Monday, November 26, 2012

Is Your Blog Ready for 2013?


We have some fun and really exciting news! Paper.li is the official sponsor this December for Mack Collier’s #BlogChat  -- and we can’t wait!

With 2012 coming to an end and the new year knocking at the door, we thought it would be fun to end off the year, together, with a “group activity” - a Tweetchat!

Join us this December on Sunday evenings, 8:00pm CST, to share your ideas, tips and best practices around personal and professional blogging. The #Blogchat community is really helpful and full of great tips and advice. You're guaranteed to meet a lot of really great folks there. The First chat is December 2nd, so save the date!

“Why #Blogchat”?

The Paper.li community is comprised of all kinds of bloggers; experienced bloggers, beginning bloggers and “would like to be” bloggers! Blogging is one of the most popular tactics deployed by marketers today to reach and engage audiences - who can’t use more tips, strategies and best practices moving into the new year?!

Never attended a Tweetchat? No problem. Here's a post I wrote covering the essentials. If it's your first time feel free to just start off by joining us and "listening".  There's a lot of great information to soak up!

Mack has put together a really fun month, and it’s a great fit for Paper.li publishers, too!

  • December 2nd - Content curation in the workplace; how companies, organizations and small businesses can curate relevant content for its employees and stakeholders, especially blog content.  
  • December 9th - Email + Blogging: how you can use email newsletters, campaigns, blog commenting and other various ways to drive one-to-one interactions with your readers.
  • December 16th - Creating your blog plan for 2013: how to put together a strategy to help you accomplish what you want in 2013!
  • December 23rd - Fa-la-la Content: sharing and curating Christmas content for personal or professional use. 
  • December 30th - OPEN MIC: there's no topic set and this is a great chance to ask any blogging questions you have and get some great advice!

The team and I can't wait to get the month rolling. You'll hear more from me leading up to the first chat, but until then, you can find me @kdhungerford.  Mack's handle is @MackCollier - so be sure to follow him now!

We'd like to thank Mack for the opportunity to sponsor #Blogchat and we can't wait to see you all joining in on December 2nd!

Image credit

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Look What's New! Curated Email Newsletters

We're really excited to share some enhancements and new features that will better support your email marketing activities.

According to the 2012 MarketingSherpa Lead Generation Benchmark Report, email marketing is the most effective lead generation tactic used by marketers -- so we're truly excited to introduce the new Paper.li Email Newsletter Service, along with a few other cool bells and whistles, to you today.

Here's what's new!

Brand new features:
  • Email newsletters - activate the Email Notification Service and automatically send the entire front page of your paper’s content, as revised by you, directly to your subscribers’ inbox for each new edition. 
  • HTML export - easily export the HTML for your newsletter and send it your subscribers directly through third-party email list services such as Aweber, MailChimp and VerticalRepsonse... just to name a few.
Both of these features are available to Pro users.

Other great enhancements:

CSV import

We enhanced the email invitation feature to include comma-separated-value (.csv.) files. Now you can import up to 10,000 contacts per file and we’ll send out the invitations for you.

Updated look-and-feel

Both for the original email notification and the email newsletter are sporting a new, updated look-and-feel to compliment the new paper-view launched last month. They even carry the custom color accents from your paper.

Responsive email design

Regardless of device, your subscribers will have no trouble viewing your paper's email notifications. Let us know how it's working for them!

As always we count on your feedback to keep up moving in the right direction. Tweet us, or leave a comment here and let us know how the new features and enhancements are working for you.

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Paper.li: 2012 Monaco Media Forum Partner

The 7th annual Monaco Media Forum is taking place November 14 -16 and we're honored to be invited back to this prestigious event, produced by PublicisLive, for the third year running as an official media partner!

This invitation only forum, chaired by HRH Prince Albert II of Monaco, brings together thought leaders and executives of new-and-old media from both sides of the Atlantic for discussions about the future of online, broadcast and print communications.

This year's theme, "Four Screens", will strongly emphasize the opportunities in content consumption and distribution for the explosive markets of tablets and television. Learn more about the Monaco Media Forum and why "four screens" in this short video clip from Beet TV's Spencer Reiss.

