Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hello Everyone:

We have recently launched Cylive beta. I would appreciate it if the members of this forum could critique it. I have appended this message with a brief writeup about Cylive.

Thank you

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Cylive is a "social media publishing and management" platform. Cylive lets you PERSONALIZE your content. You can store & share; produce & publish ANY content in a social, collaborative context.

Cylive gives you “virtual estate” for managing all your digital content under “one roof.” It also gives you the freedom to mix-n-match, slice-n-dice content pretty much in ANY way. For e.g., upload an e-book (a MS-Word document) with a video introduction to the book.

 

Thus, you have the power to publish personalized material. You can even quickly create non-mainstream content (i.e., content other than photo, video, music, etc.) such as your "Oscar Picks," or "March Madness Brackets," etc. No programming effort is required.

 

Besides publicly posting content, Cylive lets you share content within a private community. For instance, you can upload video of your son’s first steps or photos of your daughter’s first birthday and share it privately with your extended family and friends only.

 

The Cylive application also provides elaborate functions for content (co-) creation. In your “digital home” on Cylive, you can COLLABORATE with your friends & family to jointly produce & publish content. In other words, Cylive gives you the flexibility to control who can do what and when with your content. For instance, you can assign ‘add photos’ privilege to everyone in your family, but only give ‘view photos’ right to your friends. These privileges can be specified individually for your contacts on Cylive. You can also set time restrictions for these rights.

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I haven`t read your snippet on it - intentionally.

I went to the site and it looks like digg. But, somehow different. I guess it is not doing enough to tell me about it or differentiate itself. That works for digg, because they are digg. I think when you are new, you have to do more to explain, welcome, and guide people.

I guess it just seems a little whitewashed and not very user-inviting to me.

Yeah I agree.  Quite frankly, I just didn`t get it.  It looks like digg but is even more boring in design.  Digg has pretty good color theory.  Nothing on your site made me want to click on anything.  I didn`t understand why the headlines all started with a category of some sort.  That makes skimming headlines pretty difficult.  I`d at least change that and punch up the colors.  But like Nikole says, what makes you different?  Tell us why we should use your site.

Can I be blunt? I`m going to skip a discussion of competitive strategy and differentiation because I don`t yet understand your website and business model enough to make comments about those aspects. You have also not requested feedback for those areas.

Your site/concept might be good but your marketing communication needs a lot of work if you want anyone to understand it. Great marketing is all about communication and, more specifically, great marketing is about communicating relevance to your visitors. I visited your site but had absolutely no idea why the site was relevant to me. In fact, I have no idea what your site does or why you built it.

The copywriting that you do have is very generic. "Create, store, share, all your digital stuff?" This sounds like a description of a computer, of a website ... of many things. That`s what I mean by generic. The site does not communicate any specific reason that I should use Cylive.

I read the snippet of text you included with your post and I can assure that it didn`t help. Post a Microsoft Word document and include a video introduction? What is the point of all these strange descriptions? Upload photos and allow people to see them? Is this site what I have heard called a "mash up"? If so, the blend is confusing and unappealing as implemented. This doesn`t mean that the site is bad; it just means that I can`t figure it out.

I went to your "About" page hoping that this would inject clarity. However this page talks about sharing medical records, blogging, publishing, content frameworks, product ratings, comments, and many other things. How is anyone supposed to figure this out? Seriously. The About page left me feeling that the site is a "jack of all trades, master of none". I`m not sure why I would want to use a site that allows me to create a video introduction to my medical records. Some of your marketing communication verges on the surreal.

You need a top down rethink of your marketing. What is your level of experience with respect to marketing? Do you have any practical experience marketing? If not, you need to educate yourself, and fast. I`m not trying to make unnecessarily harsh remarks, but the marketing/communication/strategy for this site is literally so bad that it`s going to kill your startup if you don`t act immediately.

Here are some resources.

Here is a link to an article I wrote about copywriting.

Spend $6 and buy the article "What Is Strategy" from Harvard Business Review.

Link to Purchase Harvard Business Review Strategy Article

Go to the library or bookstore and get the book titled "22 Immutable Laws of Branding" [it`s short] and "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind" [also short]. These four resources would be a great crash course in marketing and strategy. Please post any additional questions.

Hello Everyone-

Thank you very much for your taking the trouble to visit the site and sharing your valuable insights with me. I appreciate it very much.

It is `three strikes` and so I am out. I will work on revamping the marketing message keeping clarity, crispness, conciseness and consistency in mind. I will go through the articles & books CookieMonster has recommended.

Just to give a bit of a backdrop, the layout design is indeed digg- and youtube-inspired. We wanted to keep it simple (yet intuitive), but not dull. Obviously, we have NOT been successful. 

But, may I request all three of you to give me examples of sites (outside of the big guns like Google, Digg, YouTube, etc.) that have appealed to you?  This will help me with my learning.