Outsourcing Fabuluous: The Personal Brand Assistant

I've been part of an email thread at Monitor Talent about "Personal Brand Assistants," a term I never heard of until today.  Think folks who might help you manage your online presence. At first I thought, "How absurd." But this was a serious thread that demanded a serious response.

So I decided to write a  job description. Which I posted on Craig's list. It was flagged and removed as fast as you can say, "Whoa, that's not in our terms of service."

I can't believe Craig is killing new job opportunities at this moment in history. (And I'm not even gonna make the cheap  Craig's List joke that comes to mind...)   So for an economy that sorely needs new jobs, here is the  newest of all:

Personal Brand Assistant
Can you help make this brand fabulous?

Wanted: someone with the unique talents and drive to help build one of the most important brands of all, me. The brief:  in order to be me,  to do a really good job of being me, I need to twit, blog, respond, post pictures and engage with the market 27 hours a day. You see the problem. In the age of television being me was a relatively mindless thing to do. No longer. And that's where you come in. Now that I realize that I'm a brand, the matter of brand development, Search Engine Optimization, beating the competition, and looming large in the loomisphere has become of utmost importance. As a Personal Brand Assistant you'll be a key contributor to the team that is the digital me. You'll report  on parties and post  embarrassing photos.  Respond to events in technology and media in real time while minting status updates in Facebook.  You'll make my twitter followers feel special,  because they are special. You'll help insure that my 2,100 facebook friends have a friend. One that cares. Listens. Is authentic.

And because authenticity is so important in this era of social media, you'll receive ongoing training on the finer points of being me. Training that will serve you well for the rest of your life, even offline. Whatever that is.

You'll work in programming, content development and partnerships helping to insure that I not only don't forget to eat breakfast, but that I remain relevant to today's audiences and delight sponsors. Over time, you'll drive strategy monitoring the blogosphere 24/7, refreshing and refining the brand to meet the changing tastes and requirements of my followers.

Is this necessary you ask? As necessary as the air we breathe. Vital for our species development. A couple million years ago humans didn't even exist. All we had was Homo Erectus. He walked, but didn't friend. A half million years ago humans were born: Homo Sapien, man the wise. Just like your parents. Today we, you, I are beyond that. Today we are all individual brands, connected, in need of brand management and ongoing global engagement. Homo Brandus, man the brand. Only we're evolving so quickly we can't quite do it alone. Which is why I look forward to interviewing you as my personal brand assistant.

Comments

[Alana Winter]

Very good Peter. I can't wait to see someone copy this and post it for real. There are already lots of people who hire some one to write their blog posts. Every PR agency is offering to do that for their clients now - why not go full service?!?
Hey - we could start an agency and call it "Virtual Me"...

[peter hirshberg]

Alana, whats weird is that while its a joke, it isn't. The whole thread at monitor talent deal with all the real issues surrounding this. One the other hand, if we had subscriptions from only 1% of all Americans and they paid us $15.00 a month....

[Lisa]

In the old days they called this a "secretary" or a "wife." I prefer your modern twist.

[John Zeisler]

This is a great idea, and worth investigating! We're all way too busy in our lives to stop every 5 minutes to Twitter when we're taking a crap or buying a Peet's. You should post this on eLance or Odesk and see what comes back. I'll bet there are a lot of qualified posts, and trying to find help thru Craigslist is sort of like buying a Chrylser. There are better global alternatives to consider. Go for it!

[Malcolm Hobbs]

Great ideas...but somehow reminiscent of the New Yorker cartoon from 20+ years ago of a lecture hall full of empty seats with tape recorders (old cartoon) recording a lecture from a professor being played back from a tape recorder...if a blog falls in the woods...

[yossi vardi]

Peter,
I always knew you are a genius, but I would like to take your ingenious idea one step further !Isn't now the age of computing and spiritual machines. Did you forget ? Why do manually something which can be automated ? The right approach is that someone will develop a bot that will do all of it automatically . why spending human time and ingenuity on something that with the aid of AI and semantic web can be done by a bot? My bot , your bot and all our friends' bots will continuesly surf the web, post and mine things on blogs, facebook, youtube, twitter, myspace etc, will dialogue with each other , will IM each other, and save us the time and the agony associated with maintaining and promoting our virtual identity on the web. The bot which will recruit the largest number of Bot-friends will be the winner. And while they are doing it, we will be freed to go and develop a whole new way of interaction: meeting face to face, talking face to face, touching each other, hugging each other ,and having good time on the beach or where ever!.
I will call my bot " I seek Me"

[Bob Kalsey]

Craigslist would probably have been cool with this posting, Peter, if you'd left out the term "Homo erectus." They probably got the wrong idea.

[peter hirshberg]

Yossi...i sure hope you own the iseekme url!

And you are absolutely right. The only possible future for our species is to evolve a bot and get on with things in an efficient manner.

