Google+ for Business Part 11

* Campfire: It's something to gather around.

* Connections: Create them between members of your community and share your network.

* Continuity: Keep things consistent; blend the offline and online worlds.

* Content: Make your posts interesting.

* Concepts: Educate others and empower them.

With this as a method for growing your audience, go forth and start experimenting. Learn what you can do to grow your community. Send a letter to your email list inviting them to connect with you on Google+. Encourage your offline customer base to connect with you there as well. Make it easy for people to navigate to your presence on Google+. And build with all the tools we've shared.

10. Sharing.

The ability to share other people's posts and information on Google+ is something that the Google team stated as one of the major reasons why it built the platform, and it shows. The blue link to share a post is directly listed at the bottom of every post (see Figure 10-1)-except those where the creator of the post disables sharing. So, within the system, it's easy to share other people's interesting finds.

Figure 10-1 The share link in Google+.

Bringing information into Google+ from the outside is also helpful; sharing other people's ideas interspersed with your own shows your audience members that you care about their education and entertainment as much as you care about getting the sale. (And yes, you need to entertain your audience.) Whether posting or sharing information from people's blogs that you find useful, or sharing links to articles that relate to your business or your location, sharing information is a great way to build audience, to round out people's perceptions of you and your business, and an opportunity to connect others with useful information that keeps them coming back to you for more interesting finds.

This chapter discusses the value of the content you share and what you should be sharing.

The Value of Content Curation.

Steve Rosenbaum has been championing content curation for all the years that I've known him. His book, Curation Nation, is an excellent source of ideas on how to do sharing the right way, and it makes a great complement to this chapter. Steve is the CEO of Magnify.net, a site that helps you collect and organize video content into useful groupings.

Sharing is just as important (maybe more) as creating original and unique content. People want to follow your interests, not just your company updates. A great strategy for sharing is one that helps you gain a following for what you share but also rounds out people's perspectives on what you believe in and what you (and your organization) are about.

Steve says this: Sharing used to be a "nice" thing to do. But that was back when other ways of finding things worked. Media used to work. Search used to work. But today, all the old systems that filtered out noise and created context are broken. So sharing becomes the only thing we can trust to separate signal from noise.

When Chris Brogan tells me to pay attention to Google+, I do so because I know he's been into this whole social media thing for a very long time and he's been right before. If he points me to articles, posts, sites, or people, I pay attention.

Sharing is more than just a pointer or a map: It's an implicit endors.e.m.e.nt. So, by sharing things that matter, you are building your collective digital "story," a story of what you believe in and what you endorse.

I call it digital clothing. When you wake up in the morning, you look in your closet and say, "Today, I'll wear the blue shirt with the white collar." You put on the image you want to share with the world. Increasingly, we live our lives online, so the links we share and the collection of information we curate and endorse becomes a critical part of who we are.

Put another way: We are what we share. And our friends and followers increasingly count on us to create a consistent digital ident.i.ty and both create and share content that re-enforces that ident.i.ty.

In a world of too much information, you can see how apps like FlipBoard take our social network, overlay it with what the people we value are endorsing, and create an editorial experience that is shockingly interesting. It is what Sci-Fi writers have been promising for a long time, a daily newspaper that is essentially "The Daily Me." Only, it's better. It's "The Daily Us."

Just when I think I know Steve's perspective, he comes up with a term like "digital clothing." Now, I'd probably think of it more as "accessories," but either way, he's right. "Clothes make the man," is the old expression, and what Steve is saying is that people check out what you "wear" by checking out what you "share."

Further, his premise, The Daily Us, is a great way to look at it. If you're a real estate professional, for instance, this is a great way to show community. Imagine gathering up the go-to information on your neighborhood and putting it in a digital newspaper (such as Google+) for others to find.

Your locals, the people you count on for referrals, will come to this shared information, your own version of The Daily Us, and they'll see themselves in the paper, and other information that's useful to them. But even better for you, this paper, complete with all kinds of keywords about the area, can be searched for and found by your potential prospects, those moving to the area. Do you see how this can be useful?

A little later in this chapter, you learn about the mindset of building a magazine. Keep what Steve said in mind when you get there. But first, meet someone who shares simply because it spreads good feelings.

Sharing as a Practice.

I asked Mahei Foliaki, who identifies himself as a Chief Happiness Officer, Google+ Tipster, and Ideas Engineer, what he knows about sharing and why he shares what he does. I've known Mahei from Twitter since somewhere around 2008, I believe, where he goes by @iconic88. On every platform where I've seen him, Mahei is about sharing. On Twitter, you have only 140 characters, so Mahei's shares are mostly just repointing us to good information.

