Oh for a co-worker

NINE hours of isolation or 30 minutes trapped by the office bore? The attentions of the boss or the distractions of daytime TV? The choice between slogging to the office and working from home can be pretty unappealing. For increasing numbers of people, the answer is “co-working”.

The concept of co-working is elastic but at its broadest means working alongside, and often collaborating with, people you wouldn’t normally. Users book a space in a co-working office, plonk themselves down where they can and start beavering away. (Opening the laptop in a Starbucks is not quite the same thing: enough stick-in-the-muds go to coffee shops to drink coffee that it is not a proper working environment.)
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The idea first surfaced a few years back, but according to Steve King of Emergent Research, a California-based outfit, it reached an inflection-point about 18 months ago. The absolute numbers are still small: Mr King reckons there are now around 760 office-based co-working facilities in America, up from 405 in 2010.

Their rise is fueled by several things, including technologies such as cloud computing; more women and freelancers in the workforce, which means greater demand for flexible work arrangements; and economic pressure on firms’ property costs. Nor is the trend confined to office workers. An organization called Bio Curious recently opened a community biology lab in California’s Bay Area. Budding chefs share kitchens; communal workshops known as “maker spaces” are springing up too.

Some co-working spaces are dedicated facilities, others are set up within business incubators or company offices. Campbell McKellar, who runs a website called Loosecubes where people can find spaces to work, says that 65% of the 2,800 workplaces available are inside small, private companies with desks to spare. Creative and media businesses with a culture of bringing lots of people together to work on specific projects are heavily represented among both users and space providers.

New co-working chains are emerging, with names like The Hub and NextSpace. More established firms have also cottoned on to the trend. Regus, a big provider of managed office space, has a product called Businessworld that offers cardholders flexible access to its facilities. Mark Dixon, Regus’s boss, likens it to having airport business lounges in city centres, and says that products like this already account for 20% of the firm’s revenue, up from almost nothing before the financial crisis.

Purists are sniffy about the likes of Regus. Generation Y-ers do not aspire to work in airport lounges: Loose cubes offers people a choice of working atmospheres that include the “hacker vibe” (black T-shirts and not much in the way of light, apparently). The benefits of collaboration are stressed. One strand of the co-working movement is the “jelly”, an informal event, often held at specific times of the week, where people gather to work together. Co-working evangelists also emphasize the role of each facility’s “host”, a person who organizes social events for users, introduces people to each other and spots opportunities for collaboration.

Still, there should be room for many different styles of co-working, particularly if it takes off among larger companies. Some big firms are trying to soup up innovation by getting people to co-work internally: the striking new Sydney offices of Macquarie, a bank, have no personal desks and emphasise collaborative working. Others have already started shedding their own properties: Yell, a directories business, is now using Regus memberships to give its salespeople in Britain access to office space when they want it. Drew Jones, co-author of a book on co-working, thinks that there is scope to turn empty retail space in the suburbs of big cities into large co-working facilities. Compared with city-centre offices, these would take less time for people to commute to and cost less for firms to buy or rent space in.

None of this signals the end of the conventional office. Corporate cultures move slowly, for one thing. Managers worry about how to deal with issues such as confidentiality. Some job functions will always benefit from being in one location. But co-working multiplies the options that people have when they ask themselves: “Where shall I work today?” For that reason alone, it will keep spreading.

A recent consumer survey found that a full 85% of us are willing to pay more for a product or service if it means a better customer experience. That means that no matter what you’re selling, what customers think of you and your business is as important to them as your actual product and its price tag. Obviously the cornerstone of getting a reputation for stellar customer service is to provide great customer service, but how do you inspire confidence before someone has tried you out?

Social media is a great way to establish a reputation beyond the reach of your storefront or online shopping cart. We recently posted some great advice, with informative links, on our blog. Building your reputation for customer service with social media is as easy as 1-2-3:

1. Build Your Fan Base — Facebook is a great first step to building a networked fan base. Why do you need one? Market research shows that 60% of Facebook users are more likely to recommend a brand they’ve “liked.” And, with more than 500 million users, “60% of Facebook users” is a lot of people.
2. Give Voice to the Customers — Social media makes it easy for everyone to complain — and for those complaints to go instantly global. However, when you quickly turn a complaint into a satisfactory resolution, that’s also done on the worldwide stage. Twitter, in particular, has transformed the ability to put your commitment to your customers front and center.
3. Go Local — Geolocation apps are becoming increasingly popular as the smart-phone revolution continues. For businesses with a local presence, the ability to reach out to willing consumers with spur-of-the-moment deals is a cheap, friendly, high-ROI gift from the business-development gods.

