Part 6 (1/2)
Pause for a moment and go to findpeopleonplus.com. This is an unofficial third-party site that sc.r.a.pes publicly visible data from Google+ and organizes it into interesting categories. This might help you find locals, at least if some of those people have identified their location for you.
Following are a few other ways to potentially organize your circles-the first of which we just explained in a use case: * Local: If you're in Boston or Mumbai, include a circle for people who are local to your area. This helps with prospects for your business and can give you more local news to keep current on what happens in your area.
* Thinkers: No matter what you call it, there are people you'll want to follow who have ideas that are different than yours and who make you think. This kind of circle is where you go for inspiration.
* Compet.i.tors: I personally don't do a lot of compet.i.tive a.n.a.lysis for my business, but that's me. If you're from Apple, maybe this is Dell employees. If you're a photographer, maybe you name this Colleagues but secretly think of them as compet.i.tors. It's your decision.
* News: I have a Journalists circle so that I can read what they're doing, comment on what they're talking about, and get myself generally known. Although this is partially so that I can appreciate their work, it's also so that they might get to know me, and then think of me, should a story arise that I could help with. You can do this in other ways, having journalists get to know you, but that is covered later.
* Potential Employees: Think about that. If you want to hire people to run community development for your great new software platform, maybe this is a way to keep an eye on them.
* Vendors: A lot of web design and WordPress people follow me, and I'm often asked for people who do that kind of work. Putting together a circle of people who do something that pertains to your business might be useful. It's like keeping a little directory handy.
* Personal Pa.s.sion: I have a circle of comic book artists, writers, and professionals in that industry. This has no direct business value to me. I just love comic books and have since I was 5 or 6. Feel free to make a circle about something you care about, even if this is your business account and even if the bosses might frown on it. Know why? Because it's out of these serendipitous connections that can bring you other connections. That was how I interviewed Greg Pak (a writer, currently doing interesting stuff for Marvel Comics, among others) for this book.
* Prospects: Okay, so adding people to this circle is difficult at present. People don't exactly line themselves up and say, ”I'm really anxious to buy what you're selling.” But if you do a little searching and a little thinking, you might start to find ways to add people to a circle like this. Just realize something important: Just because someone looks like your prospect doesn't mean they're all that interested in you selling something to them. Tread gently.
Who Should You Follow?
As stated before, you can check at findpeopleonplus.com to see if any particular occupation, locale, or some other identifying factor helps you determine whether someone is interesting to follow. You can also search on Google.com by adding site:plus.google.com to your search, and then adding in a search term that you think might prove useful in finding someone of interest. If, for instance, you want to find people talking about yoga, you can type the following into Google: site:plus.google.com yoga.
If that doesn't narrow it down enough, you can add more search terms, and you can use a -term type of search to filter even more. For instance, I used the word ”Boston” after ”yoga” and found people talking about yoga and having something to do with Boston. It's not perfect, but it's one way to find more potential people of interest.
Friendsurfing.
In the early days of using Google+, one way I found interesting people to follow was that I friendsurfed. By this, I mean that I would find someone whom I followed or found interesting, and I would click into that person's profile. From there, I'd see who he or she had chosen to add to his or her circles, and I would sometimes add some of the same people.
For instance, I just went to Greg Pak's profile, and I looked at who he was following. I found Evie Nagy from Rolling Stone and decided to follow her. I also found Christopher Yost from Marvel Studios and Adam Koford from Disney Interactive. I don't know any of these people, but if Greg finds them interesting, I thought I would give them a try.
By doing this, you can often find interesting new people to connect with, and there might be even more connections after following someone's content and information that they've shared. To me, friendsurfing becomes a potential way to make new connections of value. I wouldn't exactly attempt to sell anyone anything simply because you've chosen to add someone to a circle, but making a preliminary relations.h.i.+p is certainly not effort lost.
Do I Know You?
Often, you discover that people have circled you, but you aren't sure who they are. An easy way to tell is to hover over the name of the person, and you can see who you have in common at the bottom of the box that displays. I find this useful when determining whether someone might actually know me, or whether they're following me because I fit a certain ”set” of people they're following. In my case, if I see people in my corner of the industry, such as Seth G.o.din, Brian Clark, Guy Kawasaki, and Robert Scoble, I know that someone's collecting a certain group of voices. Seeing this means that the person might be a ”collector” seeking to gather up ”top marketer” voices or something of that nature. I don't often circle these people back because they don't often communicate as much as they just read and share.
