Posts tagged triberr
Four reasons why I finally like Triberr
Dec 29th
For the past six months I have given Triberr a whirl and it has been quite a drama.
Triberr is a new platform that bands together like-minded bloggers who support each other by tweeting worthy posts. I’ve participated in a limited way because up until now, the application was misguided, political and melodramatic.
The first problem was auto-tweeting. Not just auto-tweeting, but an expectation or even a REQUIREMENT for auto-tweeting other tribe-member posts. I created my own little resistance movement and was nearly thrown out of tribes a time or two but I’m happy to say that Triberr now has NO auto-tweeting. So I’m staying.
The second problem was/is the politics. For some tribe members there is a strong entitlement mentality that since your post gets tweeted, you should always return the favor. Which I do … unless the blog posts aren’t very good or are blatantly self-promotional. Everything you do and say reflects on your “brand.” You are what you tweet. And part of my brand is “quality content” so I’ve had to ignore some barbs from people who I would happily tweet if their content was aligned with what my audience comes to expect from me.
Now let’s talk about the upside to Triberr and why you should consider this interesting innovation.
Fresh voices. I’ve been introduced to new bloggers like Eric Wittlake, Douglas Idugboe, Michael Brenner, Pam Moore, and many more who are delivering AMAZING content. I love almost everything they write and I enjoy sharing their insights with my audience. And many of these new connections are also becoming friends and even business associates.
Meaningful traffic. I am not a big advocate of driving blog “traffic” as a goal. What does that really do for you if you are trying to build a business? However, Triberr has boosted my blog visitors by about 7 percent and I suspect that many of these new readers are sticking around and becoming regular readers because the tweets of my posts are coming from other trusted bloggers.
Feedback. Triberr provides some nice analytics about how your posts perform in the blogosphere. In a very real way, tribe member “tweets” equate to votes. When I write a post and knock it out of the park, the Triberr community clearly rewards me for it. If I put something out there that gets a reaction of “meh,” I usually learn something that will help me be a better blogger next time. So Triberr has been a bit of a Darwinian catalyst for continuous improvement.
It solves a problem. There is a chronic unfairness about the blogosphere. Many bloggers are popular simply because they were there first. They may not be the most creative or talented, but their blogs are at the top of the pile because they have so many followers, so many backlinks, and so much social proof. There is one blog in the AdAge Top 100 that has not been updated since 2009. So it is literally impossible for new voices to crack into the elite league because of this permanent disadvantage. I really hate this aspect of the social web. There is a blogging glass ceiling and mediocrity is institutionalized.
Triberr helps combat this problem by supporting worthy new voices. Now that auto-tweeting is over, it is a true meritocracy. If you do good work and help others doing good work, you will be rewarded. That’s the way it should be. We may not have 100,000 followers, but with the support of an engaged group of supporters, we can make a dent and at least promote deserving work from people who are not considered A-Listers
I think Triberr has evolved to the point where it’s now focused on the right things and founders Dino Dogan and Dan Cristo continue to innovate and add cool new features at a breakneck pace. If you’re trying to break through the clutter, meet new friends, and learn to be a better blogger, you should give it a try. One challenge is you need an invitation to join (and my tribes are complete). But there are message boards with people looking for bloggers to add to the mix, or you can start your own tribe. Check it out.
Quit looking for the easy solution and do your marketing job!
Nov 20th
By Neicole Crepeau, Contributing {grow} Columnist
QR codes are failing. Users are rejecting the Like button and unfollowing brands on Facebook. And now a product beloved to many in the blogosphere, Triberr, has had to nix its most popular feature. What do all of these events have in common? You, dear marketer, and your refusal to do your job.
In October, Sean X Cummings blogged about the failure of QR codes. In part, it’s a lack of user understanding. But, as Sean argues, “Creative usage of a technical solution increases its viral potential and positive brand association.” The opposite is also true. When consumers repeatedly see a technical solution that offers little or no value, that wastes their time, they begin to have negative brand associations and avoid the solution.
Sean does a great job of laying out some of the ways QR codes can be used to add real value for consumers. That’s not how most marketers are using them, though. Instead, QR codes serve as a convoluted way to get to a website, when the faster way would be to just type the URL into your mobile browser.
As I wrote on {grow}, we are killing our customers with mediocre engagement. Now, even analysts like Brian Solis are predicting an “Impending Flood of Customer Unlikes and Unfollows.” Companies drank the Kool-Aid en masse, to the point where every company of any size seems to have a Facebook page and/or a Twitter account. They urge people to follow them. Then, once they have fans, they proceed to drive them away by posting largely useless or uninteresting content and making inept attempts at starting conversations.
