A Better Virtual – USA Virtual Offices

If you are looking for a virtual assistant who specializes in social media marketing, you might want to get Angel Leback a call.

Others certainly are.

In fact, Leback, CEO of Assistant Angel, has been invited to speak about social media marketing at Wake Tech Community College and at the All Women’s Social Media Summit.

Specifically, Lebak co-led the Wake Tech “Lunch and Learn” along with marketing strategist Olalah Njenga, CEO of YellowWood Group using “Martin Brossman’s Facebook for Business” class materials. Next month, Lebak will serve as a panelist at the All Women’s Social Media Summit at the Durham Arts Council.

Applause goes to Leback for finding a niche and filling it. These speaking engagements will give her an instant credibility boost with clients who need a social media savvy virtual assistant. Clearly, Leback already has credibility in this area, or she wouldn’t have been invited as a speaker at the events.

As Leback sees it, more businesses in the Raleigh area are beginning to understand the value of social media in their marketing efforts. She sees them taking classes on social media marketing and hiring social media marketing managers to coach, advise, and implement a social media strategy.

Leback founded Assistant Angel to give small business owners the support they need to focus on what they do best. Lebak leads a team of virtual assistants that offer social media marketing management, administrative, secretarial, and other services to businesses locally and across the US. Work is performed online, off-site, and for as few as two hours a week to more than 20.

Leback is practicing what she preaches. First of all, I found out about her company via online press releases that she sends out. When I visited her Web site, I discovered that she has done a good job setting up her own business in the social media world. Right on her home page, she offers a YouTube video in which she explains what a virtual assistant is. She also posts buttons on her home page for e-mail, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Inside919, a social networking site aimed at her local area.

Leback is one smart cookie. By demonstrating on her own Web site how to do social media the right way, she attracts clients that want to know how to do what she does—and ultimately want her team to do it for them. Social media marketing is a strong niche, and Angel Assistant has set itself up well to succeed in this area.

Don’t let its name fool you. Corporate Executive Offices is about more than executive office suites. The company is making a big name for itself on the virtual office front.

In fact, Corporate Executive Offices just landed a sizeable story in Connecticut’s The Daily Fairfield. The article by Fenella Pearson is entitled, “CEO Provides Virtual Offices to CEOs.” The article starts, “If you’re sick of commuting to an office or jetting to and from your company’s HQ, you might want to consider renting one of CEO’s fully furnished executive office suites.”

Corporate Executive Offices offers an attractive virtual office program. It includes a comprehensive office space solution that empowers businesses to work from any central location—whether that’s a home office or on the road—and still use a prestigious Greenwich address. Corporate Executive Offices offers a fully-staffed, completely supported executive office suite that its virtual office customers can come in and use when they need access to copy machines, printers and other state-of-the-art office equipment.

Corporate Executive Offices customizes virtual office packages for clients. But they all include a Greenwich address, personalized telephone answering, access to conference room and video rooms and mail service. You can use that prestigious Greenwich office address on all your business communications, including business cards, letterhead and Web sites. You can pick up your mail in person, have it mailed to you twice a week, or make a custom arrangement.

On the receptionist front, your calls are personally answered during normal business hours of 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. EST. The calls are also archived in Corporate Executive Office’s advanced phone messaging system. You can also choose to have calls forwarded to wherever you are at the time. Corporate Executive Offices also offers various support services on demand, like teleconferencing, video conferencing, word processing, desktop publishing and presentations, and courier services.

If you are looking or virtual office space in Greenwich, Corporate Executive Offices offers a strong set of amenities. The company posts a photo gallery and some audio from the CEO on its Web site, but does not post rates.

Habilis, a virtual assistant firm headquartered in New York City, is launching an office in the United Kingdom. The company previously expanded into India, making it truly global.

Only one year old, Habilis is expanding rapidly on the virtual assistant front. The company promises to help its clients “create more time” by taking care of every day tasks. Apparently, the virtual assistant company is striking a chord on an international scale.

One reason Habilis is so successful is because it has mastered media relations. Habilis has been seen on Good Morning America, the Wall Street Journal, and other popular media outlets. That drives tremendous exposure for the young company and has seemingly helped to make it what appears to be an overnight success. That said, if this virtual assistant company’s services weren’t sterling, the company wouldn’t be succeeding.

Habilis’ model works this way: Clients sign up for free, then submit tasks online, via e-mail over on the phone. The virtual assistants process the requests right away and alert you when it is done. Habilis boasts a large workforce of people with diverse talents that can handle simple or sophisticated tasks.

