Storify (discontinued)

It collects a story thread from a live chat.

It allows people to tap into a group discussion, even after the fact.

It's a great means of finding links to targeted professional resources.

I look forward to Twitter opening up the character limit. As it is, a Q & A session can feel superficial because the answers need to be so brief.

Pull media from all online sources

Provide links for easy access to content

Display content in a pleasing and straightforward format

Better searchablility of web content

Notification if links in stories are no longer active

Suggestions for similar Storify users to follow

Allows journalists to search diverse social media outlets.

Enables journalists to cover social-media related events as they unfold.

Makes writing online stories easy, with very simple skills.

Allows journalists to create accurate stories with evidence/examples from YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Maybe a more detailed search engine/method.

It would be nice if we could search Facebook/Instagram, etc. even if the user does not have a FB/Instagram account.

Offer users a simple video tutorial on how to conduct searches for various social media.

Storify displays images and video quite well in its stream, fully capturing all of the different media users of social are deploying across Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Storify also does a nice job embedding full YouTube videos and links to editorial content, integrating it seamlessly into the feed in a visual manner that is easy to digest.

Our Storify stories embed nicely into our website, enhancing our game coverage by appearing on the same pages as the game stats, highlights, etc., while also allowing us to surround the content with our own advertising.

Storify should add a TweetDeck like function for live content curation. During a game, I have a TweetDeck window open to monitor multiple search terms and accounts, and when I see something I want to add to my Storify, I have to manually type that term or handle into Storify to pull it in. Content isn't as "discoverable" as it could be.

Storify could pull in content more quickly. From the time I see a post published to the time I'm able to access it in Storify is usually ~20-30 seconds, and sometimes longer, which is an eternity when curating reaction to a fast-paced, live event.

The notify feature is funky and it's harder to notify ALL users who have been featured in a Storify once you get beyond the first handful that are available in the pop-up "notify" feature.

Excellent content gathering capabilities

User experience

Helpful customer support

No weaknesses

Storify's ability to curate relevent social media content is an asset to my teaching. Storify allows easy access to current social media content and research, making it a one stop tool for creating digital stories.

The Storify platform is excellent for engaging my students in the learning process. They are able to use technologies they are already familiar with (facebook, twitter, instagram, etc) in new ways, resulting in deeper learning.

Storify offers marketing professionals the ability to track story views, distribute stories across social media platforms and engage audiences through customized social media content.

In terms of student engagement, students in a Politics and Media course created videos asking participants about various political issues. These videos were then uploaded to YouTube and added to their digital stories on Storify.

In a Media Ethics course, students preseneted their Storify projects to their peers, who in turn were able to give real-time feeback by liking, sharing and commenting on the stories being presented.

Several Storify users have indicated that they would like the ability to upload their own content directly to Storify instead of uploading to an external site first.

The ability to customize backgrounds in Storify would be a welcome addition.

Storify offers a basic menu of content sources. I would like to see additional sources added to the menu selection.

Storify is a great tool to expose our membership to social media, when they might not be users themselves.

Storify allows us to create a detailed account of our meetings, webinars, and other important organizational events and happenings. We have been able to reuse social media content that would have otherwise been lost after it was initially posted.

It has been a nice tool to add URL pages to a story (aka: leaving breadcrumbs). If someone talks about a particular event, we can link to a URL about that event.

Occasionally will timeout.

On the account we are using (basic, free), to add content from Facebook, you have to get a direct URL. Fine for pictures, but not great for text posts.

Best used to tell a story primarily told on Twitter. Could limit some who don't have a big Twitter presence.

Event Storytelling

Campaign-specific aggregation

Validation of engagement for social media influencers participating in conversation

Easier search within platform to find items for storyboard inclusion.

Additional suggestions of Storify users to follow.

More regular engagement within Storify user community.

Provides a way to chronicle engagement in a linear fashion

Is a great way to display user-generated content.

There are times when the site is down and this can be problematic.

In today's world, some stories break or even take place on social media. Storify allows journalists to easily curate these conversations about news and shape them into stories.

Storify's interface is easy to use and can be taught in minutes. My college journalism students take to it quickly and love working with it.

Storify can employ any social media that I can think of. If a story is being discussed in the social media world, you can find it in words, photos, videos, etc.

Telling stories through Storify is a creative process that I see becoming more prominent in the future.

Products you create in Storify are easy to embed or use for other purposes.

Because Storify is a new way to tell a story with so many possibilities, it would be great if Storify had guides or examples of effective stories for different purposes for people to look at. Some people are a bit overwhelmed and don't deliver a great product. I have had to create these for my students.

Storify has allowed me to gather communications and media coverage around particular stories and present them in a clean, attractive, user-friendly, web-based format that can be used by a wide variety of people at my workplace, from my department director to a hospital CEO to a university department head.

Storify provides built-in tools that allow me to easily search for relevant content across the web, from Twitter to YouTube to media stories on Google News.

Storify's plug-ins and quick buttons make it easy for me to notice an article, video, or other relevant content and without even going to Storify itself, add to stories or save it to my personal collection to be added to stories later.