Last month, I posted about Triberr and other tools that auto-tweet for users. In Twitter is dying—and it’s all your fault, I lamented the negative impact, the spam, that Triberr was putting into our streams. I even suggested that the best thing would be for Twitter to ban auto-tweeting.
I didn’t know that Triberr was in violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service, which apparently does ban mass auto-tweeting. It appears the Triberr founders didn’t know that either. Am I sorry that Triberr was forced to get rid of that feature? No. I stand by what I said. It was having a negative impact on Twitter. But I am sorry that it got to the point where Twitter had to step in, because it didn’t have to get to that point.
Bloggers were so thrilled with the idea of a nearly effortless way to get more visitors to their website that they gave up any oversight or ownership of their tweets. They used Twitter as a broadcast platform to pump advertisements for posts to their followers, without ever bothering to actually read what they were promoting. If bloggers had been a little more circumspect, using manual mode most of the time or perhaps limiting their tribes to a very small number of people, maybe the spam problem wouldn’t have driven Twitter to step in.
In all of these cases, marketers—or bloggers doing their own marketing—took a technical solution and misused it. They grabbed onto the latest shiny tool and started thoughtlessly using it, in the most simplistic of fashions.
Similarly, marketers and agencies have taken the lowest common denominator of social media advice available: put up a Facebook page and start sharing content and conversing. Apparently happy that it really wasn’t all that complicated, the majority put no effort into coming up with creative ways to use Facebook pages to add real value to their customers’ online lives.
I remember talking with my dad about littering when I was a kid. I explicitly remember him pointing out that one person dropping a piece of paper or a soda can on the ground wasn’t a big problem. But you always have to remember, he said, that it’s not going to be just one person. Always think about what will happen if everyone or at least lots and lots of people drop that soda can. Is that the world you want to live in? If not, then it’s your responsibility not to add to the problem.
Your business, your blog, it doesn’t live in isolation. When you choose to take the easiest path and the cheapest solution, just remember that there are thousands and thousands of other bloggers, marketers, and businesses putting just as little thought into their actions. When everyone is taking the mediocre approach, we get a mediocre ecosystem: a mediocre Twitter, a mediocre marketing tool, a mediocre social network. Consumers know mediocrity when they see it, and they reject it.
We reap what we sow. If you want a better business environment and more opportunities to engage with readers or customers, put a little thought into your work. Give a little forethought to the impact of your decisions. Quit looking for the easy solution and do your job. We’ll all be better off.
Neicole Crepeau a blogger at Coherent Social Media and the creator of CurateXpress, a content curation tool. She works at Coherent Interactive on social media, website design, mobile apps, & marketing. Connect with Neicole on Twitter at @neicolec
A quick look at MS365, Kyoo and Triberr
Jul 5th
I rarely do tech reviews but I wanted to provide my experiences with three recent test drives, Microsoft 365, Kyoo and the controversial new Triberr application.
Microsoft 365
I have really been looking forward to this cloud-based office productivity application.
As a small business owner, putting my office management and document suite into the cloud can solve a lot of problems. I use a variety of access points — laptop, desktop, smart phone and iPad. I’m tired of all the syncing and not syncing and this is the future of efficient business management and communication.
The price is really sweet. I can get all the basic functionality for $6/month, This includes web conferencing, which I am currently shelling our $49/month to achieve through Citrix. It’s worth the price of admission just for that. The basic Outlook functionality works great and office tools like Excel and PowerPoint offer most of the great features of the original.
And for that price, I am thinking of bringing all my freelance partners together under the same Sharepoint umbrella offered in this suite. Hey, I can act like a big company now.
It is going to take some time to really optimize this and learn how to leverage the capabilities — and that is the basic downfall. When I sign up for something like this, I want it to go POOF and magically integrate with my current Outlook software and basically just lay itself at my feet and say “Use me.” Nope. First, there are instructions for the “administrator.” The email tutorial includes comforting words like, “don’t worry about set-up, your administrator will take care of that.”
Dude. I AM the administrator.
There is no POOF. After several hours of manual setting manipulation and malfunctions, I am still not synched up all the way. I am especially having difficulty with multiple email accounts on Gmail and Yahoo. Coordinating the Google Apps seems much simpler. I’m wondering if MS rushed this to market to be cloud-worthy? Online support is nearly non-existent.
I’m hanging in there because long-term I know this is the way to go — and the cost/benefit is tremendous – but it has been frustrating for a small business owner to spend so much time on set-up.
