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I have created a new daily paper.li for WNBA news. Why a #WNBA page? Two reasons. The @PhoenixMercury made it to the Western Conference Finals and I wanted to try out paper.li’s service.

What’s Paper.li?

It is a site that gathers all the stories tweeted with a particular hashtag from around the web. (In this case, the hashtag #WNBA.)  Paper.li automatically goes through the links posted with that hashtag and finds the original stories published in the last 24 hours. It pulls them together in a “Front page” of stories and images. (You can get to the full list of articles and posts mentioned with the #WNBA hashtag from the top of the paper.li page.) Once the stories are pulled together, the page is published and shared daily.

You can set up to get notified by email when the daily issue is available. Since Amplify lets me create posts by email, I have a notification set to be sent daily to my Amplify posting address. This way, when the new issue is available, it gets automatically shared with Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the web.

You can also create paper.li pages from Twitter lists and individual Twitter members and their followers.I plan to create a list one to test that functionality out soon, but don’t know what list to use yet.

I learned about paper.li from several of my friends over at Amplify… There are a couple of people there who have created paper.li pages which re-publish content curated and created on Amplify. I like this use of the site. I also like the flexibility of the entire process.

Creating a paper.li page is straight forward.

Create an account (or log in if you already have one). At the upper right of your page, there is a link to “create a newspaper”. Click that link and complete the source information for your paper.li. If the term or list is already being tracked, you will be taken to that term’s page. If not, you will see a page indicating that the content is being curated. Once the content is pulled together, the new page will be created.

If the item you want to follow has not content, you will be told that and prompted to come back tomorrow. This happened when I tried to create one for OneNote. It seems that people share on OneNote, but don’t hashtag the information. If the page starts to populate, I will start to share it more. (If you want to see the empty page for yourself, you can find it at http://paper.li/tag/onenote#)

My thoughts

So far, the page looks interesting. It seems to be catching the big stories. I don’t think it is catching everything… It didn’t add my story from this weekend, even after it was tweeted. I don’t know if it will catch this one.

The ability to curate content based off of Twitter links is a great idea. I miss the ability to connect and hold a conversation there on the page, but I understand why the company decided to go that way. They see the site as a content consuming site, not a content creation site.

If you have a paper.li you recommend, let me know in the comments.

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In response to the post I wrote on Job Qualifications and Salaries for Community Managers, I was asked on Miio what I would recommend someone do to get started in the Community Management field. Here are some ideas to get you started.

The place you start is where the conversation is. I firmly believe that the best way to learn is to do. Find out where people are talking about what you are interested in and join the conversation.

Pick a unique name/handle for yourself. Pick something that relates to who you are. Names are great, if yours is unique. Numbers aren’t great – at least in my opinion. Be consistent in using that name across all the social sites where you create accounts. Get a great picture or avatar to go with it and use it everywhere as well. (I have two. My photo is some places and my manga style avatar is others. They look enough like me that it works to have both out there.) Put together a good story about who you are and what you do. Use that when you create profiles. (But don’t always use the exact same wording – it will make you look too much like a robot.)

Follow the best in the community management world, including:

• Connie Bensen, Alterian - http://twitter.com/cbensen
• Shashi Bellamkonda, Network Solutions – http://twitter.com/shashib
• Amber Naslund, Radian 6 – http://twitter.com/AmberCadabra
• Kristie Wells, Social Media Club – http://twitter.com/kristiewells
• Jake McKee, Ant’s Eye View – http://twitter.com/jakemckee
• Sean O’Driscoll, Ant’s Eye View – http://twitter.com/seanodmvp

Follow them on Twitter and anywhere else they are. Read everything they write. Check out the tools they use. Comment on what you read. Get involved. Don’t be a spammer about it, be real and be authentic. But do connect as best you can. Find out where they are and be there too.

Search out forums you can get involved in and start participating. Remember that a good bit of the conversation is still happening in old style forums. If you want to connect with people, create an account where your topic is being discussed. Make sure you fill in profile fields so that people find you. Answer questions. Help out. Do what you can to be a good cyber-citizen.

If you know a certain piece of software, find out where people are talking about that software and start talking. Answer questions more than you ask. Give more than you take. A good place to start is with boards where people are active. If you know Microsoft software, for example, check out the Social Answers site. You probably already have an account there, you just need to make it active.

Start creating content that helps people. Become the one that knows how to do it, then you can become the one who gets paid to do it. Whenever possible add screen shots to your answers. Create screencasts and videos to go with your content. Create a test case which you can use to document your skills. Find a project or non-profit that needs online help and volunteer.

