Triberr Part 4: Lazing Around In the Royal Triberr Hot Tub

Welcome to Techie Tuesday Thursday here at More Cowbell! This is the day each week when I unleash my inner geek and we talk about some groovy piece of technology or a technical point of writing.

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced you to my new Time-Saving Social Media BFF, Triberr and explained why I love it. Part 2 showed you how to get set up once you’re in Triberr. In Part 3, you learned how to ROCK your Tribal Stream.

Today we’re focusing on how to set up tribes, accept invitations and really enjoy the benefits of Triberr. You’re going to learn the knack of hanging out in the Royal Triberr Hot Tub (Triberr’s Home Window), near the comfort of the Bonfires, and allow Triberr do some of your social media work for you.

But first we need a Triberr Contest Update!

I’m giving away spots in a new More Cowbell tribe specifically from the comments in my Triberr blogs. PLUS, I will give the winners a Triberr tutorial via GoToMeeting where we all talk on the phone and do a quick online session about how Triberr works.

Here’s how to enter this contest:

1. Comment or link back to any of my Triberr posts
2. I will add your name to the Magic Hat of Triberr Love
3. I will draw 3 names each time I put up a Triberr post, announcing the winners for the week.

As of mid-January, Triberr is now open to all with no invite needed. Any of you that don’t end up in my tribe can still go find and form your own tribes. There are MANY nifty enhancements coming down the Triberr pike right now, especially for WordPress bloggers.

Feel free to start setting up your tribes in the comments section here – I’ll answer questions as well. Dino Dogan, one of Triberr’s co-founders has been nice enough to show up and answer questions when he can, so cross your fingers. 🙂

Week 1′s winners were: Nicole Basaraba, Sheila Seabrook and Raelyn Barclay.
Week 2′s winners are: Jessica O’Neal, Marcy Kennedy and Fabio Bueno.
Week 3′s winners are: Leanne Shirtliffe, Gloria Richard and Kate Wood. Congrats!

I will add the commenter’s names from today to my Magic Hat of Triberr Love. THREE Week 4 winners will be announced at the end of my ROW80 update this Sunday.

OK, let’s talk Triberr…

Many of you are already in the program and loving it, some of you are in and flailing around, some of you are running as far away from OMG-More-Social-Media as you can.

Before I lose that last group, let’s make something clear:

Triberr is about consolidating all your social media into one place to save time.

Triberr is NOT about adding a bunch of time into your already over-burdened social media schedule. Don’t believe me? Look at all the fun tasks you can do in your Triberr Home:

• Chat with your tribemates in a private environment
• Tweet your tribemates’ posts at a scheduled interval all day long
• Share your tribemates’ posts via Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ or StumbleUpon
• Click the post title to GO to your tribemates’ blogs

Very soon, you will also be able to read the posts AND comment on them inside  Triberr. Pretty nifty, huh?

Today we’re focusing on how to set up tribes, accept invitations and really enjoy the benefits of Triberr. (p.s. This post is a tad long because I don’t know how many more of these you’ll want so I’m stuffing some extras into this one.)

Your Triberr Toolbar

Here’s how you use your Triberr toolbar, from left to right:

• Tribes – click here to go to an existing tribe or make a new one.
• Bonfires – this is where all Triberr info, help and open discussions are held.
• Search – type someone’s Twitter handle here to find them in Triberr – this is extremely important because you invite existing Triberr members differently than non-members. More on this later in the post…
• Home – your main Triberr area is here, including all the Streams I explained in Part 3
• Bones – where you go to buy, manage or see an accounting of your Triberr currency, which are called “bones.” More on this later in the post too. 🙂
• Invite – click here to invite new people to Triberr (remember to Search first so you know if they’re already in the program). Non-Triberr members are free, existing Triberr members (called inbreeding) cost 15 bones.
• Your Name – if you click in the box surrounding your picture and name, you have the choice to go to your Triberr Settings (discussed in Part 2) or to your Bones area. You can also logout of Triberr, but I’ve never once hit that option.

Setting Up Tribes

When you join Triberr, you are given several free tribes to work with. I was originally invited to the program by Roni Loren (bless her!) and I had three more tribes to work with, along with 100 bones.

If you click on Tribes on your Triberr toolbar, you’ll see the names of your existing tribes, along with the ability to create new tribes – to the right is an early screen shot of mine.

You click New Tribe to create a tribe and invite people that you know. You click New Dynamic Tribe to invite people that you don’t know yet, and Triberr searches them out based on whatever “Shared Message” you type.

I haven’t used the Dynamic Tribes yet but supposing I wanted to hook up with Mommy bloggers or Pregnancy bloggers, this would be one way to search them out.  I could go to the Bonfires for this too.

Since I’m in Triberr to manage what I do NOW, I haven’t spent much time in the Bonfires, or creating Dynamic Tribes. That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t enjoy them, it just means I haven’t had time. If you want to branch out and meet new people on Triberr, those are the places you need to visit.

The two MOST important things to know when creating tribes:

• Always search Triberr first before sending an invite. If the person is in the program, you need to invite them differently than you would a non-Triberr person.
• You will be charged bones to open your tribe to inbreeding (accepting existing members of other tribes). It costs 90 bones to “unlock” inbreeding but you’ll only have to do it once. Unless you plan to only accept non-Triberr people, at some point you will have to unlock inbreeding.

Nowadays, there are reminders of this built into the program. When you click “Invite” on your main toolbar, you’ll see the following dialog box show up:

You’ll have the choice of sending these people either a Twitter invite through Direct Message or an email.

Invitations to an existing Triberr members will ALWAYS come via email. The subject of the email will say “A Call To Arms by…” I’ve been meaning to ask the Triberr creators what made them choose that subject line, as it seems a bit out of place to me.

Joining Tribes

Supposing you’ve been invited to Triberr…what do you do then? The only times I’ve had trouble getting someone in is when they were already a Triberr member and I didn’t know it. I’d send them a Twitter DM, and they’d click it and nothing would happen.

If you are an existing member, you will be alerted to your new invites via email and inside the program. We discussed the email above, but you will also see a number show up next to inbreeding in your left side bar.

Can’t find that left sidebar? I totally understand! I’ve thrown alot at you in one short post so I’ve included a picture to the right.

You get here by clicking Home in the Triberr toolbar at the top of your screen and scrolling down until you see your picture on the left and your Streams in the middle of the page.

Click on Inbreeding in that left pane and accept your invite from there. The screen will look like what you see below – this is an invite I received from a WANA person this week.

Dancing Around the Triberr Bonfires

The Bonfires are where you go to party and gossip find out all the latest in Triberr. To the right is a screen shot of the Bonfires list, which you can get to by clicking on Bonfires in your Triberr toolbar at the top of the screen and scrolling down till you see them on the left side of your screen.

Within the bonfires, you can:

• Run a general search on any topic
• Look for tribes or guest posters
• Find others who blog about the same topics
• Discover areas to socialize and chat
• Read Triberr FAQ’s
• Give feedback
• Get Technical Support (also available at http://support.Triberr.com)

There is much more, but that should get you started.

Are you excited about your Triberr possibilities or completely wiped out from Techie overload? Do you have questions for me about the program? For those of you on Triberr, how are you liking it? Are you seeing an increase in your traffic and contacts? Enquiring minds always  want to know these things here at More Cowbell!

Jenny