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By Root 810 0

your circle names are private to you. You can call a circle “Big Fat Jerks” and put me in it, and I would never know. I’ll just know that you have me in a circle. I guess, before you start creating circles like that, with names such as “People I’d Probably Sleep With” or some such name, I recommend keeping them named something that wouldn’t offend, on the off-chance someone would find out.

My circle names don’t often have specific meaning. But who goes where matters to me. My circle names look something like Figure 5-3:

Following are the names of my circles and what they mean to me:

• Close: For people who are close enough to me that I’d let them babysit my kids.

• Keepers: For a select few dozen people that I wouldn’t want to miss their every utterance.

• Good People: For people I’ve met in my travels who I like and want to check in with from time to time.

• Attention Getters: For the interesting “big names” (who also sometimes chat a lot).

• Bacon Filchers: For business professionals in larger companies. (There’s absolutely no reason why I called this circle Bacon Filchers, but I did it to be funny, and I don’t want to change it now.)

• Journalists: For a bunch of professional journalists in print, TV, and otherwise.

• MKTG: This is an “outbound” circle, which I’ll explain more about in a bit.

Figure 5-3 Example of circles named by Chris Brogan.

I have a few others. The point for now is that you can name your circles however you want. Let’s talk about some potential ways to organize circles, which suggests a few other naming conventions.

Outbound Circles and Inbound Circles

Users of Google+ coined circles outbound or inbound. It isn’t how Google looks at circles. Some of us have created outbound circles, meaning we group some people into circles based on things we want to share with them, but maybe not with others. For instance, if I’m sharing something interesting about marketing, I share it with my MKTG circle but not necessarily with everyone.

Inbound circles are simply groups of people you’ve organized by what they tend to share or how you choose to view them. For instance, if you have a Boston circle, that’s where you’d tend to put people who live in and around Boston or who talk about it a lot.

There’s technically no such thing as outbound or inbound circles, but you and I can create them to better understand how we use circles.

Sharing Circles

It is possible to share circles you’ve created with others. From the Circles tab, click the circle you want to share. You’ll now see “Edit/Delete/Share.” Click Share. You can then decide whether to share this circle with public (everyone) or with specific circles of interest. For instance, you could share your Competitors circle with your Teammates circle. Sharing really amps up the opportunity to collaborate.

Ordering Circles

On the main Circles page, you can rearrange circles so that they are listed in the order you choose. For instance, if you want to put your Important circle at the top of your list of circles to explore and then Vendors circle next in line, you can do that. Just drag and arrange.

Some people choose to put their inbound circles at the top and their outbound circles at the bottom so that they are clear about which circles to include when sending information out, for instance. That’s a matter of choice. The arrangement of the circles simply changes how they are presented to you on the Home page of Google+ located at http://plus.google.com.

For some businesses, where you are makes a difference. For instance, Joe Sorge sells hamburgers at AJ Bombers in Milwaukee, so it would benefit him to know about other people who identify as being in Milwaukee. But Google+ doesn’t immediately make this easy to figure out.

Pause for a moment and go to http://findpeopleonplus.com. This is an unofficial third-party site that scrapes 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