by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Jan 4, 2013 | Delegation, Entrepreneur, Social Media
Welcome to the first week of 2013 and what a productive week it was: new clients, consults and projects!
As a Virtual Assistant, part of my day is content curation and this affords me the opportunity to do quite a bit of reading. While some days it seems like a digital overload and my bandwidth has far exceeded it’s elasticity. I love to find relevant content to put into play or share with my network to help demonstrate the positive growth opportunities that can be achieved via outsourcing.
I am very passionate about it and not just because it is my business, but because it works; because it is true; because there is “science” to prove it. With 168 hours in the work week, it is important to choose your activities and projects that make the most sense for yourself and your business. The Sales Blog said: “Successful people spend their time where they create value. They delegate, eliminate, or defer activities where they cannot create value.”
Three of my favorite topics are time management, productivity and delegating as they all support you, your organization and goals for success. This theme seemed to be very prevalent across many news platforms and blogs this week which further supports the evidence that in order to experience growth, you need these key elements.
Weekly Words of Wisdom
“A clear vision, backed by definite plans, gives you a tremendous feeling of confidence and personal power.” Brian Tracy
“As a business owner it can be difficult to let someone else take care of your baby, but it is almost always in the business’s best interest to create a team with diverse and useful skills to improve processes.” Curt Finch
“If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s most important and then give it all you’ve got.” Lee Iacocca
“Smart outsourcing means remembering just because I can do something, doesn’t mean I should be doing something.” Trista Harris
“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.” Jim Rohn
Weekly Relevant Content
The Productivity Issue Fast Company: an incredible compilation of resource articles
Delegate and Know When to Let Go of Small Business Operations Small Business Trends
30sec Tip: Identify Your Peak Hour of Productivity Life Hacker
4 Fantastic Time Management Quotes & How To Put Them Into Practice Pick the Brain
80% Is Good Enough: Grow Your Business By Delegating Forbes
How To Outsource Your Most Dreaded Tasks Fast Company
My New Productivity Tweaks for 2013 Ray Edwards
These are just a few of the articles that delighted me this week. They truly are eye candy or should I say brain candy for me and further exemplify the clear need for time management, productivity tools (plans) and delegation in order to experience personal and professional growth.
Wishing you a successful and productive 2013.
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | May 16, 2012 | Social Media
Most companies have realized the tremendous benefits of creating communities and becoming involved in social media. It is a vital component to your business, marketing, sales and customer service strategies.
Some companies fear creating a social media presence because they believe that if they do, they may provide their audience with a platform to complain or otherwise post negative feedback. Whether you create your community or not, the “talk” is still out there and if you are not listening, then you are missing the opportunity to troubleshoot and amend any potential detrimental comments about your organization.
The Internet is a vast abyss of content and if a customer or prospective buyer is having an issue with your company, they will surely voice their opinions and with the viral reach of social media, you need to be able to counteract and turn the situation around before it spirals out of your control.
Your company can create alerts using Google, YAHOO, Twitter or other social media tools for keywords to monitor the chatter about you and your business. Isn’t it better to know what is being said than to hide from the conversation?
Be proactive and take the opportunity to listen and respond to what your audience is saying. It will help to create loyal customers, increase sales, provide customer service, instill goodwill, and give your company the chance to provide the best service and industry voice.
Real Life Example:
Recently I was having issues with AT & T and I chose to utilize social media to reach out vs continuing to endlessly remain on hold or deal with offshore techs. After 3 months of conventional methods, I chose to tweet and post on Facebook. My voice was heard- loud and clear!! I received responses on Twitter and Facebook and shortly thereafter, 3 phone calls from their corporate offices. My problems were solved, I received credits and now have direct phone numbers of people who can make a difference.
This was not the first time I used social media to get in touch with organizations who were not responding to phone calls or emails. These companies are listening to the conversations and responding. Social media proves to be a valuable customer service tool.
You don’t have to tweet, or Facebook, or even blog. But choosing not to embrace social media, even minimally, is choosing to be invisible.” Cindy Kraft
Your customers are talking, are you listening?
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Apr 29, 2012 | Social Media
Social media meets the fundamental need to be heard, to be noticed, to be known and to be validated.
Social Media (SM) is not a trendy marketing tool but rather a key facet in your viral efforts to drive business to your website, enhance company recognition, build your brand, create market segments, meet your clients and prospective client needs for information and customer service, join communities, disseminate news, press releases, product launches, improve customer service, troubleshoot issues and listen to the chatter about your company.
