There can be a couple of downsides to consider as well. Being constantly on the homepage with updates from your twitter conversation may be annoying to some people who can then choose ask for “less” about you in their home page feed. If you tend to be a prolific tweeter, your tweets will also fill your Personal Profile page as it will be considered a new “status” every time you tweet. So, it’s best to consider the positives and the possible negatives when adding this application. However, if you do add it and decide that it’s just not for you, then you do have the option to remove it as well.

Here’s how to add the application:

1) At the bottom of the Facebook window, click on “Applications” and a small box will pop up. At the top of the box, click on “Find More”.

2) After you’ve clicked on “Find More” a new page will come up and in the upper right hand corner, there is a search box where you can enter “Twitter” and hit search. The Twitter application will most likely be the first one to come up.

3) Click on the link to that application will take you to the Fan page for the application. Once there you can click on “Got to Application” to add it your Profile page. If you have a Fan/Business page, you can click on “Add to Page” to add it to your page.

4) Whichever button you click on will take you to another screen asking for your permission for the application to be added. Click on “Allow.”

5) After the application is added, then you will be asked for you Twitter ID and your Twitter password. Enter these in and you are all set to go.

I’ve also added a link to this application’s page on my Business Fan Page under “Favorite Pages” as another easy way for you to find it.

Just like anyone else, I’m busy and am not always able to answer right away, but it’s always been my policy to try and respond within 24 hours and no later than 48 hours, even if it’s just to acknowledge receipt of one’s email and to let them know I will provide them with a more detailed response later. Other than spammers or auto-generated responses, I have never felt that it was okay to just completely ignore an email with no response. Given that everyone is busy, I also do not send out unnecesary or lengthy, overly wordy emails. Am I mistakenly under the assumption that email is still a communication tool? As a Virtual Assistant, email is a critical tool for communicating with clients from any location. This is one of the advantages of working with a Virtual Assistant…that one can be traveling the globe and still receive crucial assistance for their business. But we still need to be able to communicate and email is a prime way for doing that.

I took a little look around the ‘net to see if their were some newly published top secret email etiquette rules out there that I had missed out on. In fact, I found a post over at Business Email Etiquette which addressed not only my exact issue but validated my feelings about these non-responders. Here is what it said:

By not making the Sender aware you are away with a courteous away message, the Sender will assume their e-mail is received and if not responded to promptly, in your view, not a priority.

If you are so busy that you cannot respond at all (you’re there but not “away” to require an away message be in place), you are in fact deciding to ignore the Sender — even if for the time being — and that’s exactly what they will assume. You’ve made a decision that their e-mail is not important to you or you would have responded.

Exactly! Perception is everything. As technology has advanced making it easier to communicate with the flick of a finger and the click of button, we are slowly losing our ability to acknowledge that all this technology is still human-driven. There’s a person behind every message sent and a non-response has become one way to give someone the virtual finger. I find it ironic though as more and more people jump into social networking and media with all this evangelism about making connections and creating relationships, that people are failing to also see that email is still a part of that web. Your “virtual” presence can be everything when you primarily do business from afar.

As a Virtual Assistant, I’m here to help, so here are my suggestions for how busy people can make responding to email a little quicker when time is short:

1. Even if it’s just one line…send a response. It can be as short as “Hey, I received your email, will respond shortly.” That’s takes like two seconds folks.

2. Create a template email for those quick responses, especially if they are responses you find yourself sending often.

3. Get a Virtual Assistant. They can help with your email morass more than anyone. HOWEVER, you must still be able to communicate with your Virtual Assistant on a regular, consistent basis in order to get the most value out of the relationship. I think this is where so many VA-Client relationships fall apart…but that’s another post.

What is your email response policy? How do you handle non-responses?

It’s a concept that’s been around since the beginning of time. Using the web to create your tribe with a purpose and a goal is much easier now with Web 2.0. Networks like Twitter and Facebook are prime examples of how this is taking place. It’s just a matter of identifying who the leader is or becoming the leader yourself. Twitter is based on who’s following who, but in reality, there are leaders embedded into that whole premise. Inevitably and not surprisingly, there are those within each industry who simply must be followed if you want to know the very latest of what they are saying and doing.

Which will you be– are you a leader or a follower? How will you build your tribe to get your message out and your goals accomplished?

Fall also means that the playtime and vacations of summer are officially over and it’s time to get down to business again. Much like spring cleaning rituals, Fall becomes a time when we start looking at buckling down for the long, cold, rainy season to get some real work done. I’m feeling it and I think my clients are feeling it. I’m thankfully staying quite busy with work and projects as I watch the season change before my eyes out the window in front of my desk.

What does Fall mean to you? What new goals have you set for yourself and your business as the season begins to change? If you find yourself needing some additional assistance to get more done, consider outsourcing to a Virtual Assistant. Yep, that’d be me. This wouldn’t officially be my business blog if I didn’t include the shameless plug every once and while, now would it?

Watching him bring this rock to life made me think about the awesome power of the imagination. We all have it, but sometimes I think we sort of loose the ability to use it to it’s full capacity. Using your imagination to imagine greatness and success in your own life can be a powerful (and inexpensive) tool that we should all be taking advantage of everyday.

