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?

Consuming Media: A Grammatical Fight I'm Going to Lose

I woke up one day recently to the realization that the word "consume" is now the catchall term for the experience of interacting with various forms of media. I'm usually tracking these things, but in this case, it appears to have happened, at least figuratively, overnight.

No one "consumes" TV. You watch TV. Whether on a flat-screen HD TV or on a smartphone.

No one consumes a book. You read it, whether in physical or electronic form. Same with newspapers, web sites, magazines and billboards.

You listen to the radio, to iTunes, to your iPod, Pandora and Spotify. Not to mention live music, lectures and speeches.

None of this changed with the invention and popularization of the Internet. And yet... we are now said to be "consuming media," as in these simple examples pulled from the web:

• How Kids Consume Media: Business Insider
• Pew conducts a periodic "Media Consumption Survey"
• Mashable: "3 News Ways to Create and Consume Media"

In fact, it appears that "consume media" and "media consumption" are the most popular and obvious forms of this usage. We have not yet (thankfully) made the transition to "consuming" types of media, as in my examples above, so that "consume" replaces those fine words that refer to the senses we use to experience various forms of communication.

"Consume" is a great word but it means something far afield from reading, watching or listening, all acts that leave the thing we are reading, watching or listening to intact. The first three dictionary definitions of "consume" lay out the problem:

1. to destroy or expend by use; use up. 2. to eat or drink up; devour. 3. to destroy, as by decomposition or burning

Consumption is a transformative act. At most, the final definition offered by dictionary.com hints at the way this word has been co-opted: "to absorb; engross." Yes, when I am at a Springsteen concert I am absorbed in it and engrossed by it. But I have not consumed the sounds or sights. They remain intact for others to enjoy (and bootleg).

And yet... this usage appears to have taken hold. Some of the links above are already a couple of years old.

"Consume media" seems to have slid into the lexicon as a sort of high-tech phrase for experiencing all media in general, not one type of media in particular. Further, I can't think of another phrase that it is displacing, so what we have here is a "neologism" - one of my favorite words. As dictionary.com will tell you, that's "a new word, meaning, usage, or phrase." BTW, "neologism" is pronounced nee-OL-uh-jiz-uhm. You're welcome.

Why I Dumped My Vanity URL and Switched to Gmail

Spam.

That's the short answer to why I have stopped actively using my former primary email address, the nifty jon@j*ngreer.com (the * stands for an 'o'). After several years of relatively quiet and manageable spam, it took off in the past year. That email address is now receiving more than 1,000 spams for every legit email that comes through. The spam filters can't even come close to keeping up.

Instead, I'm now using my gmail address as my primary email address, and intend to do so even as I build my consulting practice at www.jgcllc.biz.

This isn't all about spam, however. It's also about making my email easier to share and remember. I now believe that an email address with a commonly known domain, such as gmail, is a business and personal benefit.

Fewer custom characters means it's more likely that you'll get my email address right the first time. As someone who spells his name Jon Without the H and had that in both parts of my former email address, I've had to say that phrase thousands of times and always worry that the person still didn't catch it. The Internet is unforgiving in that sense, so anything one can do to make it easier for the user is worth doing.

For me, this represents a 180-degree reversal of my stance on primary email addresses. Obviously, I could have stayed with an address using @comcast or @yahoo years ago, but I shunned those in favor of a custom URL. From a marketing and positioning standpoint, my message was intended to be this: even though I'm an independent consultant, I'm sophisticated enough to have my own URL. And that was intended to be in contrast to freelancers and part-timers who stayed with provider-supplied emails.

Now that I've made this change, I've noticed that many of my consulting colleagues still have custom URLs, so I wonder: Is this still working for you from a marketing standpoint? And my follow-up: Have you been attacked by the spammers, and if not, how have you dodged that bullet?

Pinterest Bursts Onto the Scene

Pinterest has come out of nowhere to be the hot new story in social media.

For the uninitiated, Pinterest is a dandy way to share images you like on the web. You just download their little "Pin It" button and then select images you like, pinning them to "boards" on your Pinterest page.

What has made Pinterest particularly pin-teresting is that women 25-34 are the most active users of the site. It has quickly become a hub for fashion, beauty and housewares, and savvy brands have already launched Pinterest pages to get into the conversation.