On Google+, he gets the chance to explain what's interesting, to sum up the content he's read, and to make his contributions to the stream on Google+ valuable. I have found what Mahei shares to be of value to my business and my life overall. (Oh, and beyond that, he's just a friendly connector type.) Mahei said the following: Sharing is caring. I have an absolute focus on making our world a better place because that is the way I was raised. Making a difference and all that super positive "goose-b.u.mpy," "behind the neck, hair-raising, and wow! that's helpful" stuff. My sharing is simply about empowering and inspiring my friends, my networks, and my new connections, who over time, eventually become friends, to making their world a little easier and happier. I am very fortunate that my parents and other wise family members instilled in me a long time ago to be of service and to be the example that we want our world to be.

We have an expression from back home in Tonga, which is a small Pacific Island nation nestled deep in the South Pacific next to Fiji: "'Ko Tonga Mo'unga ki He Loto" translated means "The Mountain of Tonga is within you." Us Tongan people don't own many material things compared to other economically wealthier societies but what we do have is our love for others. This is the raw essence of why I share what I share because I know it will help someone. Any form of grat.i.tude is a reflection of the rich values that have been pa.s.sed down to me from my parents, my family, my ancestors, my culture, and Pacific peoples.

Advice: Share to help, inspire, and empower. Be consistent and people will eventually know you for what you share and how you have been helpful to them. You won't please everyone because we all value different things. It's all love any way and regardless of the content, people will remember your generosity of sharing a solution or eight.

What's great about Mahei is that he doesn't need anything from anyone. He chooses to share because he feels it's goodwill. We don't all have to emulate the Tongan mindset 100%, but bringing some of what Mahei's people do into how you conduct your business can result in goodwill that translates into better business relationships. It makes you a go-to person, or a connector, and that's useful.

Sharing becomes a "coin of the realm" in some ways because when you find good information for your following, and in sharing it, you get a little more of their attention. It's a transaction that builds interest (in both uses of the word).

Building Interest.

With sharing, there's an opportunity to keep your audience interested by connecting with items of value. (Both from those things you've found within Google+, but also from finding information outside of the platform that can prove useful.) There are two ways to consider using this information: to stay on-topic and try to build more useful content for your community, or to go off-topic and let people see more about you than normal. Both build interest. In one case, you show someone that you have information that can help them grow in their pursuits and that you support that community. In the other case, you show that you're more than just what you post for work purposes. For instance, Jennifer Cisney often posts about dogs. You can't connect with her on Google+ and not know that she loves pugs (and dogs in general).

Should you do one and not the other? This doesn't have to be a decision about one or the other. You should consider doing both. But what if you have multiple interests? You decide what you want to share. You can share more than one side of you. One way to think about sharing is to consider yourself as a magazine publisher.

You Are a Magazine Publisher.

Magazines rarely work as a potpourri collection of whatever comes to mind. Google+, maybe more than other social networking platforms, seems to value a somewhat consistent selection of topics for a user to share. For instance, if you share about jazz, photography, and your business subject, that's probably fine. If you also share about dogs, barbecue, interesting quotes, and vintage hammocks, you might have a trickier time. People won't understand the content focus of your "magazine," if this is how you curate.

This line of thinking might actually help you design your sharing strategy to overlay with your posting methodology. If you run a company that sells outboard motors for boats, you might post one or two posts a day about your products or your customers using your products. You might share a piece about great destinations for boating, a piece about innovative barbecue gadgets, and a piece about easy-but-exciting c.o.c.ktail recipes because these things would be in alignment with your brand.

If you see the previous suggestions as a magazine, all those pieces would fit together, right? An article about Notre Dame football coaching changes would be a bit more afield of the primary buyer.

The recipe to find great stuff to share is split between filling your magazine with interesting material that connects with your "readers" but such that you also show off a bit of who you are outside of that editorial funnel. It's a balance. You should probably split on-topic and off-topic about 80/20, depending on the nature of your business and your position in the organization. If you work for customer service in a huge company, your personal life would likely be just as interesting as your perspective on the company's top buyers. If you're the CEO or president of a smaller company, stick closer to the magazine perspective.

Don't however let this a.n.a.logy limit you. Instead, let it guide you. The more you think of yourself as building a magazine each time you post and share into your Google+ stream, those constraints of the a.n.a.logy might actually help you make decisions about what works for you and your community. If for any reason this feels a bit restrictive, try it a different way.

Commenting on What You Share.

Previous chapters talk about leaving comments, which are the life's blood of what builds business relationships on Google+. For sharing, you have an added benefit. Comments become the "liner notes" to what you're interested in, and they give you another way to add some context for your readers and audience.

Commenting gives your audience a chance to interact with you around the campfire. It allows people to share their opinions, and it gives people a sense of how you'll react when they bring their thoughts back to you. You need to comment back on as many posts as you can. The more you communicate in both directions with your audience, the better.