When people ask you questions, answer as much of it publicly as you can. Yes, you CAN answer questions via email and private message. But if you answer them publicly, you help more people. Answering a question privately fixes the problem for one person. Answering it publicly answers it for everyone who has the problem.

Practice measuring and monitoring the social media presence and community presence for a product or brand you love. Check out the best of the monitoring and measurement tools. Learn everything you can about how to track information, gather data, generate graphs, etc. Write about what you learn.

Find new tools and sites for social media. Check them out. Try them out. Offer to beta test them. As you play with them, help others learn them. If you run into problems, report them. When you report the problems, be sure to tell the development team what you were doing, why you were doing it, and what you would have liked to have happened that didn’t. (Looking for a way to find the best social media tools? Ask people. Check out OneForty.com regularly for new tools and ways to use them.)

Finally, pick three of the things off the list of job qualifications that you don’t already know how to do and start learning them. Ask people to help you get better at what you are doing. Ask them how you can help. The more you learn, the more you can share. The more you share, the more likely it is that someone will see what you can do for them and ask you to help out. Every time that happens, you get one step closer to your goal of becoming a full time, paid, community manager.

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Want to know what I am posting/reading/commenting on across the web? Check out my page on Amplify.

UPDATE: As of today (July 15, 2010), Amplify autoposts to WordPress blogs. So… I have turned off the extra page here on the blog. All Amplify posts will now show both here and on Amplify as regular posts. Enjoy!

What is Amplify?

Amplify is a site where you can share what you are reading on the web, comment on it, and then share those comments to your whole social network. At the same time, you can read what others are checking out and get involved in conversations about those topics as well. Community, connectivity, curation, and content. All in one place.

Why Amplify?

The people I am connecting with over on Amplify are (so far) people I would want to know in real life. They have opinions and want to share them. They like to contribute to each others content and conversation.

It is easy to connect with other users. Find someone whose content you like? Click the follow button. You don’t even have to go to their page – hovering over their name pops up a mini-profile right from what you are reading. Want to connect with others in your social graph?  Got to “Settings” (at the top of every page) and click “Find your Friends”. Easy connection to your connections on Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail.

The site is easy to use. It is based on WordPress, so the interface is one you already know. They provide a clipping tool that lets you add parts of the page content that sparked your idea quickly and easily. Click their tool while browsing a page and then click the paragraphs/headlines/objects/etc. that you want to reference in your new piece.

(Tip: Click in the order you want the content to show in your summary – you can’t change the order later.)

The site is customizable. It is easy to make your amplify look the way you want it to look. Custom headers, custom backgrounds, custom colors… All easy to change. They have also provided easy to use widgets that add your content from connected sites to the right side of your page.  Want to customize the page even further? You can add your own custom CSS and customize the page look to exactly what you want.

Sharing is great. Amplify has built in a way to share your content automatically with many of the major sites on the social web. I write content there, it is automatically sent out to Twitter – FB – Plurk – Tumblr – Friendfeed. (And you have the option of many other sites as well.)

The team is involved. The people who run Amplify are interested in what the community wants to know about. They comment on content and connect with people all day long. At the same time, they are upgrading the site on a regular basis to add new connections and features.

Ok… What’s not to like?

Like any new site, there are a couple of things that you have to watch out for when using Amplify.

There isn’t a built in spell checker or any easy way to do more than the basic formatting on your new content. If you have a spell checker built into your browser, you can live with the first. The second is harder to get around.

• If you add from the widget at the top of your newsfeed page, there isn’t any formatting or titling automatically added. These are supposed to be short pieces (almost like a tweet), so they are supposed to be self explanatory.
• If you add from the “Write” link, there is the very basic formatting that you get with WordPress. You can do more formatting on pieces added via “Write” via HTML, but only if you know it well. Things added via “Write” can be titled, but the title has to be short enough to be tweeted.
• If you add via a clipping, you get a mix of the two. You can give your items a tweetable title, but you don’t have formatting options or the ability to add HTML.

The other annoyance? No automatic way to post my Amplify posts to this blog. That’s why I had to create the page with the iframe to hold the content. You can add a widget to your blog that shows your recent content, but it isn’t the same thing. Hoping this one gets addressed sooner, rather than later.

One other thing to note:

If you are posting via Amplify to other sites, you will need to be aware of which sites post to each other. You will end up with multiple tweets/Facebook posts if you aren’t careful. I am still working out my strategy for this one. I’ll take ideas.

Final Judgement:

For now, it is a win. I am using it and loving it. I find that I am connecting to people and sharing much quicker than if I feel I have to go write a full piece.

Check it out. Let them know what you think. Talk. Get involved. Get connected. After all, isn’t that part of what life is about?