Gathering Intelligence for future reference and learning can be a daunting task.
At Inforganic Labs one of the key tasks when building our tailored Workshops is gathering relevant up-to-date Information on a daily basis.
In order to pull this of successfully, we need to utilize the smartest tools and apps out there. We try to narrow down the use of number tools to a minimum, to the core essentials, but at the same time we need to optimize and gather intel on all the new promising tools that emerge.
One of the key tools we use to gather relevant Intel is naturally Twitter. Consider what, for most type of businesses, proves valuable and does NOT emerge in the ‘Twitterverse’ these days? There are a large number of useful Twitter tools out there and this number is rapidly growing.
In Jeff Bullas post: ‘The new Twitter Newspaper You cannot Ignore’ - he claims that the time has come to get a closer look on paper.li
- Right, Let’s do it!
I have some earlier experience using paper.li from various projects but i thought i would take the opportunity to dive deeper into what it can be used for, seen from the perspective of an entrepreneur or a Start Up Enterprise.
Inforganic Labs Intel
First, naturally you create an account; We did it here!
It’s pretty straight forward; Just sign in with your Twitter ID that you want to use. Then it’s pretty much automated from there. However, you might want to adjust some minor, but important details, like naming your publication(!).
We have made our settings to update automatically and to update on a Weekly basis, to make sure we don’t spam our subscribers and Twitter followers. We’ve also added some useful tags and will add some ‘top-of-the-mind’ lists to the mix in the near future. However it seem difficult to remove the template tags and showcase your own. Guess we have to check with paper.li’s support on that one. An update will appear here when the solution is found.
What paper.li actually does, is collecting and selecting Tweets from your Twitter followers, a tagged subject or from a curated list that you’ve set up in Twitter. This enable you to narrow down and curate your content that is published in your created paper.li on-line publication.
It actually pretty much does what for instance Flipboard is doing on the iPad. But in Flipboard you can use multiple sources. Which you, as of yet, cannot do on paper.li. Since we are talking about business use, we highly recommend that you don’t add your own personal Facebook account to the stream. At the moment you cannot add Facebook pages, so wait to add anything from Facebook until this feature is enabled.
If you like us are using Twitter as an Intelligence tool for information gathering and gradually building a community, then it becomes a little bit more interesting. Our customers and followers can quickly tap into our intelligence feed and get a quick overview a great number of sources that we use to build content for our workshops etc.
A key benefit is that it showcase to our customers that we are on top of the latest and most vital information that drives our business, i.e our customers business. How to manage this effectively, adapting the intelligence feed for your own intel gathering is also one core elements and features that we focus on at an early stage in our Introductory workshop.
Of course it would be great if there was a way to also add other sources than Twitter, like RSS feeds for example. This would enable us to tailor the content to a greater extent. My qualified guess would be that this is a feature that is in the pipe from the developers at paper.li.
Lastly, One simple advice; what really pays of and make paper.li useful, both internally, for our growing team, and for our customers, is to follow a very focused and highly relevant user group on Twitter. Be extremely selective and follow only people, brands, businesses and organizations that will add top quality and value to your content. Maybe common sense, but still! Go check out their feeds and what they publish!
- Would you like their content to show up in your intel stream on paper.li or not? If yes; then please Follow!
Now, Go create your own paper.li publication and please share it with us and our followers by mentioning it on Twitter – We would really appreciate if you’d like to mention @inforganiclabs and the hashtag #paper.li in the Tweet – maybe even with a link back to this blog post – Cheeers 
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