Getting Stuff Out the Door

No matter how much content you produce and post, I'd be willing to bet that you think you ought to be doing more. And if your job responsibilities include marketing, I'd double-down on my bet.

Contributing interesting and valuable content to the worldwide conversation is easy to do – there’s virtually no barrier to publishing – but it does take time and focus. And that’s always in short supply.

For instance, I have an e-book idea in the works about brand journalism, and another idea to start posting Google+ video interviews with content marketers. Great ideas, but they haven’t seen the light of day yet.

What’s on your desk that you can’t get finished?

Gary Vaynerchuk, the hyperactive social media marketer, has figured out one way around the roadblocks. He has assigned one of his employees to be his Content Assistant, to help Gary capture more of his ideas and turn them into finished content. I think this is a brilliant idea and a likely new corporate communications job. I liked it so much I blogged about it in my last post (thanks for the inspiration, Gary!).

Don’t despair if you don't have a Content Assistant following you around. Here are some tips for getting more content posted:

• Break it up into smaller chunks. You don’t need to write a novel or even a 1,000-word post. Shorter is better anyway.
• Share visuals. No writing involved.
• Trawl Twitter and LinkedIn and other social media for interesting links you can share. Even better, write a one-sentence intro to the link when you re-post it. Again, shorter is better.

Working with people to achieve their content marketing objectives is what we do at JGC, so if you’d like some help navigating the roadblocks, give us a shout at contact@jgcllc.biz.

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?