Creating Events -G+ Food Bloggers Community

event and what you go through to create an event. Now we're live, it looks like, and so the people that are in the event— my dog— people that are in the event can actually watch what's going on. I have 2 Bernese Mountain Dogs, 2 very big dogs, and one goes out, one comes in. It's just a game they play all day long when I'm home. But to do the event, it's really pretty simple, and I'm going to walk you through the process. The first thing you're going to do is we're going to create— when we go to create an event, we don't have the name of your event yet, but when I created this event, it's pretty self-explanatory. You go to the page to create the event on the events page, and you click on and you give it a name, and you pick the time for your event, and you plug it all in. Let me see if I can even get to an events page. No, I can't open that from here. But it's pretty self-explanatory in that respect, and you just walk through the process. There is an option if you click on Advanced to make it an on-air Hangout. You do not want to do that. Alright, that's, that's something we used to do, and then we have changed that process. So you're no longer clicking on that, making it an on-air Hangout. You're going to do that from within the Hangout itself now. That's the proper way to do it. You set up your Hangout, you give it a name, and we're still working on what we're going to call this. It's going to be a holiday hashtag event for Google. We're trying to come up with something, so if you guys can brainstorm and come up with a cute name for us to have that is not restricted to any certain wintertime holiday, we can use that. Alright, so you'll name your event, fill in the times, location you don't need, you're going to put that in later, and you invite people into it. Now I would invite your friends, your circles, whoever you want to invite into it, not necessarily just food bloggers. You want to invite other people that you might think are going to come into it. You also want to try and get a panel to come and sit with you. Like right here, we have 4 of us in here. That's not bad. That's a good panel to have when you're making something. Okay, and you can also lock it so no one else can come in at that point too. If you invite those people in, then it's restricted and no one else will enter. So, uh, here comes David. Invite those people in, then it's restricted and no one else will enter. Hi David, how you doing?

Hey Dennis, how are you?

Great, good to see you.

You too.

Okay, so we're just talking about how to create the Hangout, how to create the event, and it's pretty straightforward to create the event. Then what we're going to do to open it up. Now here's where you're going to come into a few little things, so if you want to take notes or if you want to watch it later. You've created the Hangout, or you've created your event, so that's done. Alright, now when it comes time to open up your Hangout to bring people in or to teach your lesson or to show your demo that you're going to do, you're going to start your Hangout like you normally would anytime you do it. And then there is an option on there to make it an on-air event inside the Hangout. Okay, you're going to click on that. Alright, one— and you have to name it. So whatever the name of your Hangout is, in the event, title it the same thing here. This is going to make your YouTube video and that's what it's going to call it. At that point, you click on Hangout on Air and when you do that, there's going to be a little embed button that's going to show up. The embed button is going to show up right next to the broadcast button. There's a red broadcast button. I don't know if— I can screen share. Does everyone have that on theirs, or you have a— you don't have a broadcast button, okay. Let me see if I can screen share. I'll show you what I'm looking at. Okay. Can you see that all, or no? That's not good.

It's like a funhouse up in here. Awesome.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. I think it's like the never-ending circle.

It's that house of mirrors, make it stop.

I did, I did. Let's try that again. I evidently clicked on the wrong one.

I guess so.

I guess so. That was pretty neat. No, this isn't going to be any better. Okay.

Alright.

We know it's not going to work. I can't show you from here because it keeps taking a picture of a picture of a picture of a picture of a picture. It's like some kind of alternate universe is opening up. I'm afraid to let it go too far. Anyway, when you open up your on-air Hangout, before you broadcast, before you let anyone else in, this is what you need to do. There will be a little box next to— there's going to be a red broadcast button up at the top hand corner. Everybody sees where they have the microphone with a slash through it?

Mm-hmm.

Okay, next to that there's those little dots that talk when you're talking, that move when you're talking. There's going to be a red broadcast button to the left of that. To the left of that red broadcast button, it's going to say embed, and that's what you click on. So once you click on embed 2 boxes are gonna appear in a black box. One is gonna say HTML and the other is gonna say URL. You wanna copy the URL address. Alright, so once you copy the URL address, you go back to your event page that you've opened up and you're gonna make some changes to it. And you— there's a little pencil in the top corner that you click on, on your events page, and that will let you make any changes that you want to it. So once you click on that pencil, you're gonna click on event options, and when you open up event options, there's an advanced button. You click on the advanced button and it says show additional fields. Okay, when you do that, it opens up a YouTube video field, and that is where you paste your URL. So you're embedding this into a YouTube video. And that's what you want to do anytime you do a live demonstration Hangout, or if you're teaching something, or if you're doing something that you want to save for posterity. This will keep it made that way. Alright, so after you do that, now you've got it so it will embed, so people on the event page can watch it live. You can also embed this onto your website so people on your website could watch it live. It will also be on your Google+ profile page. Those are the options of where people can watch it if someone stumbles across any of those and it's happening. You have to actually put it into your website to make it happen. The other two places it's going to appear automatically. Once you've done that, now you're going to copy the address of the Hangout. All right, and that's up at the very top of the screen above the on-air, above the top line. You copy that address and you're gonna go back to your event page and you're gonna paste that into location. All right, so that's telling people where you are. That's gonna give them the link to click into the event. Now, besides doing that, before I come on, I always put it in an announcement right underneath, like the last thing it said. Click here, here's the link for the live hangout, just to make sure. It will put one in, but if people don't open that up or if they don't see it or if they don't look for it, they might miss it. It's good to give them another way to get in. Everything's good to go at that point. People will start coming in, but you're still not broadcasting yet. Anyone that's on the outside on that event page or looking for it won't see anything until you go to the the very top of the screen where it says broadcast, the red box, and you click on that. Then there's a little bit of a countdown and it'll go, going live, and then you know you're live. That's when you start. Does anybody have any questions on that process? I know it was involved and tedious, but if you go back and you write them down as you go and then walk yourself through it a couple times. Go in, open it up. If you make a video, you can always go into your YouTube account, and you can cancel it. Just put up a test event if you want to and try that out and embed it and see what happens. Have a friend watch it to see if it works for you. It's good to practice it and just to see if it is coming up the way it's supposed to come up, then you'll know for sure. It's good to have confidence in what you're doing and not just hope that it's working, which a lot of times some of us do. Any questions on any of that?

