Food Blogger Community - how to use Google+

And see if we can bring them back on board here. And we need to get more people involved to do that. And you know, if you know other bloggers or other people, not necessarily on Food Buzz, but just getting more bloggers together to really start building ourselves a strong community here. Something we can share. I think this is like the prime place for us to get together. I mean, Google+ is offering us a really nice home. Hi.

Hi, how are you?

Good. We just started. You didn't miss much. Google+ is offering us a really nice place here to gather and to bring everyone together and to really get a strong community. It seems like every other community that's out there is trying to make money. And, you know, Google's making money, but they're not making money off of us so much as, like, from running ads. So we don't have other interests interfering with us as food bloggers or foodies. So my thought is to, like I said, to gather people to try and get more food bloggers or foodies involved and get them in the community and just, you know, start growing and see what we can do. I think if we show Google that we're a strong community and that we can build and we can really offer them something. You know, you never know what they might come up with for us too. So that's my thoughts. Anybody have any thoughts on that while we're talking about this part?

I think it's right on. Anybody that knows FoodBuzz is aware that Federated Media, in my opinion, probably a shared opinion here, made a big mistake in doing what they did. So, you know, I was thinking about this— pardon the metaphor— I spent the last 2 hours outside working in the yard. What do ants do when you mow over the anthill? They rebuild a new anthill. And I think that that's exactly what we're going to do. I'm not suggesting that we're mere ants, but what we have is the might of the ant. We will rebuild the community, and I think Google+ is a good place to start.

Absolutely. Anyone else?

Well, I know we love feedback.

I'm actually the community manager for Google here in Washington, D.C. Well, hello.

I'm glad. I wasn't sure who you were, actually. I was just happy that you were here.

Well, you invited me.

I know. I sent out invitations to all of my Google friends. But I never know who's showing up. Till they show up.

So basically, we love feedback. And any feedback you guys have, anything I can do, or I can suggest and help escalate that would make the environment better for you guys and help you use the product, I want to do. So think of me as an advocate, and let me know how I can help.

Great.

Great.

It's good to have you guys on our side. And that's really how I got more involved with Google+ was we went to a Philadelphia meeting. And I found out how much you really were for us and there to help us. It was a surprise. You served herbs and drinks. And I said, oh my God, they got money to spend and everything. So my thought is really to just try to build— we have such a large number of food bloggers here already and foodies and food aficionados and chefs and people that just love food, that my idea was to try and structure something, you know, very loosely structured, but to bring people together, you know, to share what we do, to share what we know, and just to foster some type of sense of community. Because I know that's the one thing that I miss most about Food Buzz, and when they kind of drove it under, you know, that's what we lost, is we lost the community. And, you know, we like each other. We like to talk to each other. We like to see what each other does. You know, we're looking for regular people, which Google has tons of, to look at our food and to read our blogs. But, you know, to have each other as peers to speak to and to bounce things off of and to share ideas with is really what we need. And I think this is a great place to do it. Anyone else, any ideas or thoughts?

I'd love to hear about where everyone is, where you're all located.

Well, I'm in Philadelphia, right outside of Philly.

Am I on? You're on. Can you hear me, Dennis?

Yep, I can hear you.

Okay, thanks.

I'm right outside of Philadelphia too, but on the Jersey side, in South Jersey. Me too, we're neighbors, we're not that far apart. Brooks, are you there? I see you're kind of static. Brooks is in California. I'm trying to think of what part though. And who else is on? Dion is the little green block here, and she's in Polyop, Washington. Yep, I'm in the Northwest.

Roxanna is—

Can you hear me okay? I can hear you.

Oh good, there I am.

Did I say that right? Polyop, is that right?

It's close. It's Puyallup, but it's close enough. Puyallup, all right.

I was on, and the black block on the end is Roxanna, and she is in Virginia. Can you hear us, Roxanna? Are you talking?

Yes, I can hear you.

There you go!

Yay!

Yay! Gareth, where are you at? Um, I can't hear you. I can hear something in the background, but I can't hear you. Rebecca, how about you?

Hi, I'm from Colorado.

Rebecca's in Colorado, okay. There also is a side box too, I don't know if everybody knows, a chat box, so if you can't hear or you need to type something, you can always type something in there.

Okay, I need to go turn down my radio, sorry.

That's okay. Hi, Lizette. How you doing?

Hi, I'm so sorry, I'm working out of the office, so my internet connection is a little bit unreliable right now.

That's okay. Where are you at? Where are you coming from today, Lizette?