You can choose a dedicated virtual assistant for office help, such as e-mail handling, creating presentations, tracking your appointments and schedules, updating your Web site, finding fresh content, answering online queries and more. Your dedicated virtual assistant can also do wake up calls, get driving directions, order your lunch, dinner and groceries and other similar tasks.

For $1,000 a month you can get 160 hours of virtual assistant services. $350 a month gets you 40 hours. Alternatively, you can pay as you go. But that will cost you more. You can pay for five tasks for $10 or up to 30 tasks for $50. The pay-as-you go model is ideal for customers who are easing into virtual assistant use or that rarely need help but want to know there is a virtual assistant ready and waiting when they do.

So far as virtual assistant companies go, this one looks reputable, cost-effective and productive. If any of you have tried Habilis, give us a shout and let us know how it worked out for you.

Rent A Smile. Sounds like the perfect solution for an entrepreneur who is overworked and overstressed. But when you work with Rent A Smile you get more than a smile—you get a virtual assistant who can alleviate your administrative burdens.

Rent A Smile is ramping up for the holiday season, knowing all too well how difficult it is for entrepreneurs to manage the increased workloads that often accompany the fall months, as well as the personal demands from family and friends.

Rent A Smile virtual assistants jumping on the opportunity to help business owners across the country that are chalking out strategies, budgets and hiring plans for the coming months.

Rent A Smile has done its homework and knows that the holiday season accounts for nearly 75 percent—or even more—of annual sales volume for some businesses. And this virtual assistant company wants companies large and small looking for behind the scenes support to rely on them for everything from administrative, marketing and customer service functions.

Rent A Smile offers a laundry list of virtual assistant services, including data entry, research, uploading product catalogues on Web sites, social media management, and live chat support. Rent A Smile charges for its virtual assistant services on an hourly basis and only for the actual time taken to do the work. The company promises that each task is performed by assistants who have the right skill set and expertise for that specific task.

Rent A Smile’s vision is to make life easier by providing dedicated and specialized assistance for business tasks. There is no contract and plans are on a month-to-month basis. At a flat rate of $10 an hour, this is one of the least expensive virtual assistant companies I’ve seen. So far as reputation goes, well, the company has been featured in Inc., Business News Daily and Forbes.

You can get a free seven-day trial if you visit the virtual assistant company’s Web site. If you have questions, you can go to the site for a live Web chat with a company representative.

Virtual offices and meeting rooms go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Nobody knows this better than Davinci Virtual office solutions. That’s why the company is rolling out a free DavinciMeetingRooms.com Member Access Card Program.

“We are excited to launch our member access card program,” says Bill Grodnik, President and CEO of Davinci Virtual. “Now clients can search and book professional meeting space instantly online and take advantage of all member benefits.”

This free card give virtual office clients, road warriors and home-based entrepreneurs access to Davinci Virtual’s global network of more than 750 physical office locations and more than 2,200 meeting spaces. The best part—you get discounted rates when you use the card.

What does this mean to you? Well, if you are a card-carrying member you can reserve professionally equipped day offices, conference rooms and meeting rooms at any of Davinci’s locations using its state-of-the-art online reservation platform—DavinciMeetingRooms.com.

If you haven’t logged on to DavinciMeetingRooms.com, give it a quick test drive. You’ll discover it’s one of the quickest ways to book a meeting room—it takes as little as a couple of minutes to customize the space you want. DavinciMeetingRooms.com lets you tap into instantly available, live conference room inventory, add-on services like LCD projectors and video conferencing, catering and business support services.

Whether you want a meeting room in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago or Miami, DavinciMeetingRooms.com helps you book it in a hurry. And the new Member Access Card program helps you level the playing field and stretch your budget.

My1voice is moving to level the virtual phone playing field by adding voicemail transcription it its quiver. The virtual phone provider, which aims at small businesses who need an affordable alternative to traditional PBX systems, is working to make it easier for busy people to check their voice messages.

“Okay, I don’t really hate voicemail. I just hate checking it, especially when I have three or four messages at once, or when someone (read: my Mom) leaves me a long, drawn-out message where I have to listen to the entire thing to get to the point (sorry Mom!),” Kevin Baker, product marketing manager for My1voice, wrote in a blog post. “Or even worse, when I’m rushing between meetings with only a minute to spare, I just don’t have time to listen to even the shortest of messages.”

