My new favourite toy – Storify

Content Curation

Traditionally this has been through RSS feeds, bookmarks etc and as useful as they are, they are a little tiresome on the eyes. For a more comprehensive introduction to content curation, I recommend reading Michiel Gaasterland’s post.

These days content curation is not only becoming much more aesthetically pleasing but is also increasing in versatility and functionality and above all allows for curation to be social.

Storify - designed to be just that, launched in private beta in September 2010 and only went public in April of this year and it has already documented stories as they unfold but crucially they capture the emotion of the event. See an Occupy Storify example.

As you may know, simply-communicate hosted its seminar on social media for internal communicators last week and we decided to test out using Storify during the event.

As a first time user, I must admit, it was fool proof. Creating a story took a matter of minutes and then it was matter of simply searching, clicking and dragging.

For Storify to reach its true potential, an event or conversation needs to be taking place, it works best in the here and now.

During our seminar we were using #simplysocial and via Storify I could collate the best tweets during the day. But the real value, in my opinion, is pooling in resources across the ether that were relevant during the event.

Rather than delegates scrawling down notes from a presention of a recommended book or an outrageous but highly relevant video, I sat at the back of the room and located the web pages that were being discussed. I simply embedded them into the Storify that just continued to grow and grow throughout the day.

The range of multimedia you’re able to embed really enhances the depth of the story, from footage just shot at the event and quickly uploaded, to YouTube videos of other great speakers, to pictures, SlideShare, Prezi and Flikr Albums. Tweets look great and with the option to notify contributors, it immediately becomes a social story.

Complement these with photos of the speakers and quick interviews with the delegates taken on my Android smartphone and you get a story of the whole event. One that not only supports the delegate during the day but afterwards as well, particularly when the slides were also embedded a few hours later.

Gone are the days of waiting two weeks before seeing any resources from a conference you attended. In this case it was the one page that continued to develop dynamically.

Probably the best thing about it is its reach. The layout and ease of accessibility means that even if you weren’t at the event itself you can quickly get a feel for what you missed. It was fantastic having 44 people at our seminar; it was a very interactive day yet already our Storify page of the same event has been viewed 345 times.

Here are tips on how to get the most out of your Storify.

Have you used Storify? Or a similar tool? Let us know your thoughts and share your stories.

-Sophia Cheng