Virtual Assistance and You

Categorizing and marketing

When it comes to your relationships, your clients, your colleagues, contacts, and suppliers, it’s tempting to categorize them and set up automated systems based on assumptions or aggregate descriptives about them.

The possibility of categorizing – i.e., labeling groups of people with certain shared characteristics – has triggered the past century or so in advertising. Some Henry Ford idea of standardization has blinded us to anything else but a mechanized version of human life.

But people are not essentially mechanistic. Our differences are both subtle and enormous.

Do you judge rather than serve?

Are you positively paralyzed by the fracas over the “Ground Zero” Muslim community center? Could we possibly be more splintered, more divided than we are over this issue? (The whole thing makes me sad.)

I realize I have a palpable fear of certain political viewpoints. I am actually afraid of those who espouse certain affiliations. I feel threatened by them.

These realizations cause me to re-assess. To have such extreme responses bodes no good. I am believing in my categories instead of perceiving the individuality of every moment, person, and situation.

Do you agree that there is a difference here?

You can hold to the hard line, insisting that everything can be categorized; or you can open to the reality that there is no categorization, that every instance is unique.

The tools for service

It is, of course, a lot easier to sort things into boxes and deal with them in bulk. But real life, nature, and the environment around us all suggest that it’s a lot more complicated than that. Especially when it comes to other people, shortcuts created by generalizing are costly if not completely destructive.

So thank goodness for social media, giving us the means by which to address our ‘public’ one by one. The technology has an uncanny way of expressing solutions to needs we hardly knew we had! But our need to serve rather than judge surely preceded the internet’s explosion.

That thing you do …

The old ‘billboard’ outbound marketing had to die. People do not want to be categorized, so any system that perpetrates categorization is doomed from the start. People want to be seen in their individuality, and it is the extent to which you can convince them you see them accordingly that you win their trust, and patronage.

Applying this maxim to the continual search for my ideal client, it becomes clear that there’s no final definition of that elusive personality. The person who resonates best with me may actually fit a multitude of ‘profile’ types. I can no more hope to predict the type than I can resolve the “Ground Zero Mosque” question.

Ultimately, que sera, sera, right? If I be what I be, you be what you be, and we meet through the internet or anywhere, then you are my ideal client. At least until proven otherwise.

It’s interesting that the internet is rising to such ascendancy during one of the worst times, economically speaking, that the world has seen. While we are struggling with everyday survival, the internet is taking us to unprecedented heights of thought and societal awareness.

Whether one is the result of the other, I don’t know and won’t attempt to explore here. But because the juxtaposition is so startling, it demands notice. Somehow, the technologies, practices, and cultures of the web are involved in our happy future. The omnipotent and largely free internet suggests possibilities for not only coping but succeeding in major ways despite our material and ecological woes.

But there’s no denying that establishing a strong presence online is an acquired skill, gained through patience and humble learning. The norms of the ‘net aren’t easy to describe to the uninitiated. How often, when discussing social media, have you heard someone sneer, “Reading what kind of sandwich you had for lunch is not interesting to me. What a waste of time!”

Yet, online branding being the multi-faceted dragon that it is, your lunchtime ham on rye can actually be a not-insignificant part of it.  That is,  internet protocols are a new mixture of work and play; and mastering the mix makes artists of us all.

As he so often does, Mitch Joel nails it.

From gossip and soap operas to professional wrestling and reality television, we love following and burrowing ourselves in the lives of others. So, why is it any shock that Facebook has over 500 million accounts?

(You’ll really enjoy Mitch’s post. Go ahead and check it out. I’ll wait.)

Mitch points out that the internet plays well to our natural propensity for being seen. We have a natural need to be recognized by others, and online participation allows that in a big way. Of course, if I’m to be seen, I must also see others; and it’s been observed that success online is proportional to your genuine interest in others. So the 80/20 rules applies here as in so many other places: 80% listening, 20% talking.