—Can you have something that broadcasts but it be private? Which I know is contradictory. —You know, David, I'm not sure.

That's a good question though, because I think if you're making it live to the public, though, I don't know how you would do it.

—Okay. Because as I was going through to find this— oh, there's an echo going on— it said that it was private. There were only certain people who were invited.

Into this? Yeah.

David, do you have a headset or something?

Not that I can grab. I'll just be quiet.

I saw that too where it said private. I was wondering what that meant.

But you still came in though? Yeah. Aha, okay. Now I know last time I did this, people said they couldn't get in, that it was locked and the room wasn't full. One time either when I did my embedded demonstration, the one on the pumpkin crunch cake. So I know if you invite people into the room, I think it locks it down. But I think if it's not in this case, you guys got in. Once you start broadcasting, is it locked out? Well, no, because David came in. Oh, hi, David. Hi, David. Hi. You know what?

I'm going to walk away for a second and get a headset.

That way, if I'm the one causing this, I'm Sorry, sorry.

That's okay. No, we've all done it, I'm sure.

If you wanted to invite specific people, how do you limit it to those specific people or is anyone coming in?

There is a way to lock it out and I'll have to try and find out what that is to lock it out. It's simple, there's a box up at the top everyone should have on their screen, the invite people box, I think on the on the left-hand side. At that point, if you open that up, you can invite more people into the Hangout. Let's say you have 4 people on the panel, and that's really important to do it right. You can invite those 4 people in right there, and before you go live, before you open it up to everybody else— I can start the Hangout and I can put you in there and you'll all show up, and then I'll go, okay, I'm going to go put the address in, I'm going to embed it. I'm going to open it up to everybody else. That way, if you want to get people in and you want to make sure they're in, that's the easiest way to do it, to invite them in directly. I really wasn't sure who was coming in or I would have invited you some of you in directly into it. That's always a good way to do it. I'll check on that. This is still kind of new to me.

I just wandered in. It started and it said join hangout, so I did and there you were.

Did it say private for you also?

It just said join, so I said okay.

Good. Yeah, and I think we had just started broadcast. No, you came in before— no, Stefani and Amy were in here. I think you came in after that, so we had started broadcasting. So that's a good question. It's something we should probably know, and if there is a way to lock it out, it might be a good idea in some instances to do that.

I can see having a lot of dry runs this weekend and deleting a whole bunch of crappy YouTube videos.

There's nothing wrong with that. Practice makes perfect, and it's good to have a way to see what you're doing.

Is anyone still getting an echo with me?

Yeah, Cindy just came in. Hi, Cindy.

Hi, it's new for me, so I'm kind of hanging back and watching.

Okay, we're going to ask you to mute, though, until you have a question because we're getting a feedback from in front of you. Okay? So if you could just mute yourself, that would be a big help. And then if you have a question, you can open up.

So in terms of scheduling, setting up these events, are we each setting up our own individual events, or are we— is there going to be like some kind of a group listing somewhere?

No, you're going to set up your own individual events, but they are going to all have the same basic name. We're still working on that name. It's going to be a distinction of the holiday hashtag that Google is running. They're running events across the board and that is their way that they show that they're part of one of their events. They're not really promoting this right now. This is a pilot, a test run for us to see. We're working with the folks from Google to show that it will work and it will be something good and it's something they do. Can do ongoing, and if they do it ongoing, it may be something they very well do promote. But in any instance, okay, you're getting exposure. You know, there are eyes on us to see what we do and how we handle this and how we come through with it. And, you know, you know, if you do well, you know, even if you do bad and you try, you know, you're still going to get some points for that, and it's going to say, you know, a lot about you trying it. I know he was— they were real surprised that we had so many people sign up for this.

It was a good thing.

I have a question.

Yes. Last night, Gareth had a Hangout, and he said we should have someone on our panel that would be the person to fill any dead space, that would kind of be our go-to person and read any questions that we couldn't hear while we were cooking.

That's a good thing. You'll notice that there's a group chat box over on the right-hand side. It'll tell you who comes in, who joins, who leaves. You can also go down to the bottom and you can type things. Are there any questions? You're liable to get people that don't have cameras or microphones, which is kind of bizarre. You think they're coming into a hangout, but that will happen. Here's where you have— if you have someone, they can monitor this, and they can be feeding you because you don't want to constantly be looking over here and take your eyes off. Remember, I have a bad habit of looking down because I'm looking at all of you when I'm talking, which isn't too bad, but you really want to try, especially if you're doing a cooking hangout and demo, you want to try and look at the camera while you're cooking. You can look down at what you're making, but when you talk, you want to Sometimes it's not good to have the monitor where you can see it because you're going to look at the monitor. It's better to remember to look at the camera.

It's my intention to designate one person to read any chat questions and have everybody else just muted the whole time, I think.

And if we were going to really do this the way it should be done and moving forward, you know, this will be something as a goal for us, you should also have another person who's going to tweet. What you're saying, post it to Facebook, or, you know, do the whole other social media blitz on it for you, okay? Because then it really looks, you know, like it's very professional. Just like having these names under us, you know, it kind of gives it an air of authenticity. So, you know, and that's simple enough again with the lower thirds on the Hangout Toolbox. You just add that extension onto your, onto your browser. I don't know, everyone's not using Google Chrome, so I guess it works. Amy, you said you weren't, right? You're using— I'm in Firefox. You're in Firefox. It works in other browsers, so that's good.

Can we have a sign-up for people who would say, okay, I'll be your go-to person?

Yes. Actually, did everyone see the posting of the schedule?

I have not seen it.

