Janet Johnson here with Social Media Hangout Time. Thanks for joining us today. We are here today with Kimmy, the social media puppet, who if you’ve been here before you know she’s a salon owner. And we’re also here with our guest who is Dino Dogan.
Who’s also a puppet.
Hey, alright! I love it! Hi everybody.
Well we’re going to have fun here today. We’re going to talk a little bit about how to stand out in a crowd, because that’s what we talk about with our program. And we’re going to talk about the Triberr, which a lot of people haven’t heard of. Triberr which is, I’m going to let Dino get in to that but I’m just going to talk about who Dino is first. He is the founder of Triberr. And he is lousy mixed martial artist, I’m going to let him explain that one. And a recovery network engineer, well I can understand that one. He is a pretty good singer-song writer so we might have him sing to us today. And a trainer of dogs and a blogger of biz. For parties I can already tell just by being with him in the first few minutes, and a Global Force for Badassery. So welcome.
I love it! It’s fun to collect the Badasseries.
Thank you guys, great to be on the show.
Yeah, thank you, thank you. We welcome you to our show. We want to go into, first I want to always have Kimmy ask her favorite question.
Okay. It’s real serious you guys. Hey Dino, have you ever been interviewed by a puppet?
Never, I’ve never been interviewed by a puppet. This is the first and I’m loving it.
Awesome. Just have fun. Thanks for coming on the show.
Thank you for having me.
Let’s talk about little bit first and start with Triberr. Let’s start with what is Triberr? Can you explain to people that don’t have any idea?
Yeah I’ll try. It’s a social network for bloggers basically. And where’s the mandate of all other social networks whether Twitter, Facebook, G+, whatever. Their mandate is to bring people on to their platform and keep them there. Our mandate is to help you bring more eyeballs into your own blog. So our mandate is to help you grow your traffic or your audience grow your blog instead of focusing everything on Triberrs though we’re kind of sitting in the middle between you and your audience.
Now Kimmy as a salon owner she blogs a little bit but so as salon owner – small business, is this product, this platform is recommended for the little businesses like that that are blogging?
It’s actually built for little bloggers and medium-sized bloggers, that’s really who our audience is. Large blogs don’t need our help. They already have traffic and the audience.
Sure.
So the small business owners can benefit because they have content to share and give and just build the community?
Yeah, all of that. Yeah it’s like the easiest way to curate content on social media. So it’s very easy to consume content, to comment on articles, to share those articles. You don’t even have to click, you just hover over the little approve button and that schedules it out to go out to Twitter, to Facebook and so on. So it’s a really easy way to consume and to curate content. It’s a great way to connect with other leaders and top leaders and inluencers in your space. And if you have content of your own, if you have a blog of your own, you connect your RSS feed to Triberr and we automatically import your latest blog post and we show it to all of your Tribemates and they check it out and if they like it, if they think their audience is going to like it, they easily approve it to you and get shared and stuff like that.
Great idea.
Nice. What made you think of this product?
A big giant pain is what made me think of it because everything I just described I was already doing with my little tribe of bloggers back like in 2009-2010. I was doing all these like SEO-nonsense and all kinds of gray hat trickery and what not. The thing that really worked, there was about 15 of us and we were reading each other’s content, sharing each other’s content. I managed to build a nice whole community, I managed to build a nice whole audience from that but it was impossible to scale. Like if I want to grow to 50 or 150 of bloggers I just couldn’t because it was too hard, imagine going to 50 blogs everyday or something like that? That’s insane. So I’m like there’s got to be a tool that allow me to bring all of my favorite bloggers to one spot and allow me to read their content, to comment on their content and to share their content. And sure enough, there was no such tool. So we built it.
Awesome, that’s great.
Nice, nice. And can you breakdown a little bit of how it works? Like how to get started and what steps people would take?
