When Measurement Misleads: A Lesson From Triberr’s Downtime

I’ve have been using Triberr for about two months. Last week, Triberr was down for upgrades. All of a sudden, my posts, normally shared by 25 to 30 tribe members, didn’t have any automated support.

What’s Triberr? It’s a platform for forming tribes of bloggers that support each other by tweeting the posts of other tribe members.

Over the last month, the traffic here from Triberr has steadily increased. I was hooked on the numbers and started to see the increasing traffic numbers as success. But it wasn’t my success, it was Pam Moore’s and Michael Brenner’s success. I was simply fortunate to have been invited into their tribes.

Suddenly, despite the warnings I give others, it happened to me. I was focused on the metrics and forgot why I started blogging. I let measurement trump purpose. [Read more…]