Where is that? I listed it today. It's a Google Doc, and you can't sign up right now. Greg Wright from Google, who is helping us with this, who's asking us to do this, helped set up the document for it, and he has it set up so you can sign up under each individual event to help with the panel. Because, you know, you don't want it to be empty. You want to have 3, 4 people in it, you know, and that's fine, that's enough. You don't have to have 7 or 8, but if you do, that's great. But there's a place here to sign up so you guys can support each other. And it's not a bad idea, like I said, just to do practice runs with each other. If you have time, you can connect, just come on and give it a try. I would time whatever you're gonna make, even if you don't actually make it, go through the process just so you become a little more familiar with it. If it's something that you haven't made a lot of times If it's something you can do in your sleep, and you don't have to worry about it, and there are dishes that you have that are like that. But just time it, just to get a feel for how long it's going to take. These should run about 30 minutes to an hour. Okay? If it runs 20 minutes, okay, we're going to live with it. If it runs an hour and 10 minutes, we're going to live with it. It's whatever it is. But your target range should be somewhere between 30 minutes and an hour. I think after an hour, it becomes too long. Even up to an hour becomes a little bit a little bit too long. So it's a good idea to use the magic of television. When I did my pumpkin crunch cake, I showed everybody how to put it together. I mixed it. I fixed the pans. I set it up. I poured it into the pans. I put it in the oven, and then I went to the counter, and I took my cakes that were already done, and then I put it together, okay? Because you don't have the kind of time to stand around and watch the cakes bake. Okay, or you don't want to spend 20 minutes engaging the audience either, which, you know, so you want to prepare yourself for the event and have everything set up. Also, I don't want to scare anybody, but whatever can happen will happen. Of course.

Okay, if it happens, Murphy will be joining us all with his law, right? Exactly.

You roll with it, okay? And trust me, I have had everything, knock on wood, that could possibly happen happen in a Hangout. When I did my pumpkin crunch cake, my headset went dead. The people that were in there are going, "Chef, we can't hear you. We can't hear you." I had to stop, take it off, turn it off, go over to the camera, change the settings because you've got to go up to that little gearbox anytime you change something. If you're running two cameras, that's how you have to change it. There is software available to change it, but you still got to manually do it unless you're having both cameras live at the same time. I had to do that, and I came back, and fine. The Google guy said, "Oh, you handled that like a pro." I said, "Well, okay. That's because it's happened before." The other piece of advice I would give you, if at all possible, do not do this wireless. 90% of the time, 95% of the time, It'll work. 5% of the time or 10%, it will not. Okay, you'll have problems. So again, anything you can do so you won't have problems is something you want to think about and do. All right, so I plug in— I have a cord that I run down the hallway up here into the room. I bury it under carpet so the dogs don't trip over it, or I don't trip over it, and hook it into the computer. All right, I have a separate camera, and that, you know, if you're going to do these with any regularity, that's something you should think about. I have a Logitech 910 and a 920, I think is the new model. I have both of those. They're around $80, but if you're going to do these with any regularity, it's better to spend $80 and get something good than to spend $30 and wish you had gotten something good.

I have a question about— oh, go ahead, David. Thank you.

Who runs those cameras for you?

It's stationary on my laptop. Right now it is. When I do my cooking demos, I have one positioned over the stove, and then I use my laptop camera for the other one.

How do you switch back and forth?

Then there's— you go— there's a little gearbox up here, and I will show you what happens when I switch it. Okay. I switch on the little gearbox. It gives me two options. I have a Logitech HD Pro Webcam C910.— or my camera from my laptop. And because my other camera is blocking it, you don't see it because it's right over top of the other one. We don't have—

I don't have that right now in the Gearbox. That's because I don't have other microphones— other cameras, right?

No, you'll always have, even if you don't have them, you'll still have this— they won't appear in your GearBox because you don't have them.

Right, I just have built-in iSight, which is my Mac. Okay.

Right, and your Mac works great for normal everything, but I think for cooking— I mean, you could probably use it for cooking demos too. Have you used it for that before, David?

No, I'm terrified of cooking demos. I get nervous enough when I go on the Today Show, so it's— I'm just—

cooking demos is a step down from the Today Show, David.

I'm just dipping in so I can see how to do this when I just talk with you in January, that's all.

It works really well. Now here's the other point, Al. Does it change who you see in the big box when I did that, or do you still just see me? Just you. Just you. Okay, because I did one demo and there was another person in the big box for half of it because I hadn't clicked on me. I think sound changes it if there's nobody clicked and it moves. Just be on the safe side, make sure there's a little blue outline around your box. Again, anything that can happen will happen. That was one of the things that I've had happen.

You just taught me how to make my 920 work because I had no idea. It was just sitting there being an $80 lump of plastic until you told me to push the gearbox. I was like, oh, that's Awesome.

Now I've got the wireless, this is a Parrot, a Blue Parrot, and it has worked 95% of the time, okay? And during my pumpkin crunch cake it stopped, and in another Hangout there was nothing really, it stopped. So, you know, things can happen, just be prepared. Then I just— the microphone on this camera is really very good, so it's a good mic to use too. Yeah, in your gearbox you'll have also settings for microphone, and you can pick the webcam one or your your headset one, and then what you hear it through, and that's on a default device. You can check your connection speed, and you can test your sound at the same time, too.

That's great. That's good to know, because I had no idea.

And then, of course, next to it, the other settings are, you know, turn your camera off or to turn your microphone off, which you really wouldn't want to turn yours off unless something really— if something disastrous happens, well, yeah, then you're going to go up and you're going to turn your camera off real quick. And give yourself a moment to compose or whatever, you know, pan catches on fire, although the audience is going to like that. I did one of my first classes ever when I started teaching online, and it was two sisters from Holland and two sisters from Dallas, and they were in the same Hangout, and we were making my famous buffalo chicken wings with my sauce, my really good sauce, and we're making the sauce and we're getting everything ready, so let's get the wings, and I'm looking at them and going, Damn, those are the biggest wings I've ever seen in my life. They were getting chicken legs. The concept of wings had gone by them. I'm thinking, well, I can go all— what's that chef that gets crazy? I can go all him on them.

Gordon Ramsay, all up one side, down the other.

I can go all Ramsay on them.

That'll make an interesting YouTube video. Or I can just go the other direction and go, "That's okay." They're jumbo wings, that's what they are. They're still going to taste really good. You just might have to cook them a little bit longer. Be prepared for if you're doing something and there's interaction of anything that can go wrong, just so it doesn't throw you when it does happen. In your Hangouts, things are going to happen. They just are. On my last Hangout, if any of you saw it, we lost connection.. I was almost through the whole thing and we were just getting on to communities and I think we overloaded Google that day because it was the first day the communities were really running and Chrome shut down. Nothing was working, the extensions weren't working and it kicked us all off. You do have a grace period of I think 10 minutes where you can re-enter, someone told me. If you can get back on, you can get back into it. It was about 15 for me, so it was gone at that point. So if you do, you can just go in and create another event. If it was something you needed to finish or wanted to finish, that would be the only way to do it at that point, to create another event and open it back up and start over from where you were. Or just pick another day and do it again, you know, one of the two. Just prepare. Prepare for the worst, you know, prepare and just hope that none of it happens and it'll be a lot easier going through.

