Judy publishes the daily paper @PRConversations Champions and is a member of the Paper.li Business Heroes program; a program dedicated to promoting and recognizing outstanding individuals in the Paper.li community.

1. A Conversation
about
Mindful Curation
with Paper.li
Interview with
Judy Gombita

2. Judy Gombita is a Toronto-based hybrid public relations, communication
management and social media strategist, with more than 20 years of
employment and executive-level volunteer board experience, primarily in the
financial and lifelong learning non-profit sectors.
She is a principal, co-content editor and Canadian contributor (since 2007)
to the global, collaborative blog, PR Conversations and also wrote a monthly
column on social PR on the Maximize Social Business site for two years. She
is an editorial advisory board member (and contributor) to The Journal of
Professional Communication (JPC).
Judy publishes the daily paper @PRConversations Champions and is a member
of the Paper.li Business Heroes program; a program dedicated to promoting and
recognizing outstanding individuals in the Paper.li community.

3. Part Two
Mindful Curation and Paper.li
3Business Heroes
Interview with Judy Gombita
by Kelly Hungerford
edited by Magda Alexandra Torres

4. Part Two
Mindful Curation and Paper.li
Do you remember what drew your attention to Paper.li and why you
began publishing one for PR Conversations?
I remember when I was really starting to make use of Twitter from a business
perspective (in 2010), I saw many of the earlier adopters making use of Paper.li.
Sometimes I would be notified of having a Top Stories tweet. Interestingly, most of
those people appear to have stopped making use of your service; I’m guessing
they moved on to some brighter, shinier social media toys—and on again to others!
Anyhow, when Heather Yaxley, Markus Pirchner and I decided to become the
principals of PR Conversations in early 2010—we called it the Redux version—
I agreed to take on the role of primary promoter of our global blog. I ran it by the
other principals and they were in agreement I should experiment with instituting a
PR Conversations-dedicated Paper.li.
At first most of the Daily issues had only one, sometimes two, Top Stories picks de-
termined by the algorithm. I wanted to publish three Top Stories, so a habit began
of reviewing each day’s Paper.li and filling in missing Top Stories spots. With the
manual Top Stories selections, I aimed to even out the country-of-origin and gender
balance in any given week (i.e., seven days a week of three choices per day). Unsur-
prisingly, the featured articles I selected related to public relations, journalism, social
business, etc., whereas the algorithm’s selections were sometimes less focused.
Happily, over the past two years or so the algorithm has regularly selected three Top
Stories per day. As I was already in the habit of reviewing the Daily, I continued this
practice with three objectives:
1. To check out the three tweets that had been algorithmically selected and try
to figure out why they resonated with people, mainly in relation to suitable con-
cepts or trends for future PR Conversations posts.
2. To harvest, separately, some of the other great articles and posts (not chosen by
the algorithm) for regular tweets on our @PRConversations account.
3. To find new people who had a similar public relations ethos to our blog and
monitor their posts and thinking.
4Business Heroes

5. Part 2. Mindful Curation and Paper.li
5Business Heroes
Why did you decide on the name @PRConversations Champions?
Credit to Italian Toni Muzi Falconi, the founder of our global blog, for the name and
the overarching concept—international conversations about public relations. He’d
researched its availability in late 2006 and no one else was using it. Interestingly,
a woman in the USA set up a video-based blog a few years later (a WordPress.
org version) with a similar URL, but she had to name it “Conversations in PR.” She
should have heeded advice this was short-sighted, as almost all of the profile and
Google juice came to our global blog. Not only did Toni register the name first but it
was better known, with some significant guest posters, interview subjects and com-
menters, including James Grunig and Richard Edelman, colleagues and friends of
Toni Muzi Falconi.
I wanted a similar mindfulness in creating our Paper.li version. It’s why I thought it
was important to make both the publication name and why/how the people on its
list from which our Paper.li were drawn clear to casual readers.
The original name was PR Conversations Champions; I made the small change to
@PRConversations Champions around the time the algorithm regularly selected
three Top Stories. Why? Because it was a blindingly obvious better profile tool—
each Daily Paper.li also includes our Twitter account. Those who may not have
realized they were on its list—or that a Twitter account existed—can easily find it.
Many then follow it. Since I began mindfully curating our paper.li and populating the
Twitter feed with articles and links from it and elswhere, I estimate the number of
followers to our Twitter account has tripled.
It surprises me other Paper.li users don’t build the Twitter account from which the
Paper.li is published into the Daily name. Perhaps they don’t realize the name can
be modified at any time without impacting delivery. I also like the fact that you can
decide what time of your day or night it publishes, as I’ve also modified that.
How do you decide the list of people from which the Daily
@PRConversations Champions is drawn? What tangible or intangible
value has Paper.li brought to the PR Conversations community?
The original list included present and past blog principals, people who had contri­
buted a guest post or those who were frequent or at least semi-regular commenters.
Originally it was a small, but very focused, list.

