The premise of the session focuses on the consolidation of the social web into corporate media companies. Combined with the increasing focus by search algorithms on frequency and social validation, this consolidation has harmed individual blogs and voices. Small businesses and entrepreneurs struggle to compete in the face of these virtual machines. Dino will discuss how his network of small voices offers a new way for the groundswell to shine through.
Here is a sneak preview of Dino’s session!
GL: How can small bloggers and companies compete against content machines like Red Bull and media companies like the Huffington Post?
DD: Thanks for the setup, Geoff. The self-serving answer I would have to give is Triberr, of course.
We believe we’re solving the next big problem. But to understand what that is, we have to look back into 1436.
In 1436, a young upstart named Johannes Gutenberg combined the wine press, a conveyor belt, and a movable type plate, and created the printing press.
This was a monumental event in human development.
Before the print press, knowledge was available only to the privileged. Print press made replication of books so easy that the knowledge was made available to the middle class and even to the poor.
Between 1500s and 2000s, the age in which knowledge was readily available to all, a new problem has emerged.
While reading was available to all, publishing was available only to the privileged. And then, through 1999-2007, few platforms stepped up to solve that problem.
Blogger.com, WordPress, Tumblr, etc. They all enable any of us to establish our own publishing channels.
And now that publishing is available to all, a new problem has emerged. Getting eyeballs on published content is available only to the privileged, like RedBull and HuffPost.
And Triberr is solving this new problem.
Top 1% of Internet sites get 99% of attention. And their content doesn’t warrant that kind of attention. The truly great content I find is on small and medium sized blogs.
How can a small blog break through the noise gate imposed by these giant content warehouses like HuffPost, Mashable, NYTimes, and the like?
Triberr is the best answer I could come up with. And our mission is to democratize attention for all.
GL: Why does modern search hold back the independent content creator?
DD: Most bloggers are either not technical enough to compete with SEO wizards, or they’re unable to afford an SEO wizard of their own.
Big brands can afford all the SEO wizards in the world. Google favors big brands, and there are million reasons why that is, none of which actually help the little guy.
GL: Discuss how banded together in Tribes people are affecting groundswells?
DD: While America was investing in telephonic infrastructure, USSR was investing in a country-wide PA system.
The idea was that someone in Kremlin could get on the PA system, school principal style, and broadcast the message -top down- to everyone in Russia.
Meanwhile, in America, telephones enables peer to peer communication.
This is one of many examples in human history where peer to peer communication has enabled massive societal changes. And the pattern is always the same.
Command and control, top down approach leads to uprise.
Peer to peer approach leads to innovation. Napster anyone?
As of now, the Internet is in a command and control stage. If they had their druthers, big media sites would broadcast their shitty content all PA like, and your job would be to consume their message.
Tribes enables all of us to push our message up the chain of command. Or at the very least, effectively compete for attention against big media sites.
And we do this by tapping into the collective and exponential power of our tribes.
GL: Isn’t this its own top-down approach, albeit through the mouths of mid-tier and long tail bloggers?
DD: I haven’t really thought about it that way. I’ll have to get back to you :-)
GL: You went from a strongly automation model to a manually managed distribution of blog posts and content. Why?
DD: There are several reasons, but I think the main one is this.
When we first created Triberr, we didn’t envision someone trading reach for quality. But that’s exactly what started happening. Here’s the thing…
Triberr has the deepest trust-model of any social networks out there.
Take Twitter and G+ as an example. The trust model is unidirectional. I follow you, but you don’t have to follow me back.
Facebook and LinkedIn have a bi-directional trust mode. I friend you, AND you have to friend me back for us to “see” each other.
With Triberr, I don’t know if we’re doing it right, or if we’re doing it wrong, but we’re doing it different.
I not only have to trust you, and you have to trust me (Facebook’s bi-directional trust model), but I also have to trust you with my audience, AND you have to trust me with your audience.
It’s a kind of a pass-through trust model that doesn’t exist on any other social network.
It’s hard to communicate that degree of trust as a requirement before you tribe up with someone. And when that kind of trust doesn’t exist, auto mode takes people by surprise and they freak out.
So we made it manual with the ability to put some people on auto if you so desire.
Learn more from Dino on Twitter or Triberr, and don’t miss his session on the New Face of the Groundswell at xPotomac.
Geoff Livingston on Google+
