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:

• http://storify.com/lelil/social-media-tools-for-research-and-collaboration
• http://storify.com/lelil/scottish-public-sector-digital-group-re-boot

 

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:

• http://storify.com/bisgovuk/uk-mid-sized-businesses-visit-turkey-to-boost-trad (thanks to Marilyn Booth – a fellow Storifyer – for bringing this one to my attention)
• http://storify.com/number10gov (even Larry the cat has got in on the Storify action: http://storify.com/number10gov/larry-the-downing-street-cat)

Anybody got any other examples of Storifyication?