Amazingly, the internet takes us back, in a way, more than forward. It demands old-fashioned manners, and it judges a business more by its reputation than by its looks. Its terrain feels like a frontier, and its laws have yet to be created. It seems like an adolescent: lithe, pimply, emotional, self-righteous, hopeful, and ripe with all the glories of young adulthood.

But whatever else it may be, the web lets us share in enormous amounts compared to just 20 years ago. That’s what’s really new about it. And when we share this way, our ideas about work and play and  mission and branding and purpose are profoundly affected. Your ham-on-rye-ness may or may not be attractive to my grilled cheese-ness. Keeping this data in proper perspective and order is the challenge: but it’s data we need (even crave!) and use nonetheless.

If you’re still waffling, not wanting to tackle the internet’s challenges, consider how it is bringing us closer to our true selves. Why deny yourself, or your business, such a pleasurable profit?

I wonder how many web content producers are old enough to remember personally the experience that was the Grateful Dead. Now that David Meerman Scott and Brian Halligan (I’m not sure they can count themselves amongst the elders – ?) have exhumed the Dead’s philosophy in their soon to be published Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, perhaps we can all begin to appreciate the legacy of the 60s/70s as productive in many ways.

After all, half a century later, we are realizing the marketing brilliance of those musical prophets. We have even developed technology to facilitate their ideas. Though we may have thought that the internet itself forces change, perhaps it’s more true that soul and society have changed, and the internet was created in response to those transformations.

It’s evidence of his superior intelligence that 26-year-old Dan Schawbel celebrates the coming launch of the Scott-Halligan book on his Personal Branding Blog, providing an excerpt for his audience.

The given chapter celebrates the Dead’s love for their work.

“We are taught as children that work and play are opposing forces in nature. This teaching is incorrect—it is possible that your work can be like play! In fact, if you do what you love the way the Grateful did, you’ll never ‘work’ a day in your life.”

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re undergoing an enormous re-calibration of work, all over the world. All facets of employment and career are being renovated, morphing because of pressures from the economy, society, and acts of God and mammon. Mine is the first generation in a very long time to believe that life should be personally fulfilling, and work should be more than drudgery.

The Dead shocked us with their simple being-ness, no excuses, no pretending. They gathered their following through happy sharing. A micro-economy still revolves around their heirs, descendant bands, and ever-living fans.

The most famous Dead takeaway for marketing:  let your customers sell for you.

The Dead invited fans to record their concerts, rather than fight costly battles over copyright. This meant that their fans were the record producers, and thus they were the marketing department as well.

I don’t know if this was sheer prescience on someone’s part; maybe Gerry Garcia thought it up. But it’s certainly likely that the Dead’s tactics were a result of their conviction that going with the flow is the right way to live. When you run into brick walls, go around them. The Dead, in an ironic sense, gave us a new way to live. Heroism transformed, through their culture, from monster bashing machismo to loving peacemaker.

So now we’re experimenting with inbound marketing, because

• the establishment of relationships is clearly so much more profitable than yelling at crowds;
• erring on the side of generosity brings our customers closer to us and gives them the tools to become our advocates;
• giving equal value to work and play in our lives allows us to become the best we can be, instead of trying to fit in molds.

I thank Scott and Halligan for paying this tribute to the Dead; and also for reminding us that the internet did not spring full grown from the head of Google or anyone on our current cutting edge. Rather, it’s been a long strange trip, and its origins go back 50 years, at least.

Working in inbound marketing can be frustrating because its precepts – which work so well, when applied conscientiously – are foreign to traditional business practices. They’re the opposite of marketing tactics we grew up with. They sound suspiciously soft-hearted, on first encounter. Therefore, very few people know and hold to them.

It’s frustrating when, as  an inbound marketer, you consider warm responsiveness to be basic to good business, for example, but you realize that very few of your vendors and colleagues hold that value.  Unless you serve an immediate need of theirs, you won’t get a response from them at all.

Or when you work hard on good listening skills, and then realize the other person’s awareness doesn’t extend any further than the end of their nose.

Or when you generously give, and then suddenly see that your gifts are taken for granted or even resented.