It is hard to believe that Social Media is only 7 years old. Facebook started in 2004. Blogging did too. Twitter was born a few years later in 2006 and LinkedIn, the business networking site began in 2009. It’s unbelievable that something has impacted the marketing world with such a force in such a short period of time.
Social media has evolved from a powerful communication avenue to a key marketing channel. It offers a platform for clients, colleagues or prospects to discover you when they’re looking for reviews, comparing pricing, or researching offers. It is paramount for you and your company to maintain a presence, ensuring the opportunities for listening, effective online communications and increased visibility. It is essential that companies create and utilize a variety of social media platforms to cross promote, market and enhance their organization. Each channel offers an individual as well as combined opportunity for company-wide growth and expansion.
How do I Measure my results?
The ROI on SM is multi-faceted: it is a return on influence and before you have influence, you need visibility. You have the opportunity to increase followers, create deeper meaningful connections, develop relations with industry colleagues and associates, increase web traffic, RTs, “likes,” shares, +1s, and discussions about your company or brand and all this eventually translates into dollars. The list below applies to ALL social networking platforms.
- Return on engagement — the duration of time spent either in conversation or interacting with social objects, and in turn, what transpired that’s worthy of measurement.
- Return on participation — the metric tied to measuring and valuing the time spent participating in social media through conversations or the creation of, social objects.
- Return on involvement — similar to participation, marketers explored touchpoints for documenting states of interaction and tying metrics and potential return of each.
- Return on attention — In the attention economy, we assess the means to seize attention, hold it and as such measure the responses activities that we engender.
- Return on trust — A variant on measuring customer loyalty and the likelihood for referrals, a trust barometer establishes the state of trust earned in social media engagement and the prospect of generating advocacy and how it impacts future business.[1]
How much time should I expect to spend each day/ week to get best results?
You could easily spend a few minutes or a few hours per day engaging followers, creating relationships, and searching for content to share and building your brand. You have to be patient. Times builds results.
25 Eye-Popping Internet Marketing Statistics for 2012
The Internet Advantage
- Over 2 billion people use the Internet on a daily basis – this is about 30% of the world’s population, reaching more people, in more demographics than any other marketing tool.
- This represents a 480% increase in 2011 alone
- Over 245 million people or over 80% of Americans, use at least one social network.
- Creating a social media strategy is simple and inexpensive. You can easily integrate it into your existing marketing plan.
Videos:
Social Media Revolution Socialnomics 2011
What Is The Business Value of Social Media? – Advice from @Hubspot
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Mar 12, 2012 | Executive Administration, Social Media, Word Processing
Ace has been busy assisting our client base with a variety of tasks and projects, helping to create more time for them to focus ON their business rather than IN it. While we have some consistent daily activities like social media management, many of the projects we complete for our clients are a variety of administrative or concierge type duties. The possibilities are limitless.
Our Virtual Assistant services encompass a wide range of solutions to help support our clients in their business activities. It is not merely WHAT we do for you in terms of tasks and projects, but it is more about what you gain by outsourcing your To Do list to Ace Concierge.
Delegation is a low cost, high impact solution enabling you to focus on what is important, rather than on what needs to be done. If you are tied up working on tedious administrative details, then you are not able to focus on building your business, providing customer service, using your core genius, or otherwise, doing what only YOU can do. Use your skills and talents to do what you do best and outsource the rest. Your time is too valuable to become engrossed in the “small stuff” when you should be dedicating your expertise to your company.
Here is a small sampling how we have helped our clients:
- Appointment scheduling
- Blog posts
- Calendaring
- Data compilation
- Document creation
- Editing/proofing
- Email management
- E-newsletters
- Internet research
- LinkedIn groups
- Mailings
- PowerPoint presentations
- Re-purposing content
- Social Media management: Twitter/Facebook
- Transcription
What is on your To Do list this week that you really don’t need to do, don’t want to do, don’t have time to do or don’t like to do? Think about what you can effectively delegate to help increase your productivity levels, time management and essentially, your bottom line.
Just think: if you outsourced 4 hours per week, you would gain 16 hours a month. Can you imagine what you could do with 16 more hours??
Our Ace solutions are only limited by your requests. How can we best serve you?
“A VA’s role is to help the business owner be more profitable by absorbing the tasks, responsibilities and roles that don’t allow the business owner to play to her/his strength.” Olalah Njenga
