Social media curation startup Storify is unveiling a couple of new features that should be particularly useful for the brands that make up a growing part of its user base.
The biggest change is probably the new collaboration feature. Previously, if different people were going to post Storify stories from a single account, they had to share a single login and password, which is not really ideal — particularly if you’re posting for, say, the White House.
Now, however, different users can be authorized to edit a single account, with no more password-sharing needed. In addition, users can now lock their content so that they don’t accidentally undo or override each other’s work. The Storify team gave me a quick demo of the feature last week. When one user wants to access a story that someone else is editing, the editing user will get a notification asking whether they want to save and close (so that their collaborator can take over) or keep working (in which case their collaborator won’t be allowed in). Over time, the team said this could get more sophisticated, so that different users could edit different sections of a story without interfering with each other, or could set different permissions levels for different users.
Another new feature is the ability to export a Storify as a PDF. So if an agency or other company wants to showcase their work for a client, it shouldn’t require any extra work to create a well-formatted document that they can attach to an email.
Both features are going to be available for Storify’s paying customers. The company added VIP and Business payment tiers earlier this year, and co-founder and CEO Xavier Damman told me that it now has more than 130 customers. Surprisingly (given the high-profile adoption of Storify by journalists and media organizations), 90 percent of those customers aren’t publishers. That helps Damman address one of the main concerns he has heard about turning Storify into a business — the fact that traditional media organizations aren’t in a position to do a lot of spending.
Storify’s customers include everything from sports teams to universities, but Damman said the biggest group includes brands plus the agencies representing those brands. (Storify’s Business plan, in particular, includes features aimed at marketers, such as the ability to create private stories.)
“We realize that the boundary between media and brands and content marketing is getting more and more blurry,” Damman said. “Brands increasingly want to publish their own content, and they want to use the tools that journalists are using.”
That’s what gives Storify its unique perspective on content marketing, he added — it comes at the problem from a journalistic perspective (Damman and several team members have journalism experience), and they want to continue building a product that’s useful for both journalists and marketers.
Today’s announcement isn’t just relevant for paying customers, however. Storify is also introducing a slick-looking grid view, which you can see in the screenshot above, and which is available to all users.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/SfZ7pJ7ivtg/
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