Rules in Triberr Tribes: Protecting us all from each other

It started with a choice of verbiage for blog post title that soured relations (okay, not that much, but, this will serve as an example) for The Business of Change Triberr tribe’s Down Under faction.  Names will be withheld so no one gets Cross with me.  My Applicant Requirement guidelines may not have been clear on language.  Lately, a fairly new member to the same tribe published an article that is most certainly an over sales promotion for a report.  I cannot blame the member, I must assume, because I did invite him with an internal invite (he was already a Triberr member), and he may not have perused our guidelines.  As it happens, we ask that marketing, self-promotion and sales-oriented material be limited to site/blog static areas (i.e. pages, or in the sidebar, header/footer, etc.) but kept out of blog articles themselves.

Why would I point fingers at you using your blog for marketing?

In here long enough, and I believe you should like what you get from Triberr.  If it is of value to members of my tribes, I need them to acknowledge the importance of 5, 10 or even 40+ bloggers carrying their message further, amplifying their reach dramatically, and in the tribes I am building, one condition is that we don’t ask other members to do our selling for us.  Our tribes are for bloggers happy to share knowledge, know-how, and ideas, and as for promotion, to do so passively.  We lead people to our blogs by showing what we know, who we are, and why you should do business with us – rather than going for the jugular (selling, I mean) within a blog post.  Sell in the widgets and pages, not in the blog posts or their links, please – because why the hell should all of us be selling for you with nothing in it for us…?

The final responsibility to be clear on terms is mine, as Chief.

I did not invite a single member to any of my tribes without designating a Name, Category and then completing the Tribe Description and Applicant Requirements sections for the tribes.  Triberr inexplicably zapped our “Requirements.”  Super “Fail,” as I have told the Triberr guys.  That said, I have thus revised the Descriptions of my tribes (see “Settings” > “Description.”)  While I am comfortable with the current state of the applicant requirements (our charters, actually; Applicant Requirements is Triberr terminology), and will provide them for two of the tribes I have launched in tomorrow’s follow-up post, having spoken with nearly all our members, I believe we have too much of a blogging think-tank to not crowd-source or tribe-source input for what our Article Quality & Quantity Standards should include.

The request I make to members of my tribes is to contribute to the creation of our standards:

Make us a stronger tribe, and not just as a page-view-driver for your own blog.

While most of our “charter,” or what appears in “Applicant Requirements” can be handled by me, I believe that we will all take more confidence in a section on Article Quality & Quantity Standards that is a product of all the members we have who are thoughtful enough to contribute to it.

The cooperation I ask of members of my tribes is that they read “Applicant Requirements,” add ideas to be used to write our Article Quality & Quantity Standards, and then, join me in adhering to them.  I ask members of my tribes to provide ideas for the governance of the tribes they belong to, and give their fellow members a chance to uphold them.  We will retain members who uphold them, and who, in time, demonstrate solidarity with us with the automatic setting.  It shows our confidence in each other.  I begin by giving you all the benefit of any doubt from me.  After all, while I have invited or accepted all members after reviewing blogs, I cannot know what you would publish in the future, and thus, it does come down to a judgment call.

Article Quality & Quantity Standards

For suggestions for blog content quality and quantity guidelines, I’ll go first:
A. Think “article,” rather than “post.”  Kindly proofread before you publish. This isn’t Facebook or Google+.  An occasional typo here or there are excusable.  When they are strewn throughout your “article,” clearly with reckless abandon, you show lack of respect to readers of your site.  Please don’t have your tribe sharing that which is disrespectful to the reader.  (Punctuation is good too.)

B. If the body, tags, metadata, or title of the article might lead it to be flagged by search engines and article bookmarking site as “not safe for work” (NSFW), please edit out the offending text.  Below is a screen-shot of how I was rejected by reddit.com when I attempted to surprise a Business of Change member with a backlink boost – bu was rejected.  The word “sucks” in he article titled relegated this article to the dreaded NSFW realm:

Sorry about the Japanese all over my Reddit; that’s how we see it over here in Japan.  As for this case, though, besides what banned words do for your backlinks ban-ability, let’s not put our tribespeople in a bad situation – by having them tweet our articles containing titles or body material with foul language.

The article: fabulous. The title: a problem for any of my tribes.

C. Build your own tribes, and also, firehose your other tribes as you see fit; kindly send no more than one/week through SMMAKERS. other tribes I have built.  I do not care if you are saving children, suggesting products, or doing whatever other good deeds you believe you should burden our Twitter accounts with; this will soon be a large tribe and cannot be asking members to carry more than one tribr.it/week.
D. Triberr lets you send several blog posts/day to your tribes. I have zero confidence in regards to getting overbearing about this. I want your feedback.   Many members are in other tribes, all of which are more lax in requirements, so Triberr members seem to expect that “anything will be okay,” but, do we want to ask our members to limit to 1/day? lease give your position on this, and please add additional items E… F… and so on, additional content quality and quantity control guidelines below.  I see a couple members are sending through 2+/day, and that is a bit many.  What do others think, though?  Kindly consider that if we limit to up to one/day/member, I can grow the tribe – without overloading everyones’ Tribal Stream with too many posts to vett.

Thank you, in advance, for helping your tribe become much stronger.

I expect any of my Tribes to be nothing short of a cornerstone of your blog marketing.  I ask that you afford my tribes and fellow tribe members with the consideration that we’re worth.

About Saul Fleischman

Working with social web apps developers on getting things made: my role tends to be functionality ideation, user experience, and also, marketing communications and community development.

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