Which is why i was so excited to learn that watson and crick found that human cells have not only DNA and RNA but also APIs. And what is so heartening is that mankind is just about to decode the human API for the first time ever. Few people realize that craig venter has been sailing the world trying to understand and code to it for years. And once the human API is wired to facebook and twitter and the iphone then we can let some damn bodily organ spend all day friending and responding to twits and trying to monetize itself while metabolizing glycogen. And we can get on with mankind's greater purpose: attending conferences.

see you at kinnernet!

warm regards
-peter

[Lisa Romano]

There's been a lot of talk about this lately in certain circles so it's not that far off. So what I want to know is what happens to the "authenticity" that social media proclaims is of the utmost importance? Will there be a time when the reaction will be the same as when you meet a celebrity - they look nothing like their pictures and are not nearly as articulate?! And when do we get a break to just be ourselves?

[peter hirshberg]

Lisa,

I think that's the problem, and why i found this a bit absurd in the first place.

Taken to extreme social media lets us be less ourselves and more a brand representation of ourselves that must satisfy its followers as brands do. The joke about Homo Brandus, man the brand, is that we're evolving into something that gives us a lot less time just to be. And if we do spend time just being we aren't tending to our public lives. i think its one of the essential things that's emerging about the new media environment. A lot of adults i know who are deep into it take a deep dive and then retreat for lack of time and then may take a dive again.
To turn it into a pun, where's our Walden Pond to go twit in solitude?

There is a balance between getting the serendipitous and delightful value from face book and being a slave to it. Of course , mankind has had the same issue with booze for thousands of years!

It would be pretty funny if just as brands are becoming more authentic, people have to become more like manufactured brands!

And yes, the funny job description i wrote is only about 2 degrees off from a lot of real job descriptions.
Write a comment...

[Paul Pruneau]

Well this is interesting.
What exactly are the qualifications of a brand assistant?

Do they have to have depth and breath of experience in creating a formal brand positioning for you that will be the foundation for defining the unique value that you offer your friends, associates, business prospects and others?

Do they have to have have a portfolio of awards from an industry resource validating their experience and fluency in creating original content with the ability and expertise to conceive, develop and produce blog posts, integrate multi-media, optimize SEO, shoot/cut/edit videos, assemble compelling images, animation, illustration, and everything else that the current environment suggests as necessary to promote brand YOU (Thank you Tom Peters)?

And what are the KPI’s for this position?
Number of posts that make a high ranking in digg?
Percentage of lift in your number of friends on FB?
Frequency of retweets to the tusnami of tweets from Alltop and others?

Will there be adequate compensation incentives for building your brand value and setting you up for a liquidity event?
An M&A
An IPO?

Will Craig’s list be the most effective place to find qualified candidates?

So much to consider.
Time may be our guide.

[Peg Samuel]

Peter, as always, you crack me up! The job description is priceless. I know a few "public" figures that do this, but unsuccessfully b/c the intern or whomever they have posting isn't communicating back to people intelligently thus making it a one way "look at me". Twittering or Facebooking and not interacting with others, is like going to a party walking around and just talking about yourself then leaving...everyone says, "now who was that self absorbed person?"

[Simon Firth]

Peter -- I had the same thought about people who 'ghost twitter.' See my job description here: http://simonfirth.wordpress.com/2009/03/27/a-growth-market-for-writers-celebrity-ghosttweeter/

[Mel Kleiman]

Peter I am in the slow group since I don't read a lot of blogs. But I will tell you that many of the best speakers out there have someone who does exactly what you are talking about and if they didn't once they ready your blog they would go out and try and find someone to manage their on line presents.

[Buy Tamiflu]

Actually It would be a perfect way out for many people!

[mbt shoes]

Thank you ! You did a good post !
MBTIt turns out to be so popular to everyone not only due to it’s best quality,but also it can provide you more choices before you buy itmbt shoes.MBT hope to help people all over the world have a more healthy, active and happy life.

[viagra for women]

This is fantastic and a work of a genius...well it goes to show that humans are always breaking barriers and I guess the only limit is Really your IMAGINATION...

[coach bags]

Peter I am in the slow group since I don't read a lot of blogs

[oakley]

In the old days they called this a "secretary" or a "wife." I prefer your modern twist.

[MS Office 2007 Ultimate]

it is ok

[cheap laptops canada]

Over time, you'll drive strategy monitoring the blogosphere 24/7, refreshing and refining the brand to meet the changing tastes and requirements of my followers.

[coach bags]

All that changed when I needed answers to questions about emerging Solaris technologies (SMF, ZFS, COMSTAR, etc.) that were too new to get help from others.

[chanel bags]

I've now moved out of the exploratory era and into the sustained monitoring era with DTrace.

[prada bags]

Not only do I want to run DTrace scripts interactively, not only do I want to run them periodically via some management agent, rather I want to run persistent traces.

[gucci bags]

Is the tracing going to suck up resources or let buffers grow incrementally over days or weeks until the trace impacts the running environment?