Any other questions? I have a question. Yes. On the recipe, should we do things like chopping to show how we're chopping, or should we have that already finished?

I would have the majority of it finished, but it never hurts to show people, you know, because a lot of people really don't know how to chop right. Right. I have parents come to me all the time because I teach a class at school, and they'll say, "My daughter said, 'No, you're doing that wrong.'" I'll show you how to cut it, which is funny. You never know. What seems basic knowledge to us is not basic knowledge to everybody. Also, when you do your demo, I'm going to ask you also to place your recipe and instructions into the Hangout information. I'm glad you said that. We're going to give them— this is like a freebie all the way around, and you'll get traffic from it. Don't worry. I know it's not— as food bloggers and stuff, we cringe over giving our recipes and things away for free sometimes, but put the ingredients list and instructions and everything in there for them. That will be like when you're talking about what you're making, when you set up your event, as you're going down the about, list it. I'm going to make my famous yada, yada, yada, and this is the list of what you'll need. That way they can be prepared, and people will appreciate the fact that you've actually done that. Plus, they seem to really get excited when you share recipes with them. Could you also go ahead and just link over?

If you have the recipe on your blog, you can just send them over there.

You could link it. I would go ahead and put it up, though, just so it's there, because that makes Google happy, too. Oh, okay.

We want to keep Google happy.

Yes, we do. Yes, we do. To do. That makes them happy because again, you're giving something to the people, to the plusers. You're giving them something. Sending them, giving them a link, like we give them links for everything else. This one time or this occasional time isn't going to be a big deal. You're still going to get traffic because then people are going to go to your site to see what else you've done once you've shown them what you can do. You'll create excitement. You create a connection.— and this is what's really important about this. I talk about community. I talk about— people tell me, I hear all the time, it doesn't work. Google+ doesn't work. The problem isn't that it doesn't work. The problem is that they're not using it correctly. They're using it like Facebook. They're using it like Twitter. They're using it like every other social media. You can't treat it that way. It's its own— entire entity. It's different. It's a community. People respond differently. Some of the old social media techniques will work and other ones will just— these people won't know what you're doing or why you're doing it and it's going to turn people off. It's just like the new communities now. I go in some of them and everybody's in a hurry to post their recipe. You go to their page and you'll see 6 different postings for different communities.— that you can't just do one blanket one for all communities, which is a good thing. That's all they're doing. They're spending their time going there, and they're spinning their wheels. I tell people it's like a hamster on that little roller. He's going around and around and around, sharing his stuff with other food bloggers. We love our friends. We need our peers. We need people to talk to, to talk things through. We need support. And we need guidance and we need them for that, but we all have our own agendas, we all have what we're doing, and no matter how many times we say, "Boy, I'm gonna make that," we rarely do. It's a strange time when we do. So sharing it with us is— you're spinning your wheels. You want all the other people on Google. That is your audience. So I tell you to engage in other areas to find other interests, to join other groups, to make friends in science and technology and, you know, artistry and music and everything, because everybody eats and everybody loves, you know, food porn. So you're— that's— this is where you're going to increase your following. This is where you're going to increase your readership through this. So you have to think of Google as a community more than a social media.

Hey Dennis, a technical question. Yes. About the lower third, I'm seeing that mine, I hope mine is appearing correctly.

You can mirror it if you want to so you can see it the way we see it, but it's fine. Mine is backwards to me.

Alright, so when I put my finger up, is this the left side of my face that you're seeing?

If I were turned this way.

I'm facing you, I'm seeing the left side of your face, yeah. It's like we're face to face.

Okay, because what's I'm concerned about is that if I— let's say I say, okay, to your left, or you're folding something from left to right, you're going to see it backwards.

You can mirror in your lower third. You can push— click the mirror button and then you'll see what everybody else sees.

Okay, I have to go back to— every time I hit lower third, it goes away. I need to go to—

Mine is backwards for me because I wanted to see my name the right way. If your name's going backwards, then you're seeing what everyone else sees. Oh, okay. If it's going forwards, then it's reversed. Okay, so let me do that. If you can see your own name correctly, it's reversed. This is my left side, okay, for me.

It's saying that there's an error loading it.

Okay. Yeah, and this is something good to work through, too. You want to practice setting it up, and if you have someone else, too, you'd need them there to work— I guess you can't work the sound effects, too. It's got some pretty fun sound effects on it, too. Applause and hissing and booing and oohs and all kinds of neat things, but inappropriate for most of what we're doing.

Not necessarily.

Maybe not for our first official Google Hangout. Okay, and moving forward, we're going into January and we're going to do this more, and eventually this is going to be offered to more food communities too. So we'll be the pioneers of this though. They were very impressed at what we're doing in the community and that we have taken— that we did have this many people sign up for it. It was really, really a nice thing to see. And we'll be working hand in hand with some other communities too out there and trying to get more videos on, more people on. The vision was to make it like a cooking network. It can only help you. It can only help you. Then once you have your YouTube videos, you're going to want to have ads on those too once they start doing some action. David, do you do those at all?

I have them on Elite School of Aria that we've done, produced professionally. I was talking to Greg Wright today. Whatever I do, we'll stream over. He still doesn't quite know how— let's say you and I do one with 3 or 4 other people, all of us get to stream them to our own thing. He wasn't quite— he didn't give me an answer on that.

He wasn't sure. That's a good question. Yes. Yeah, because you know you should all have a copy, be able to do that and have a copy of it, have some ownership to it.

And I don't want it to come to David, my Gmail here. I want it to go on Leeds Culinaria. So I have to link that somehow.

And he's going to show me how to do that. Good. Good.

That's kind of the same question that I have. If you figure it out, I'd love to know. Because it's linking mine to my Stephanie Impollic YouTube account, and I really want it to go to my Cupcake Project YouTube account, and I have no idea how to make that happen. I can't figure it out.

