SEO Yourself By Filling Out Your GooglePlus Profile

Your G+ profile page is a web-wide cheat sheet for you & everyone else.

And when it’s time to update your avatar, your bio, your tagline, or whenever you’ve got fresh content to share, it'll help you remember where you are online too.

By hot linking all the places you need to update you’ll make your task so much easier. Since your G+ profile is prioritized by the Google search engine, when someone searches for you, they’ll also find all the other places you exist online too.

That's from my latest guest post for Jan Gordon's Curatti: Editors of Chaos.

I've been writing a weekly series about online community building at this social business and marketing site. My posts so far have incorporated aspects of curation, storytelling, branding, content strategy, conversation, cocreation, collaboration, discoverability, persuasion, fascination and engagement -- as well as highlighting best practices and work of industry figures I see leading the way.

Some of my Curatti guest posts:

• Who You Follow is Important and Here’s Why
• How to Use Twitter Chats to Build Dynamic Online Communities
• Who Should You Follow Back and Why?
• Here’s How to Use Social Media To Build Powerful Networks
• The Great Big Social Networking Experiment
• How To Find And Share Content That Makes You Distinct
• Go Public With Your Process To Attract Like-Minded People

Worry About Who You Follow: Unpacking The Mysteries Of Online Community At Curatti

Your social networks are your window onto the world, and a lens on your market, I write in "Who You Follow Is Important And Here's Why" my first post in a new series at Curatti: Editors Of Chaos. On a regular basis at Curatti I’m going to be unpacking the mysteries of online community, and exploring how to organically grow a network filled with people who are all deriving value from their connection.

In this post I go on to explain that you determine how wide your window is, and how focused the lens. Ultimately, your online connections will color your day, slant your view, and propel your actions.

Take a look at your timelines. They are the fruit of your curation efforts. You selected whom you follow.

Do the people and accounts you follow challenge you (in a good way)?

Read the whole piece here.

Reasons To Not Auto-Follow On Twitter

A LinkedIn group for photographers hosted a discussion thread about Twitter and invited us to share our handle. But to do so, we had to agree to follow everyone else in the thread. My response:

Very sorry you make this auto-follow stipulation. I've been using twitter for 9 months and it's changed my life. I believe there are many completely legitimate reasons not to auto-follow someone back on Twitter.

Among the reasons not to auto-follow: curating one's own timeline for particular communities and posting-behavior/topics/usage level, frequency and style.

Twitter is very much about customizing your experience for your own needs.

Even the most 'expert' users are split on the idea of auto-following out of politeness/courtesy. I routinely check in to see what followers I am not following are tweeting, especially newcomers and infrequent posters, who may change their output and interest me. If my followers engage with me I often follow them back as I get to know them. however I choose to follow people on Twitter for reasons other than that they are following me.

And I don't unfollow people because they don't choose to follow me -- that's very high school. If what they tweet is valuable to me, that is all I need from them.