Yeah. You know you start them like just any platform. You make sure your RSS is connected. That’s kind of the biggest pain point for a lot of people because RSS is so like geeky and most people don’t understand what it is. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and FeedBurner is an example of an RSS feed. But it’s just a URL. In my case my RSS feed is dinodogan.com/feed or /rss, alright. So different platforms have different URLs for it. So that’s the most difficult part. Once you figure out what your URL for the RSS feed is, you punch it into Triberr and you’re good to go. From that point forward we’re going to import all your latest posts. So you don’t have to copy a link and paste the way you do in Facebook. We automatically import that stuff to Triberr. And at that point you just need to connect with people whose content you love to read and love to share. So you can join existing tribes or you can build your own tribe and invite people who rock your world on daily basis with their content. You just use it as sort of a daily reading place. You go in there, spend 5 minutes checking out what everyone’s doing, you approve their content to get shared. You can approve like 10, 15, 20 posts like in 5 minutes and Triberr just staggers them out and shares them to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and so on. And all your tribemates do the same thing for your content.
That’s great.
Yeah.
The more I’m active there the more I do see my content shared and then when I’m forget and pull back I notice that suddenly the content is and I know who the Triberr people are really sharing the content so I think the more you engage there. It’s kind of like any social network, correct?
It is but I would also add that Triberr is built to reward you tenfold, right. So you know little bit of effort yields a lot of outcome. So I’ll give you an example, when I share your post, Triberr has this thing called the affinity algorithm. And when I share your post I’m showing affinity for you. So a Triberr does is like a giant karmic engine says ‘oh do you know like Janet, how about we show Janet Dino’s content. See if she likes Dino’s content’, right. So Triberr sticks my post right on top of your stream and that gives you an opportunity to reciprocate.
Oh okay. So you don’t have the hunt pack, yeah. That’s great.
Nice. Okay, okay. So this is getting down to the, you have a specific kind of your own little algorithm there.
Oh yeah yeah yeah.
Okay. Cool! What would you say makes a using Triberr, what would you say we want to get in a little bit more about the uniqueness of standing out in this crowded world of social media and that kind of thing. What benefit could Triberr be or what would you suggest, in your experience?
You know let’s tie it all together, right. Let’s tie the whole standing out idea where the theme of this show and Triberr. A great way to stand out is to do exact opposite of whatever everybody else is doing. So what is everybody else doing? Everybody is saying ‘hey look at me, hey look at my content, hey I did this thing yesterday why don’t you go check it out. How about you share my stuff, right’ Everybody is doing that. What Triberr allows you to do, Triberr allows you to do the exact opposite. It allows you to promote your friends. It allows you to showcase somebody else rather than showcase yourself. And what Triberr does in return your friends end up showcasing you. So it’s a kind of a reciprocal exchange of audience, if you will. So that’s one way of Triberr helps people stand out in a fundamental way.
Oh you just help edify the people that are in your influence and a lot of times when you’re telling people how much you like what they do other people look at you as a referral source.
Absolutely.
So they say ‘hey Kimmy, who do you know that does plumbing or who do you know that’s good in hair coloring?’ Because I’ve been able to share information to other business owners around me and I edify them, they come to me as a referral source so it’s a lot of fun.
Yeah, I’ll pretend I know what edify means, but yeah.
You don’t know what edify, it’s just talk you make sure that you know I think that you have a valuable service.
That’s right.
What the heck. I think you’re cool, how’s that?
Born and raised in Bosnia, English is my second language so go easy on me.
That makes sense. It means that I think you’re cool.
Right on!
Awesome.
It’s giving back. So if you care, you know. You don’t want to expect ever to get anything back but that in the end that usually what happens. So that’s kind of how Triberr is set up, correct?
Yeah. You know because reciprocity is such a basic fundamental human emotion. All mammals have it. The best groomed ape at the zoo is the one that does the most grooming on others. They’re just reciprocity-driven animals. Somebody does nice forest, there’s all of a sudden this notion of imbalance in the universe. It’s like I look to reciprocate the nice thing you’ve done for me. And that’s essentially the basic fundamental principle of it.
It makes me think about the movie ‘Pay It Forward.’
Right.
Yes, yeah. And the pay-it-forward that’s happening a lot in the drive-thrus. I’ve had that happen a few times speaking of the pay it forward, it’s been happening a lot at the McDonald’s drive thru and stuff like that where their buying for the person behind them.
Interesting.
You know Nick has a great pay it forward Friday. He does it every single Friday and he says pay it forward and they do different videos. So there’s some good stuff out there and I love that all these ideas and how there’s actually a platform that’s kind of were trying to get that secret out here. And I honestly Mike’s show was where I heard of it first.
