http://osakabentures.com/2011/08/crowdsourcing-article-standards/
Tribe-Sourced Blog Promotion Standards
Posted by OsakaSaul on August 12, 2011 in English | 5 Comments
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.
I intend to monetize my blog.
Why would I point fingers at you using your blog for marketing, then?
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.
The 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. When I have been proven to have been unclear, I have revised the description and requirements sections. 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.
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. Tribr.it (paid tweets, sent through a tribe): firehose your other tribes as you see fit; kindly send no more than one/week through SMMAKERS. I do not care if you are saving children 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 up to two 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? 10/week? Please 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?
Thank you, in advance, for helping your tribe become much stronger.
I expect it to be nothing short of a cornerstone of your blog marketing. I ask that you afford this tribe and fellow tribe members with the consideration it is worth.
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Saul Fleischman (edit profile)
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Paul Morin 6 days ago
Saul,
As you know, I'm quite new to this tribe and to Triberr in general. I am very happy to be part of the group and I applaud you for what you are doing with the tribe. I can say that you were very thorough and meticulous in making clear to me the key rules of the tribe. You took a good chunk of your own time on Skype to do so. I appreciate it.
I am too new to make any strong statements about the rules and regulations. Everything you explained to me on Skype and you cover in this article seems very fair and reasonable. At this point, I have the sense that you've been clear enough with me that if I run afoul of the expectations, it will have been my oversight, not yours.
I look forward to being a contributing and respectful member of the tribe and will be a little less reserved with my opinions once I've been around a while and have a better sense of what's going on.
Thank you again for all that you are doing.
Paul
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Saul Fleischman [Moderator] 6 days ago in reply to Paul Morin
Thanks, Paul @companyfounder the pleasure was mine, and I look forward to
give-n-taking with you on blog stuff, Triberr stuff, and more. Maybe
even weight-control (though, if you can Triathlon, I’m going to guess
that weight-control probably is not an issue for you or your wife).
If you recall, I did also note that sometimes we all go a little
“off-brand.” Sometimes we talk, when that happens - or when people have problems with what others are doing.
I speak with people, while nearly everyone using Triberr, I
find, likes to make snap decisions and the press buttons. They add
bloggers easily, find fault easily… “idiot me,” I talk with people…
Very glad to have you with us – and, as you may have noticed, just as
“The Business of Change” is about to hit a reach of 400,000!
Dan Cristo 1 week ago
I've got to say, Saul. You are one of the most dedicated and ambitious Chief's out there. You've amassed a reach larger than most celebrities, and you are dead set on making your tribe even strong. Much respect.
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Saul Fleischman [Moderator] 1 week ago in reply to Dan Cristo
Thanks, Dan, but actually, what I think I do better is refinement in regards to policy and communication: I look to the membership for contributions, and we build strong tribes together. And then, since every single day I get applicants who are not perfect fits for my own tribes, I enjoy helping those people, bloggers who are not yet in Triberr, find "homes" in tribes being developed by other Chiefs.
Looking forward to the upcoming tribr.it replacement system. Perhaps we can test that with The Business of Change (if testing does anything for you, that is). Just let me know.
Samantha Bangayan 6 days ago
Great idea to set these guidelines, Saul! It really helps keep every member of a tribe on the same page! I'll be looking into doing something similar with my tribes! =)