That’s the mindset behind the development of my1voice’s new voicemail transcription service. My1voice just rolled out the new service last week. Baker calls it a “lifesaver for those still living in a voicemail world.”

Here’s how it works: When someone leaves a voice message for you, my1voice converts the message to text and sends the message to you via e-mail or text message to your mobile phone. Essentially, you then read your voicemail. Of course, these types of services aren’t always perfect, but you can generally get a gist of the heart of the message and whether it needs an immediate callback or if it can wait until later.

In case you aren’t familiar with my1voice, the service offers you a virtual receptionist, toll free number, dial by name directory, professional greetings, and customized extensions. The idea is to make your small business look like a much larger company. You can manage your calls so you can be reached on any phone at any location—from a common number. You can screen calls, direct calls to multiple extensions and much more.

My1voice gives you a free 30-day trial of its virtual PBX service. After that, you pay $10 a month for 150 minutes a month, or $20 a month for $500 minutes a month. The best value for heavy users is $30 a month for 1,000 minutes. There’s no contract, no set up fees and you can switch your plan at any time. With the voicemail transcription service, my1voice is giving customers one more reason to try their service.

At the end of every week, I usually say the same thing: “I need longer days.” A virtual assistant company is betting many of you say the same thing—and it’s expanding its horizons to Michigan to serve more clients.

LongerDays.com, a virtual assistant company that handles client requests in house in a traditional office setting, just opened a new office location in Muskegon, Michigan.

While many virtual assistants work from a virtual office, LongerDays.com is breaking the mold with its physical office location at 318 Houston Ave. The location looks like a serviced office space, which means overhead costs are significantly lower than traditional office space. It may even be a virtual office rental where the new branch merely has the liberty to meet with clients in person, if needed.

“Michigan’s manufacturing economy was hit hard over the past few years” says LongerDays.com branch owner Chad Lawie, “It feels really good to be bringing new technology based jobs to a place that really needs them.”

Headquartered in Charleston, S.C., LongerDays.com opened the main branch of it’s virtual assistant business in October 2007. The company claims it has since provided over 30,000 hours of assistance to companies all over the world. LongerDays specializes in offering small businesses part-time help on a variety of tasks.

“Even with unemployment high, it is difficult for business owners to find employees who are willing to take a job that only offers two or three hours of work a day,” says Lawie “By combining our skills, we form a sort of super office assistant that is proficient in a variety of areas including technical projects such as graphic design, FileMaker Pro databases, or web design, to simple tasks like travel planning, answering the phone, or gift shopping online for your wonderful wife or husband.”

I’m not sure if this puts LongerDays.com at an advantage because they get foot traffic, street visibility and a place to meet with clients, or if it puts the company at a disadvantage because they have to carry overhead costs that most virtual assistants don’t have.

Will LongerDays.com have to charge higher prices to pay for its office space? LongerDays.com is offering a 25 percent discount to the first five clients who walk in from the West Michigan area. That leads me to believe that the prices may be somewhat inflated in order to pay rent. Then again, maybe it’s really a virtual office space, in which case, this is brilliant.

Virtual PBX just stuck one to the competition.

In a move to drive home its “value” message to the industry, the hosted PBX services provider just made call recording free in its standard plans. The upgrades bolsters Virtual PBX’s reputation for offering a feature-rich, economical platform.

“With the addition of call recording, Virtual PBX extends our leadership in providing clients with the most flexible and diverse set of features at the lowest cost,” says Greg Brashier, COO of Virtual PBX. “Today’s announcement gives our users the ability to improve their own customer satisfaction and ensure that high priority calls are properly managed.”

Here’s how it works: Any and every Virtual PBX extension owner has the ability to record all calls automatically or select calls to record manually. Administrators can also decide to control call recording for all users or give each user the ability to manage his or her recordings.

Virtual PBX’s built-in selective recording architecture also allows calls to be recorded for pre-selected extensions and/or departments. Other call recording features include the ability to sort recordings by date and time, length, caller ID, user name or extension number. You can also play recordings back or delete them at your convenience, or download them to a PC for future playback.

I don’t know about you, but call recording is part and parcel to my work. I can see how it would be a valuable tool for small- to mid-sized businesses in many industries. For example, when you call a customer service line, you often hear “This call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes.” With Virtual PBX’s free call recording feature, businesses can easily implement this tool to monitor customer service agents interactions with callers.

