Thirsty Thursday of Knowledge - Selling Social Media Internally

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I've had a number of conversations over the last week or so with companies big and small that all share a similar problem -- How do I sell my organization on using social media? Maybe the person needs to sell their boss on the idea, the CEO or CMO or on a broader platform -- get the entire organization believing in the power of social media.

I've been taking notes on my conversations and I'm putting together a more complete post for next week, so stay tuned. But in the meantime, here is one tip/tool that I found via the incredibly talented Lisa Petrilli who is using Paper.li to create a daily "newspaper" of the content she thinks her MENGonline group will value.

So what does Paper.li have to do with helping you sell in the idea of using social media to your organization? Simple. It's a great Drip Marketing tool. I'll talk more about Drip Marketing next week. But suffice to say, one of the best ways to sell anyone on anything is to stop selling and just let them make a buying decision on their own. Paper.li gives you the ability to create a daily paper of good social media content (that will help bolster your argument) and have that paper delivered directly to the in-boxes of your key decision makers.

A couple of things I really like about the service:

• It looks like a paper. Sometimes when selling something new, I find it is helpful if there is something recognizable or "known" about the idea/product you're selling. Thus, when trying to convince the 60 year old CEO to monitor mentions of your brand in social media, maybe it would help if what he was reading looked more like what he's used to reading -- a newspaper.
• The ability to have multiple "authors" create the paper. By using a unique hastag, you can curate a list of posts/tweets that all find their way to your personal paper even though the original link/tweet may be shared by anyone who knows of and is actively using the hashtag. For instance, Lisa uses the #MengOnline hashtag to create her paper. I've started one using #IandI (short for Insight & Information) that I'm going to use to create my own curated newspaper. If you like the stuff I share on Twitter, be sure to sign up to get this daily digest -- which will be easier than following all my tweets.
• You can create a paper that follows lists of Twitter folks -- this might be really interesting if you want your bosses to see what the Twitterati of your industry are sharing. I could certainly see this as a way to help make the point that your company isn't in the conversation while the competition is... hmmm getting any ideas yet?

A couple of things I'm not crazy about and hope Paper.li will add very, very soon.

• Once you have a paper set up, I don't see how you can delete or edit the settings. Given that you can only have 10 papers per account, this would seem like a much needed feature.
• You can't print the paper out as a PDF or hard copy. Again, thinking about using this as a tool to help non-social media users and likely techno-challenged individuals "get" the need to use social media, having the ability to create a physical printed piece would be nice. Further, if you've ever used a service like HP's Tabbloid, which lets you convert an RSS feed into a daily magazine/newsletter in PDF format, you know that having a printed copy of your online reading can be helpful. It's far easier to carry around all day and read a post or two when you have a few free minutes. It's also something more "comfortable" for those not accustomed to reading RSS feeds.
• You can't create some kind of "private" tag or multi-author paper. While it is nice to be able to use a custom hashtag, it would be easy for a spammer to jump on that tag and start inserting their crap into your paper.

All in all, I'm very intrigued by this service and look forward to using it for clients and myself personally. Take a peek and let me know what you think? I'd be most interested in hearing your thoughts and maybe your own ideas for how you'd apply the technology.

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