The Brass Ring in Blog Syndication

The Triberr brass ring: Tribing down with members who check in daily.

Connecting with bloggers who will check their Tribal Stream regularly is the summit to climb towards in Triberr.

We attain this from either leading tribes or refining our Triberr tribe memberships to drill down to aligning our blog with members of tribes who read or skim our posts and decide to click the approve button and share our posts. It sure as hell is not the Atomic Tribes deal. It is not roping members into signing on to share your blog without reciprocation. It is building a tribe in which members check in daily, and choose to send any of the members’ content out. This is the brass ring.

Atomic Tribes appear to be very, very well-monetized blogs and, among Triberr users, self-appointed Diva bloggers. They would like you to sign on to share their blog, but don’t expect any form of a reach-around.

Do we believe you are a diva, and we should all rally behind your blog, and share yours – without the courtesy of reciprocation? You know, because your blog is on the order of Huffington Post, Killer Startups or something as important, and thus, we’d be delighted to fortify our Twitter and Facebook content with the quality material (revered far and wide, commonly regarded as always bursting with take-away value in each and every one of its copy-and-pasted infographics) that you flog our way – but wouldn’t think of aspiring to have our lowly blog shared by you…?

“Every time you publish a new post, members of your Atomic Tribe will automatically share it via their social networks.” (source: Triberr.com) Why does no one else see what is wrong with the Atomic scenario? It is “top-down” mentality: everyone in the tribe shares the Chief’s posts; as for their own posts, they are left to hope that members and the Chief share their blog posts. This is expected to be okay with members…? I read the description: a few more Chief controls, and the ability to reblog (no!!! My read on reblogging: yet MORE rehashes of rehashes to add to the fodder and draw Twitter mentions to feed Klout, Kred, etc.) and for this, a monthly fee – oh, and we are left to convince members to join an Atomic tribe with the understanding that while they can be hardwired to share our posts, we are not bound to reciprocate.

“Email Notifications” I see. So, the Chief will automatically spam the lowly members’ email inboxes each and every time he spews out another infographic, cartoon, reblog… any “post” at all (if he cares to). How is this a good thing?

“Powerful Stats” You know what? We had them. (Many long-time Triberr members remember them, I assume.) The stats were not as powerful as suggested with Atomic Tribes, but they were enough. We saw who shared our posts, and how many pageviews they drove to our blog posts. Triberr took them back. Now they’re up for sale – but just for Atomic Tribes. The truth is, people are not going to bust their butts to change their Twitter authority, etc., to get the Chief more reads of his blog. The “contest” and competition aspect looks odd to me as well. No, actually, simply having other members see your title, perhaps skim the post and decide to manually share it – this is the brass ring.

Information on Atomic Tribes is provided for creators only – those who get their blogs shared by the little people.

If you click through to join an Atomic Tribe, the following image is the information provided, ostensibly meant to entice the little people to sign on to share the A.T. Chief’s blog – for absolutely nothing in return. Those who join pay nothing; the diva is expected to find US$80.00/month value in this scenario, which allows them to rope up to 500 people into furthering the reach of the diva’s blog.

Atomic Tribes: What I read is “share the diva’a blog / the diva will do nothing for you”

So, those who join an Atomic Tribe either:

A. Have no blog and are thus happy to share one person’s blog – and get nothing in return or

B. Haven’t the sense to join a standard tribe (no US$80/month fee) – in which their blog would be shared by at least some of their tribemates.

Silly me, I see the standard tribe being deal that would be easier to “sell” to prospective members: they join not just to share your blog, but because they want their own blog shared as well.

Before you deem me a dot-communist…

I’m a bootstrapper, and a big fan of the bootstrapped-startup business model. The creators of Triberr.com deserve to earn a good living from what they have built and the outstanding community-building work (Moderator) Nicole, (Moderator) Christina, Dan and Dino have done. Some of feel that they will do better to study more fremium models that have flourished, and focus on getting their core features to fully work before launching additional flashy features. (Example: within a day after the social sharing beyond Twitter was launched, we could not just “like” or “+” tribemembers’ content, we could also share it to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+. Mysteriously, they do nothing about the overlap problem that prevents us from doing this – in both or the most widely used browsers, Firefox and Chrome.) Ensure what you have already actually works, before rolling out more features. Finally, provide features that are of value to all participants when you wish to charge for them. As I see it, with Atomic Tribes, it is all a “top-down,” “all should ralley behind and serve the big, bad Diva blogger” mentality, and a sucker’s bet for the members. It is worth doing only for the Chief.

For what it’s worth, from a Twitter search in RiteTag.com I see…

The most used tag with “Atomic Tribe” tweets is #dt, with 185 tweets from 183 accounts (in the last five days). From the “content” tab, from a search of “atomic tribe” in Twitter > select “dt” from the suggested tags > content tab, it appears that the @AmazonCares Empire Avenue account has a Mission out, promoting someone’s new Atomic Tribe: