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• Working on setting up a reciprocal system. I help them by +1’ing their posts, commenting on them, sharing their best posts, telling my audience to follow them, and so on.

• Developing a story. In Rackspace’s case, our story that we want the world to know is ‘those folks are up to date on the latest cloud technology and they have the best support.’ So, how do we develop that story? At Red Bull, the story will be one of extreme sports. Every brand will have a different story, and it needs to be developed over time with every post, every photo, every video.

All of this is aimed at driving relationships that bring us thought leadership points, but also that turn into real business.”

Robert has demonstrated a lot of different ways to use his influence to learn, to find stories that tell the larger story of his business, and to build an actionable community, instead of simply following people willy-nilly without a plan. In his power plays are all kinds of ways for you to consider how your own business might implement some of these ideas.

My Power Plays

In summing this up, I want to share some of what I’ve been experimenting with over the last several months so that you might consider which of these are useful to your business. I often experiment with several ideas and angles so that I can report back on what I discover, but you wouldn’t want to mimic all that I’m doing because I’m making steps forward and backward to see what results I can observe from those experiences. Therefore, some of what I do has a negative impact. Plan accordingly. Following is a list of my moves:

• To get more people to add you to circles: If you want a somewhat broad and untargeted following on Google+, the best way to get people to circle you is to find information from outside of Google+ (versus resharing what’s going around) that is at once interesting, entertaining, and useful. The more times you do that, the more the number of people who circle you will jump.

• To get more people to add you to circles, fill out your profile in detail, but not overly so (a few paragraphs will suffice). Use the links. Make it easy for people to contact you.

• To get more people to engage with you, comment much more often on other people’s posts. Circle 100 or so people you think are interesting, important, or helpful, and comment frequently on their material with something thoughtful (or sometimes funny) to say.

• To have people click your links more often, provide interesting context before the link, and try to make the links not be simply promotional for your own business. The most action people take on links I post in Google+ are when I’ve written the information before the link such that the person realizes that what I’m offering will be helpful to them. This is the magic formula.

• Posting too much waters down people’s responses to you. Posting too rarely means that your information flows past in the stream and gets lots. I’m not yet sure the perfect posting timing or volume (if there even is such a thing), but an abundance of posts means a shortcoming in clicks or comments, and that posting a few thoughtful pieces (maybe no more than four a day) amounts to more activity all the way around.

• To mix Google+ into your business overall, think of it as part community engagement platform, part media sharing environment, part customer service handling, and part sales lead generation. Of these, I try to do those four items in that order of importance. You would think customer service comes first, but community is about more than the people who have issues.

• If you want your information to travel far, always post it to public and not to a limited group of circles. The more hoops you make people jump through to circle, the shorter the distance of the shares.

Your mileage may vary. In thinking through what kinds of power plays might be useful to you as a business, you might also want to see more about “How do I convert sales?” The thing is, that’s what I’ve been teaching