And predictably, there is some blowback. Pinterest essentially lives off the images uploaded to the web by others, so the big question is: is Pinterest trying to build a business solely on someone else's intellectual property? On the other hand, so much of the web is about linking and sharing, where's the harm to any individual copyright holder of an image being shown on Pinterest?

We'll be discussing the way brands can capitalize on Pinterest on a Bulldog Reporter PR University webinar, and some of the possible speed bumps, on April 20.

Financial Services Firms Finally Making the Move Into Social Media Marketing

Banks, brokerages and other conservative financial services industry firms have been very, very slow to adopt social media marketing practices -- and for good reason.

The regulatory environment for financial services firms that sell their services to individuals and businesses is very strict, particularly around the kind of "loose talk" that is so common in social media. The companies employ very highly paid "compliance" officers, using trained and experienced corporate lawyers, whose job it is to say "no" to most of the kinds of marketing that unregulated companies use on a daily basis.

But to ignore social media marketing is to stay in the buggy-whip era when everyone else is moving to gas-powered cars.

How to get around the problem of strict regulation? One solid strategy is for financial services companies to create a library of approved content that staff members can tweet or blog or post on Facebook. Another is to use third-party software from players like Hearsay and SocialVolt that is built to allow Compliance to review social media posts before they go out. Firms such as Northwestern Mutual and Morgan Stanley are starting to test these sorts of initiatives.

But make no mistake -- this is still a difficult industry to move in to the social media. Scary example: it's not okay for a Facebook user to "like" a post by an investment adviser, as it constitutes illegal word-of-mouth marketing. I get the regulation, but sheesh, something is going to have to change, since social media isn't going away.

 

The Tech IPO Window Finally Reopens - Woot Woot!

Today's Wall Street Journal article about the Silicon Valley start-ups readying themselves to go public signals the reopening -- finally! -- of the IPO "window." It' about time! This has been the longest drought I've experienced since I got to the Valley in 1981, and it was historic by any measure.

The notion of a "window" is that there are good times and bad times to take a company public. It mainly has to do with the receptivity of capital markets investors to new issues by unproven companies. When they are in a buying mood, the window is said to be open, and vice versa.

The window has been all-but closed since about 2002 (it never slams shut, it just gets so small that only the strongest companies can get through, such as Google and more recently, LinkedIn). There was good reason, too -- 2002 was when the dying embers of Internet bubble finally went out, and lots of people were feeling burned and in no mood to buy shares of unproven, unprofitable web 1.0 companies (furniture.com anyone?).

Now, though, memories have faded, the appetite for new issues has returned and a handful of companies such as Splunk, Infoblox, Workday and ServiceNow are getting ready to test the waters.

If this first batch is successful in going public, you can be sure that many more companies will file in a rush to take advantage.

 

Will Apple Ever Create Another "Insanely Great" Product?

Amid all the tributes, hosannas and whatnot about Steve Jobs stepping down as CEO of Apple, this simple fact seems to have gotten lost: the only time Apple has developed and released hit products has been when Steve Jobs has been CEO.

Another thing: for now, Steve Jobs isn't going anywhere. He's still alive, as far as we know he is still involved in the company to the best of his abilities and energies, and I would guess that the last thing he will give up is offering his opinions and leadership regarding new product development.

But the sad fact is that Steve is likely very ill and may not be with us much longer. And then Apple will have to attempt to do something it has never successfully done: create and market hit technology products without Steve Jobs' guidance.

From the Apple II in the 1970s to the iPad in 2010, everything great that has come out of Apple has been shepherded to the market by Steve Jobs. Apple's track record after Steve was pushed out of the company by John Sculley in 1985 until his return as CEO in 1997? Zero hit products, death spiral, near bankruptcy.

Another fact to consider: Sculley was the hottest exec in the country when he took over Apple and has at least as much mojo as Tim Cook. Yet he couldn't deliver. In Cook's favor, of course, is that he has been deeply involved in Apple for years, unlike Sculley, who had no tech industry experience.

Meanwhile, during his exile Jobs founded Next Computer, which merely created the operating system that now powers the Mac, and built Pixar into the moviemaking powerhouse it is today.

Conclusion: Steve Jobs is a unique technology industry talent, and Apple has no track record producing hits without him. So we'll see how they do as the future unfolds.