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Your Blogging Voice – Keep it Real

February 11, 2009 by  
Filed under Social Media Marketing

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Leesa Barnes wrote a BLOG POST today on Why You Should Never Outsource Your Social Media Tasks & What You Should Delegate Instead. This subject is near to my heart so I have copied my response to her here.

Hi Leesa,

Thank you so much for addressing this important subject. We must be vigilant in this area or people will lose faith in the social media networks much the same way they have lost faith in TV or Radio advertising.

I am a Virtual Assistant who specializes in Social Media Marketing and I agree with you completely concerning not outsourcing the social media networking tasks that revolve around your unique voice or point of view. Social Media is built upon the principles of authenticity, transparency and relationship building. There is no way to maintain those principles and outsource your blog posts or conversational tweets.

But does that mean an entrepreneur must be bogged down by all zillions of other tasks involved with developing and maintaining a productive Social Media Strategy. I don’t think that is realistic.

For example would you or should you outsource your attendance at a large family function such as a reunion or anniversary celebration? Of course not that would be unthinkable. But could you outsource the many technical details involved such as house cleaning, grocery shopping, menu planning or invitations etc? I think everyone would agree that would be acceptable and could quite possibly make the event even better.

One of the most important skills to learn if you want to become a successful entrepreneur is how to delegate so you can concentrate on what you do best.

There are many Social networking tasks that can be outsourced to a qualified specialist that have no direct impact on the actual voice of the person who is using them such as tracking and reporting on your reputation in the blogosphere, building and maintaining business pages in Facebook, researching and identifying targeted blogs for the client to comment on  etc. There are also so too many Applications and tools available for one person to investigate and test alone.

I think the consumer is very capable of figuring out which people are presenting their own authentic thoughts and experiences and which ones are delegating those important tasks to someone else. I think those that allow others to be their voice will not have a following for long.

 

 

 

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  • http://www.heikemiller.com Heike Miller

    Hi Lauren,

    I’ve read Leesa’s blog post and the replies she has received so far with an excellent one from Craig who explained which tasks can be outsourced easily and which ones don’t.

    I fully agree. The thing is that many entrepreneurs don’t know and don’t have the time to follow lots of bloggers and other social media sources to learn all about the tools to use for a successful social media presence.

    Let’s face it, if you are interested in social media and subscribe to some of the bloggers and social media sites, chances are you get a small heart attack every morning, when you click the “receive” button of your Outlook or try to wade through your RSS feeds.

    The resources and information that comes through every morning is enormous. It’s overwhelming and not even the social media experts can probably keep up with all of it. The most important task is to keep calm and prioritize. To do this successfully you need to have a plan on what you want to learn about social media and its neverending newly established tools and trickes. This can actually fill your whole day if you it to do.

    I believe that a lot of the blogs I have subscribed to convey extremely valuable information that will enhance my social media presence, but it is not easy to read all the information, follow all the links and respond to it.

    I am sure that an entrepreneur alone definitely can’t have a really successful social media campaign without any help if his or her field is NOT social media. Say you are an energy healer or a business coach: chances are you have clients coming to your practice and also talking to you on the phone. You also need to develop more products to get passive income and this involves a lot of thinking and work. I don’t think there will be much time left for this energy healer or business coach to wade through all the social media information, set up new profiles, check out other people’s happenings, approve friends, find new friends, identify potential JV partners, go through all blogs relating to the industry, AND posting lots of relationship building posts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

    This is sad, but we need to be realistic here. Yes, I believe the entrepreneur needs to have an authentic voice and communicate this to the clients, JV partners and the general public, but there are, as Craig outlined, a huge number of tasks and information gathering a social media VA could do to make sure the entrepreneur can solely concentrate on REAL relationship building when they occupy their daily social media time slots for the day, which is probably not more then one or so hours, otherwise these people can get divorced or live in a desert because they can’t just be working 24/7.

    The VA could undertake many social media tasks for the entrepreneur so that the person just needs to log in to their netwoks and start connecting for the slot of time they have set apart.

    The dedicated VA probably has already checked all industry news, told the entrepreneur what the competitiors are up to, which teleconferences are an asset to attend or which networking event to go to. The VA can also update the entrepreneurs’ Facebook page with new video postings and general information, such as postings about upcoming teleconferences, planned webinars and seminar. This should never be the part of the entrepreneur, it wastes time and money because the entrepreneurs charges, for example, $150 for an hour while the VA probably charges between $30 and 60 per hour. Who would be crazy enough to waste such a big portion of money if this can be outsources successfully?

    The VA can also transform bulletpointed information the entrepreneur has given her into a proper blog post or an article or press release, ready to be checked and signed off by the entrepreneur. Or, the VA writes these articles, press releases and blog posts and hands it over to the entrepreneur to edit with their own voice. I have worked as an executive assistant offline and that’s some of the tasks were that I did for my executive.

    These are all activities a VA can do without overriding the entrepreneurs voice or personal tasks.