Part 11 (2/2)

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 relations.h.i.+ps 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 publis.h.i.+ng), 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 relations.h.i.+ps, 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 google.com/reader, you can find a tool that enables you to read multiple blogs and online magazines in an orderly fas.h.i.+on. 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 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 relations.h.i.+ps. Sharing falls into this category.

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