Cindy RoyalAssociate ProfessorTexas State Universitycindyroyal.com@cindyroyalfacebook.com/cindyroyallinkedin.com/in/cindyroyal

Curating Stories with Social Media

Birthday PartiesAnd Events

Storify can be used to aggregate social content for a variety of applications. You can make a Storify about anything.

Concerts

You could even make a Storify about Storify, as in this one created for inclusion in a book chapter on News as User Experience.

Events

But Storify can be most useful in journalism in the following situations:

Breaking News

Collective Experiences

It's easy to get started with Storify. Go to Storify.com. You don't even have to sign up to begin. Simply choose Create Story. You will be asked to login with Twitter, Facebook or a Storify login to Save or Publish.

You will see your Storify on the left and the social media options on the right. First provide a name and description for your Storify.

Search

You can search from a variety of social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Google+ and more, as well as Storify itself. Storify is constantly adding more sources, so click the + button to manage the sources you can access.

Drag

Find an item you'd like to add to your Storify.

Drop

Drop it in the window on the left. You can continue this for as many items as you would like.

Text

You'll definitely want to add text to your Storify, to provide context and transitions between social media items. Hover above or below any item until you see “Click to add text.” Then start typing. Use the icons at the top of the page for bold, italic, underline, strike through, to add a link or to format text as a header.

URL

If you want to provide a link via a url, click the link button in the media tool bar.

Photos

Photos can be inserted a few different ways. First, search on Flickr to see if there are any photos with your search term on that service.

Photos

If the photo you want to use is in the form of another url, you can insert the address as you would a link, and retrieve that photo. Twitter messages themselves will also display any photos associated with those posts.

YouTube

YouTube videos can be inserted and played directly within the Storify.

Storify has added some new features that make it even easier to add content. You can install the bookmarklet by dragging it to your button bar to insert any Web page or parts of pages while you are browsing. Find the bookmarklet under the Storify icon, Bookmarklet tab.

The content appears under the Storify icon's Storypad tab under Media.

Storify also has a Chrome extension that can be installed to provide the same functionality within a context menu (right-click) in the browser.

Publish

When you are finished, simply choose Publish. You may also Save without publishing, if you haven't completed the Storify and want to return to it later.

Share

Once you publish, Storify will give you the option to share with the world via social media and to notify anyone you may have included.

Embed

Finally, you can grab the embed code to insert your Storify on your own blog or website. Storify can be embedded on a variety of platforms. For those that need unique embed codes, Storify can automatically post for you to Wordpress.com, Drupal, Tumblr and other sites. Click Post at the top of the published story. Others can also embed your Storify.

Here are some examples using Storify from a student project covering SXSW. We were invited to participate during the public beta stage of the company.

Previews

Panel Coverage

Parties

See more examples at sxtxstate.com

Storify works well for live events like SXSW, with a lot of social media activity.

For more information, visit Storify.comFollow @Storify on TwitterAnd the founders:@burtherman & @xdamman

South By Texas State Project: sxtxstate.comFind this presentation at slideshare.net/clroyal