Mike Brooks, Nuclear Chowder?
Yes.
Right on.
Yes, you got it. And so just happen to be listening to his podcast when he interviewed you. And so it shows that this podcast work, too.
I love podcasts.
And let’s get in to the little talking about the podcast. I’d love to hear about your other podcast that you have because we might as well promote you here and talk about what you discuss on that podcast also.
Yeah. Cool. Yeah. So Mike Brooks and I have a podcast it called Road to TED. And we interview TED speakers as they prepare for the most important talk of their life. So it’s about 20 minutes of interviewing the person about their public speaking journey and then the other 20 minutes we hang up on them and we talk about them behind their back.
Hey that’s kind of fun!
Yeah. We discuss what we learned during the first 20 minutes and the lessons we’ve extracted and stuff like that because both Mike and I are huge…. we just love the whole art and craft to public speaking. It’s such a fascinating topic to us so it’s great to talk about these people who are preparing for TED talk, which if anyone watching or listening to this is not aware of TED talks, it’s just amazing. It’s like the pinnacle of public speaking. So it’s a lot of fun to interview people who are preparing for that.
And what made you decide to do that type of topic for your podcast?
Mike did.
Okay.
Mike and I are good buddies, we’ve been buddies for couple of years now. We talk on Skype all the time and what not and I’ve been a host on his podcast. We have fun talking to each other in general, right? So he came to me last year and like ‘dude, we got to do a podcast together’ and I’m like ‘no way’. There’s no way I can do a podcast. It’s like I’m running Tribber, now were raising money. There’s like a million things to do and he’s like, ‘no, no, no. All you got to do is record with me and I’ll do everything else.’ And I’m like ‘sold!’ If you’re going to do all the heavy lifting, I’ll talk for 40 minutes I don’t care. You know I can do that.
That’s great, that’s great.
So that’s how it came about.
Love it, love it. Okay well that’s something that our audience… so what was the name of that again?
Road to TED.
Okay, Road to TED, very easy to to remember. Road to TED.
We want to run spin offs like Road to Bed relationship podcast.
Uh-oh. That might be kind of interesting. Either you put them to bed or not interesting.
Right.
That’s great. Good. Well we have the one thing that we really like to do with so that our audience has a task in the next 24 hours.
Uh-huh.
What would you suggest they do for their business? And you know let’s go back to Triberr. I’d like to have them try out Triberr so what could they do in their first task that they could simply implement in the next 24 hours that can make a difference for them in their business?
Yeah, absolutely. Number 1 is start a blog. If you don’t have a blog, you don’t have a voice.
Yep.
In Twitter, Facebook, G+, that doesn’t count. It’s a rent vs. own argument. Anytime you post anything on Facebook, you’re building somebody else’s empire with your bricks. You need to own your own empire. And you don’t own Facebook. They will shut you down if you get out of line. Twitter, same thing. G+, same thing. You need to own your empire and that empire is your blog. So if you don’t have a blog you need to start a blog. The reason I have my own business today, Triberr, it all came from a blog. I built a community with my blog and then I took that community and asked them to join this dinky little shack that we erected in the middle of nowhere that we called Triberr. That’s what it was originally – it was clunky and ugly but I had couple hundred people who didn’t mind. You know they came in, they gave us feedback, they invited their friends. The reason I have a business is because of my blog, there’s a direct co-relation. So if you don’t have a blog, start a blog. That’s number 1.
Number 2 is you need a tribe. It takes a village to raise a baby, it takes a village to raise a blog. You need a tribe. I just so happens that my platform Triberr helps you build that tribes. So go side with Triberr, that’s number 3.
Perfect, perfect and it’s free. We haven’t mentioned that either. So there’s a paid version but to get started it’s free.
Absolutely. Yeah. Most people don’t need the paid version. Paid version is for like multi-authored blogs or company blogs or agency blogs. Or generally speaking bigger blogs. You can do everything you need to do for free.
And then you have a plug in, too, for people that are familiar with blogging and do already have a blog and use the WordPress. Can you talk a little bit about that plug in also?