Well, you know, drop me an email, and what I'll do is if I find it out or if I ask Greg and I get the answer, I'll ping you and let you know. Would you do it for me too? Sure. Everybody just email me and just say linking your YouTube account— and I'm trying to do my damn lower third and I just can't get it.

What is your email, David?

David@leadsculinaria.com. Okay, thanks.

Can you type it for us? Sure. Thank you.

Perhaps when you do get it, you could post it to the community too so we have a copy of it. Sure. Then that will be good to know. And using the community, I mean, the community has been coming across really well. I'm happy with how that's moving. I think we're keeping it in a good direction because like I said, you go in other communities and it's chaotic right now. There's so many people coming in and so many people posting pictures and recipes and the stream is just never-ending. It's kind of redundant. You're going to post the same thing to your public stream anyway, but you don't want to be double-posting and triple-posting. You want to come in here and ask the tough questions. Or ask the questions like, you know, I'm not— I don't feel I'm getting enough hits. What can I do? Take a look at my blog. Is there somebody that has time to look and tell me? Or like, we had a problem. We're talking about Cloudflare today, and is it really a good thing? Some of us are thinking no because our sites are offline. We're getting this "We're offline" message, you know. So maybe it's time when that happens that you just have to bite the bullet, spend a little money, and get your own get a bigger server or go to where it's going to be able to handle your traffic. If you're getting that much traffic, then it's time anyway.

Let me ask you, Dennis, what we post on the community board, is that automatically posted on our page too, our home page?

That's posted on your stream. I'm still wondering, it doesn't get posted to the main stream. It's not on the public stream. But it's my personal one.— and if someone goes to your personal one, they'll see it.

But what's weird is that I answered a lot of people's posts yesterday and I don't see any of them listed. I just see the one in which I introduced myself.

You'll only see the one that you start. Got it. You won't see the ones you respond. The ones that you responded on, they'll be on whoever you responded to on their page. Okay. We could have made this private and I think down the road there may be some options to change things. I asked I sent out a question to a couple of them. Some said, "No, you just have to close this one down and make a private one." The other answer I finally got was, "At this time, no, we do not have that capability." I think rather than asking everybody to shut down their communities that want to have it a little more private— it's not like we're hiding anything. It would just be better, I think, to keep it off of our stream sometimes or just to keep it in there and not visible to just everybody. Because sometimes you might want to discuss something that is a little delicate and it's better if we could do it in private or without any prying eyes. I've kept the site kind of clean. It's just bloggers for now, although I have been toying with the idea of bringing in some brands from time to time just to to work with us on things. We need the brands for certain things, but I'm still trying to figure out how to do it.

Maybe hangouts with them or something.

Definitely. I've talked to a few brands already about that. I've offered to bring them into Google+. They don't have a presence yet, and offered them some exposure, all in the hopes of them working with us, giving our bloggers something to do. If there's money to be spent, span if our bloggers can make something and do something for them. Or in the long run too, I envisioned this community, I've tried to think of a way to make this community and it just kind of happened. And one of the Google reps said, "Oh, we wanted to say something to you so bad when you were talking about it," because they knew it was coming. But this is finally something that's happened. When we lost FoodBuzz the way we lost it, we kind of lost our home or our community, a lot of us.. So this is replacing it. So I see a festival down the road. I don't know when exactly we'll do it, but I think if things keep going the way they are, we should be able to get enough backing from some brands and some sponsors to do a Google Festival, a food bloggers festival. I think that would be pretty cool to do, possibly in different cities too, depending on how much we can get. So the community's growing really well, so I'm very happy. Great. And Google's happy, and that's even more important. They're offering us opportunities because they see, you know, what we're doing in our community, and I think we're really the only community that's had this offer, so it's a good thing.

I think we have you to thank a lot for that because you have really embraced and championed this whole G+ thing. And I was like, what the hell is Google+? I want nothing to do with it. Until about a week and a half ago, I realized, oh, well, something is happening there.

Well, you know, when I started blogging and I finally realized what was going on with blogging and what the opportunities were, the game had changed so much. There's never going to be another Read Dennis Littley. That's not going to happen again. There's so many bloggers out there now that you're going to find your niche. You can make money. You can do well. You can have a nice brand, but to have that kind of power and that kind of money, I don't think it's ever going to happen because there's so many of us. I felt like number one, I came to the dance late. Social media, I still don't have a clue about Twitter. I mean, I use it, but I don't know why. It just confounds me. G+, when it started, I said, "This is the beginning. Google never fails, or hasn't yet. Let's knock on wood. Let's hope on that." They're dumping a ton of money into this, and I don't think they're going to fail. Right now, this is the ground floor, and we're still all on it. It's still early. They have millions and millions and millions of people on here, but it's a big world. Pretty soon it's going to keep growing and growing. We're still on the bottom floor. We're going to be those people that are the big people in this social media because we started at the beginning. That was it. I'd look at other people on Facebook or on Twitter and see all the readership that they had and go, "Damn." Why can't I do that? Now people are looking at me and I got 300,000 followers and they're going, damn.

Damn, why can't I do that?

Here's the good thing. From what I understand, Google is going to start rotating bloggers and other people on and off the food and drink list to follow. Where do you find that food and drink list? When you open up G+, I can't open it up now, but when you open it up, I'm there. There on the left sidebar, it says Explore. Explore. Explore. You click on Explore, and then you're going to scroll over. I believe it's on the right-hand side now. It'll say Interesting People to Follow on Google.

Ah, there we go.

Open that up. Oh, there's the Dalai Lama.

Oh yeah, you and the Dalai Lama. Wow!

You can click on him and say, "Hello, Dolly." It's Dennis Lama and Dolly Lama together as interesting people.

Let me tell you, if the Dolly Lama ever started following me, I think I would just— that would be like the end.

That would be bliss. I bet he doesn't follow Reid Drummond.

