Storify was a social curation platform that collects updates from social networks, to create a new story format that is interactive, dynamic and social. It was acquired by Adobe, and has been retired (May 2018).
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Sysomos, now part of Meltwater
Score 9.5 out of 10
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Sysomos was a social media listening and marketing solution for content discovery, planning, publishing, moderation, and analytics. Sysomos was acquired by Meltwater, and is no longer available, but the features of the former Sysomos are now part of the Meltwater platform.
I would advise that Storify is easy to use and includes many built-in resources, such as search tools, but that its application can be improved even more by combining it with other tools such as Google News (also accessible in Storify, but using standalone site is easy), Twitter (corporate and 3rd party) search tools and media management / "clipping" services like Vocus
Sysomos Expion is best suited, in my opinion, to offices where either you have only one moderator/manager OR where multiple users plan to manage a specific channel. Without live updates, it gets far too complicated for multiple users to manage the exact same workload
Storify is a really clean and cool way to demonstrate the use of live-tweeting at an event. Whenever we hosted galas or organized huge events, we would gather all of the Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter posts using the same hashtag and create a story. What's nice about this is you can choose which posts you want to include or omit. Once you create it, it tags everyone that's mentioned -- which is great because it streamlines your time -- and you can easily import the finished Storify in WordPress. This made it easy to include in our blog.
Storify can make your organization look pretty social media savvy, which is what people would tell us whenever we used it. It's also a fun way to tell a story in real time without having to invest too much effort in writing an old-fashioned blog.
Aside from using Storify to strengthen my organization's brand, I've learned that it can be an effective educational tool. I've used it to learn more about a news story by gathering tweets using the same hashtag. It's fun to see how a story unfolds in real time!
Sysomos Heartbeat: the proactive social media monitoring software. The dashboard was efficient and minimalist, and provided detailed reporting on where the social conversation was held for each individual hotel. The rich data and the simplicity of the dashboard made this tool particularly useful and easy to implement -- it was also easier to train new employees with the software.
Sysomos Heartbeat: We also used it to keep track of any crisis that arose. The tool made it easy to catch any spikes in conversation that would spread rapidly either across one channel or multiple channels.
Customer Service: Our hotels receive lots of inquiries, requests, payments, and reviews through various social channels. Sysomos helped keep track of them.
Their influencer/klout score algorithm is worthless - it caps out at 10 so the New York Times and Jo Schmo gamer dude and Justin Bieber all have the same score.
The Boolean builder can be frustrating, it will tell you there is an error, but gives you no indication of where. In a complex string it can take forever to figure out what you messed up.
Twitter listening only goes back one year. If you ever need to compare something year over year, without anticipating the need in advance and downloading reports, you're screwed.
Storify allows the user to tell a story or convey a message using not just words but conversations that take place in the social media. As use of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and other social media increase, journalists - and anyone with a message - needs something like this to pull the information into one unifying form. Storify does that.
There are two differentiating features that Sysomos MAP has that the competitor tools I have experienced (Radian6, Meltwater Buzz) did not: user-friendly Boolean queries for searches and near-real-time results. The former is important because, of course, your results are only as good as your search/campaign. With Sysomos, once you master Boolean queries (which isn't terribly difficult) you're set for creating any kind of listening report. I strongly prefer this to the "campaign creator" forms that other services provide. Second, Sysomos MAP returns results almost immediately - like a Google search. So if you get your results and see that you need to tweak your query - no big deal. Or if you have a last-minute request for a client - not an issue. Meltwater can take up to 48 hours for a search to fully populate. This is a major issue if you get your full set of results back and see that you need to adjust the query; you're looking at another two days of wait time. A long wait on results can also prove problematic in agency settings where clients or prospective clients often need results with a quick turnaround.
From the day I first started using it, Storify has always made total sense. It's not the kind of product that forces you grit your teeth a lot or go into cumbersome customer support areas or fumble around forever only to be unhappy with the end result. I have been able to successfully use the product from the beginning
The product is very easy to use. The platform is visual and data is easy to read. Boolean construction can sometimes be difficult, but the boolean constructor tool is helpful for boolean beginners. For more experienced boolean constructors, the boolean display at the top is very helpful in identifying where there may be holes in the construction
The system is typically pretty fast and easily accesible. Due to contract restrictions, our team sometimes has issues with overlap in usage (we only have one login to share amongst the team).
Unfortunately, we have not had a great experience with customer support from Klear. In the sales process, they were very responsive and helpful, but when onboarded, it definitely changed. We are based in the US and our customer service rep is based in Israel, meaning our work hours barely overlap. Oftentimes we're waiting 24+ hours for a response, and when it's a time-sensitive issue (like the platform not pulling in Instagram Story data) we want it to be resolved as quickly as possible. Klear also has a chat feature for more immediate help, but we've experienced a similar situation there where it takes 12+ hours to get a response and it's usually from our customer service rep. Our rep is very nice, but also doesn't seem very knowledgeable about the platform, and usually can't provide an immediate answer to a question we ask and has to "check with her team."
Practice makes perfect. The more often any new tool is used, the more comfortable the implementer is with the tool. Also, there is a natural tendency with any new tool, to want to use it a great deal. Identifying proper uses as they relate to your overall marketing goals is key to any decision to use a tool.
I addressed this in an earlier comment, but Storify is truly the best that I have found for displaying things in a narrative form. Other alternatives are more visually pleasing (like Tint, RebelMouse), but don't handle the narrative form so well. Those other platforms also do not display text only social posts quite as well.
Sysomos MAP is focused on listening (not management of social media accounts - features exist, but these are not the core purpose). It does a great job of measuring open networks, particularly Twitter, and a good job of monitoring mainstream press sites. For the most part it scales well, and the user-interface is relatively user-friendly, which allows us to decentralize use (important for a very large organization). Not the most expensive of the pack either.
Storify has significantly increased the visibility of our social media channels. With the clean embedding options offered by Storify, we are able to present our social media activity on some of our more established channels (i.e. university websites). In turn, we can convert passive audiences into active ones.
Storify has really helped our constituents in the academic community embrace social media. By providing a space where social media conversations can be archived, Storify really turns social media conversations into spaces for collaborative note-taking. In short, it helped shift the perspective—making social media a tool instead of a distraction.
Storify helps us organize and, frankly, remember what we're doing in the social media space. It allows us to document and tell a compelling story about our social media efforts to senior decision makers and other internal constituents.
