Thanks for the advice, Marketing has been quite a struggle for us and I started working on a landing page that integrates some of your points. However, we got high differentiation points with Pulse, Zite & Co.
3 points:
- Contrary to our competitors our users mainly get their news by filtering curated stuff from their existing social networks. Let's say you have selected 'Baseball' as a topic filter, and your FB friend shares an article on 'Soccer', well you won't see it. Basically, you can filter all the stuff your friends shares on your social networks (or Risely) and only see the stuff from topics you have selected. The effect is really good with Twitter, where I follow people that are known experts in their field but often curates stuff I don’t care about. That’s a very different approach than Zite where they suggest you stories, or Pulse where you directly follow certain blogs.
- Second, Risely is curation platform but also a social network with built-in popularity mechanism. The more your curations generates interactions, the more you become popular and recognized: you get to be featured in “Topic boards” but one of the most radical effect is that it directly influences the layout of the stories you share to your followers. They get bigger, and thus you get more chance of being read.
- Third, you will be able to make money based on a revenue sharing program. How it works is that we provide some information on terms of the article you are reading. For e.g. if we detect a link to a product from one of our partners, we show you some information about it (small image, price, title, brand). If you click on it you are of course redirected to the merchant. How it comes to play is that if you share this article to your followers, and you make a lead, you will get a cut out of it. And if one of your followers shares it, and makes a lead, you still get a cut. We are extending that to “Personalities”, Places etc… This feature is limited for the moment, because we don’t have many partnerships.
Sorry my statement is confusing. You only see stories from "topics you care about". We don't really need to analyze you because when you signup you select your own topics (We got around 170 atm) which you can change at anytime.
Then when people you follow on social networks (or Risely) have shared a story that has generated a lot of interactions, we make it bigger.
We have more a news filtering approach. If you select for e.g. "Ruby on Rails" we will analyze your twitter feed and only show you stories from people you follow on twitter that have curated this kind of stories. You can of course set multiple topic filters.
Prismatic has a different approach, where they try to figure out your interests, then they suggest you stories. Those are not stories curated directly from people you follow on your social networks.
With Flipboard, you follow blogs or curated magazines. No detailed filters.