Archive | February, 2014

If you’re a self-obsessed narcissist trying to build thought leadership, you may have looked at Paper.li as a way to automatically curate and share content.

I can’t say I blame you. There’s a whole internet of crap out there. Why should you, a thought leader, be bothered with finding quality content to share to people you’re trying to influence?

Paper.li takes all the humanity out of content curation. No longer will you need to carefully read articles to determine their quality and value. Paper.li will capture the most meaningless links from your social media connections and figure out which group of links make the least sense together. It then spits them back out as a daily digital newspaper.

A newspaper on the internet? How novel!

Even better, if you sync it with your Twitter account, it will automatically tweet using the user names of scraped content every. single. day. Talk about building relationships!

But should you use Paper.li?

No.

No one in their right mind who cares about sharing great things and building genuine relationships with human beings should use Paper.li.

The ACME Marketing Company accidentally released killer content yesterday, wiping out millions of internet users within mere minutes.

The content, a viral video developed in a decommissioned germ warfare lab, began its psychopathic bloodbath within moments of being uploaded to YouTube. It then quickly spread across Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter, leaving a wake of carnage and destruction in its wake.

In a blood-scrawled statement, the CEO of the ACME Marketing Company posted the following to Instagram, “Our deepest sympathies go out to the millions of families we annihilated yesterday. How could we know this video would harbor genocidal tendencies? We’re so sorry. God forgive us.”

Though the video remains at large, comments on YouTube from survivors describe the video as “Kinda gay” and state “Only pussies get killed by this shit.”

Facebook released a new app yesterday for iPhones called Paper.

Paper makes the newsfeed on Facebook prettier. But only if you have an iPhone. Now, when your uncle shares his crazy conspiracy theories, you at least have something nice to look at. But only if you have an iPhone.

Of course, now that every social media “expert” has had less than 24 hours to use the app, they all have opinions and best practices on the app based on their thorough understanding of consumer behavior. They’ll also tell you how it’s going fundamentally change show people use Facebook.

Because their iPhones tell them things the rest of us will never know.

Well, I’m going to beat them to the punch. Here are my tips for optimizing your Facebook posts for Paper:

• Don’t optimize for Paper.

Paper is one day old. It’s only available on iPhones. The only people using it now are total nerds.

There’s likely to be lots of changes to how Paper serves content over the coming weeks and months if it catches on. And that’s a big if. 

You can wait a few weeks to see if Paper catches on. In the meantime:

• Produce great content.
• Tell meaningful stories.
• Have honest conversations.

Those actions will always get attention, regardless of what a newsfeed looks like.