Google_ for Business_ How Google's Social Network Changes Everything - Chris Brogan [55]
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
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 cocktail 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 analogy 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 analogy 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.
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