Earlier this week, I finished reading Seth Godin’s Tribes
Tribes
Triberr.com, at it’s most basic, is a website which allows you to increase the reach of your blog posts by building a network of people who will retweet the links out to their own network of Twitter followers.
In this video, Triberr co-founder Dino Dogan, explains the site.
Many of the things that make Triberr interesting are also things which Godin mentions in his book about building tribes.
A shared interest
Triberr builds networks of people with similar interests, occupations or experiences. They might be entrepreneurs or beauty bloggers or mums. This makes sense. If you’re going to be retweeting blog posts, it’s surely better that they are about a topic that you’re interested in (and that, by association, your followers might be interested in too).
A way to communicate
I’m not a Triberr myself, but already I can see that the site provides a way to contact the leader a tribe and request membership. Three minutes into the video, it also shows how a tribal leader can invite new members and communicate with existing ones.
Of course, there’s also the pre-existing platform of Twitter, which isn’t just useful as a way to broadcast links but also as a way to meet and get to know members and potential members of your tribe.
Exclusivity
You can’t be a member of Triberr without an invite from the leader of an existing tribe. You can ask for one, but it’s up to the tribal leader to grant it – presumably based on whether he or she thinks you’re a good fit for the network that’s being built. Dogan has written an interesting blog post about what he’s learnt about creating tribes.
Once you’ve got that initial invite, you can then create a limited number of tribes of your own. That way, the site grows, but it still maintains a sense of exclusivity.
Taking the follow
You start on Triberr as a member of a group of Twitterers, automatically promoting content written by other group members. This allows you to learn the system before you take the lead and start a tribe yourself.
But taking the follow here is also taking a risk. Just like the tribal leader, an applicant also needs to be selective. You don’t have to know someone, of course, to retweet their blog posts. You don’t even need to read their blog posts to do that. However, it pays to do so. After all, your own reputation on Twitter will be affected by the quality of content that you retweet. It would seem worthwhile then, to check out the other members of the tribe that you want to join and see if their blog content is a good fit with your interests and views.
I’m not a member of Triberr, and I’m not currently sending off messages to leaders asking to join their networks (though if an invite came my way, I’d consider it). But already I’ve found that exploring the different categories a useful human-based filtering system to find ’experts’ in particular areas. After all, the people who make up a tribe are people that the leader thought were worthwhile contributors in that area. Without joining the tribe, I can still connect with them on Twitter. I can still subscribe to and comment on their blogs. I can find out more about the movement they’re creating, who their followers are, and where they want to go.
If you’re using Triberr at the moment – or, for that matter, if you’ve read Tribes – it’d be great to hear your thoughts.