I'm actually in Chicago. Chicago? I'm actually also, I work for Google too, and I'm part of the field marketing team, so I'm sure that you've spoken to at least one of us sometime in the past. But I've actually been working a little bit with the cooking community on Google+ and trying to create those opportunities where a lot of the food bloggers can come in and show their content and also connect with each other.

That's great.

I'm also here to answer any other questions that you guys have.

Good, and that's exactly why we're here. I'm an expat from FoodBuzz, and there's some of us here from that. And when that community kind of dissolved, this was the perfect opportunity to bring it on board at Google. So we're looking for a new home, and there's a ton of us on here, not just FoodBuzz people, but there's a ton of food bloggers. I think I have about 500 in my circles. So we're trying to find ourselves a home, someplace we can build a community and just really do what we do, which is cook, eat, and share. So we're happy to be here.

So what's kind of the concept? What are you thinking about making this look like on Google+?

Is that for me or for Lizette?

That's for whoever wants to answer.

Well, my concept is just to bring us together in some type of cohesive community. And I mean, the easiest way to do that for everyone, you know, once we get a good shared circle, is to use that circle to communicate. And you know, I know with Food Buzz we would have the mail and the mailbox would get so full and our posts would stream.. And it's exactly the same thing here. So if we have a circle with our group together and everyone kind of has the same circle, you can go plug into that circle and you can just scroll down and see what everybody's doing. You can +1 them, you can go to their website and see the post if you want to see more about it. You can leave a comment for them. I mean, it's like the best of both worlds, of everything that we wanted and we had without a lot of the aggravation attached with a company that's really just trying to make money off of us. I mean, they're giving us a home for just because, you know, that's what they're doing, right? They're making money somewhere else. They don't need to make it off of us. We're just, you know, we're a nice extra, I think.

Well, I'm— I've been thinking about doing it with just some of the people that are in my groups already that I cook with on different other sites, and it's a nice way to meet people face to face that we see and blog with all the time. I think it's a great idea.

Absolutely, and then this, being able to hang out and just chat is another added plus. I mean, it's something we didn't have before. We can get on at any time. Like if there's something that you want to discuss, you throw it to the group and see who's available to come on for a quick chat.

I think it's great, especially like I'm rebuilding my site right now on WordPress, and so it'd be nice to get on and hear from other people people that have been on WordPress and see what kind of issues they're having, you know, and just get some ideas that way as well.

Well, that's good. You know, if you wanted to put some kind of a hangout together, they have the event scheduler. You can even do a little promo for it now. Schedule the event, and like I said, I have a pretty good number of followers too. I'll be happy to push anything out to everyone. That's great. And you know, if you have an event coming up, you let me know. And you can get more people on. So if you want to discuss WordPress or issues you're having or things you'd like to do, this is a good medium to do it in. I know I'm on Facebook too, you know, the other place. And we have a food bloggers group that meets, that kind of converses there, but it's static. You're typing and you're waiting, you're typing and you're waiting. You can never really just talk to somebody and have a conversation, cohesive, and you know that you can really remember what you're talking about. You know, you gotta come back, someone else interrupts, then you gotta go back and look at what you wrote, come back down and type. So, you know, to be able to have a Hangout and to grab some people on, whoever's online, I mean, this is a great way to use the product.

I think it's great. Well, thanks for heading it up, for sure.

Oh, I'm very happy to do this, and I have got to be doing this more often. I have been a little lax. When work started this September, I kind of got in a hole, so I'm finally getting out of the hole.

I don't want to keep everybody's time. If anybody else has anything to say, I just wanted to jump in while I had a minute before I go get my children from school.

No problem. So, anybody else? Any—

Yeah, I think that, like, to answer that question and to kind of repeat what you said, I think it's On my side, we completely agree that we want this to be a platform where food bloggers and people who cook and people who are interested or passionate about a specific topic have a place to talk to each other. So this is a place not only to kind of build your content and do fun stuff, but it's also to see, you know, who else is in the community and trying to find each other— a way to find each other first and then kind of again like you said, have that communication across the board. I think right now what we're seeing is that everyone is signing on and saying, who else is out there? Who else, you know, I have no idea who is out there. They are afraid that, you know, they are writing a post to nobody. But we do know that obviously the food community is pretty large and pretty big and popular in general online. So it's kind of, we're trying to find those opportunities for you guys to just find each other in a community like this.

That's exactly it. And I think wherever you are and what city you are, if there is a Google office, I always urge people to reach out to your Google people. Because like I said, you're ready to help. Everyone's always friendly and available. And you want us to succeed, which is a nice turnaround from what we're used to.

Yeah, definitely.

We're not competing with each other. And you want us to succeed. As a whole.