I bet he doesn't. Reid isn't on here. I love Reid. Reid is great. But a lot of the bigger guys haven't really embraced Google+ yet. This is our edge right now. We've got an opportunity to build inroads, to build readership, to get a following, and to make a community. This is where you're going to build. I had a guy this morning, and I'll get a message that says, "Boy, I wonder what Chef Dennis Littley thinks about this." I'll go and look. Or he says, "I wonder what he's going to show me today that I'm going to have to go make tonight." I put a picture of lasagna up. I had to go dig something up real quick that was mouthwatering and looked really good. He loved it. This is a guy in a completely different field. He connected me with a woman that was looking for a cake recipe one time in England. She made it right then and there and came back and how she loved it. It was so easy to make. Her and her daughter make it. These are the connections you make. And you meet people, and these people that you meet introduce you to other people that you would have never known. And, you know, they're becoming— they're going to become probably lifelong readers. More importantly, they're going to become friends. And it's, you know, you're not going to have that relationship with a lot of them because it's just— there's not enough hours in the day. But every now and then you get to touch someone's life, and that means a lot to people. I know it does to me when someone does that to me. When they take a minute just to talk to you or to answer something. Absolutely. Yeah, you know, I am important enough to them to respond. So when people do ask you— on the same token, you're going to get a lot of people that you're just going to delete right away, and you'll know who those are when they approach you or anything. But I'll follow anybody that has a picture, a complete profile, and posts anything regularly. As long as it's not deviant or something.

Do you just follow them or do you put them in circles?

I put them in circles. I always advise if you're starting to start your circles and to break them up in a way that makes sense to you right away. When you go back, when you've got a lot of people in circles and you've got to start dividing them up again, it's time-consuming. Just going through my food blogger circle to see who's active who's not active takes weeks sometimes. I don't have that much time to do it, to see who's still not posting or who's posting. And then they move from an active to an inactive. So when I share, I only share my active food bloggers, okay? Because I want the people that I'm sharing it to, to trust me, okay? That I'm giving them good people to follow, not dead space.

When you share other people, how do you do that?

I'll share a circle. Oh, you share a circle. Okay. I'll share a circle. I have my food blogger circle right now has 460 food bloggers in it, which is quite a lot. When I do go through it, it takes a long time to go through it. I'm picking up more now as our community opens up and new people join. I want everyone to connect with me when they join just so I can put them in a circle and I can keep track of them. I can promote them when I have an opportunity to promote them. I also can promote, like if there was someone— a good way to promote someone to your friends is when you see something good that they share that you like. You share it again to your circles.— not necessarily sharing to your circles, but you're sharing it publicly and they're going to see it once you share it to the stream. It will be in their stream if they're following you. That's how that works. Talking about that, when you do share, share to the public. We talk about this all the time and I still see people sharing limited. Sharing limited does two things. When you share limited, you're sharing to circles. You're sending it to people, you're sending them notifications. By sending them notifications, you're filling up their inbox for no apparent reason. You're filling up their little notification boxes. I'll miss notifications sometimes simply because I have too many of them in there. If you share something, you want to make sure that you're sharing something that's really important. If you have to send it out, like if you're doing a Hangout if you're doing an event, if there's something that you really want to get out to everyone, then share it to your circles. Other than that, just share it public. I had a friend that was sharing it public once and then sharing it to the circles twice. You're being redundant. Again, this is like using it like other social medias, like on Twitter where we would share it 3 times a day for 2 days or something to get our maximum exposure. How many click-through How many views do we ever really get from that? This is more of a community. If you want your content to be shared, make it good content. If you want your content to move back up to the stream, to the top of the stream, people leaving comments for you drive your content back to the top of the stream. That again is a good reason for you to leave comments when you can because you're going to drive a friend's pushes content back to the top of the stream, more people are going to see it again. When they thank you, if they go to your site and they thank you on your site, it's going to drive yours up.

When you say the stream, clearly there's our own stream, but you mean a general stream?

There's the general public stream. There's our stream of what we post, and there's the public stream.

If you responded to something of mine, it goes right to the very top of that.

Top of the public stream.

It probably gets pushed down incredibly fast since there's millions of people.

Yes, people post it and really unless you're going to go through and look for it. Now a good way to do that is like I always tell people, they were saying they can't keep track of their friends. Well, the very easiest way to do that is to break up your circles. Like if you're a niche blogger and you're a vegetarian or a vegan or you're a baker or you're whatever specific type that you do and you want to keep track of just those same people, set up a circle, a vegan circle, a vegetarian circle. Now, when I come on, and these are my very good friends, and we keep contact, and we are like-minded, and we want to share ideas, and we want to brainstorm because we think the same way, I'll go to the top of my screen where it says— and it lists all your different circles. I'll click on my niche circle and open it up, and that stream will appear. Now I can go down and see what all my friends have posted recently. I can +1 them, I can leave comments for them, I can share them, and then I can go back to the public stream. I lost you there. When you open up your page— I am. Your profile page. Let me see if I can—

You said you go to the very top. Yeah. Do you mean go to the Circles page?

Let me see if I can— Open this up. Okay. Okay, not your profile. Go home. Oh, okay. You need to go home. Alright, go home and right across from home you see all. Oh, yes, okay. Next to all you should have your circle name. Got it. And your most active should be first, and then there should be 2 of them and then more. So if you click on one of those, it'll take you to a stream of nothing but those people. Got it. Okay. Okay. And so that way it's easy to keep track on everybody you really want to keep track of. Okay. And you can send those people just a message if you really want to, say there was something, a life-changing something happened in your life and you wanted your friends to know about it. It might not be all of them, but a small segment of them. You can send them that message privately. If there were 10 people on that list that you were really close to and you had them in a special circle, you can message 1 person, you can message 5 people, you can message 1,000 people, you can message the world. It all depends on who you share it to. In one way I'm saying that's a good thing, and another way I'm saying it's a bad thing. Because when you're sharing just to circles, you're missing out on all the new people that might see it when it's in the public stream. If you're sharing it just to people that already know you, unless they reshare it to their circles, which is all they can do if you share it limited, they can't share it public. So you're shooting yourself in the foot twice. Not only aren't you sharing it to new people, You're not letting me share it to new people. Here's the worst part. When I share it limited, that means all those people are getting notifications from me. Now I'm annoying all those people too. I have stopped sharing anything that's posted limited simply because I don't want to over-notify the people that I'm sending things to. I want them to understand when I do send them something that it's important.

