• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

• 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 endorsement. 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 shirt 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 identity and both create