For those of us who are small business owners or solo entrepreneurs, we are where we are because we imagined it could happen and it did. We imagined that we could be successful and we are or we have been or we will be.

So now I ask you this…what else are you imagining to move your business and yourself forward? As you continue to imagine and think about where you would like to see yourself in a years time, does that include figuring out a way to gain more time or to start delegate tasks? Do you imagine that you will have achieved greater strides in your own business success?

Bring your own “rock” to life and imagine all the possibilities for what you can achieve. Tell me what you are imagining about right now…if you can imagine it, it can happen.

On the morning of the first day, when the moment came for me to leave him, I could see little tears start to well up in his eyes. It seemed no matter how excited he was to venture off in Kindergarten, he was still a little nervous and scared at something so big and so new. He was fine after some reassurance and once the classroom activities actually started, he was the first to join in.

All in all, he dove right in and he was excited to go back the next day. Eager once more to begin learning and making new friends. Still a little nervous, but not quite so much as the first day.

The whole experience has made me think about how young children have such a unique capability to have such wonder and excitement about the world around them and about new experiences. Somewhere in the process of growing up, we seem to lose this carefree ability and start becoming more reserved in our excitement and are not so eager to jump out and try new things. Sure, young children can get nervous and scared, but yet it seems the desire to try something new wins out over that fear.

As a business owner or solo entrepreneur perhaps you find that you’d like to try something new and innovative that might just be the thing that helps propel you forward into the next phase of success. But fear and the unknown hold you back. I think sometimes this is the case with people who consider or want to further explore hiring a Virtual Assistant. All in all, it sounds like a great idea and wouldn’t it be wonderful to have the extra help? But, how does it work? How much does it cost? Can I afford it? And that small voice in your head that says, “If I want it done right, I’m the only one who can do it.”

What if you could get satisfactory answers to those questions, and what if you could move beyond your fear and nervousness to find a highly skilled and qualified assistant who will be a partner in the success and growth of your business? Just as my son jumped in feet first into Kindergarten and towards the first step in his life long education process, you can set fear aside and make the decision to move your business forward. Give up some of the control, learn to delegate and you might just find that hiring a Virtual Assistant is all worth it in the long run.

What’s holding you back?

A Virtual Assistant is a skilled administrative professional and entrepreneur who provides off-site administrative assistance and specialized business services from their home office. Because Virtual Assistants are contracted services providers then there are no extra employee related expenses, no benefits to pay for, and no overhead cost such as those associated with having an in-house employee.

It is estimated that small business owners spend as much as 40-60% of their time on administrative tasks. Working with a Virtual Assistant is one way that small business owners can minimize the costs of their administrative overhead while not sacrificing service or compromising their business. A Virtual Assistant can keep your business running efficiently and effectively while creating more time for you to focus your core business tasks and income generating activities.

Continuing to market and advertise your business during a recession will be the key to staying connected with your customer base. Business analysts often recommend that companies not reduce their marketing or advertising activities during an economic downturn. However, you may want need to consider lower cost alternatives for your marketing and this is where a Virtual Assistant can help you. Many Virtual Assistants have knowledge and expertise to help the small business owner or solo entrepreneur with marketing activities, especially with online marketing ideas such as setting up and maintaining a blog. A blog is an inexpensive way to provide fresh, new content about your business online. Further, a blog linked with your website can help to improve your visibility with the search engines.

Social networking and Web 2.0 has quickly become one of best ways to get known and stay known online. Virtual Assistants are familiar with most of the social and business networking sites because many of them utilize these sites for their own business needs. Since Virtual Assistants can work with clients from anywhere in the world, the establishment and maintenance of their online persona is vital to the success of their business. This makes them the perfect resource for you to use to set up and maintain your online social and business network profile and persona.

Staying connected with your current and existing customers is also important. Your current customers are already familiar with your business, services, or products so showing them the added value that you bring will help you maintain that customer base. A Virtual Assistant can help you to send out personalized cards or make phone calls on your behalf to let customers know that you appreciate their business. Setting up, revitalizing or maintaining a newsletter is a low-cost way to continue marketing and keep in touch with your customers. Typically, Virtual Assistants have the training and experience to do this either in a hard copy format or for distribution via email.

Economic analysts suggest that one of the best ways to ride out a recession is to remain flexible. Small business owners can stay flexible by thinking outside of the traditional way of doing business and embracing the technology available that makes outsourcing their administrative tasks to a Virtual Assistant a cost-effective and time efficient option.

Maybe you think life hasn’t quite turned out the way you thought it would be, as they sing in the song…but if you think about it, your life has most likely turned out just the way it was supposed to given choices you’ve made, the background you come from and the surroundings you’ve lived in. That isn’t to say though that we don’t have some control over the direction of our lives. We do!

I chose to be a Virtual Assisant because I believe that it fits well with my life, with who I am, and with where I see my life moving in the next few years. In essence, I am that Rock Star Virtual Assistant and I provide the administrative support and business services in such a manner that it just might rock your world. And more than that, what I can do, and what I can help you with, may be just what you need to put you on the path to becoming a “Rock Star” in your business and in your life.

So, what are you gonna do today? How ya gonna do it? Be A Rock Star!