Why you should jump on the Paper.li bandwagon

A few weeks ago (or was it days? I’ve lost all track of time) I started seeing a lot of BFF updates. “That’s nice,” I thought. I can’t really tell who I tweet with, so having an automated application which probably is sucking all of my info from my Twitter account out into a sales list or something is awesome. But I digress.

Around the same time, I started seeing a lot of these updates about Twitter newspapers. And then I started seeing these paper.li URLs popping up everywhere.

Now, I like to think that I’m pretty good about staying up on the new developments going on in my little sphere of the universe. I mean, staying up on Facebook’s changes of heart is a full time job just on its own, but I do okay with it. Even so, I have been so swamped that I just did not have time to check out this paper.li thing. Until tonight. So, if you are like me and have been itching to figure the whole thing out, let me save you some time. I’ll even give you some analysis!

What is it?

I thought that the whole concept was going to be pretty complicated because when I looked at some of the newspapers, it looked confusing to me. I couldn’t figure out what tied the stories together in some of them. I looked at the “#custserv daily newspaper” and saw that there were various contributors, but I had no idea how that was all worked out.

Once you sign in to paper.li it all becomes pretty clear – and pretty self-explanatory (in a way). You type in either a username, a tag, or a Twitter list, and Paper.li grabs contributions from whatever you set up. So, the #custserv newspaper probably pulls everything with that tag every day. Guy Kawasaki has a Holy Kaw paper that gathers a lot of the links he shares into one central location.

So What?

I know. I kind of thought the same thing at first. Great, so, anyone who tags “worthreading” will appear in the daily “paper.” Well, actually, the ramifications of paper.li could have huge implications for marketing if used correctly.

– Imagine creating a daily “newspaper” based on #yourcompany or #yourproduct. Every day you could print out your daily paper.li newspaper and show your client, your C-level executive, whomever, what the daily spin is on Twitter regarding your company. The next day, you can see if you’ve altered the conversation. Same thing for competitors.

– Let’s say your company manufacturers shoes. You create a paper that is based around all of the links you collect every day about shoes and shoe-related topics. Every day you tweet out useful information. You can also link to your newspaper from a blog or from Facebook or LinkedIn, like this –> http://paper.li/bearbull/blogroll

– If you’re a marketer, you could create a newspaper for #SM or #marketing and have a newspaper, literally, every day with up-to-date links about what people are talking about.

Really, this could become quite a powerful tool in your business or marketing toolbox.

So, check out paper.li. Let this application suck out the information from your Twitter account. At least you can do something truly useful with it. Not that there is anything wrong with the BFF thing. It’s just…well…

I’ve said my piece.