Kyoo Channels
I first saw this technology in action at Social Slam. It was an eye-popping interface that organized the social media wall of noise in a very compelling way. This channels development is something new and just launched last week.
This is something to use when you want to find and follow all the online buzz about a particular topic. Let’s use Google as an example.
People are talking about Google, especially with the recent launch of Google+. And while many of us are using networks like Twitter and Facebook, in addition to blog posts and news articles to follow what people are saying about it, it’s historically been hard to follow the buzz around a topic across a variety of social platforms and news sources without having to visit each website individually. Kyoo Channels is hoping to change that.
Channels enables users to easily follow and interact with the online buzz surrounding popular trends and hot topics in real-time. Kyoo.com is a constantly updated content aggregation website that dynamically displays social content, images and videos surrounding a variety of topics, each on its own visual dashboard.
Each “Kyoo” displays the online buzz surrounding a specific topic – from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, social bookmarking websites, major news sources and blogs.
Current “Kyoos” span a variety of topics – from news and political topics such as the Casey Anthony trial and Barack Obama, to celebrities like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, to viral sensations such as “People of Walmart” and Pottermore, to lifestyle trends like extreme couponing and home brewing, and everything in between.
Give it a spin and let me know what you think.
Triberr
Triberr seems to be one of the most controversial developments in blog land. Simply put it allows you to join a group that automatically tweets all of your new blog posts.
I was an early adopter because my friend Dino Dogan is a founder and asked me to try it out. I ran into problems early on when the tribe added members who created posts that were inconsistent with what I would normally tweet. I had to leave the group and start my own hand-picked tribe.
There are a few bloggers who are consistently so excellent I always tweet their posts. People like Stanford Smith, Jeff Bullas, Neicole Crepeau, and Jon Buscall. So we have our own little group going now.
There is a distinct ickiness factor to Triberr because it flies in the face of Twitter authenticity — tweeting a post before reading it. But from a practical standpoint, it saves me a lot of time. I literally tweet every post from these guys any way so this allows me to offer quality content without digging through my blog reader every single day.
Triberr has added new features constantly, the most important being an option to operate in “manual mode.” This way, you can review queued posts and approve them before you tweet. Without this feature, I never would have bought into Triberr.
The problem is, many people probably won’t go to manual. So there is a distinct danger of these tribes becoming unwieldy and clogging our streams. It all gets down to people and their motives and we’ll probably see all flavors of strategies emerge.
In recent days, Triberr has received a lot of coverage, both pro and con but the posts I’ve seen miss an essential point. Why would people resort to auto-tweeting in the first place? Why don’t they just concentrate on providing insanely good content that people will WANT to tweet?
The simple answer is that the path to breaking into the ranks of elite bloggers is stacked against good content.
With the way blogs are rated, either by Alexa, Post Rank or Ad Age, there is a cumulative effect of backlinks. For example, there was one blog in the Ad Age Top 50 that had not been updated since 2009. Likewise, a long-time blogger like Chris Brogan may never fall out of the Top 50, even if he never blogs again because of the permanence of the links to his blog.
I also think that in many cases SEO trumps content. Over the past six months a bevy of SEO blogs have been inexorably marching up the AdAge Power 150 list. I’m not saying they don’t have good content, but I guarantee you they have good SEO. As an independent, solo blogger, I can’t bring that kind of fire power to my blog. And neither can you. That’s a big reason people are turning to a shortcut like Triberr. It’s a sprint to get a lot of attention because it’s increasingly unlikely that a marathon of great content will work. My hunch is that if there were 50 SEO-focused blogs all aimed at getting onto the AdAge list, eventually all 50 would get there.
In other words, if you are a new or emerging blogger, it is going to be extremely difficult to get ahead on content alone. I find this a disturbingly sad fact but the reality of the situation. No matter how hard we work, we can’t overcome this legacy of backlinks, if these ratings are important to you.
The current grading systems could drive a focus on SEO gamesmanship over quality content. We need a better accounting of blog efforts to give everybody a fair perspective of who is delivering great work. For example, a better system would feature a rolling 12 month average of content, comments, tweets, backlinks etc. You would have to “earn” your place every month, not just sit on history. This would at least give people a chance to be the best “now” rather than have to fight against this impenetrable legacy with systems like Triberr.
As for me, I intend to use Triberr in only a very exclusive and limited way as long as my most trusted blogging buddies continue to deliver the goods!
Have you tried any of these tools yet? What are your thoughts?
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