When using the items stored in my "private collection," I often find that items I have already dragged and dropped into story packages remain listed, and when I try to delete the items, so they won't clog up the list, I often am presented with an error message.

I wish that there was the ability to have more control over item previews, such as choosing or uploading an image or editing text if, for example, that preview material is not accurate because the software isn't "seeing" or importing in the best way. Facebook (personal accounts and Pages) allows this and it's allowed me to put in proper descriptions or a more representative image or headline when appropriate.

When I go to my account profile, the initial view is only of my three most recent story packages; if I want to see more I have to click "See All." I would rather see at least 6. Having the option to switch to List view (as a default) would also be nice, as often I am updating multiple packages and saving even one click is helpful.

Storify is a really clean and cool way to demonstrate the use of live-tweeting at an event. Whenever we hosted galas or organized huge events, we would gather all of the Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter posts using the same hashtag and create a story. What's nice about this is you can choose which posts you want to include or omit. Once you create it, it tags everyone that's mentioned -- which is great because it streamlines your time -- and you can easily import the finished Storify in WordPress. This made it easy to include in our blog.

Storify can make your organization look pretty social media savvy, which is what people would tell us whenever we used it. It's also a fun way to tell a story in real time without having to invest too much effort in writing an old-fashioned blog.

Aside from using Storify to strengthen my organization's brand, I've learned that it can be an effective educational tool. I've used it to learn more about a news story by gathering tweets using the same hashtag. It's fun to see how a story unfolds in real time!

Storify picks up all of the retweets, which can be repetitive and confusing because sometimes people retweet hours after the event. I like how you can change the order of the posts in the timeline, but it would be nice if there were filters to eliminate retweets and specific posts.

When I was using Storify, it didn't gather all of the Facebook posts that were out there using the same hashtag. They should improve their search functionality to include as much as possible.

You have to drag posts in place, which can be tedious. It would be nice if Storify organized everything for you, and all you had to do was eliminate the posts you don't want to ad.

I like the Wordress plugin that allows using Storify in my Wordpress blog. I set up and installed Wordpress myself on my cloundhostedcommunications.com domain. Using Storify to create a blog post is an experiment I've repeated. It makes it easy to link in story elements and outbound links.

I was pleasantly surprised that on targeting "Lync vs Jabber' as a long tail keyword search phrase in my blog title "Lync vs Jabber decision point?" that I got "page 1" page results twice, one from the blog instance and one from the storify instance. More analysts and trade journal/blogs are writing about this topic now, so though my post and storify story are no longer on page 1 after a year, I still get weekly inbound traffic from search.

I was considering trying the business plan to see how we might construct vertical specific solution stories together from Polycom elements and our technology partner solution elements. It appears the plans have changed.

An option to select from available images would be nice.

An integrated "tumblr-like' rich editor would be nice. I find myself construction some story element in tumblr just to pull them in

Storify takes disparate elements from across social sites and weaves them into one story that you're interested in telling. Especially using Twitter, which was the main source of the content in my Storify stories, individual tweets can get lost in the storm. Storify was a great way to clear the clutter away from what you want to say.

There are several social tools woven in with Storify that make sharing and receiving feedback easy. For example, people can easily comment on your Storify story through Facebook integrated comments and your Storify stories can be embedded across several social sites. The point is to get your story out there so that connection is vital.

Inputing different story elements into Storify is fairly easy. There are built-in sites that can be searched and the level of detail of that searching is based on the source. So for Twitter, you could search by keyword, user, including @replies or not, etc. Because these are your story elements, it's essential that this search tool is robust.

One insider tip if you're trying to embed your Storify story onto Tumblr. The embed code can easily be pasted into the Tumblr HTML format, but if you try to preview your post it might look like nothing is there. Even once you post it onto Tumblr, there will only be a small box in your (and your followers') feed. But check your Tumblr blog and it's there. My trick was always to include a line of text under the code that identified that this was a Storify story and that you have to click on it to see it. Though this is also a negative of the tool, that embedding on Tumblr is possible. Hopefully they work on embedding on that particular site, though...I sent them some feedback about it too as it's not quite there.

As a Storify story is dependent on the social elements going into it, and those social elements are moving at the speed of life, it can sometimes be difficult to go far enough back into the past to find the elements you're looking for. I used probably the biggest culprit, Twitter, so I would try to build my story within the couple of days after an event happened. Otherwise, you'll be scrolling endlessly to find your tweets and sometimes, if too far back, Storify would simply stop loading content. Though the search function did have many different features, a timespan search function would probably be very useful.

Though I mentioned it as an insider tip in the strengths section - that Tumblr embedding was possible - most of my experience embedding Storify stories on Tumblr was not smooth. At first I didn't think it worked at all and sent several emails to Storify support to figure out if it was user error or on their end. In the end, they told me it might be a browser issue on my end which may be the case but seemed somewhat unlikely given that I could see Storify stories everywhere else. So if you're embedding a Storify story on Tumblr, it will show up on your Tumblr blog but won't show up in your (or your followers') feed - where people are looking at your content 90% of the time. My fix was to include a line of text that said that it was a Storify story and you must click on it to see it, but I believe Storify needs to work on this issue.