They click on it. Yeah, I make everything public. Let me ask you though, when it says that you've had a Hangout, like I had that Hangout with Greg today, and it says limited, that's limited to him and I and that's it? Correct. Okay, so I can delete that, that's no big deal.

It's everything, like if you sent me a private message, it'll come up on your screen and my screen and it'll be in the stream. Right. Would think, and everybody can see it. But if it's limited, it's locked.

So if I send it just to you, like, it'll be just for you, between you and I?

Correct. And— but it'll still be on both of our streams, on our, on our paid streams. But when people come to it, if it wasn't for them, they can't see it. Got it. Which is why I don't really understand how they can see what we're discussing in the communities. It's got to be because they're not— now you can lock posts in the community. There's a place to lock it in the community. At the top there's a little dropdown menu and you can lock the post. Just like you can lock any post that you put up so there's no comments made on it. Every now and then I'll go to leave a comment and it says you're not allowed to leave a comment on this post. Why did you bother posting? Okay. Well, I do know that when someone—

when I was trying to moderate yesterday and today, if somebody leaves a comment, I get a notification that they've left a message. I can't respond to that message. I have to go back to the original post and leave a message there. I can't do it through email or through my own post.

Oh, through email.

Yeah, through the post that's sent to me. It notifies me that I have a notification that someone has left something on the community. I can't respond to that. I have to go back to the community, look that up, and then leave a message there.

Which browser are you using? Chrome. Chrome. You are using Chrome.

OK. Yeah. And I had asked Greg about that, and he says yeah.

I think these are all things they're working through. But I don't think in their wildest dreams they could have expected communities to do as well as they've done. In such a short time. Yeah. I mean, it's just mind-boggling how many people are racing to open them. Again, a lot of it is just like anything else. A lot of them are going to die down. Ones that are unmoderated, that anybody can just join, they're getting huge. There's no way to really do anything in it. Why are you going in and just posting something for no reason hoping somebody's going to see it? Your time's better spent spent doing that on the public stream where you're going to interact with people. The communities need to be set up as communities. Right now they're just being set up kind of chaotically, I think, haphazardly. Some of them, not all of them. Some of them. But I mean, you can see the use for it. You could have a community for anybody. It could be your school. It could be parents from your children's school. It could be where you work, a specific region of where you work. It's a good way to communicate between people.

Can you hear me now? Because when I was talking before, nobody could hear me. I had to leave and come back.

Yeah, we can hear you. Okay, good.

Yeah, so I'm wondering, when you interact with these different communities, I mean, I guess you interact as yourself, but I mean, does it make more sense for me to be me or to have used my brand page? What are most people doing?

What do you recommend? See, I have been of the mind Again, I'm not the authority on this, but it seems to me that you're better off being yourself for a couple of reasons. Unless your brand is already huge and recognizable, but even then on G+, G+ is not set up really for brand involvement to be as powerful as it could be because they've got a find a way to filter out spam. So if you're a brand, you can't follow me unless I follow you. Alright? And that restricts your growth. Because people aren't really— a lot of people aren't going to follow you unless you follow them back, number one. And if they've got to find you and follow you— like, you can't just go out on your own and find people to follow that you'd like to follow. You have to wait for them to find you. You'll see a lot of people that are using brands. Some people have done very, very well with them too, but you'll find a lot of people that are using brands don't experience very good growth. Now, if you have your own private and your brand and you're double posting, again, you're kind of spinning your wheels. Pick one or the other and I would just stick with that. The problem is your personal page is going to grow so much faster that you're going to want to share your brand stuff on your personal page, which is again, it kind of gets like, "Gee, what are they doing? I just clicked on that on the brand and now they're sharing it here." I'll go through there and I'll see the same thing again. I'll see it in two languages sometimes. I already clicked on it in your own language and now I see it in English. I didn't know you were posting it in both. There's a translate button. Granted, every now and then something gets lost in the translation. I'm going, "I don't think that's what they mean," but I still get the idea for the general part. We've actually had some bloggers come to me, too, that wanted to do these and said, "My accent is too heavy. My English is no good." I said, "Do it in your home language, then." You can do it in German, you can do it in French. So you can speak in a foreign language and it will translate into English? It won't translate it, but you're going to capture your market in your own language. Oh, okay. Now someone did tell me that they have a translator. Larry Fournier has a cooking show out there. He's another one of the chefs at Google, and he has someone who does German speaks German and speaks Japanese, and they have a Japanese chef, and they translate it into German. So it's kind of bizarre. But so you can get a translator to translate for you. But I think, you know, if you're German and you're in Germany, your market is there. Yeah. Okay, if your English gets better and you want to do something in English later, then you can break into the American— the English market. But I think to start You start, you know, do it in your home language, what you feel comfortable in, until you get to the point where you can do it and you don't— it doesn't seem a hindrance to you that you have an accent or that you don't know English real well. I interviewed a new chef for Chef Hangout the other day. I helped go through the process, and he is in Barcelona, and he's going, "Oh, forgive me, my English is no too good. I don't know words." I says, "Oh, that's Perfect. People are going to love that.

Americans are suckers for accents.

He's really good looking too, and my wife's going by and goes, "Why can't you talk like that?" I says, "Oh no, even when you do know the word, pretend you don't know the word. It's going to work very, very well for you." So, you know, but again, they're self-conscious, not thinking that way, thinking that they're embarrassed because they don't know English. Spanish. Well, they know it a lot better than I know any other foreign language. So, you know, it's good. But there's a market for all of this is what I'm saying too. And, you know, I think globally we're probably going to be able to do a lot with this. And everybody— a lot of people do speak English, so you've got a great opportunity to really spread out across there.

And Stephanie, I just want to throw something in. I was at the social media conference and that question came up about whether should I tweet or do social media under myself or under my brand, and there was a very great answer which was, people like to follow people, they don't like to follow brands. And I have to say that I have twice as many Twitter followers for me than I do for Leeds Culinaria.

It's interesting because it's different with Facebook. Like, with Facebook I've been able to develop a very a really big following for my brand and it's a whole different thing I think.

