Will Google+ Circles put you in a box?

The online world is getting noisier. The rise of Facebook brought with it mass-friending, meaning mass-sharing. Twitter’s stream let us create an actual flood of links, quotes, and insights from people we don’t even know. Google+ just turned the volume up, yet again.

To manage all the noise, users either restrict their follows or categorize them. As the online world gets busier, how can you ensure that you end up on users’ lists and in the right category?

Circles are the Future

Google+ has changed the game with its circles, because it makes it easy to view and share content with discrete sets of people.

Through Twitter Lists, we’ve had the ability to view content from only selected people. But Twitter Lists remained one-dimensional, since Twitter never built on the feature to really integrate it into the the user interface or add features like allowing tweeting at Lists. Facebook’s Lists are so unusable that nobody does use them.

Enter Google+. Its Circles are highly-usable and allow you to categorize the masses of people you follow and very easily view content and share content within those categories. People are embracing Circles because it’s exactly how they want to view and share with others. That’s why I’m betting that Twitter, and even laggard Facebook, will beef up their List offerings to parallel Google+.

You’re going to be placed in a circle

With the exception of your online friends—people decide whether to fan your Facebook page, follow you on Twitter, or connect with you online largely based on what they see you share and talk about. They decide to connect because they perceive that you will provide them some value—information, entertainment, relationship. With Circles, when they connect with you, they have to decide where to put you. What category do you fall into?

When it’s easy to categorize people and view the content from different sets of people, we can expect that users will leverage the feature to manage the noise. When your Facebook feed gets too noisy right now, the only real choice is to unfriend people or unlike pages. If Facebook improves Lists, users will keep their wider networks, but group people based on their relationship or on the kind of posts they can expect from each person.  Just as many Twitter users maintain Lists in order to manage hundreds or thousands of follows, people will do the same on Facebook and Google+.

Market yourself for social channel surfing

Google+’s high-quality implementation of Circles, and Facebook and Twitter’s likely implementation, will make it easier for people to flip channels in order to view different “programs” on their social networks. Do I feel like being entertained? I’ll check out my “Funny People” circle. Wondering what’s happening in technology? I’ll check my “Tech Bloggers and Reporters” circle.

If you’re trying to gain an audience online, you should know what channel you want to be on. Are you trying to gain an audience for your blog that covers the entertainment industry? You want to be in people’s celebrity gossip circles, or their Movie reviewer circle.  You sell PR services? You want to be the circles of executive marketing or communications business folks.

To get in the right circles, you need to apply basic marketing practices to your online activities: differentiate yourself, define your brand, and be consistent about it. On the social web, that means:

• Send a clear message through your online activity about the topics you primarily speak to and share about.
• Differentiate yourself through your personality, your analysis, your niche, and your perspective.
• Ensure that your bio, name, and other information convey a clear brand message about who you are online and what your focus is.
• Be consistent and stick with it!