Google_ for Business_ How Google's Social Network Changes Everything - Chris Brogan [31]
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 relationship 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 Godin, 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,