This is a guest post by Neicole Crepeau.
Triberr is taking the blogging world by storm. And my hat is off to its creators, Dino Dogan and Daniel Cristo for trying to help smaller bloggers like myself get exposure.
I can definitely understand the appeal of Triberr, Twitterfeed, and other RSS auto-post systems. I find myself hesitant to use them, though. As a content curator, they don’t meet my needs–and I’m worried they’re just adding to the noise.
Triberr, Twitterfeed, and Similar Tools
Triberr offers a quid-pro-quo arrangement with other bloggers. You become part of up to four tribes. They tweet your blog posts (the timing handled by Triberr), and you tweet their’s. By default, this just happens automatically without you having to think about it.
(Note that Triberr recently did add a feature that allows you to change your settings so that you can choose which content to tweet. It was built for and optimized for auto-tweeting, though, and that’s the scenario I’m discussing.)
Triberr makes the quid-pro-quo arrangement explicit–and fun. These kinds of arrangements have been taking place informally for a long time. Most of us active in content creation also share other people’s content on a regular basis, and we naturally end up with a specific set of bloggers or sources whose content we tend to read and share.
Reaching a Larger Audience
Of course, we all want our content to reach a larger audience. It’s one of the key reasons we participate in social media. It’s one of the reasons that we share other bloggers’ content.
Triberr touts the increased reach that bloggers get by joining tribes. Its tagline is “The Reach Multiplier!”. So, ultimately, like an advertising network, it’s about getting views and clicks. I have no doubt that using Triberr, or any quid-pro-quo system, will get my links in front of more people. The problem is two-fold:
- Are my links getting in front of the right audience?
- Am I short-changing my audience to do it?
Content Curation versus Content Inundation
As I said, I consider myself a content curator. I am selective about the posts that I share. I take pride in reading each one before sharing it. I share content that I think my particular audience, or the audience I’m trying to build, will find of value. I know they are flooded with content. I like to think they trust that what I share is going to be worth clicking on.
There are bloggers whose content I routinely share. Even with those bloggers, though, I don’t share every post. Even for the blogs I helped start (SMB Collective) or am a regular contributor to (Mark Schaefer’s Grow blog), I don’t share every post. I share those that are relevant to my audience and of high quality.
If a person auto-tweets every post from my blog, then they aren’t being selective. They aren’t choosing the posts relevant to their audience. I bet they don’t have a quality bar, either. Yes, I want my content to be shared. But what I really want is for my content to be shared by someone whose judgement his or her followers trust, and whose audience is the target audience I’m trying to reach.
We are inundated with information, links, content. The problem is just getting worse. When people auto-share every post from everyone in their network, they just add to the problem, inundating people with more links.
The Value of the Curator
That’s why I personally think that true curators are going to become more valuable. As we try to filter out all the junk and focus our time on consuming really good content, we will rely on selected tools and selected individuals.
Some websites and applications are trying to help surface the best content to those who are seeking it. There will be a role for these tools: Flipboard, Zite, Alltop, and the like. They will be locations for people to go to when they are in the consumption mode, actively looking for information on a topic or ready to sit down and do their daily reading.
More and more, though, people get their content primarily in small snippets, through friends and their online networks. They receive it in small chunks: a post on Facebook, or LinkedIn, or Twitter. They click because a particular headline grabs them.
There is evidence to suggest that we are becoming more selective about the pages we Like. Similarly, as content marketing and the content volume grows, we’ll become more selective about the people we follow. As a blogger or curator trying to build an audience, it will become even more important to pick your niche and create and share quality content about your selected topic. People will choose to follow and to really pay attention to the content shared by curators who have proved themselves trustworthy.
For that reason, and just my own personal integrity, I’m not willing to auto-tweet. I don’t want to be part of the problem, and I want to maintain my own reputation–because I think having a reputation as a good content curator is going to become more and more valuable.
What about you? Can automated syndication work, or does manual curation seem the better approach?
About the author: Neicole Crepeau is a speaker, blogger, columnist at {grow}, and co-founder of SMB Collective. She works at Coherent Interactive on social media, website design, mobile apps, & marketing. Connect with Neicole on Twitter at @neicolec.
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