Part 11 (1/2)

* 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 relations.h.i.+ps. 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.