Sharing is the fuel that drives social media, but have you thought what sharing really looks like? What does it mean to share?

I’m sure many of us think sharing simply refers to sharing URLs, but there’s much more to sharing than content.

There are many ways to share. Many perspectives.  In this post I explore how one group of collaborators put together a unique project in a very short timeframe. I believe it’s something we call all learn from.

Collaboration and cooperation are the only way to succeed today. It’s how we scale.

Sharing is as much a way to break through the noise as it is a method of creating noise.

I’m not sure we all think of sharing in the same way, which explains why some suceeed and some fail in their efforts to collaborate..

This project made me ask a simple question. What did they share?

That led to this list of 7 ways to share.

Am I missing anything?

Let me explore these 7 types of sharing in terms of a specific project and discover what this group achieved from inception in less than 2 weeks. I believe they exhibited all seven types of activity.

These bloggers and businesses saw the opportunity they could create by working collaboratively. It’s very much a still being written, but here’s the story thus far:

Share Point Community Partners.

I first connected with Mark Jones from Collaboris.com when he upgraded to premium Listly on the 29th of Jan 2013. He’d quickly explored Listly and had made a few lists on and around SharePoint.

We exchanged a few emails after he suggested some cool new features, then we got chatting about his project.

Mark wanted to collaborate with other SharePoint blogs to co-promote their work and build community around their passion for Microsoft SharePoint.

He got the idea of building a list of blogs to promote the group and to make them all more findable. Here’s the list. Once the community is in place there’s many creative stepping off points to build the value for the group and for the individuals.

Mark had already made this page on his blog

He created the logo and the name.

He made an invite only Linkedin Group and so an inner circle of early adopters could collaborate and discuss the idea.

Mark also shared this link via his email newsletter to a community of 25,000 SharePoint enthusiasts.

Within 2 weeks Mark had a group of 19 people from various blogs/businesses on LinkedIn and has laid out some simple rules for the collaborators. This is just the pilot group. Mark has big plans to scale this idea. He wanted to keep it small and produce something meaningful that would let him grow the concept to something much bigger.

Here’s quote from Mark.

To make the partnership idea work it was essential that everyone should integrate the list into their sites in the same way. At first we had no rules and we were all going about it differently.

Since introducing the rules, this has introduced a much greater degree of consistency which ensures fairness.

Each member now has a ‘SharePoint Community Partner’ badge on their front page which links to a full page containing the embedded list.

We have also stared to introduce some gamification into the idea. For example, the partner who creates the most views from their embed, will be featured as top of the list for the following week. Using this metric, along with the Listly voting mechanism, this gives those who reside at the lower part of the list a way to get to the top. The great thing is that both strategies mean more views for us all! It’s a win-win.

I thought this was a highly creative way to use the “Featured” item and a great way to reward people.

This image gives you a sense of how views are distributed across all the blogs, but it’s clearly a moving target and these only show some of the blogs.

There are 14 blogs that have embedded this list already. You can get a sense how the traffic has been spread across many blogs – sharing your audience is highly effective. This is really just the beginning  but as more people share and the reach of the group grows Mark is expecting great things.

As of 26th Feb that number has doubled to over 28+ embeds with over 16k list views.

This week I’m featuring 3 lists of 5. 14 lists from Mark’s project and one bonus list, which also has a SharePoint connection.

List 1

List 2

List 3

Bonus SharePoint List: IBM Connect2013 Sessions On SlideShare

I added this list to collection to make a total of 15 lists. This list features a collection of Slidedecks from a recent IBM Connect conference. This list caught my attention in the last week as it was shared. It was created by one of the speakers at the event Thomas Duff who just happens to be a SharePoint and a Notes/Domino expert. Sometimes the world just feels like a very small place.

Thomas shared his lists via Facebook with a rather nice comment about Listly. If that doesn’t deserve being made a featured list I don’t know what does, but wait the story gets better. This was no ordinary list.

Beyond being simply shared it via Twitter and Facebook it got picked up by collaborationtoday.info

The best bit was how it got picked up embedded here. The real difference here is those tweets that shared the list will soon be long forgotten, but the embeded list will get found and keep on getting found via organic search.

Don’t forget the long term value of embedded content. Sharing via Twitter have a lifespan of hours.

Only true Twitter celebrities get quoted and retweets weeks and months later. Blog posts live for the life of the blog.

PS If you think a specific embedded lists needs featuring feel free to suggest it. We schedule to produce one such list of 5 featured embeds each week. This week was special with three lists.

Image Credit: traitlinburke