MobileMonkey, headquartered in Boston, offers their social media messaging marketing tool to marketers and agencies, featuring chatbots, landing page creation, integration with social ads, and an emphasis on Facebook. They offer a free plan and a paid plan with more advanced features (e.g. bot analytics, drip campaigns, etc.). MobileMonkey acquired ChattyPeople to extend their chatbot building capabilities.
$21.75
per month
Storify (discontinued)
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Storify was a social curation platform that collects updates from social networks, to create a new story format that is interactive, dynamic and social. It was acquired by Adobe, and has been retired (May 2018).
MobileMonkey would be great if you have a really strong social media presence and want to capitalize on people visiting your pages. It's great if you have a tech friendly audience who is not afraid to talk to a chatbot. If you have an audience where they might be uncomfortable or more of an "uptight" audience then it might not be fore you. It's also not great for heavy B2B if your focus is on high level targets as they're likely not logged in to Facebook at work. B2C is probably the best function for MobileMonkey, although it could be used to help field support messages.
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
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.
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.
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
MobileMonkey support is second to none when you have a paid plan. Always willing to help and make your life a lot easier when you're facing any technical difficulties or frustrations. When I was on the free plan, I found plenty of useful resources that helped me solve my problems, and I could still contact support for help.
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.
MobileMonkey is a lot less expensive than both Olark and Drift. We chose MobileMonkey because we were hoping the familiar interface and integration between social and the website would drive more interest which would lead to conversion and revenue. It's more of a chatbot than Intercom in that Intercom is really good for customer support, but MM is a nice way to get people interested by sharing high level data through a conversation that doesn't require a real person. However, Olark, Drift, and Intercom all integrate with the major CRMs and marketing automation platforms which gives them a real edge over MobileMonkey at this time.
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.
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.
