Web Worker Daily

Posted: 30 Jan 2009 10:00 AM PST

WebWorkerDaily began in September 2006 as GigaOM founder Om Malik was building his new company from a table at Starbucks.

Now, just about everyone who earns income is a “web worker” at least for some part of their day.

To keep up with this ever-changing working world, and so we may continue to be a go-to resource for those who work in the cloud, we’ve got some staff changes to announce. We’ll be saying goodbye to Mike Gunderloy as Senior Writer, and hello to Simon Mackie as the new Editor of WWD. I’ll be stepping down as Editor to concentrate on writing for the site.

Mike Gunderloy joined WWD a few weeks after I did in December 2006, and since then has contributed nearly 1000 posts. Mike is going off to concentrate on his development work, which has grown significantly for him over the last few months. While we’re thrilled for his success, we hope that we can convince him to drop back in for a post or two. Mike was able to cut through the hype and get right to why it mattered for web workers. His voice will be missed.

Who is taking Mike’s place as Senior Writer? Me! I am very, very lucky that I wake up every morning and I can’t wait to get to the computer to do two jobs that I love. In addition to editing WebWorkerDaily, I also work fulltime for C3: Colorectal Cancer Coalition, telecommuting from my home office. I helped start the nonprofit in 2005 and have seen it grow to become the leading colorectal cancer patient advocacy organization in the United States.

Unfortunately, I can’t work fulltime for both wonderful companies. Therefore, I asked Om Malik to replace me as Editor of WWD. As anyone who has built a successful site knows it’s difficult, if not impossible, to do parttime. WWD deserves fulltime love and attention. I will stay with WWD as a writer, which suits me (and the site) well.

I’m pleased to introduce Simon Mackie as the new Editor of WebWorkerDaily. Simon has worked in technical publishing for nearly ten years, with a particular focus on content for web professionals, most recently at Vitamin and SitePoint. He lives in Bristol in the South West of England and has a passion for the Web “done right.”

Simon has great plans for WWD which you’ll see unfold over the coming months. Please give him a warm welcome, and feel free to send him your ideas: tips(at)webworkerdaily.com.

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The Art of Delegating Tasks to a Virtual Assistant

Posted: 30 Jan 2009 08:30 AM PST

“It’s all hype. Trust me, I gave it a shot. I worked with a virtual assistant and it was a complete waste of time. Wouldn’t do it again.”

This is what a friend of mine said when I was thinking about hiring a virtual assistant (VA) almost a year ago. Until I tried it myself, I didn’t realize that a great working relationship with a VA goes both ways. While they have to be efficient at executing your instructions, you also need to be good at the art of delegating if you want to make the most out of their services.

How exactly do you become good at getting the most out of your VA, thus freeing up much more of your own valuable time?

Get a VA that you trust 100%. Lack of trust is a sure way to waste your money. Not because the person you hire is going to scam you, but you’ll be spending an awful amount of time worrying about it. I’m talking about the time that the VA is supposed to free up on your schedule so you can work on other projects. If you’re going to spend the same time worrying about the tasks you delegated, then there’s no point to hiring a VA. Here are some ways you can find someone you can trust to work with:

Ask your friends and associates for referrals.
Do a thorough background check (if you’re hiring an individual).
Look for online reviews of the service (if you’re hiring a company or team).
At the very least, have a couple of phone or VoIP conversations with your potential assistants before you hire them.

Be specific about your instructions. “I find myself asking a lot of questions for clients if they send me general instructions. The more specific the instructions, the better the quality of the output.” said Ella Pelayo of epVirtualAssistants. Many VAs I’ve talked to echo this statement. You’ll be wasting both your own time, as well as your assistant’s, if your instructions require more clarification.

