Curata vs. Storify (discontinued)

I liked Curata, but it depends on the use case of how it will be used as to how effective it is for someone. If you are trying to curate content it works great. Had I not been so put off by the issue mentioned earlier I would have given more effort to learn the CMS, so I am not sure how effective it really is.

Incentivized

I would advise that Storify is easy to use and includes many built-in resources, such as search tools, but that its application can be improved even more by combining it with other tools such as Google News (also accessible in Storify, but using standalone site is easy), Twitter (corporate and 3rd party) search tools and media management / "clipping" services like Vocus

• Curata is great at curating in content that is relevant to our audience. It is easy to add many different sources to the feed from all around the web and we've really seen Curata "learn" what we see as the most relevant.
• The microsite we got as part of our Curata subscription is really fantastic. It's very customizable and we've been able to really craft it to suit our needs. There are so many different options available and our Curata rep has been really great with helping us cater each piece to our vision while making helpful suggestions along the way in terms of best practices. Plus, the word processor for publishing blog posts is so easy to use and I've had no issues with it so far unlike many other CMS platforms I've worked with. The Curata microsite is actually going to be replacing our current blog very soon - we love it that much!
• I've had a great experience with customer service from Curata. Our rep is responsive and helpful and really good about not just answering our concerns but also providing feedback on our processes and giving advice for how we can improve.
• Search capabilities within the curated content feed are fabulous. This is one area where I found other solutions to be lacking when we were going through the sales process, but Curata really succeeds here. It's extremely easy to find exactly what you're looking for in your content feed.

• 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.

• more subscription plans as not all people need all features.

Incentivized

• 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.

For all of the features we loved when we signed on like the microsite and search capabilities and also their customer service, we will very likely renew with Curata. We also really like the evolution we have seen of the solution, just recently a new integration with Marketo (also a vendor of ours) was announced which will be very beneficial to us in optimizing our email newsletters

Storify is worth it if you and your organization is creating a lot of social media buzz. If there are less than 15 people that are a part of the social media conversation, you really don't need to use this tool. It's most effective as an organizational storytelling tool, so you need to find a way to get people talking about you before you implement it.

From the day I first started using it, Storify has always made total sense. It's not the kind of product that forces you grit your teeth a lot or go into cumbersome customer support areas or fumble around forever only to be unhappy with the end result. I have been able to successfully use the product from the beginning

Practice makes perfect. The more often any new tool is used, the more comfortable the implementer is with the tool. Also, there is a natural tendency with any new tool, to want to use it a great deal. Identifying proper uses as they relate to your overall marketing goals is key to any decision to use a tool.

The main difference that made me choose Curata over Percolate is that it is not complex. Curata is easier to set up, to use, and to manage. It does not involve any complicated configuration to get the content and data you need. Curata technical support is amazing, to say the least. I am not an expert in the technical stuff, but I feel assured their team can help me out when I have an issue

Incentivized

I addressed this in an earlier comment, but Storify is truly the best that I have found for displaying things in a narrative form. Other alternatives are more visually pleasing (like Tint, RebelMouse), but don't handle the narrative form so well. Those other platforms also do not display text only social posts quite as well.

Incentivized

• I would say neutral for us, but more so because of how we were using it and it being a stop-gap fix for us.

Incentivized

• My Storify stories ran the gamut of thousands of readers to a few dozen. That was on me as far as how engaging the content was/interest in the topic I came up with, probably the length of the Storify stories as well, and how much my stories were shared by others. Those reader numbers were not unique by the way, and unfortunately counted when I looked at my own story (even though I was logged in and they could tell it was me).
• My objectives were to let people in on a narrative story they may have missed and to cement a passing social conversation into something more long-lasting. These Storify stories are now a part of a Tumblr blog and thus can be more easily accessed. Those aren't hard and fast numbers, but Storify helped me reach my objectives nonetheless.
• As somewhat of a disclaimer, my use of Storify was not conducted for a client but as a social media experiment so I could interact with some digital transmedia storytelling. Storify was simply one piece of an integrated online persona. That being said, it was easy to track how many people had seen my Storify stories to see which were the most popular.