Understanding the need for sites to grow their base of members, one thing I thought was odd about Storify was that readers of your stories had to log in if they wanted to like or comment on your stories. I saw quite a few users that had never built a story themselves but had created profiles just to follow other people's stories. With integrated Facebook comments, you'd think it would be easy to allow anyone to log in and comment without becoming a member, but that didn't seem to be the case. Perhaps I'm wrong and I only observed people on Storify commenting, but the empty profiles seem indicative of not being able to read and interact on the site without joining and that seems limiting.

As far as the Storify stories themselves, prepare yourself for endless scrolling. Especially if the story gets embedded, it then gets whittled down to a narrow box so event tweets take up a few lines. And if your story happens to be very long, readers may need to click to continue to see the rest of your story. I feel like you'll start to lose readers. There's just the one format, and people are used to scrolling but there may be a limit to how much Storify users want to share for this reason, either within a story or because the Storify is taking up the entire window of their blog (as examples).

Curate social content around an event.

Publish a series of articles as a topic page.

Curate news items around a topic.

Direct deeper links, for instance of LinkedIn profiles, often throw error messages.

You cannot select an image and the image selected by Storify for an item isn't always the best image.

Changes don't always stick after saving.

Interface is easy to use and understand

Makes curation possible for even the most novice user

Being able to curate across social platforms helps companies show a broad spectrum of impact and conversation

Our company receives a lot of interaction on Facebook. It's difficult to capture this through Storify.

I wish it didn't split into multiple pages. Readers most likely won't go on to a second page.

At my company we focused on integrating social media conversations to better engage users and drive traffic across platforms. Storify is practically based around making this easier! It consolidates and simplifies what we try and do anyways in a way that is always perfectly pleasing to the eye.

Storify has a user base that is still growing. When I started using the tool it was simply a way to create content we would share on other social channels. Now it's become a platform for distribution and consumption all on its own, thus strengthening our social presence and position.

I think ease of use is important to note. Storify is set up in a way that is completely intuitive and easy to navigate. In being so, it's not intimidating for new users and encourages me to keep it on my social agenda.

Though Storify is growing, it does still have a small user base compared to other places you have the option of allocating resources. Since Storify content is much more time intensive than something you would blast on Twitter, the limited reach can be difficult to justify if you only have limited resources available or don't have a well integrated social strategy.

Storify is a fantastic tool that can be used to connect with your audience across social media platforms.

It allows you to bring attention to sometimes overlooked social media pieces for example a tweet or a youtube video, and organize it in a way that makes sense for your audience.

Storify allows you to easily present information to an individual who might not have normally interacted with it, for example you can organize your story to include tweets for your reader who say, for example, does not use twitter, you can still provide them with the information even though they might not have seen it on the actual social media platform.

Storify helps you block out all the "noise" and because of that you can create a beautiful social media picture and really target what your audience wants to read about whether that is about a particular event, product, etc.

You can easily embed your story and share it so it does not take a lot for it to go viral.

If the future I would like to see more sources of social media available to search from, for example Reddit and Pinterest.

More interesting story designs (Prezi look - interactive and more visual).

Creates a timeline of an event

Provides general social sentiment quickly

Adds humanization to a real-time event

Collects social data accurately

User interface

Site design

Integration with social networks OTHER than Twitter

Alerts users when they are mentioned in a Storify thread.

Nice interface for combining different types of media.

Shareable after the fact.

I don't think it makes its functionality immediately obvious, looks more like an aggregator than an essential tool.

The marketing around it hasn't been great, so managers at big companies are reluctant to have employees spend time using it.

A lot of creative content there just drowns among the rest, unseen, no tips on how to use it outside of the Storify medium.

Archiving content from Twitter.

Aggregating content from multiple social media platforms.

Offering embed options to present social media content on websites, blogs, or pretty much anywhere on the web.

Building interest driven communities (i.e. aggregating a lot of information about a particular topic to engage a particular audience).

We like to live-tweet academic conferences and events. We think of it as collaborative note-taking. Storify is a great place to "file" these notes for later reference, but it falls a bit short as a place to go during the live-tweeted event. This is due to the fact that it is slow to refresh, if I add a tweet to the story, it can take up to a few minutes for it to appear for other users viewing that story. So we definitely use Storify in these events, but it's an after thought rather than an integrated part of the live activity.

Storify is not as powerful as other social media platforms when it comes to driving new audiences to our content. Facebook, Twitter, and Google + help us expand our networks. Storify is more functional as an organization tool that we can use to engage our existing network.

Each Storify story seems to exist in a silo. It does not make natural connections between stories that might be emerging around the same interest or topic. In academics for example, we have created Storify stories around the value of a Liberal Arts Education. It turns out that others were doing the same, but we only discovered that by accident; Storify was not connecting the dots for us.