Again, these are personal choices, but when you see who you might have in common with someone, you start to understand whether this is someone you might choose to follow. Now, let me tell you a bit of a ”hack” about this. If you're in business and you want to connect with someone specific (potentially someone of influence) in an industry, it is useful to connect with other people connected to that influencer. Meaning, if you want to connect and win business with Michael Dell, it wouldn't hurt to have a handful of people in common with him already circling you.
How you go about using this tip is up to you. If you stretch too far outside of your circle of ”known” people, it's not likely that this can work. That said, I thought I'd mention it because it can be useful.
Should You Circle Celebrities?
There are, believe it or not, quite a number of celebrities (and their publicists) on Google+. I've seen Taylor Swift, 50 Cent, William Shatner, and many more celebrities using Google+. To me, this is a personal preference. If you're interested in following celebrities, feel free to put together a circle of them. Will they ever be useful for your business? It's not as likely that you can make a meaningful connection with a celebrity via this medium, with a few exceptions.
Observe how certain celebrities use these tools, and you can ”smell” rather quickly who's having their publicist post for them and who's doing their own work. Wil Wheaton, famous in the past for Star Trek: The Next Generation, but relevant for so much more than that, is a power user of this platform and is fun to follow. You are likely to have a conversation with him. Ditto for Alyssa Milano. Ditto for a few other celebrities. But these are often the exception to the rule, sadly.
If you hope to do business with celebrities, I can't yet recommend Google+ as a useful tool for this. Use it to stay up on their comings and goings, but you should seek another venue for connecting. At least that's been my experience. It's not that there's any specific negative to circling celebrities, but you'll probably get their publicist's news stream and no real interaction to speak of, in lots of cases.
More About Outbound Circles.
I've talked a few times in this chapter about outbound circles. By this, I mean that you have the opportunity to group together people in a circle so that you can send them specific information, while not sending it out to others. For instance, I have a marketing circle, where, if I want to talk specifically about marketing, I can target a post to that circle, and none of the other people who choose to follow my posts will see it.
This can be useful in a few ways. If you want to group together company teams into circles, you can. Imagine making a ”project team” circle, and putting the specific employees and contractors in that circle, and then advising them all to do the same. Pow-instant, reasonably private communications and sharing. (I say ”reasonably” because I wouldn't yet trust Google+ with specific company proprietary data. It is a public site.) You can also use outbound circles for personal interests, obviously. Maybe you're into fitness and nutrition and you want to share recipes with a group of people into similar things. Perhaps you're a car enthusiast and like to share photos and videos of cars. If you're not interested in sharing with the general public, by all means, this is the way to do it.
Circle Tricks.
You can put people in more than one circle. Simply hover over their name with your mouse, and you can see where you've listed them; then decide if you want to move these people to another circle by unselecting the old and selecting the new, or if you want to add these people to more than one circle. Just select the new circle or circles you'd like to add them to, and make sure those boxes are checked, too.
I have a few friends I've put in Close because I want to share specific things with them. I have a few of these friends also placed into Marketing because they opted into receiving information that I share with people about marketing. I have a good friend in four circles and counting because our interests relate in matters of health, marketing, and Buddhism. Plus, she's in my Close circle. You can do the same with select friends, work colleagues, and customers, if it makes sense to you and your business.
Another trick: If you want to copy everyone (or most everyone) from one circle into another circle (maybe you're promoting people from Not Sure to Interesting), simply go to the Circles page, and then click the circle you specifically want to copy from. When it displays, click the View Circle In tab. Then, go to the upper-right part of the screen, click More Actions, and choose Select All. Then, click and hold the mouse b.u.t.ton down and drag everyone into the new circle (below) that you want to move them into.
Want to do all but one person? Hold down Command (on a Mac) or Control (on a PC) and click the person you don't want to move to the new circle. Easy as that, you've moved all (but one) to where you want them to go.
Circles Aren't a One-Time Thing.