During the two and a half day forum, the official MMF paper will update four times daily. Here's how you can keep up with MMF 2012 news:
  • Subscribe to the Leading the Digital Revolution Paper.li to receive fresh, curated event news delivered daily to your inbox
  • Bookmark and visit the "MMF Daily" news page on the Monaco Media Forum's website
  • Follow @MoMF12 on Twitter
  • Participate and contribute to the paper by tweeting with tag #MoMF12
We're looking forward to delivering you, and Monaco Media Forum participants, the most relevant event news from across the web. Enjoy!

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

New Paper.li Color and Font Schemes

Earlier this month we launched a new paper view that boasted a responsive design and a fresh new look and feel. Your response to the Paper.li makeover was overwhelmingly positive. Thank you to everyone who sent us feedback.

One of the most commented upon aspects of design was the choice of color and font. Most of you loved it, but some of you didn't; the orange accent color and the font type were too specific to match personal tastes, styles or branding efforts.

Branding is important and we understand that. We also understand that one of the many ways you use Paper.li is as an additional channel to promote your business. So we've implemented additional color and font schemes to support your marketing needs.

Custom Color Scheme
  • six "1-click" color suggestions for easy customization 
  • color selector that covers all options, plus the ability to enter your own color code 

Custom Font Scheme
  • twelve awesome fonts to modify your Title, Article Title or Article Text 
  • six font sizes to compliment your new font type

We're excited to hear how the new color and font schemes work for you, so please be sure to Tweet us your paper once you have customized it so we can share it.

Again, thank you to everyone who took the time to send us comments. Rant or rave, we value your feedback.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Paper.li: New Responsive Design Paper View


You asked for it, so we coded it! Today we're excited to announce the deployment of the new Paper.li "responsive design" paper view.

Back in the good old days designing a user interface for a website was a whole lot easier. Consumption came in just a couple of flavors, desktop computer or laptop, and development teams only had one or two screen sizes to think about.

Today end-users, designers and developers alike face the excitement and challenges of accessing favorite sites and services over multiple screens; desktop, tablets, smart-phones, and subnotebooks to name a few. Accommodating them all is no trivial task.

So in order to scale across screens we've implemented a new paper view based on Twitter's Bootstrap framework and CSS media queries. The framework enables us to deliver you a tailored experience that best fits the device, resizing and reorganizing content elements for the specific platform on which it is being viewed. It also allows our development resources to focus more on features and less on multiscreen device maintenance.

The new design delivers an all-around better experience for everyone; publishers are assured that their papers can be read across all devices and readers aren't bothered any more with installing apps!

We also implemented a few other improvements while we were coding:
  • Cleaner, updated paper look and feel
  • More prominent positioning for the publisher's profile on the front page
  • Complete editorial control from the front page
  • More articles within each topic section
To see how responsive design works, open a browser window and go to your favorite Paper.li. Grab the corner of your browser window and drag the screen left and right to make the window smaller or larger. Check out what happens!

Tweet us or leave a comment here and let us know how the responsive design is working for you. As always, we look forward to hearing from you.

Monday, September 24, 2012

5 Ways Marketers Can Use Paper.li For Brand Monitoring


As a content marketer, one of your primary concerns is very likely how to maintain a steady flow of relevant and compelling content, both original and curated, that will "wow" your community and keep them engaged and informed.

Once you've achieved that goal, the next concern may be which tools you  and your team can use to monitor as well as keep other colleagues and departments informed about the content being produced and shared by both your company and the community... and for a reasonable price.

The good news is that today content marketing tactics don't need to cost you an arm and a leg and neither do monitoring services. Some of the largest names in social media as well as brands are mashing up services and tools, including free ones, alongside paid services.

As a marketer you may be using Paper.li already as an inbound marketing tactic to publish a digital newsletter and attract the right audience through curated content. However Paper.li is also an inexpensive and effective solution for monitoring and keeping an overview of who's blogging and sharing content around your brand, service, market or industry.

Below are five examples of how marketing teams are using Paper.li to monitor. See where Paper.li fits in to your organization.