Or how about this one: you realize the person you’re talking to is completely possessed by fear of identity theft, not to mention AIDS, drugs, crime, terrorists, and Bigfoot, and can’t hear a word you’re saying about sharing and openness on the internet.

If you’ve read any of my previous posts, you know I’m involved in an ongoing campaign to spread the good word about inbound marketing in my local area. But sometimes the gap in understanding leaves me gasping.

• Be open about who you are personally?
• Give things away?
• Forget privacy paranoia?
• Mix business and social life?
• Publish my journal in a blog?

These things are anathema in the American South. Still.

So I get disheartened, sometimes, like the Congresswoman yesterday who remarked that philosophical differences between the sides were so great in the immigration discussions that no meeting of the minds seems possible.

On the other hand, I know inbound marketing is here to stay. How do I know that? Because it works, and the old invasive techniques increasingly do not work.

There’s one fellow I know from local networking, whom I have seen at meetings for a couple years now, though we haven’t spoken personally much. I regarded him as a master with the elevator speech, and an accomplished socializer, definitely part of the glue keeping the groups together. Not until today did I learn that he considers himself a student in, as he puts it, “learning how to talk to people.” He’s probably 55 or 60 years old; was a firefighter all his career; only recently turned to selling. There was a look in his eye as he spoke, and the spellbinding clarity of his intention. He is curious about “how to talk to people,” and that means he listens, and gives, and serves, and keeps an open mind. Awe-inspiring.

So there, I’ve now convinced myself that all is not lost, and I can go on preaching the inbound marketing gospel to the insurance agents and realtors in my local groups. If my fireman gets it, maybe many more can and will.

What do you think?

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.

No one took exception to my last entry here, though – at least in my little mind – it tested the edges of what it means to be a virtual assistant. But since there seems to be no objection so far, I’m going to push the point a bit further.

It was after I started working as a VA that the phenomenon known as social media began to impinge on my consciousness. Actually, it was a full year later, in late 2008, that the awakening happened: I heard the clarion call of social media as a marketing and branding uber tool. I was dazzled, swept away, and things have not been the same since.

The advent of social media (detestable as the term sounds in ear – can’t we come up with a better name for it?) meant that I could synthesize so many objectives. I work with small businesses as a virtual assistant, centering on planning, can-do admin, and meaningful evaluations – all with the purpose of building brand.

Which is a long way of saying, I am a virtual assistant because I work as a partner to you and your business. I’m invisible but always there; a fellow eye on the big picture as well as a structure for follow through.

As a VA, I want to serve client businesses holistically. As a social media marketing assistant, I use thorough understanding of client objectives and operations to speak their messages faithfully.

A SMM assistant is the one who helps you stay current with your online networking updates of all kinds. The service can be the key to successful internet branding and selling, which is relatively inexpensive as marketing goes, but a hungry monster when it comes to time. Assigning updates of many kinds to an assistant is a no-brainer.

Before your objections flood the comments, let me say that I do not advocate ‘ghost updating’ in any way. Updates that are generic are an entirely different thing from those that reference personal life. The latter can’t be faked online, so don’t even try.

But there are a host of duties that can be shared with a SMM assistant, making life once again both livable and profitable for you as small business owner. Your SMM assist can:

• Edit and upload (or schedule) blog posts, tweets, Facebook, LinkedIn or other network updates;
• edit and distribute articles;
• add tags to media content and upload;
• complete profiles and account information on relevant sites;
• monitor alerts for your keywords and participate appropriately;
• manage social media groups and comments;
• build pages on Facebook, HubPages, etc.;
• optimize your website copy for search engines;
• monitor your traffic, reputation, and other stats and send you reports;
• so much more, I can’t even think of all the possibilities.

Social media is so much about being consistently there. Sort of like the old brick and mortar imperative: the store’s gotta be open 7 to 11. Somebody’s got to be there. In social media, the time requirement is not so strict, but it’s there. Be sporadic in your updates, have long unexplained absences, take an extended vacation and your efforts deflate like an old balloon.

Your social media marketing assistant assures your presence is solid online.