It's a whole different animal. People that are on Facebook are looking for the Cupcake Project. They're looking for a culinary journey. They're looking, that's what they're looking for, they're targeting, they're looking for recipes, they're looking for places they can go to pick, so I think brands do better there. But in any format that connects people— the people. Again, this is Google authorship at work. If you're going to apply for Google authorship and you're getting it under your name, this is the whole benefit of it. When someone does a search, your picture is going to come up next to your post. Now, when I'm doing a search and I see somebody, even if I don't know them but I see a person, I'm more likely to click on that than I am all the rest recipes or the Food Network because half the time those recipes don't work anyway. You go through them. I've tried to make it and I'm going, "Oh, that doesn't seem right at all," or I'll make something and it's not. I want to find a blogger that I can trust, that I know really is telling me the truth and is making something. Then the next time I go to search and I see your picture, I'm going to click on yours because I already know that you know what you're doing.

Gave me something good.

So again, the personal reaction between people, the connection is very important. So I always tell people to stay with their personal accounts. But again, it's yours, it's your business, you're the only one that knows what's right for you, and it's just your decision to make. But on Google+, I think that's the best bet, the way to go.— and there's nothing wrong with you using yourself. I know you want your business to grow, but that can always be your tagline underneath your name. I'm seeing more people changing over and using their real names too.

Dennis, I have to go. Everybody, thank you very much.

Thank you, David. Take care.

All right, if there's no more questions, I think we're pretty much going to wrap it up too. I've talked longer than I thought I would. It's usually what happens.

Will there be someplace where you'll have a document that goes through these steps, or should we just all go play with it?

Or both? I wouldn't exactly put it that way. I will print them out step by step. I will write them out for you. Actually, this is the first time I did. As I was doing it, I I took notes because when you just do something and you know what to do, I want to be able to explain it in the right way, in the right— doing it. I will write it down and put it up, and I will post it to the YouTube event section of our community. That way— you guys know how that works, too, in the community. When you post something to the community, if it's a specific topic, there's a little pull-down menu. Post it to a certain section. So say you came in, and I know Dennis talked about that, he put it in the events. So you go click on the events box and then the things that are listed in the events will stream. Okay, so that's a way to kind of keep track of things, like if it's about photography, if it's about taxes, if it's about working with brands, if it's a general announcement, it's just going to go to the general announcements. But if it's something important or that you want to categorize so we have a place to find it, that's a good way to do things.

Where did you say to sign up for the whole master schedule for next week is?

It is on— let me see if I can find this now that I clicked on. It should be in events. Is it in events? Go back to here. Let's see if I don't get the screen share of death this time. Okay, can we all see that good? Yeah, pretty well. Okay, good. And it's not turning into each other. All right, that's good. All right, in the sidebar of our thing here, Hangouts in Events. Okay. Okay, here's the community hangout. Let's see if I put it in here. Where did I put it? Here it is, the event schedule.

Under hangouts and events is where it is, you said?

Yeah, it's—

Oh, I see it. Okay, Gareth posted it.

Okay. Uh, did he post it? He may have posted it as well.

I think he did.

Here it is, PF. Yeah, he did. No. Well, I have it down there too. It's in mine. He may have posted it too. Let me open it up. Can you guys see that? The schedule? Mm-hmm. Okay, good. It's here. This wasn't working earlier where you could click on the sign up. There you go. And then you would type your name in there. Can you see the screen for the signup page now?

Mm-hmm. Okay, good. So then we would sign up to watch other people's Hangouts?

Correct. Okay. To let them know, you know, that there's support. It gives you a place to click on, and then you go in here, and you would just type your name in.

It looks like I'm first, so I could get all this— if I can get any support, that would be awesome. I'll sign up.

Okay, so I mean, that way we know who's going. And again, nothing is etched in stone here. You know, if you guys want to move to a different time or whatever, that's fine. Gareth asked if he could do two. I think Stephanie wants to do two also. That's fine. You know, there's no pressure to do more than one. It's just, you know, they're trying to fill— we want to look good. We want to put our best foot forward. I have not I haven't posted mine yet of what I'm going to do. I was waiting to see where there were openings or where we needed something. I don't even know what I'm going to do yet, but I will do one. I also asked my friends at Chef Hangout if any of them had time, if they would join us on this, too. Moving forward, it looks like we're really going to try and do it in January more, and all during the week. For the whole month. And if it works and we can get attention, we may be able to get some, some real help with this, and they may start promoting it.

I think it would be fantastic, and it's a good way to build your YouTube base too, because I have a channel, I have like 40 videos or something, but when I do these, that just adds to my total.

So that's great. It'll bring new people over and they'll look at your other ones too, right? That'll help. More importantly, he says, "This, believe me, they notice what we're doing." I didn't even know they had watched my video, and I said something happened to it on the case. He says, "Oh, yeah. We saw that. You handled that well." Again, with them rotating, I'm not saying they're going to pick whoever does it, but I mean, it puts you in front of them and gives you more visibility. That certainly can't hurt. I know I've said it before, too, but if any of your cities that have Google offices. Try and find out who your rep is. We actually have some Google people in our community. Greg is the one guy that we're working with. Corey Davidson is down in Washington, D.C., and she is in our community. Greg Wright is the other one that's in our community. I have invited a few other Google people in. I invited Natalie Villabusa in. She hasn't come in yet. She may. She gets so many requests though. I invited my local Google rep in. If there's other Google people that want to come in, those are the ones we want coming into our community. I think they can see anyway. I think they have omnipotent powers And they can go wherever they want.

Big brother is watching.

Yeah, but only for good. They're benevolent. Benevolent brother. That's how I like it. I keep asking them, I says, "When are we just going to get the thing that you can implant under the skin? I just want to get that and get it over with." Skynet. And they're like, "Don't worry, it's coming. It's coming." Someone did say that, Skynet. I went, "Oh, no." No, we don't want that to happen. It's a good thing. I think we're headed in a good positive direction. If you have friends that want to come on, pass this on to them, other bloggers that may not have found us yet or seen us. We're up over 400 now. I know there's not that many active in there. There's just not enough hours to be active in there all the time too. I'm very happy to be here and have such a nice community around us. To work with. All right, I'm gonna sign off and feed my doggies and make dinner, and then I'm gonna take a nap, I think.

Sounds good. Thanks a lot, Dennis. It was nice to meet everybody. We're all in this together. Yeehaw! That's right.

Thank you. Sign up. Bye-bye. Bye, Dennis.

Thank you. Good night, you guys. Take care. Good night.