Waltzing Matilda

Tools what now?

Welcome to our new blog-based adventure in technology, Tools Tuesday! We’ve been doing a lot of research on the many, many different social media tools around,  and rather than keep it all to ourselves or our colleagues who read the Commission wiki, we thought we’d share our thoughts with you. Hopefully these reviews will save you a little time, or maybe even give you a little bit of that rare and wonderful thing; inspiration.

We’ll still be blogging regularly about other things and ideas in social media, but Tuesdays will be the day to check for new tools reviews if we’ve got one for you. Any comments, opinions or ideas you have are very welcome, so please share your reviews and experiences too, and together we can find our way through this social media jungle.

Up first, it’s the art of storytelling with Storify. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.

Image by Shalawesome http://www.flickr.com/photos/shalawesome/

What’s it all about?

Storify, as the name suggests, is a media curation tool that lets you narrate a particular story for the reader. It allows you to take a topic or an event, bring together all the relevant social media posts, online news and commentary as the story unfolds, and ’storify it’ – present it as a coherent and compelling storyline.

Why should you be interested?

• Storytelling and well-executed curation is the direction that social media is heading in. For the online reader who is bombarded with pure information and constant newsflashes, a good story can offer something more valuable, and valuable content is what will grow and strengthen your audience. Besides, all the information is in one place.

• You can post all types of media– Twitter posts, video, news articles – and in this sense you have pretty broad scope to be creative.

• The major advantage of this sort of tool from an online communications perspective is that you don’t have to generate your own content to have a strong voice. Instead, you can use your judgement and curator’s eye to gather and present the best material that’s already online.

• It’s free, and you don’t need to be too technical to get the hang of it.

How it works:

1. Sign up for a Storify account.

2. Use key words to search the available sources for content- Twitter, Facebook, Storify itself, Google, YouTube, Flickr, RSS feeds, Embed.ly.

3. Drag and drop the content into the column on the right of your screen.

4. Rearrange and add your own texts or comments.

5. Save your story as a draft to review later or publish the story and share it with your social network – you can keep adding as you go, which can keep the audience paying attention.

Storify only really shines when you have a specific story to tell – a big event to follow that will unfold as the days or weeks go by, or an issue that you know is going to suck your audience in.  Think about it carefully, and make yourself a plan of action.

Who else uses it?

The European Parliament used Storify to create a narrative covering the State of the Union delivered by President Barroso in September. Two people working for about four hours were able to craft the coverage – see it for yourself right here: http://storify.com/europarl_en/state-of-the-union. In the week following the address, the story got 1.1 thousand hits. Nice.

Brygida Walczak also storified the EU institutions’ use of social media from the TechMap on 6th October – have a look http://storify.com/brygidawalczak/they-run-social-medias-at-european-institutions.

Outside of EU stories, the tool is being used to cover the US Republican primaries, development issues and a myriad of other interesting stuff that is well worth a look – spend a little time exploring and you’ll gather some good ideas.

The downsides

Storify tells a chronological story, meaning that the reader has to scroll down to follow the ‘plot’ that you present – this can be a little inflexible, and obviously works best when you’re able to give people a proper beginning, middle and end.

It can also be time-consuming to source the content, particularly if you are attempting to fully document an event in retrospect – finding all the Twitter posts and matching them up to what was happening at that time can be tricky. We reckon that you might be better off either doing it live as the event happens so you can find the tweets as they come, or if you’re working after the fact, don’t attempt to include all the updates – tell a more analytical story.

The upshot

There’s no doubt that Storify is aesthetically slick and for the multi-platform, minute-by-minute news junkies amongst us, it’s both useful and a bit of a kick to have everything so cleanly and quickly compiled.

That said, if you’re thinking about taking it on as a regular part of your communications artillery, it seems like real questions you need to ask yourself are: How would you put it to good use? What stories would you tell? Could it add something substantial to how you’re communicating already?

If you can’t see a clear answer, you run the risk of adopting an extra time-consuming and potentially unnecessary layer to your communication strategy just because it looks pretty, and because it’s nice to be leading the charge of the Twitterpack.  Worst case scenario, you  end up looking like the social media equivalent of that guy at a party who loudly recounts anecdotes that don’t go anywhere…and no one likes that guy.

If, on the other hand, you’ve got an idea that could really capture the attention of the story-hungry masses, run with it. We’ll be cheering you on!

@AmyJColgan and @Linda_Margaret

Social Media Team

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