BUT (and this is major) your SMM assistant also represents you. So find one who will eagerly learn the totality of your biz and take you on as a partner. A virtual assistant, for instance, may well be a ready candidate!

Over on the marketer’s forum that I recently joined, I posed the question, “Why are blogs so often urgently encouraged when the vast majority of people don’t read much at all?”

The commenters vociferously denied that blogging is essential. What is essential is content creation, content marketing; it’s really not about writing blog posts. You shouldn’t get hung up in the blogging idea, as if it’s a literal thing, they admonished me.

This, to me, confirms that we should be making videos, or maybe podcasts, but certainly not writing posts for markets that have neither the time nor the patience for reading.

Or perhaps we should be holding daily group sessions, or contests, raffles, games, news updates, meetups, events, specials, discounts, whatever. Totally hilarious videos du jour. Awesome beauty tip of the day.  Morning tips on car maintenance.

Content marketing. It’s like good old fashioned merchandising, done with internet tools; endlessly creating displays online, especially ones that include participatory elements. This is the practice of the new marketing.

To call it simply ‘blogging’ is deceptive. Blogging is keeping a web log. A journal on the web, relating/sharing your experiences as they unfold. It’s a useful endeavor in its way, but it’s only a sub-sub-set of content marketing.

The key concept that is necessary to understand and execute is content marketing, because the online goal is recognition by search engines, and those hungry machines are appeased only by continuously refreshed content. Search engines surmise that the most active and engaged publisher of content in any field is the one most relevant to search queries.

So how can your biz be active online on a daily basis, in a natural, sustainable way? This is the question for small businesses who want to brand themselves online. Don’t get deterred by all the emphasis on blogging; you don’t have to be a writer. You do have to be active in your field, perhaps with an intensity that’s new to you.

If the prospect of so much activity scares you, contact a virtual assistant, who will partner with you to keep your brand energized on the internet and beyond.

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?

Increasingly, I’m aware that the field of virtual assistance – in its broadest scope – includes anyone who is offering help to others via online channels. We use the web for research, communications, sales, and an enormous number of other business applications.

And the field of virtual assistance – whether you offer transcription, coaching, client-specific software design, or anything in between these extremes – has its own set of rules and requirements,  some of which radically depart from tradition.  Take, for instance, the meaning of time, online.

Not only have computers and the internet made business astronomically faster than it was 50 years ago, but this increase in velocity has carved its effect in the individual’s experience of time as well.

Because this can be a source of confusion for noobs, I list below a few cautions.

• If they don’t respond to your email within 24 hours, they’re not going to respond.
• If they haven’t opened your newsletter within 24 hours, they’re not going to open it.
• If it wasn’t tweeted within the past hour, it’s passé.
• If it’s an article about a social media tool that was published last summer, don’t bother to read it.
• If it’s a blog with no dates displayed, it’s not a blog but rather a collection of articles. No need to read it now: put it in the folder for later. (Along with all the other articles you’re planning to read later.)
• If you like the look of the Twitter background at very first glance, they’re probably someone you want to follow.
• If you do something stupid and it goes viral, you’re a villain overnight: if you do something brilliant and it’s viral, your future may be instantly assured.

It’s a precarious existence; one in which fate can hang a hard left at any given instant. Therefore, the development of a spontaneous relationship with the web is really the best practice. You have to be ready, alert, tuned in. You have to grab ‘em with a glance. You have to be eminently responsive.

It’s is a new and different rhythm of life, to be sure, for anyone over 50 and perhaps for many less aged. But this post’s theme occurred to me because I ‘met’ a client, quite suddenly and serendipitously, online five days ago and immediately we struck up a delightful and rare harmony.  I could easily have missed this opportunity, but I didn’t. I was there and I responded.

In my earliest days of web exploration, I read an article that said internet success involves staying open, being willing to try things, suspending doubt. Way back when I studied theatrical improv, one of the rules was, ‘Say yes!’ That’s how you make interactions work.

The web is sudden, and fast, and improvisational.  Assimilating its rhythm is a big part of finding its treasures.