Personal Content Assistant - An Idea Whose Time Has Come

The ubiquitous Gary Vaynerchuk has just created a new position, and I think, provided the germ for a dandy new job in corporate communications: Personal Content Assistant.

Gary, who has pivoted from using Internet marketing to grow a liquor business into being a fulltime digital marketing consultant, has redeployed one of his people to join him at various speaking events and check in with him at other times to capture content that Gary wants to share with his substantial audience. He broke the news through an interview with Forbes, and then the story picked up steam when Ford social media chief Scott Monty critiqued it. Gary then posted a quick video response about it, which is worth watching:



This is one of those slap-on-the-side-of-the-head, why-didn't-I-think-of-that ideas. The single biggest roadblock nearly everyone faces in content marketing is getting ideas and thoughts out of their heads and onto the Internet. So why not create a staff position to handle the production process of capturing, finalizing and uploading the content to the net, and keeping it curated and fresh?

Before you scoff and say -- who needs more mindless content on the Internet -- I say wait! This idea is all about improving quality, not increasing quantity. You really can't create too much content that is educational, informative and entertaining for your audience. Even if you literally used every idea you had, you could spend years reproducing those ideas in different forms in social media (for instance, writing a book about social marketing, doing a video and podcast about the same subject, tweeting about it, pinning about it, blogging about it. And so on...).

So this gets us back to roadblocks - what stops most people who want to do content marketing is getting the content produced. Even super-productive people like GaryVee experience this, so this is not an affliction of the shiftless.

Gary's idea goes a long way toward solving that problem - and that's just the germ of the idea. He hasn't really explained yet how he see such a job working, for him or other people. And I'd be willing to bet that others have thought of this idea too -- outsourcing content creation through ghostwriting is alive and well, so why not bring the person in-house? I'd love to hear from other people who know of in-house Personal Content Assistants or similar positions.

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Blogging note: I'm really excited by this idea and have ideas for more posts, but I decided in the name of speed to get this first post out, then follow up with others, rather than my typical approach of trying to cover a topic in one blog post. As GaryVee says in his video, he's tripling down on content. I agree, and one way to do that is to break one longer post into 3 posts. Who wants to read anything longer anyway?