I will be updating some of Erica’s Emails and her words of wisdom to our site. I feel that she can be a wonderful asset to all of our clients and friends. I encourage you to accept her FREE offer to become a member of her “community” and actively listen, learn and participate. See more of Erica’s marketing pearls of wisdom by visiting our MARKETING PAGE.

Let’s face it; most small businesses do the bulk of their business locally. So, the thought of gaining access to Facebook’s 300 trillion users (may be more by now) isn’t that relevant or useful.

However, if those local businesses could use the some of the new powerful online tools and platforms to gain access to the 200-300 social media users in their town, now that might just make some sense.

There are many ways to filter, sort, aggregate and otherwise take advantage of social media tools that can specifically benefit even the smallest neighborhood oriented business.

Below are five things any local business can do to get more business using social media tools

1) Start a Local Group Online

Most social network platforms offer some form of group creation. Any member has the ability to start a group around a niche or pretty much any topic – including a local topic. Sites such as Flickr, Facebook, LinkedIn and Slideshare all allow members to create and manage groups.

For example here’s a local independent merchant group in Austin, TX using a Flickr Group to promote it’s “Keep Austin Weird” slogan.

This Boston Networking Group on LinkedIn was founded by Jeff Popin, owner of BostonEventGuide.com. With over 3,000 members, there’s a pretty good bet this group serves as a conduit for Popin’s main business locally.

2) Find and Network with Local Bloggers

Using tools such as Placeblogger, outside.in, Bloglines you can locate bloggers in your community that might have an interest in writing about your business or industry or actively linking to your blog.

Networking with relevant bloggers locally, commenting on their blog posts, and maybe even contributing a post is a great way to create additional local exposure. Don’t forget to seek out and add blogs from traditional media publications locally as well. Most radio, TV and news journalists have been asked to write a blog as part of their job, these can be great local social media contacts if you take the time to build relationships though their blogs.

3) Hold Meetups and Tweetups

Using a social media tool like MeetUp, you create and promote local events and tap the user base of MeetUp to create additional awareness about your seminars, product demonstrations, open houses, and grand openings.

Here a home remodeler in Encinitas, CA is offering a workshop on green remodeling through MeetUP.

TweetUps, a gathering of people in a community using Twitter, have become very popular ways to meet others locally that believe in the power of social media. That alone can be enough common ground to network on. Search locally for the term TweetUp and don’t be surprised to find one schedule in your community.

The online social media network Biznik allows members to join its online platform, but belong to a local community and promote in-person local events on the site.

4) Find local leads

Finding local prospects or potential strategic partners on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter is pretty simple through the use of the powerful search interfaces built into all. Simply searching by City is a great way to find other people using social media in your community. A service such as Twellowhood or LocalTweeps may aid in your search to find other businesses in your community using Twitter.

Many smart marketers are also employing some of the advanced features of Twitter Search to find people locally and filter their tweets to turn up leads. An auto body shop might set-up searches for people talking about being in an accident and reach out to them with advice for what to do to get the best quote. A computer network service provider can use advanced search to find people locally complaining about their network being down.

Naked Pizza in New Orleans uses Twitter to publish exclusive offers to followers and attributes a significant rise in business using to this tactic.

Cupcakes on Wheels, a Los Angeles mobile cupcake business, tweets its location throughout the day so followers can find its signature brown vans.

Facebook’s Ad Targeting is also another great way to reach only local prospects on the Facebook platform. One of the targeting criteria is geography, so you can create ads that promote your web site or Facebook Fan page that are only shown to people in the geographic region you choose

5) Enhance Local Search Results

No matter how you put social media to use to create engagement locally, simply creating profiles on dozens of social media sites and linking those sites with local keyword content back to your main web site will help your site do better when people search locally. Creating very brand and local optimized profiles on sites like YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare will help with overall links to your site. Creating and enhancing local profiles on Google Maps, Yahoo and Bing Local will help you show up higher in the local results.

Finally, don’t forget to get active with the social review sites like Yelp! and Insider Pages. Ask, and even teach, your local customers hot to write reviews about your business. Currently Google Maps and Bing Local add these reviews to their local profile database too.