This one aspect of social networking and social media is the huge difference between business communications in the past and what can be accomplished today. Similarly, in the past, magazines had a static "letters" column, whereas you can now talk with the authors and the editors of most magazines online at your whim. I write for Entrepreneur magazine and many times have had conversations with people who read my articles. In both perspectives (business and publishing), this ability to communicate via comments is a powerful boost to how your audience can interact with you, and how you're perceived. Take advantage of it.

What Does Your Magazine Look Like?

When asking people on Google+ what their show or magazine would look like, the answers were quite varied. One said his show would be like the Jon Stewart show (politics meets comedy). Another wants to be the "Gordon Ramsey of small business marketing." One friend wants to do a show called Investing in Your Future Self, about how you can grow and prosper.

The thing is, you can do whatever show you want. The platform exists. On Google+, you can upload YouTube videos, host live Hangouts, and start conversations around a picture, a post, or a reshare. It is your show. It is your magazine. Make something that draws attention, that grows an audience, that builds potential relationships, and that can convert to a prospective audience. It simply takes thought, time, and effort.

Create a magazine that gives you a framework to think about what resembles what the experience might feel like. There's a difference between the magazines you read and what you can create. Most magazines have more than one person putting them together. In this case, you're a one-person show, and to that point, you need some help with tools to build out your magazine. Curating interesting content is a great concept, but how can you accomplish this goal?

Two Resources to Help with Your Sharing.

Does it take a lot of time to find interesting items to share? Not if you have some kind of a system in place. You can use another Google product to help find interesting things to share: Google Reader.

If you go to http://google.com/reader, you can find a tool that enables you to read multiple blogs and online magazines in an orderly fashion. What's great about Reader is that you can organize and share thousands of blogs and feeds based on your interests. If you use list mode, you see only headlines and a slender amount of detail from which you can decide to drill down and make even more sense of whichever articles catch your fancy.

Oh, but your reader starts out fairly empty. Where would you start looking for sites to add to it? Start at http://alltop.com, Guy Kawasaki's "magazine rack for the Internet." You can find hundreds and hundreds of topic categories, under which there are hundreds and hundreds of blogs. It's a great way to start figuring out where to source material for your sharing needs. (Guy and I are friends, but I have no business interest in Alltop. It's just the right tool for this job.) Find a few dozen (or if you're daring, a few hundred) blogs to skim through each day; read a few posts that you find interesting and that help you build up interesting content; then share that content into your Google+ by posting your thoughts and then a link to the original post. You'll give people something of value to consider.

To round this out a bit more, now consider creating a bit of a workflow. Google Reader and its place in this flow are mentioned shortly.

A Sharing Workflow.

If you're not sure how to fit sharing into your other social networking tasks and time management for Google+, this section should help. You need to experiment, of course. Results can vary depending on what type of business you run, on whether your buyers have found their way onto Google+ yet, and a whole host of other variables.

A simple workflow might look something like this: * Read other people's posts and comment where appropriate (10 minutes).

* Check previous posts of yours and comment back where appropriate. (510 minutes).

* Find interesting information inside and outside of Google+ to share with your community (1520 minutes).

* Share one or two posts (5 minutes).

* Create a unique post (1030 minutes).

* Comment back and forth on posts (1520 minutes).

This adds up. Social networking for business takes approximately 2 hours a day. The previous list addresses only Google+. If you add in practices such as blogging, using other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, and other tasks, you can eat up significant time. The challenge is to understand what works and what doesn't, and tune your use of time so that you work for results and you're not just churning the waters all the time.

Time-wise, sharing is something that might take you between 15 to 20 minutes tops to get through, after you have a bit of a system. Go to Google Reader, look through topics that would fit with your "magazine," share one or two posts in the earlier part of the day, and maybe another one or two in the later part of the day.

Quick point to make: There isn't a specific or magic time to post information because it varies depending on your audience, on whether you're location-specific, on how people use social networks, and other factors. It's up to you to measure. Use Google a.n.a.lytics. Use whatever other tools you have, but definitely measure and decide what you'll do.

Consider posting information at a few set times throughout the day: early in the morning to hit Europe and the east coast of the United States before people become too busy. Consider posting again around 2 p.m. Eastern time, which is right before lunch on the west coast of the United States. Then you can post around 7 p.m. Eastern time, which is when some folks are home, when the west coast people are getting ready to call it a day at the office, and when some Australians and New Zealanders start getting active. In this way, you can hit your worldwide demographic.

Experiment. You'll find what works.

Can Sharing Add Direct Business Value?

Depending on your company, sharing can certainly help to add business value. The question some people might need to answer is whether that can be directly tied back to your efforts on Google+. That answer is more difficult when it comes to sharing. It might be traceable when you post something original, and there's a call-to-action link or phone number embedded in the post. That certainly is measurable.

It's more difficult to measure whether sharing gives you a direct business value. A lot of actions you take as businesses (and in your lives) aren't easily measurable, and these change how you are perceived and "sweeten" the deal in your relationships. Sharing falls into this category.