According to a recent Accenture Interactive survey, 50 percent of marketers now have more content than they can effectively manage.

Mark Schaefer predicted it two years ago–content shock is officially upon us now, folks.

And, that means a slew of challenges for brands on the strategy side.

But today, I want to talk a little about what that means for brands on the OPERATIONAL side of things.

Because I think it means we’ll see a new–and very hot–new job title in late 2016 and beyond: The content librarian.

A new job for a new problem: Organizing, labeling, and managing content.

Think about the situation many brands are facing right now–does this sound familiar?

• You create anywhere between 5-10 pieces of new social/online content per week
• You store photos you use for social content in a variety of spots from your shared drive to your computer to various Dropbox accounts
• You have vendors who own and store video content for your brand
• You have other vendors/software tools that house employee-advocacy-based content

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Point is: Your content in EVERYWHERE.

Spread out across different internal drives and files; Dropbox and Google Drive accounts; and vendors.

That’s a tough situation.

And the worst part: No one is paying attention to this right now.

Why? Because it’s really no one’s job. And, since teams are spread so thin now anyway, they have little time to spend on content organization and management.

Enter the content librarian.

The job: Essentially to file, label and organize your content.

To make sure it’s centrally located, in a spot where multiple employees and teams can access it.

To make sure it’s labeled correctly, so employees can find content easily.

And, to make sure all content is organized effectively.

Now, the other problem will most likely be this: Who’s going to do this job?

Better yet: Who’s actually qualified to do this job?

Two differently questions–but two BIG questions.

First–who’s going to do this job? Who knows. I do know that it won’t be the sexiest job in the world, so convincing existing PR/social folks to take this on might be tough. You’re not going to see a lot of volunteers.

Second–who’s qualified to do this job? Does it really require a refined skill set? I probably lean toward “no.” It’s widely known and accepted that many PRs are “Type A” and hyper-organized. So, taking on a job to organize a mountain of content won’t exactly be foreign. But, I can’t help but wonder if there are some finer details to this job. Some nuances that might only be relevant to a “content librarian.” Long way of saying: I don’t know the answer to this question either (how’s that for honesty?).

The job really doesn’t even exist yet–but when it does start popping up, it’ll be interesting to see who starts applying for these kinds of jobs, and what the requirements are.

photo credit: In the Library via photopin (license)
Until then, happy content-ing!