3 Easy Peazy Apps for Online Story Telling
By: Jen Baier of AARPIllinois
Hey Blog Readers, so nice to "meet" you all!
If you're like me - you marvel at how fast technology is moving, you revel in all the time you save when you find the perfect app, and sometimes you feel absolutely panicked by the sheer number of digital tools out there.
I'm one of those "try any app once" kind of girls…you know, the one who runs around at geek conventions downloading new apps in exchange for a breakfast burritos, (yes this really happened) but at the end of the day here are some of the latest apps that have stuck with me and proven really useful in our digital strategy at work. Bonus - they're all FREE.
Storify - The Digital Content Aggregator
- Pull Tweets, Facebook Posts, YouTube Videos, and snippets from Websites all by searching for keyword
- Drop and drag easily into one storyboard - highly intuitive
- Let other's know you've quoted them in your story via Twitter (hello retweet potential).
- Available via the web and iPad for on the go fun
- Here's an Example of one we did for NCVS convention
Instagram - The Photo Filtering Craze
In the last year or so Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are becoming more and more visual. A picture is worth a thousand words and the attention span of your online audience is about 5 seconds or less...
- Snap a pic and add a cool filter in just seconds- black and white, low-fi, a bit of blurr - in a snap
- Share out to all of your favorite social networks like Twitter and Facebook simultaneously
- Full hashtag integration for Twitter spreads your message like wildfire.
- Combine it with Statigram to track your stats
- Here's one we did of our volunteers in action at Union Station it got 235 twitter clicks!
Viddy - The Pretty Quick Video
Up to this point it's been kind of a pain to easily share a video from your iPhone onto Facebook and Twitter - and not have them look like home movies…then along came Viddy...
- Shoot a 15 second video add a filter, drop in a song, and share it to your social networks for all the world to see
- Like Instagram it gives your audience something unique, artsy, NOT BORING to look at
- 15 seconds might not seem like a lot but in the world of Social media it's plenty.
- Use it to shoot your volunteers in action, your quick pitch for recruitment, your advocacy 800 number and more!
About the Author:
Jennifer Baier is the Associate State Director for Digital Strategy at AARP Illinois. Volunteers have dubbed her a "tech goddess" and her Star Wars loving husband just calls her a straight up geek. She's constantly connected, incessantly commuting from her home in WIsconsin to her job in Chicago, and absolutely in love with her Siberian Husky Tonks - who of course has his own Facebook Page. Tweet her @nanifu or email her at [email protected]