Generic instructions such as “check my email” or “research this topic” might give you results that are different from what you expected, so it’s best to include step by step instructions, as well as a few sentences describing the expected output. In a recent webinar, outsourcing expert Jeff Mills said that he even uses Jing, a free screencasting tool, to show VAs and contractors how to do more complex tasks. This is a useful suggestion, especially if the task is more complex than you can put into words.

Also, don’t forget to point out the maximum amount of time your VA needs to complete each task. This is especially important if you’re paying by the hour. Ask your VA to repeat your instructions to you, paraphrased, just to confirm that he understood the task.

Prepare a manual for repetitive or long-term tasks. When I first hired a VA to do customer support, I provided her with an FAQ document, as well as some email templates. The FAQ document dealt with any possible questions the VA might ask herself when encountering a complex customer support situation. Here are some of the questions I answered in the document:

What do I do if the customer is not satisfied with the service?
What do I do if a customer is asking for a service that we do not provide?
What happens if the customer doesn’t send the needed deliverables on time?

Alternatively, you can provide a comprehensive guide or manual that your VA can use when tackling these problems. This kind of document establishes the rules and guidelines she should follow. The point is to give an easy reference so that the VA can handle as many problems as she can without having to ask you.

Know the special skills and abilities of each VA you hire. Many VAs are generalists and can do a variety of tasks such as booking flights, setting reminders, or providing customer support. But there are some specialized tasks which you may need assistance in, so it’s important that you know your VA can handle these tasks. After all, you don’t want to spend hours writing up detailed directions - that would be contrary to the simplicity you’re trying to achieve.

Hiring an assistant, especially a virtual one, might seem like a risky or expensive move for a web worker. But if you plan for it well and learn how to delegate effectively, you won’t have to worry too much about wasting your time or your money.

Do you work with virtual assistants? Were they as helpful as you expected them to be? How do you make the client-assistant relationship as effective as possible?

Image by Sigurd Decroos from sxc.hu

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Online Community Managers: What Do They Do?

Posted: 30 Jan 2009 07:00 AM PST

In my post from earlier this week, Online Community Manager: Yes, It's Really A Job, I talked about how online community manager jobs continue to be a hot position for web workers despite the current economic conditions. The Monday post was in preparation for a talk that I gave at Oregon State University yesterday to a mix of students and other people from the business community in Corvallis who were interested in learning more about community management careers. I wanted to follow up on Monday’s post with a few more details about community manager positions along with a copy of the presentation that I used for my talk.

The day-to-day responsibilities of a community manager contain an interesting mix of tactical tasks and strategic planning for most community managers, and the work usually falls into four areas:

Facilitation. Community managers spend a large amount of time sifting through discussions in the community to make sure that people are getting answers to questions and helping to make sure that the right people are being pulled into conversations.

Content. As a community manager, I have created various types of content in the form of blog posts, new discussion topics, tweets, videos and more to help make sure that the community members have the information that they need to be productive members of the community.

Evangelism. Unless you want to have a community of one (or a very small number of people), getting out and talking about the community to get people interested is part of the role of community manager.

Evolution. Topics of conversation change, software changes, and people change, which all requires changes to your online community. This is the strategic piece where you get to think about what the community should look like in one year or five years and make changes to the community to make sure that you achieve your goals for the community.

It was also interesting to see which parts of the presentation people found most interesting during the discussion, and they tended to gravitate toward the data. The presentation had several slides from an August study conducted by Bill Johnson in Forum One’s Online Community Research Network focused on Online Community Compensation. The study showed that community managers tend to be very satisfied with their jobs with an average job satisfaction of 4.2 on a scale of one to five with five being the highest. Many community managers are also paid very well with a median salary of $72,500 per year; however, the salary data from the report looks a little like an inverted bell curve with many people making very little money or large salaries.

For people who are interested in community management careers, I also wrote two blog posts this summer from opposite perspectives on the community manager career: Hiring a Community Manager and How to Get a Community Manager Job.

What suggestions do you have for someone who wants to become a community manager? What skills do community managers need to be successful?