Using Storify to market upwards in your library

The final post of Twitter week is here! You can all four of the previous days' posts via this link - there's lots of useful stuff there for library's using insitutional Twitter accounts. Today's post is on a very handy tool called Storify.

Internal marketing is vital: never assume that the people who count will just know about the things which are working or breaking new ground; they have to be told. Particularly (ironically) with marketing initiatives - successful marketing must be marketed upwards so its value is understood, and so resources are invested in it on an ongoing basis. 

Sometimes library Twitter accounts blaze a trail, set up amid general indifference from colleagues who don't understand its potential; at the other end of the scale, sometimes library Twitter accounts are mandated from above and thrust upon the people asked to run it. Either way, when it works (and it so often does - Twitter is a brilliant way to communicate with library patrons and library users fall very much into the Twitter user demographic) you'll often find yourself wishing you had a way to bottle examples of success and easily disseminate it to your managers or just other staff in the library. Look, look what we did! See how we helped people! Look at this feedback we got via this new channel! But it's not straightforward to effectively 'export' tweets into a format useful for dissemination - not without a lot of copy/paste/editing or training up your managers to log into your twitter account and check for themselves.

There is a ready-made solution to this problem, which will allow you to internally market your success with Twitter campaigns: Storify.com.

What is Storify?

 

Storify is a tool which allows you to collect social media content from all over the web (Tweets, Facebook updates, Instagram pictures, YouTube videos etc etc) and organise it into a cohesive story - plus you can add your own title, introduction, and comments at any time. You can basically create your own archive of any conversation or event on social media, and add your own context and framing around it.

It's a very useful tool in general, just for recording things of interest and being able to easily share conversations more widely. I've used it before to crowd-source information and views on a certain topic, and then feed all that knowledge back to anyone who is interested. (For example, this Storify on how New Professionals can get involved with library marketing.)

It's particularly useful for our purposes here, to market our social media successes upwards within the library.

How can I use Storify to record and disseminate the activity on my library's twitter account? 

 

Storify allows you to search your twitter timeline, or replies, or favourites, or just Twitter in general, for whatever you want - you then drag and drop relevant tweets into the timeline, and when you're done you can publish it, embed it, send it to people etc.

So to take a scenario, let's say you've revamped your catalogue and you're relaunching it. The new site goes live, and you ask via your library's twitter account: "What do you think of the new catalogue?" 20 users reply with praise, criticism, comments and ideas - and you use Andy Burkhardt's advanced twitter search techniques to pull in the views of 5 more. You put all of them into a Storify narrative, entitled 'Twitter feedback for the new catalogue', highlight the key comments with notes of your own, and send it on to the web team (so they can bask in the praise / implement some good suggestions) and your bosses (so they can see what a useful channel of communication Twitter is).

Generally speaking, libraries have decent comments and feedback mechanism but they're all quite old-school - fill in a paper comments slip, or send us an email. But actually social media conversations are happening about your library all the time, and these comments are equally valid - in some cases more so because they pick up the grey areas (as opposed to the love it! / hate it! type people who go to the trouble of filling in a comments slip). Storify makes it really easy for you to gather these comments and feed them to management in a format they can easily understand, and which doesn't require them logging in to Twitter or, worse, you copying and pasting a load of Tweets into a Word document and emailing them.  

Can you show me a ready-made example? 

 

I can't show you one that we've used at my own institution because I don't want to publicise tweets from users which were basically just meant for our eyes. But I can show you an example of a feedback Storify, which I put together back in June just to illustrate this blog post (which got rather delayed...): 


So - have a go for yourself and see if it works for you!