Using the technology and ability to access large groups of social media users locally has become a proven small business marketing tactic and is a great way to further enhance the face-to-face relationship building you already do.

Image credit: gloom

John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach, award winning social media publisher and author of Duct Tape Marketing.

Doing something unimportant well does not make it important

Income without time has no value

The sure way to completely fail is to try to make everyone happy

Email is everyone else’s agenda for your Day
Contract with distribution teams, not employees

The customer is not always right

The perceived complexity of a task will expand to the time you allot it

Who reads you stuff is more important than how many read your stuff

Multitasking diverts focus from your primary goal

Aug 11, 2009 –
If you’ve read Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week or any number of productivity blogs, you’ll get a sense of the excitement small business owners have for hiring Indian virtual assistants. The hope is to hire an entry-level, college-graduate backoffice employee for around $5 per hour. But it’s not as easy as putting up a flyer at the local community college. Working with someone remotely (ie., not physically in your office), and in another country, presents some unique challenges.
In the end, it’ll cost about $10-15 per hour, but you’ll have an employee that is a college graduate (sometimes with advanced degrees) at around minimum wage. And if you hire a firm, instead of an individual, you can get multiple expertise in “one employee.”

Following are 10 tips for finding, vetting and hiring a virtual assistant.

1. Don’t expect them to be experts.

A VA is not a super-human who can do every task you have to assign. Don’t expect your VA to have specific industry expertise or to be able to accomplish higher level business strategy thinking. For those higher level tasks, you’ll need to hire a specialized consultant or firm.

For project based work, it might make more sense to contract out that project specifically. The benefits of hiring on a project basis include:

a clear end date, so you’re not stuck in a long-term contract with a badly performing employee;
greater expertise because presumably, you’re hiring a firm or freelancer who specializes in that type of work.
Sometimes you have a need for a mix of project and ongoing work. For example, let’s say you need to build a website or ecommerce storefront. It might make more sense to hire a web design firm that specializes in building ecommerce stores (flat project fee), and then sign a retainer contract with them for maintenance work.

To clarify, you can hire all kinds of expertise, from IT gurus to business consultants and everything in between, from India and other popular outsourcing nations. But they aren’t selling their services as “virtual assistants.” They’re specialized service providers, and hiring that group of contractors is not what we’re talking about here.

2. Think of your VA as an entry-level college grad willing to work for minimum wage.

Good tasks to outsource to a VA are ones where the procedure is relatively simple, there aren’t a lot of decision points (if any) in the workflow, and is a repetitive process. For example:

data entry: like entering hundreds of products into your ecommerce store;
blog or website maintenance: blog posting, comment moderation;
research and report: as in doing Internet research and compiling summaries of the data.
3. Make a list of your tasks and categorize them based on the type of work.

Before looking for a VA, spend a week or two writing down all the tasks you may want to outsource. Consider both tasks you need to do but don’t like doing and tasks that you like to do but haven’t found the time. Once you have this list, organize tasks based on the following criteria:

requires domain or industry expertise vs. anyone can do with training;
one-off task vs. ongoing tasks.
Tasks that don’t require domain expertise are better for outsourcing to an offshore VA. First of all, it’s easier to train them to do the task properly. Second, if the task requires specific expertise, you’re better off hiring a specialty consultant and/or a full-time, long-term employee who can grow with your company.

Tasks that are ongoing are better for assigning to a VA because you’ll get a bigger return on the investment of writing up instructions.

4. You’ll save some money, but it’s not going to make or break your business.

Speaking very broadly, the minimum hourly rate of an entry-level, college-educated employee in India starts at about $2 per hour. Here in the U.S., the equivalent rate is around $10 per hour (minimum wage plus benefits and perks).

At first glance, it seems like you will be able to shave 80% off your administrative payroll, but working with someone thousands of miles away adds significant transactional costs. It will take you more time to explain a task and train them to do it. And since hiring an employee (especially one in a different country) can be a big risk, you may be more confident working with a firm. The firm will have overhead, and will need to turn a profit themselves.

In practice, a capable VA that produces good work will cost around $10-15 an hour. For very simple data entry or data compilation (ie., copy-and-paste work), you can find an individual or small firm off Elance for $5 per hour. For tasks more involved than copy-and-paste, and for quality you’d trust for engagement beyond one project, expect to pay around $10-15 per hour for a VA.