With Virtual PBX call recording, any or all calls can be recorded, saved, and played back later to help you train employees or to meet legal or other requirements. The system can be set to automatically record all calls or allow individual selection of which calls to record to respond to unique business needs.

Virtual PBX is on a run and on the rise. The free call recording feature is one of many service enhancements the company has integrated into its hosted PBX service this year. Other free features include unlimited extensions and more free usage, open VoIP peering, free conferencing, and international numbers. The company hinted that it would soon offer yet more enhancements, so stay tuned to A Better Virtual for the news as it breaks.

Paula Belyeu, owner of Integrity Virtual Solutions, won the VAccolade Business Entrepreneur Award. This is no small feat in the virtual assistant world, and congratulations are in order.

Offered by VAnetworking.com, a member-based virtual assistant networking association, the award recognizes participation in the online group, as well as professionalism in the industry. The award gives Belyeu more credibility among in the world of virtual assistants because it signals that this industry organization has deemed her “best-in-class” for 2010. The award also brings attention to virtual assistants.

Virtual assistants, also known as VAs, entrepreneurs who work from their own offices to provide professional support, services and skills to their clients via phone, fax and the Internet. The virtual assistant’s marketing mantra sounds something like this, “Work with us and we’ll reduce your stress, protect your cash flow, eliminate administrative hassles, and help you be more successful.”

A recent VAnetworking survey found that the United States has the largest number of virtual assistants. Canada comes second, followed by Australia and Europe. Virtual assistant services have taken off, especially in a down economy, because clients pay only for time spent on their projects. What’s more, clients don’t have to pay for taxes, benefits, equipment, and so on. Virtual assistants are independent contractors hired on an hourly or a monthly retainer basis.

A virtual assistant can indeed be your sort of right hand on the administrative and secretarial side of your business. Virtual assistants often specialize in a niche, such as Internet research, transcribing or social media. But virtual assistants can typically serve most general administrative needs.

For Belyeu’s part, she specializes in creative marketing solutions, database and list management, ezines/newsletters, executive assistance, Internet research, social media and online business management, and is a home-based administrative professional providing various online services to her clients. She says she started her virtual assistance career to do what she loves to do, while building a successful company.

Nextiva is working to simplify business communication. The virtual PBX and virtual office provider offers a complete digital phone system and a communications platform that aims at the small business market.

This is an award-winning virtual PBX provider, taking home top honors as the 2010 Internet Telephony Product of the Year. Nextiva also won the 2010 Best VoIP service award from whichvoip and was named the number one VoIP provider of 2010 by VoiceReports.com. So let’s take a closer look at what Nextiva can really do on the virtual PBX front.

Nextiva has two different product solutions—both come with a 30-day money back guarantee and promise a Fortune 500 image for small businesses. Nextiva Connect is a virtual office solution and Nextiva Connect 360 is a complete hosted digital phone solution.

Nextiva Connect answers all of your calls professionally and routes them to you or your staff on any phone you choose. Nextiva positions this virtual office service as ideal for entrepreneurs and small businesses that want to project a more professional image. With this virtual office solution, you can use your existing phones or PC to receive calls anywhere via an assigned local or toll-free number.

For $8.95 a month if you pay a year upfront, this virtual office solution offers you 100 minutes. The virtual office comes equipped with voicemail, call forwarding and answering rules, a dial-by-name directory, a Web portal interface, various voicemail greeting options, voicemail-to-e-mail, voicemail remote access, visual waiting indicator, and more.

Nextiva Connect 360 gives you room to grow. You need a high-speed Internet connection to leverage the benefits of this service. But at just $19.95 a month, it’s not hard to see how Nextiva Connect 360 can slash your phone bills. Nextiva says you can cut your phone bills by 80 percent or more. This solution offers you 500 inbound and 500 outbound minutes a month.

Nextiva’s customers are raving about the service. Christopher Gonzalez of Perez Gonzalez says, “As an attorney in the Internet space, I was a bit hesitant about VoIP and its reliability, but Nextiva changed my mind. Nextiva was easy to set up and its clarity is great. I’m recommending Nextiva to all my clients and colleagues.”

And Afraz Wally Mohammed says, ““It is in my opinion that Nextiva is the best thing since slice bread. I am the president of a recruiting firm with recruiters all over the U.S., they all work from home. Nextiva allows us all to have one 800 contact number with different extension, so we can maintain legitimacy and organization.”