Yeah, yeah. Triberr plug in for self-host WordPress. It’s just, it was a necessity. Our biggest cost in terms of system cost. Our biggest cost is crawling RSS feeds. We have hundreds of thousands of RSS feed and we need to crawl them on continual basis detect if there’s a new post that has been published. So that’s just super high cost, right? And then it can from a blogger’s perspective or podcasters, YouTube or whatever, from a content creator perspective he can take an hour, two hours to pull your latest post. So with the Triberr plugin number 1 thing it addresses is that issue. So anytime you publish a new post Triberr plugin does the ‘ET phone home; E-lli-ot,’ you know. So Triberr plugin notifies Triberr that there’s a new
post and your post get’s imported immediately.
Nice. Nice, okay, okay.
That’s somebody’s stuff, too, but you know, whatever. Pictures and stuff like that.
Okay, okay. And you did have a reblog at one point, is that still available?
No. One of the most difficult things about running a start up specially bootstrap start up is resources are big issue. So over the last 3 years that we’ve been around repeatedly we have to kill our babies. We had some amazing
features, we had this thing called headline testing area. So it was basically hot or not for headlines. Right.
Yeah.
And community people can vote on which headline they would be more likely to click on. It was incredibly popular. People were using it just all the time, it was really great. But we couldn’t maintain it. We had to kill
it because we just couldn’t allocate resources – development resources and you know, all that stuff. And reblog is such another tragic story. Re-blog was around and then WordPress did some updates we couldn’t allocate resource to keep up with those updates and update that
works with reblog so we had to kill it. But re-blog is the future of Triberr. And if I have my say it’s the future of the blogger sphere. You can retweet a tweet, share a Facebook post, why can’t you “retweet” or “reblog” an entire article along with the authorship
and along with the comments? So both the content and the engagement, the comments piece, is syndicated. That’s what reblogging did. And we just couldn’t. I mean imagine if you publish a blog post and now it’s published across 50 other blogs.
Yeah and the authorship is included then you are not dinged for SEO work as long as the authorship is all attached.
Yeah. Authorship is included and you get the exposure and you get no traffic. And by the way traffic is a cost center. Like people You want attention that comes from traffic. Alright?
Oh sure.
That’s a subtle difference, right. If you have like a beanie baby store in the middle of Manhattan, right, and thousand people walk through your store and they don’t buy anything, that’s traffic. What did you get from that
traffic? Nothing, right. So it’s the attention from the traffic that you want and with reblogging you eliminate the cost of traffic and you still benefit from the attention. Authorship is there, anybody leaves a comment on any instance of the blog post gets replicated
across all the 50 other ones. And just, I mean, it was a great feature. And we will bring it back.
Wow. Nice, nice. Use it at one point and then had just not used it in awhile and then I noticed it was gone. So I’m glad I spoke directly to the source here about that. Okay.
Everybody is asking me about it, it’s a great feature. We will bring it back. We’re looking to raise money this year and that means we’ll be able to hire people and address resource allocation issues that we were not able to
address right now. And that means reblogging is the first one on the list.
Good, good. Well that’s great. And even without it your program is excellent and I everybody should get over there and test it out and join a tribe, start a tribe. Would you suggest when people get on, I’ve actually not started
my own tribe. I didn’t know what I was doing.
That’s okay.
So I was like other people. So what would you suggest, what would you suggest people start one of their own when they go on or just join and just see how it goes. What’s your stress there?
Life’s an and not an or. You know, you don’t have to just join a tribe or just start a tribe. Do both.
Got it, got it. Great.
Everywhere, right Janet?
Exactly. Well this was great. I love your analogies, the gorillas still sticking in my head.
Nice.
I love it. Well we’re going to have Kimmy finish up and ask you couple more questions.
Sweet. I love questions from Kimmy.
Awesome. Thank you. The question I have is where could people find you and your products? Where do you want them to connect with you online?
Dinodogan.com, that’s my personal blog and Triberr is triberr.com, tribe with 2 r’s at the end, triberr.com.
How about Twitter? Are you on Twitter?
@DinoDogan. Yeah. Actually. I’ll share a little secret with you guys. The reason I started Triberr is so that I have an excuse for being on Twitter all day. I most definitely haunt Twitter.
Oh wow. Great.
Thank you so much for coming on the show, we really appreciate.
Thank you for having me.
Yeah, thank you so much Dino. Have a good one, thank you.
Bye you guys!