Wednesday 2 May 2012

Stuck on Storify. Or, do as I say, not do as I do...

When I’ve got my official ‘social media adviser’ hat on, I generally try to steer people away from starting with the tool. I get approaches along the lines of "we want to use Twitter, can you help us?". But when I ask why they want to use Twitter and what for, they tend to go a bit quiet and mutter something about "well, everyone else is using it". So I get them to take a step back and think about what it is they want to achieve. And then we have a discussion about which tool/s will best help them get there.

That’s not to say that I always take my own advice…

So, a confession: I’m a wee bit addicted to Storify. It's what all social media tools should be: easy and intuitive to use, and it works well across all devices.

I’ve recently used it to curate content from events:

 
But that hasn't been enough to feed my habit…and I’ve been giving some thought to other ways to get my Storify fix. 

Hence, as a bit of an experiment, I’ve Storifyed my week on Twitter. My thinking went something like this:

  1. I don’t currently archive my tweetage.
  2. I often tweet/retweet something and then instantly forget about it.
  3. I tweet quite a lot.
  4. My tweets probably reflect the veritable information smorgesboard that constitutes my ‘area of professional interest’.
  5. I need to be better at following through on some of those thoughts/ideas that get sparked off by something I’ve seen, or a conversation I’ve had on Twitter. Sometimes they get blogged about - but more often than not, they're left hanging...)
  6. Storifying my tweets on a regular basis might be a nice way to be more systematic about recording my activities, thoughts and ideas.
  7. Making the effort to capture my tweets in this way may also prove to be a useful prompt for reflection. It should also help the blogging process.
This is the result of a weeks worth of tweeting: http://storify.com/lelil/a-week-on-storify (it embeds very nicely as slideshow, see below)


My thoughts so far:

  • Slightly more tweetage here than there would be in a normal week due to a day of event tweeting. I think in future, I'll record events separately.
  • Could make more use of the text boxes for the reflection bit.
  • It's not really a 'story'. Does that matter?
  • Maybe a thematic rather than chronological approach would work better?

So, proof of concept is still to be validated :) I'm not sure this particular tool is the best one for helping me achieve what I'm trying to achieve. But while my love affair with Storify continues, it will probably be the one I use :).

If you want to know more about Storify and how it works, Steve Dale has just written a very comprehensive blog post on that very topic. 

For some great government examples, have a look at:
Anybody got any other examples of Storifyication?

5 comments:

Diane Brodie said...

Like the slide show function. FCO do some nice ones - here's a good example

http://storify.com/foreignoffice/arab-spring-anniversaries

Sweyn Hunter said...

This is a great, informative and though-provoking post - thanks.

I was so excited when Storify came along, as (among other things) it was the implementation of a facility I'd been looking for for months previously: the ability to plan in advance the outline of a themed narrative (event based, a topic, or even artistic or creative "writing" (or "film", or "radio" content), and tweet tweet and interact in real time on that subject (sometimes this involves a beginning, a middle and an end), and "publish" the results afterwards.

Since I got my invitation to have a Storify account, I've made some attempts to do this (not nearly as many as I had expected to make), and I've found the application a bit frustrating, if I am honest. But your post has given me a new way in, to try to make it work again, so I will have a go (probably sometime in very lat May or early June!!)

Radoveden said...

I like storify also, and it seems to offer more and more possibilities. Like Sweyn said already this post is really thought-provoking. Especially the idea of working by theme gives birth to all kind ideas in my head.

Unknown said...

Hmmm...the embedding would appear not to work in IE7 (quel surprise!)

Diane

Thank you. Will check out the FCO examples.

Sweyn

Thank you for the kind comments. Glad you found this useful. I'd be more than happy to Storify #IslandGovCamp for you :)

Radoveden

Thank you! I look forward to hearing more about how those ideas develop :)

Unknown said...

And, of course, Storify is blocked on our network...