I like the idea behind the Paper.li service. It lets you easily set up and automatically send feeds from Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and RSS into a pre-built online newspaper.

Every day Paper.li monitors your feeds and from them builds a newspaper-like page of clearly laid out articles with headlines, photos and links, and sends you the latest edition. (You can also manually add any web content you like to a newspaper.)

If you like the content you receive, simply push a button and send it to your social media followers; or if you are confident your feeds will always provide relevant information, you can set the paper to automatically send itself out every day. People can also subscribe to your newspaper.

There are hundreds of thousands of papers around the world.

The paper.li site has a community area with tips and hints on how to use the service. …read more>>

A Chicago woman made derogatory comments on Twitter about her landlord and her rented property. The landlord reportedly went straight to court to sue the woman.

The citizens of cyberspace are Tweeting and blogging like crazy about it. Messages for and against both parties.

The woman may or may not have the best intentions. The landlord may or may not be the world’s best landlord. But who’s right? Who’s wrong?

It doesn’t really matter anymore. The lid has been lifted, the genie’s out. Damage control will be difficult to put in place. Take care how you project and protect your corporate reputation!

I have been a bit doubtful of Twitter as a viable business tool in NZ for the simple reason that the number of New Zealanders using it has, in my experience, not been large. More than 90 percent of the people choosing to follow my tweets are in the United States. Not useful when you are a firm that sources its business domestically.

But new figures show that my concerns may be misplaced: the percentage of Kiwis using Twitter apparently outstrips the percentage of Americans doing so. Even though the total numbers may not be huge yet,  market research company Perceptive says 6 percent of New Zealanders regularly tweet, compared with 5 percent of the US population.

So I’ll keep the Twitter experiment going, and as Kiwi Twitter numbers grow, see if I can encourage more Kiwis onboard.

Blogs are a powerful way to pull readers to your website, to educate and entertain them and lead them to action on your website. But how do you attract readers to your blog?

Compelling, useful and regularly updated material is, of course, essential. But other communication tools can also be useful to advertise your blog across the web.

Twitter: I’ve been experimenting with Twitter for a few months now and have more than 100 followers (people who have clicked to ‘follow’ – aka subscribe – to my Twitter feed). This is a small number compared to the many people with thousands of followers but the number is steadily growing every day.

So how do I attract them to my blog?

I put up an appealing (I hope!) Twitter post (aka a Tweet) about each blog post I make, and link back to my blog post. My followers and the many other Twitter readers can see it and can visit my blog, if they are attracted to my message, simply by clicking on the link . If you search and monitor the Twitter traffic, you will easily find people with an interest in the information on your blog and can tailor your Twitter messages to attract them.

Similarly with social media sites: I put up brief posts about my blog items on a social media site with a similar subject matter to this blog. People read the post and then come to my blog to learn more. Measurement of my most heavily read blogs shows that a significant  readership has come directly from this social media site.

Email: The Copyblogger site recommends pushing people to your blog using an email newsletter. Copyblogger says email your blog’s RSS feed as a newsletter; start a simple opt-in email newsletter; link back to your blog; and place newsletter subscription tools everywhere.

You have to experiment a bit with linking to your blog from various other online services, but give it a go and see what works for you.

You might also be interested in these articles from other sites:

Four ways companies use Twitter (Read Write Web)

Fifty ideas on using Twitter for business (Chris Brogan)

A good new article details how U.S airline South West uses social media tools in its PR work: from employee-writen blogs to Twitter accounts, podcasts, video and a social networking site.

Each tool is overseen by a single team member and is geared to reach a slightly different audience.

South West recommends keeping social media channels distinct. It has used its employee-written blogs to look at issues, Twitter to break or tease news (South West also uses it to share photos, highlight competitions and job opportunities) and its Facebook account to highlight promotional events.

The article says that the airline’s Flickr group pool is for customers interested in posting or viewing photos of trips on the airline; the YouTube channel is for people wanting information about destinations or South West trivia; and South West’s Facebook fan site is for people wanting to know about airline-related events and news.

(Better read the article promptly! The guys at Ragan, who have published this article, only leave things up for a few days. You can register on their site, though, to read all their back copies. It’s well worth the effort to register.)

Twitter – the microblog service where each post can only be a max of 140 characters – is getting hugely popular, even though many people are still working out just how to benefit from it.  This article shows some real world Twitter uses that are getting good PR and customer service results for the U.S company involved.