6. Part 2. Mindful Curation and Paper.li
6Business Heroes
As I began paying more attention to who was promoting and presumably read-
ing our posts, I would add them in as well. I’ve found Topsy to be a reliable tool
to discover individuals who tweet about our posts without the @PRConversations
account in the promotion. Again, if a person does it regularly, and his or her other
tweets consistently point to good, PR-oriented information, this individual can be
designated a Champion.
Now these things relate to participation (or engagement) and promotion, but they
don’t necessarily speak to loyalty—people’s job or learning priorities can change
and they might become quieter online or move on to other resources. Or perhaps
the quite-focused PR ethos of our blog no longer matches that of their own—some-
one who moves into marketing or advertising, for example.
Loyalty speaks to someone who considers PR Conversations an ongoing relevant
and viable global resource, regardless of whether the person has written a post or
commented. Public relations professors, national PR or communication associa-
tions, communication heads at international brands and global PR agencies—this is
the type of account I’m talking about. Or someone who works in a country in which
a post has never focused, but has been following our Twitter account for years and
presumably reads the blog.
I’m very mindful about who the account follows back and is on our list. On a side
note I really don’t understand the concept of the automatic follow-back, unless you
are simply looking to inflate and sustain your follower numbers. The current Paper.
li list almost mirrors the @PRConversations follows, although some accounts might
be quietly removed from the list if we find the direction a company or person has
moved into doesn’t match our unchanged ethos. Alternatively, if the type of informa-
tion he or she regularly curates—that gets picked up by the algorithm—doesn’t have
a complementary focus.
This long explanation on loyalty is to explain one of my more subjective decisions
regarding list-building curation: About a year ago I scrolled through the list of the
account followers. I looked at where people lived, worked and in what capacity.
There were several cases where I found evidence of long-term following loyalty
without reciprocity and their recent stream proved relevant and interesting (and
primarily in English), so I added them to the list. I remember adding people from Sin-
gapore, Eastern Europe, South America, Australia and Germany, amongst others.
It wasn’t a perfect science, but I think it did have an intangible impact on improving
the global appreciation of our blog, as several of the newly followed indicated their
thanks. I’m now more-inclined to add in new list follows of this nature on a more

7. Part 2. Mindful Curation and Paper.li
7Business Heroes
ad hoc basis. And I’m formulating a plan to use another tool to do this even more,
which I’ll talk about a bit later.
I think the PR Conversations community is primarily of the silent variety. If I could
use an analogy, think of a respected magazine or newspaper with thousands of
readers. Only a small portion of them write a letter to the editor or engage in the
online comments section. The true viability relates to the quality of the writers and
topics covered, how many people continue to read and/or subscribe to it, etc. Does
our licence to operate continue? Do the principals continue to earn loyalty through
the type of posts written or commissioned (no-fee) as guest posts? Have we both
focused and differentiated ourselves enough so that search engines continue to
look kindly on our offerings?
You shared a Nicholas Carr article from The Atlantic, The Great
Forgetting (online title: All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our
Knowledge in the Hands of Machines), where Carr raises a red flag
against automation in employment roles, daily computer usage and
interactions. Some aspects of Paper.li are automated—do you see his
criticisms as valid in relation to our product and services?
In his final summation Carr writes, “Knowing demands doing… each time we collide
with the real, we deepen our understanding of the world and become more fully a
part of it.”
Earlier he indicated, “Learning requires inefficiency.”
When social media first gained popularity it was very hands-on: blog posts written
that found a natural audience; people tweeted to friends what they ate for lunch (or
in my original iteration, travelling to Australia for five weeks); LinkedIn was an online
rolodex of your professional acquaintances, and so on.
But then for many the personalized aspects of social media turned into a numbers
game—the most reads, biggest number of follower/fans, particularly who would
share your content, and affiliation with large numbers of people, even if you didn’t
have much in common. Twitter is the easiest barometre in assessing who continues
to engage on a personal basis—whether an individual or a business account—and
those who have mainly resorted to various forms of automation in their usage.

