What is Storify, and how can PR pros use it?

Storify lets you curate the best tweets, photos, links, and posts about a particular subject and plug it into an easily consumable “social story.” Think of it simply as telling a story through the useful things you find online (as opposed to the mindless chatter).

The Storify editor enables you to search social media networks and the Web to find all the buzz about the topic you’re addressing. From there, you drag and drop the social elements you want into your Storify story, and connect the social elements with copy. Then you can take the embed code and place your Storify story anywhere on the web.

It’s always easiest for me to go from an example.

In an article published on Monday, I interviewed the US Olympic Committee spokesman about his organization’s dustup with a group of knitters. To put Storify to use, I knocked out a quick blog to give a recap of what happened—from the start of the crisis to my article: http://storify.com/kevin_j_allen/usoc-vs-knitters

This took about 15 minutes. It was admittedly a crude use of the technology, but I think it does a decent job of telling what happened through the eyes of the people who were involved in the story.