Storify has become a useful tool for media organizations trying to capture newsworthy or entertaining social media conversations for their readers, with its ability to combine tweets, photos and more into an embeddable conversation. Today the company is announcing a VIP plan with features designed specifically for “media organizations, publishers or anyone wanting to deeply integrate social curation and storytelling into their site.”
The plan includes the ability to update a Storify story in realtime (useful for live blogging), to customize the appearance of a story with CSS, to receive priority technical support, add custom sources and share stories privately. Co-founder Burt Herman told me via email that the first two features will probably make the biggest difference for readers, while the private sharing could be useful for newsroom collaboration, and also for communication within companies and PR agencies. So for example if a brand becomes embroiled in a big social media controversy, Storify might be a good way for an agency to capture what’s going on, but that’s probably not something they’d want to highlight publicly.
I asked Herman if a service like this was always in the company’s product plans, and he replied:
Many major media organizations, brands and non-profit groups users have come to Storify organically for its basic functionality. But it’s been clear for a while that our professional users had these needs and we’ve been thinking about how to serve them, which is why we’re launching this service now.
Herman described the cost as “enterprise-level pricing,” and he said it will vary from customer to customer.
One of the first companies to use the VIP service is the BBC, in what Storify describes as “one of our first formal partnerships with a media organization.” BBC developers have apparently built a custom Storify integration for the BBC site — you can see what it looks like in this BBC Radio 2 liveblog of an attempt to recreate The Beatles’ debut album Please Please Me.
Storify is also announcing that it’s now a WordPress VIP partner, making it easy for WordPress VIP sites (such as TechCrunch) to incorporate Storify content. The company says it now reaches 15 million unique readers per month, with 600,000 registered curators and traffic tripling over the past year.