8. Part 2. Mindful Curation and Paper.li
8Business Heroes
If you look at the Twitter streams of those with the most followers—perhaps a bar
of 15,000 or more—it becomes obvious if the owner is on the account in real time,
using various forms of automation or a combination thereof.
Some of it is scheduled or “buffered” posts, other mechanization revolves around
walled-garden platforms that promote “group” sharing of one another’s posts. Per-
haps the person has a feed of tech or other specific industry publications, etc., and
in the morning has scheduled “curation” time. The person can only devote an hour
to this because he or she is important and busy with work and speaking engage-
ments the rest of the day.
In-real-time “engagement” appears limited to responding to compliments (from
those who believe there’s reflected glory in catching the pundit’s attention), thank-
ing people for shares, or promotion of his or her next speaking gig, app release
or book. More personalized engagement about favourite sport teams or coming
conference speaking engagements seems focused on Twitter lists of people con-
sidered important and influential or those known the longest—the connections still
deemed the most valuable (i.e., early adopters’ cliques).
On my own account, the majority of my follow-backs are a result of smart and
interesting people I’ve met through Twitter chats or a productive debate about a
particular event or issue, often through a related Twitter hashtag. Sometimes I’ve
“met” and engaged with the person on a different platform such as LinkedIn group
or GooglePlus community. I’ve indicated already how much I dislike the idea of
performing for an “audience,” as that’s simply a form of one-way broadcasting, not
two-way engagement.
But back to the question of Paper.li and automation.
Paper.li provides a valuable tool for those willing to take the time in the doing,
including the seemingly inefficiency of building a really targeted list of people who
regularly tweet about content that’s complementary to your own, and continually
monitoring that same list, by adding and occasionally deleting accounts. Even the
decision of whether to take the easy automated Daily publishing route or to be
inefficient and publish it manually comes down to the individual choice of what is
the best use of my time, from a qualitative, not quantitative point of view.
The Paper.li algorithm may be automated, but I want everything else associated with
@PRConversations Champions to appear to have a mindful, personal touch related
to a “reputation, values and relationship building” ethos.
“Paper.li provides
a valuable tool for
those willing to
take the time in
the doing.”

9. Part 2. Mindful Curation and Paper.li
9Business Heroes
My goals for our Daily paper are twofold:
1. To be valued as a public relations resource (similar to how the PR Conversations
blog is, for our Paper.li to be valued as a public relations resource).
2. For the people who are on the list to feel a sense of worthiness or tribute at being
chosen.
Because ours is a group blog, rather than a personal or business one, I have a
responsibility to ensure it is our collective PR ethos at play rather than simply my
personal inclinations.
These goals and my daily routine for @PRConversations Champion (to comple-
ment the algorithmic output) can’t be automated.
If within our @PRConversations Champions I discover an article/post of interest, I
determine the platform of origin (i.e., sometimes it’s an “authorized scraping” ver-
sion that’s been curated, so I determine its first iteration), research the author’s
Twitter account and wherever possible credit both in the tweet. Sometimes I add
commentary, cc someone or credit the Champion with a hat tip.
This takes time. My way might be less efficient, but I think the end result is infinitely
more valuable from a learning and relationship-building perspective than a tweet
from a typical Paper.li Daily or other automated platform.

10. About Paper.li Business Heroes
Behind every great business
stands an even greater
community.
Our Paper.li Business Heroes
program recognizes the
extraordinary people within
our community who put their
best selves forward each day
to inspire and guide others in
finding answers to questions
and solutions for to problems.
About Paper.li
Paper.li provides a no-hassle
approach to monitoring topics
and content across the social
web.
Through advanced semantic
analysis, we process more
than 250 million social media
posts in eight languages to
delivering fresh content to
small businesses, enterprise
organizations, teams and
communities worldwide, daily.