Participation Creation using Storify.com

I believe in the power of participation creation: leveraging the influencers in your community as content collaborators to expand and extend your content distribution. But sometimes, gathering your social resources, links and conversations all in one place can be a disorganized and frustrating task. In addition, alerting those that you’ve quoted or included in your article of the new content you’ve created takes time, diligence and energy. That’s why, when I signed up for the Storify.com beta program I was eager to give it a try.

Curate, quote, contextualize and alert all in one place

Storify targets their application to Journalists and Editors looking to create sourced and credible content in realtime. Their client list today includes venerable institutions like The Washington Post and PBS Newshour. But, content marketers can leverage the platform to organize and create content about niche topics in a credible and cohesive manner. Their homepage includes a nice demo video that explains the concept in about a minute.

But basically:

Turn what people post on social media into compelling stories. You collect the best photos, video, tweets and more to publish them as simple, beautiful stories that can be embedded anywhere.

What they don’t tell you up front is that one of the best features included in their content curation engine is that they allow you to easily add context to each element you add to your story. This helps make the promotion of your content much more efficient and powerful.

A quick content marketing story

My first experiment using Storify focused solely on looking at some interesting content marketing finds using Twitter, Flickr and Google to compile a nice list of interesting stories:

Storify does a great job of allowing writers to create entire stories using the platform. During the 2010 elections in November, Burt Herman and his team showcased their platform’s capabilities in one of their blog posts created entirely on the Storify channel.

Next time you’re at a live event, I recommend you try and use Storify to create your summary of the days events on the Storify platform. It seems that the channel is best used to contextualize live events that need constant curation and smart context.

Let me know what you think after your beta invite rolls in!

About The Internet Cosmonaut

Our Chief Strategy Officer is constantly searching for new ways to build online relationships by creating, distributing, and promoting valuable content. Each week, Drew Davis will introduce you to one of the new channels he’s found as he dashes around the online universe.

He’ll help you understand, as a marketer, how you can use it (or how you shouldn’t use it) to market your products or services more effectively and efficiently. If you have a new tool you’d like Drew to review, send us a comment!