Neville Hobson does an excellent job outlining the way paper.li works and what it can mean for communications:
…the newspapers you create with Paper.li aren’t about the people in your community who tweet but rather what they link to. I was explaining it to a friend yesterday when I saw that he clearly couldn’t see the remotest value in something like this: he thought it was about publishing people’s tweets. Once he understood that it wasn’t that, he said he could see the potential usefulness of such a tool.
…Other aspects of the newspaper make it compelling, too. Sharing, for instance. It’s all very well to publish your newspaper but what about telling people about it? Paper.li offers a great way to do that – tweet it. What I especially like about this is that Paper.li auto-tweets via your Twitter account once a new edition is published, as this example tweet shows, about once a day.
…You can also get notified by email whenever a new edition of your paper is published.
If you prefer, you can see the content in list form rather than as a newspaper, which some people prefer. Hovering your mouse over the name of someone who tweeted produces a little pop-up with the actual tweet concerned, the link and any hashtags that tweeter used.
The illustration to the left is a snapshot I took of the paper created by Mark Lee. It provides links to material that his UK Tax and Accountants Twitter list have created. Now think further. Say for example you have a portfolio of clients that are in construction. There’s a paper.li for them. You could distribute this to them via an email blast or suggest they subscribe themselves.
The main weakness of paper.li is that it is entirely dependent upon your being able to find or create a community of Twitter users that are linking to a particular topic area and which provide valuable links that are worth distributing. That may not be as easy as it sounds. I ran a paper.li search on ‘hotels’ and and came up with a bunch of advertorial plus one that seemed to be all over the map. On the other hand, searching on ‘oilspill’ provided plenty of content related to recent oil spill events. An obvious use case is something like the UK Budget or links to conference related material.
Paper.li’s second main weakness is its reliance on Twitter users. Mark has worked assiduously at creating a Twitter list of UK Tax Accountants but he only comes up with 342 out of how many thousands of practitioners? It is a tiny slice of the potential population. You can argue this is an advanced group and therefore the stuff you’ll likely see is state of the art. Maybe yes and maybe no.
Used carefully, this could provide you with a valuable way to demonstrate that you are not only interested in clients’ business topics but are prepared to curate information that helps them. If you can’t find the inspiration to write a blog then this might be the next best thing.
If you need help figuring this out then please feel free to contact me: dahowlett [at] gmail [dot] com.
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