Tip: before getting started, brainstorm with your marketing and social media colleagues first to see how your organization can best leverage Paper.li internally. Use the examples below as references during your discussion.


Communications and PR

Nothing is more important to a PR team than being in the know. Create your PR and communications team a paper, or a suite of industry papers, to provide an overview of events and activities across the web.

Examples: The List.ly daily, by List.ly,

Here’s how: 
  • For a thought leadership paper, ask your PR team to create Twitter lists for industry experts, events, news sources and thought leaders. Add those to your content sources. Apply filters to these lists to fine-tune
  • For an event paper, use #tags and keywords
  • Share the URL with PR team members
  • Curated content establishes through leadership. Once your papers are fine-tuned, promote them on Twitter and Linkedin
Tip: Upgrade to Pro to control your advertisements and branding.

Brand and Product Managers

User input to product and services is key to keeping the edge. Curated content is a great way to provide product teams and brand managers a well-balanced perspective on what’s being said and felt by the user community.

Product managers can benefit by seeing how a new feature or product is being received and who their power users are.

Brand Managers can keep the pulse on who the brand experts, influencers and evangelists are.

Example: The SAP - Sharepoint News daily, by SAP-Microsoft Unite

Here’s how:
  • For brand managers, create a daily paper using brand keywords and hashtags, and include the competition
  • For product managers, create a weekly paper using service or product keywords and hashtags and include the competition
  • Edit your paper daily, promoting key content to the Headlines section. Transparency is key, so don't delete negative feedback 
  • Embed a paper on internal wikis or product pages

Internal Sales Team

Arm your sales colleagues with a weekly round-up of product-related news and reviews that they can use as a quick reference as an industry overview

The DreamForce Daily #DF12 by InsideView

Here’s how:
  • Curate a weekly paper including industry, market, product, event or conference-related keywords and #tags. Include your @usertimeline and set a filter for specific keywords
  • Set up a list on Twitter with your competitors @handles. Add that list to your paper and filter for specific keywords
  • Invite your team to subscribe to your paper
  • Embed the paper on internal wikis or a webpage

B2B Sales Team

Go one step further and provide your B2B sales team a tool that they can use as a point of reference for partners and prospective clients.

Example: #B2B Daily Social Selling Tips, by SocialSellingU

Here’s how: 
  • Curate a weekly paper including industry, market, product, event or conference-related keywords 
  • Add your own @username. If you use a specific keyword in tweets to indicate product posts or press releases, set a filter for those terms so that those specific tweets are picked up
  • Add your division or departments product blog RSS
  • Invite your partners or customers to subscribe to your paper
  • Embed your paper on your division's website or product blog, promote it automatically via Twitter

Tip: Upgrade to Paper.li Pro and customize your ad units; promote an upcoming event or webinar, direct traffic to a product page or website, display a product video.

Customer Service 

50% of requests that come into help desks are information requests. Curate original and community generated how-tos and tutorials to be shared with your user community. It will also help educate your support team about your products, customers and the industry or market in which you operate.

Example: The IBM System x Help weekly, by IBMsysxhelp
Here’s how: 
  • Create a weekly paper and set it to publish Monday mornings.  
  • Create Twitter, Youtube and FB content streams with #tags for your brand or company 
  • Use the Publish-it bookmarket to populate your in-house content created to share with your community. 
  • Embed your paper on your helpdesk, website or blog. Promote it daily via Twitter, share it with your community on blogs or forums

Tip: Upgrade to Paper.li Pro and upload customized banners and advertising to drive traffic back to your company site or product pages.

Drop me a line with your paper url and let me know how you are using Paper.li as content marketing tactic or monitoring tool.

Try pairing Paper.li with another free service like SocialMention or a low cost service such as SproutSocial to gauge user or community sentiment. I use all three at Paper.li and find they work like a charm.

For further tips and tricks on fine-tuning your paper visit the Paper.li Quick Start Guide or Tweet us. The team always enjoys hearing from you.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

The Paper.li Community: Sharing and Inspiring

Each week we feature interviews and guest posts by the experts in the Paper.li community - you! If you haven't stopped by the Paper.li Community Blog lately, check it out. You'll love what you read!

