In my Triiibe?

Seth Godin is a well-known marketing guru, public speaker, founder of Squidoo, author and, by his own account according to Technorati and AdAge, “writes the most popular marketing blog in the world.” Among his eleven published titles are Purple Cow, All Marketers Are Liars, and Meatball Sundae.

Godin’s got another book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us coming out in October and, in the interest of following his own marketing advice to “do something different” he’s come up with a rather ambitious plan. Anyone willing to pony up the dough to pre-purchase the book, sight unseen, gets free membership in a new online community he’s created called Triiibes, targeted at marketers, leaders and “those focused on building communities or creating products or spreading ideas.” With this offer he’s peddling a sense of exclusivity and elitism, though really, considering the book is less than fifteen bucks and membership goes public in October, the exclusive nature of Triiibes will be short-lived. [Update: I'm wrong — membership is closed, probably for good.]

Still, I bought the book and signed up to check out the new community. It’s kind of interesting. It’s built on the Ning platform, so the features will be familiar to most community-oriented people. You can blog and participate in forums, and of course you can post pictures and videos. There’s a job board and news — in short, there’s most of what you’d expect on a community site. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to search by subject area (or if there is, I haven’t found it) which makes it kind of hard to find conversations.

I don’t know what to make of it yet. I’m vaguely uncomfortable with the elite thing. It is kind of nice that it seems like members are using their real names, though I’m not sure if they can verify that. But since members seem interested in connecting for business purposes, like at LinkedIn, real names seem to be the way to go. I haven’t found any gaping need that Triiibes fills.

Another community?

A bigger issue for me, as I debate the merits of being part of this “tribe,” is personal. I don’t know if I want to invest in another online community. I’m curious to see where it goes, which means I’m doing more lurking than participating, which of course means I’m not getting nearly as much out of it if I were participating more actively. If people send me messages, I answer. But I’m asking myself, At what point does your bandwidth get too thin to take on another community? Twitter, which I use all the time, has proven to be a fantastic networking and marketing tool. It’s also a huge time suck. Do I have time for another social media commitment? Then again, when entrepreneurs tell me they don’t have time for Twitter, I often respond with “you can’t afford not to.”

Before I fully commit to Tribe (or not) I need to know: What makes this community unique? We already have plenty of communities for “everyone”. The only common denominator for Triibe’s that I can see is Seth’s blog. I read his blog faithfully. I think he’s a brilliant marketer, an engaging writer, and he seems like an all around good guy. Is this enough to make a community?

Which makes me dig a little deeper and ask: How much do you have in common with a group of people before you feel you really have a community? The word “friend” is becoming meaningless thanks to places like Facebook and MySpace. Clearly, being able to connect with so many people online has a lot of benefits. But at what point do you stop joining communities and focus on a select number of individuals or groups?