’s easy to fake it, and to present hype that avoids all contact with deep inner truth. Sincerely revealing your ‘nekkid’ self in social networks takes precise skill and awareness. Not all of us are up to meeting the necessary standards of authenticity every day.

I think  we have to keep trying, though. I think this is the core value of the internet. It’s a tool that can guide us to a new kind of self-awareness – a self-awareness that actually sells.

How does this contrast strike you? How do you orient your communications – to be entertaining, or to solicit a response from the receivers? Does one or the other of these approaches get a better return on your investment?

The rain pours coldly and my email has stopped churning on this Friday afternoon. Time for a little writing lesson!

Seriously, I have no wish to hurt anyone’s feelings, but sometimes the writing I encounter online just begs for help. For the most part, I don’t care for technical discussions on this blog: my obsession is more with philosophies than factoids. So writing about writing doesn’t happen a lot here. Nor are my giveaways centered on how-to-do-proper-grammar-and-spelling sorts of themes.

But given the gothic murkiness of the afternoon, I’m taking on the voice of doom for this post.  The voice of unbending fate, all-powerful rule, stern and unmoving thus speaketh:

People, please know that the extent to which you proofread your writings and have a care for the sense you’re making to the reader, is closely relative to your overall success.

Can you see the problems in each of these examples I collected over the past few months online?

making ends meat

it feel’s like I am not getting anywhere

This is excatly what I was looking for!!

potentially harm a companies’ reputation

roll play and go through your presentation

many scenario’s play out in my mind

if your having an uneasy feeling

your a business owner like himself

A Marketing Director that is in tune with social media is a dime in a dozen!

To me that is a bid contradictory. A bid hard to explain in one post, but I’ll try

I am excited about implementing this into my marketing collateral for the biz

As a director we evaluate all types of solutions

the one constant variable in my life is my goal to reach every star I set my eyes upon

A spunky sole

low and behold

instating process improvement

Twitter has to bare some of the fault

I payed for it in the long run

if your tired

on the roles of the unemployed

Each customer or audience will always have an impression on your business. This perception maybe positive or negative. Their impressions or experiences with your brand will always be recalled when they do their groceries, or on a purchasing decision.

Investment means you are constantly reinventing how to keep readers to your blog, spicen up your profile pages, creating new meaning content, building your brand, and re-designing your blog.

Even as virtual assistants, face-to-face networking can play a key role in growing our businesses.

we are defiantly interested

Now, the spelling of your and you’re may be a matter of the trickiness of the English language. But all the other problems would have been fixed by a careful proofread.

Why is excellence in writing important? Simple. Because when you write, you are attempting to influence the reader in one way or another. If your writing is imprecise, your message gets muddled and loses power. You need every shred of available power to make a success of yourself in the world. And writing is a big part of your ability to hone and maximize your power.

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.