From insights to practical tips, how-tos to don't dos, Paper.li publishers are sharing stories that inspire, and best practices that get results.

Hot off the press this week: "Why Decision-makers Need to ‘Get’ Twitter".

"Twitter is one of most important platforms for business and learning", says Nigel Cameron, strategic adviser, futurist, academic, speaker and writer. But he believes that not enough CEOs, CIOs and political leaders get its potential.

In our latest Community Blog interview Nigel explains how he gains much of his information and knowledge from curated tweets and urges leaders from all section of society to do the same.

“An hour on Twitter leaves me much better informed than a day spent working my way through standard online outlets would,” he says.

Read Nigel's interview on the Community Blog and stay tuned for our upcoming interview with Professor Shivaram Malavalli, Managing Director of the eHealth Technology Incubator, as we talk success factors for entrepreneurs!

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Make a Splash With Paper.li Pro!


You spoke, we listened and last month we launched Paper.li Pro, the first phase of our Paper.li premium services. We are really excited about the amount of publishers who have taken the plunge, like the team at Zein Marketing, and upgraded papers to Pro. Thank you community!

We received hundreds of product feature requests from you over the past months and regardless of industry, or the size of the company, the message was clear: publishers wanted affordable, no hassle features that would amplify content curation efforts and support content marketing efforts.

So we took three features that unanimously surfaced across all conversations
  • control over advertising
  • extended visual branding
  • ability to review before publishing
and launched our pay-per-paper service for $9.00 USD monthly. We're having a blast discovering new Pro papers and thought we would share a few with you!

So who's upgrading to Paper.li Pro? 

Tea lovers, social workers, actressessmall businesses and non-profits such as Water Aid and anyone who is interested in taking their paper to the next level in terms of control over branding and advertising.

Internet marketing expert Rich Brooks recently wrote a post and created a video on How (and Why) to Upgrade to Paper.li Pro. Sometimes our publishers say it best, so check out what Rich has to say!



Looking for a few more examples? Then here are another handful of publishers, and papers, that caught our eye this week. They are all unique and visually compelling statements for upgrading.

Paper.li Pro is just the first step in premium features and you can count on more great functionality to roll out in the near future.

In the coming weeks we will interview "Publishers-gone-Pro" on the Paper.li Community Blog to learn how the new functionality is helping them to reach their goals. Stay tuned!

As always, we count on your feedback and comments to keep us moving in the right direction.  Keep them coming. We love hearing from you.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Upgrade, Customize and Make Paper.li Truly Your Own!



Today we are thrilled to announce the launch of our Pro offering, a premium service for Paper.li publishers who want to make their paper truly their own!

Paper.li Pro offers small business publishers, organizations, brands and hobbyists alike the tools necessary to extend their online brand presence through customized advertising, additional branding elements and increased editorial control.

Paper.li Publishers who upgrade to Pro will enjoy:

Extended branding
  • add a custom banner or your company's logo, with hyperlink
Custom advertising
  • upload custom images and URLs
  • embed rich media
  • deactivate advertising 
Notification / promotion control
  • review your paper before notifications are sent
  • manually send email and Twitter notifications 
  • switch off notifications altogether

For more information about Paper.li Pro, please click here.


Paper.li Pro costs just $9 USD per month, per paper. To upgrade simply sign in to your Paper.li account and click the upgrade button! 

We look forward to hearing from you so please tweet or leave us a comment and let us know how Paper.li Pro is working for you.

We wish you continued good publishing!

Monday, June 25, 2012

5 Top Tips for Your Content Marketing Strategy


If you want to be sure your content marketing strategy is in good shape, we have interviewed Chad Pollitt, a leading inbound marketing director, for his insights.

Chad shares the essentials for a successful content strategy based on his experience with one of the US’s top agencies, Kuno Creative, and his own study and research.

Whether you are just starting out in content marketing, or would like to compare what you are doing to the best practices, Chad’s interview is sure to be of interest.

You can read the full article on the Paper.li Community Blog.