Tag Virtual Assistant

To network online, there’s a lot of WORK to be done. You can either struggle adding online brand management to your very long list of things to do as an entrepreneur or you can be smart and outsource a lot of the less fun and irrelevant parts of your online brand management to virtual assistants.

When outsourcing your brand management, know that your brand is extremely precious so always ensure that you maintain control of it. Your virtual assistants are there to do the monotonous work while the vision and direction of your brand MUST come from you.

4 Ways to Outsource Your Online Brand Management to Virtual Assistants

1. Claim and manage your online spaces (ie. a website/blog site) to build your reputation

When people meet you or first get to know you, there’s one thing for sure that they are going to do – they will Google you. To ensure that they are going to find awesome content about you rather than negative information from some anonymous person posting online about say a drunken stupor you had, ensure that you take control of your brand online by claiming the online spaces that you do have control over. These online spaces might include a domain name with your website, blog, facebook, twitter and youtube videos. You can outsource the creation and management of the domain name, website and social media profiles to your virtual assistant but direct your virtual staff on how you want your reputation to be managed.

2. Make it easy to communicate on online spaces but moderate it

Part of creating a great brand online is to be open to communicating with your audience. To do this, ensure that you allow comments on your personal blogs and social media profiles. Your virtual assistant can monitor any incoming messages and moderate them according to criteria that you set out for this.

3. Track thought leaders and build your reputation

To build your reputation, you need to consistently track the thought leaders in your field and get involved with online discussions. Your virtual assistant can research thought leaders in your field, transcribe or summarize their videos/podcasts/blogs and feed that vital information back to you in an easy digestible and timesaving format. You can also get your virtual assistant to research the thought leaders’ forum questions and discussions so that you can engage with them and their audience through your own comments and answers. The more you engage on the online platforms of thought leaders, the more credible you will seem to others.

4. Invite people and communicate with your peers on your online platforms

In order to foster business and personal relationships, you will need to consistently invite people and communicate with your peers on your online platforms. Other than adding your existing personal and business contacts to your online social networks, your virtual assistant can also research targeted connections and invite them to your social networks such as linkedin. You will need to ensure that you communicate with your online peers. You can guide your virtual assistant on how to answer certain posts or messages, however, always get your virtual assistant to send the reply message to you for editing and tweaking BEFORE your reply is posted.

In order to get the best out of outsourcing your brand management, always collaborate with a reliable outsourcing company with a local presence that can be held accountable.  Outsourcing your brand directly offshore, for example, to a home- based worker offshore would be an extremely perilous thing to do when your brand is at stake.

To make virtual staffing a reality in your business, we recommend that your business goes paperless or at least paper-less (less use of paper). In today’s fast-paced business landscape, you need to be able to quickly put documents at the fingertips of the right people, at the right time from anywhere. You won’t be able to do this if you’re drowned under stacks of paper and rummaging through your filing cabinets every time you need to search for a document.

Get over your paper addiction. Start consolidating all your documents into a cloud based centralized document management system to enable you to act quickly with the right people when it comes to accessing information. In order to streamline your business operations and take excellent care of your clients, it is extremely important that you process documents electronically (using the system to automatically manage, track and report on these processes). When you expand paperless across your business, you will be better ready and able to take on offshore outsourcing staff and apply complete end- to- end business workflows that automate and apply existing processes more efficiently.

For instance, instead of having client records on paper, all communication with clients and client records should be electronically recorded, stored and accessible online on a CRM (customer relationship management system). So if you have a virtual sales staff, you can readily provide your virtual sales agent the relevant access levels to the CRM so that your staff can access relevant client records. If the need arises, your sales agent can share related client information and tasks via the CRM with another authorized staff like a virtual administrative staff to take care of the client’s administrative needs.

Another example is if you have an offshore bookkeeper, ensure you electronically store all accounting documents such as expenses, receipts and sales invoices so that your virtual bookkeeper can readily access this information and do your books via an online accounting system. This will allow you to log into the online accounting system at any time to look over the progress of your virtual bookkeeper and communicate any errors quickly.

Where possible automate the initial scanning of the documents by implementing a more sophisticated document capture approach. Human errors will decrease and efficiency will increase the more you automate with the system. It is best if your systems are interlinked, for example, link your accounting system to your CRM so you’re able to view invoices and quotes directly on your CRM and link your CRM to your emails so that you’re able to view this information in your CRM directly from within your emails. A virtual staffing company can assist you in establishing these online systems and centralizing your data.

Going paperless or paper-less, by applying document management technology is a pre-requisite these days if you want to give your business a competitive advantage. Paper based processes are ancient history. While the reality of being 100% paperless may not be attainable, businesses that are taking the paperless path are reaping the rewards for each step they take in going paperless. Being able to use offshore outsourcing services is one of the benefits of going paper-less. The key in this whole process is ensuring you get reliable and secure systems and your data is backed up regularly.