5. A firm is better for most small business needs.

VA service providers come in all sizes. Big VA specializing firms include Brickwork India (India), Get Friday (India), and BPOVIA (China). And there are thousands of boutique firms and one-man operations on Elance.

Firms are better if you have diverse tasks. When working with a firm, you’ll be assigned one lead VA, who will be your single point of contact. This VA may do the tasks you assign herself, or she could delegate them to a team of other VAs.

Firms are also good for slowly scaling up the number of hours you outsource. A freelancing individual will be less able to handle swings in contracted hours from month to month.

An individual is good if you’re always assigning the same task. For example, if you want help for managing the product pages on your ecommerce store — and only that specific work — then it might make sense to hire a freelance expert for that task. Without the overhead of a firm, individuals can have a lower hourly rate if you commit to more hours.

6. Interview your potential VA on the phone before hiring them.

Whether you’re hiring a firm or individual, be sure to talk to them on the phone before you hire them.

Have prepared for the interview:

Tasks you want to offload. When talking to a firm, this information helps them assign a VA to you that is qualified for your type of work.
Number of hours you expect to buy. VAs want to know how many hours a week/month you’re committing to so they can plan their own cashflow, client portfolio, and work schedules.
Daily expectations of availability. Do they need to be at work and online at the same time as you?
Typical task schedule. Are you assigning tasks that need immediate resolution or ones that can be worked on at any time over the next few days or weeks?
Ask for this information:

Resume. Check their educational and work experience.
Examples of prior work. Get actual work product, rather than just descriptions of work done, whenever possible.
Non-disclosure agreement. This contract should be standard with any hire.
What are some recent movies they liked? (See tip #11 regarding cultural considerations.)
7. India isn’t your only option.

In fact, there are plenty of remote workers right here in the United States. Even if you hire from the U.S. (onshore outsourcing), there may be significant cost savings based on the different minimum wages imposed by states and the wide ranging costs of living.

Going offshore, India isn’t your only option. Europe, Asia (especially the Philippines), and South Africa are becoming big producers of VA providers themselves. The common thread? They all have large English speaking populations and much lower costs of living (compared to the U.S.).

8. Don’t forget about security.

Another reason to go with a big firm — they tend to have security policies and procedures in place. At a bare minimum, sign a non-disclosure agreement with the service provider. When working with a firm, make sure they also have NDAs with their employees. Also ask the provider what other security measures they take. Some examples:

Do they permanently delete your data once the task or contract is up?
Do they have regular backups of data? Do they store these backups offsite?
How do they secure physical access to your information? Who can get into the building? Who can get into the data center where the servers are kept?
What procedures do they have in place to prevent employees from walking away with sensitive data? (Eg., not allowing USB thumb drives to access work computers, NDA with employees.)
9. Try before you buy.

Try hiring freelancers for one-off projects from Elance first. This will give you some experience in dealing with a remote worker. Plus reading the submitted bids and browsing the providers on Elance will give you a sense of the quality and expertise available out there.

Elance is like eBay for individual freelancers and boutique firms. It’s better than doing a Google search because on Elance, the service provider has at least articulated their expertise in a concise form and have established a reputation based on reviews from past clients.

I’ve hired people on Elance for data entry, writing, video editing, and Internet research. Not surprisingly, the lowest cost providers inevitably produce the lowest quality work. And conversely, the providers with the most number of reviews and past jobs provided the best quality work. Just like in real life, (a) you get what you pay for, and (b) nothing beats previous experience and employer references when evaluating a potential new hire.

You can also try buying blocks of time from outsourcing firms. Brickwork India and Get Friday offer prepaid blocks of time in 10 hour increments. You’ll pay a higher rate (about $15) per hour but it’s a good way to fieldtest a firm.

10. Consider legal, cultural and language issues when working with offshore help.

If you’re hiring offshore, remember that your VA lives and works in a different country.

If you deal with sensitive customer information, consider the legal ramifications before you outsource your entire business to your Indian VA.

Although American culture has been exported worldwide in movies and websites, there are still many cultural differences. Even if the tasks you assign don’t need your VA to deal with customers or other people, it’s still important to consider cultural and language familiarity. This is one reason why a voice interview is so critical before hiring offshore help. It’s an important test for whether or not you’ll be able to communicate (and work with) your VA.

Next week, I’ll have 10 tips for working with your newfound virtual assistant.

Photo credit: iStockphoto