How To Use Storify To Share Stories From Your Musical Events

Storify, the buzzed about web service whose goal is to "make stories using social media", is now in public beta and . I spent a bit of time playing around with Storify as a tool to focus on a music related event – the release of country music group Whiskey Myers' new album Firewater. My goal was to create an embeddable Storify account that had a narrative focus without writing any text. 

The quick take is that Storify is definitely a worthwhile tool to use in presenting social media elements.  I could see Storify being used for content purposes but also for things like a music publicist's report on a particular campaign pulling in elements from Facebook to Twitter.

Documenting an event is a useful place to start because events provide a beginning, middle and end for easy organization.  I organized the example below, focused on the release of Whiskey Myers' Firewater, in chronological order.

I'm not sure my example was all that successful but it serves to indicate some of the possibilities.

When creating an account, Storify immediately takes you to a page that requires you to authorize use of a Twitter account. It's a bit unclear that that's your only option, but that seems to be the case.

The basic workspace is pretty simple. On the left one has icons of various services that one can search or use to search for content including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. A list of search results is provided, including full Flickr photos and YouTube videos, that can then be dragged from the left hand column to the right hand column where they can then be rearranged or deleted creating a column of embeddable content.

Maybe it's my Firefox/Mac combo, but once you get much content assembled, it's a fairly slow clunky process to rearrange content.  I initially did the above embed in reverse chronological order and dragging everything into chronological order was not so fun.

It's definitely worth spending some time with Storify to see what the various sources can provide. Note that the tabs at the top of the left column of the workspace change depending on the source being searched. I was eventually able to find a copy of the album cover via Google's image search, though it would be nice if I could have provided one that linked either to the Whiskey Meyers' site or to an ecommerce outlet like Amazon.

I think it would also be useful if one just wanted a simple way to display a dialogue from Twitter though it doesn't really work with Facebook dialogues. Ideally, since it's a new service, the possibilities will expand over time. For example, it would be nice if you could add your own content to the mix by uploading pics or even screen grabs.

So there are some limitations but Storify is well worth considering to determine whether or not it fits your particular needs for documenting or promoting specific events.  What else might people use this for in a music context?