I can jump in on that. Yeah, it's totally true. We just want you guys to do well and be successful. And we're here to help you guys do whatever you want to do. And we love bloggers, and food bloggers in particular. I do a ton of great events just for food bloggers, just to kind of help you guys get found better on SEO and use the product better. And I'm happy to put any of you in touch with your local community managers, depending if you're near an office that has one. Feel free to circle me, and I'll put get you in touch with the closest community manager to you, or I'm here to help you too.

Do you think that you're going to come up with some type of a button or something that maybe we could put on there that's separate just from the Google button, or are they going to be able to just attach through that or find us through there?

Are you talking about like a badge?

Yeah, maybe a badge that says, you know, Google+ Food Community or whatever it is, and, you know, come hang out or something like that so that when they go to my blog, they'll see, oh, this is cool, we can all, you go over here and chit-chat with people because I have a lot of people who I already talk to on Skype. And so it would be nice to bring them on board into something like this.

Sure.

We currently have the buttons, the +1 buttons, which you should be putting on all of your articles, obviously. We have the Google badges you can put on your website. What you're talking about, like kind of more of a content-specific badge, we don't currently have. And while I can't speak to what we may or may not be developing. It's not a foreign idea to us.

Okay.

Yeah, I think that would be a great idea because we could be a really big draw. I mean, I know there's so many talented, incredible people in other fields on Google+, but you know, food is universal. And food porn is just people, no matter what you do for a living, if you see a picture of cake or a steak or something that interests you, you know, you'll stop in your tracks and look at it. So we could be very good for Google too. As a draw to get more people on board. I mean, if they know they can find more food porn on Google+.

Well, you're going to be pulling people from everybody's websites that are out there, the millions of food bloggers, so it's a win-win.

Yeah, because people are tired of places like Taste Spotting and Food Gawker where we get buried and hidden between so much commercial stuff that we're looking for a safe haven, a place to really do our business and to be proud of what we do and show what we do. So I mean, this is a great opportunity.

That's true.

The great thing about it is you have all of the—

like, people can be on here without being part of your community, so you can attract new people.

Oh yeah.

They have so many features and they're all built into one place. You can manage everything through one portal, which is kind of the way we're going. We want everything to be really easy. We want everyone to be able to navigate all of our products through one login rather than having separate logins for every product. That's the direction we're moving, being able to kind of control all of that through one platform, really. But we are happy to have you guys. And with the Gigant integration to Google+ Local, I mean, we're definitely very prominent in the food community. And I know with a lot of the food bloggers I work with, They will link to every article they write and just do a little blurb above it to kind of drive more traffic back to their website. They're also reviewing places on Google+ Local, which puts their name and a link back to their page in front of everyone who looks at restaurants. It puts you in the search results. There's so many great ways to use the platform to drive traffic back to your blog.

Mm-hmm.

Absolutely. And the more you use it, the more you're gonna start seeing more organic hits too. At least I believe that to be true. I know I've seen a surge in the past 6 months of the organic hits I get to my blog. And a lot of that comes from— isn't the more we're mentioned, it's like a little extra bonus point is what I always tell people. When you write the @+ in front of your name and mention someone else, it's like an extra point in your favor.

I also recommend signing up with the Google Authorship tag so that your photo and byline are showing up on all the articles you write. That'll show up in search results too.

How exactly do we do that?

How do we do that? Yeah, how do we do that?

Oh my goodness, you should Google it.

Tell me what it's called again.

Let me see if I can find the link and put it in the group chat. I'll be right back.

Google Authorship.. And the whole idea from what I was told behind that is when people go to search, if they see your picture, they're going to connect more with a person than if it's just Allrecipes or Serious Eats or something. But if they see a person there, they're more likely to click on your link rather than just a generic link.

And do you think it's better to have a person or your— I have a little avatar that I use that is just my logo for my company. Which do you think is better?

Can I make a suggestion?

Sure.

Okay, um, with, um, if you have a business page with authorship, you can also set up publisher, and both can be set up. And that's really a good idea because with the social media going the way it is, it's good to have authorship and publisher credits. Both very easy to do.

Thank you. Grace? Grace in the middle there is up in Canada too. So you were asking where everyone was from.

Is she one of the dark squares?

Yes. No pictures, Grace.

Oh yeah, I don't know if it's in the middle on your screen. It's one of the dark screens.

Sorry, and mine's green.

I'll try to have that fixed for next time. I know we kind of want to see faces.

That's alright.

Can I say a little something too? And about the, the using of the avatar for your blog name, I was talking to somebody that I kind of experimented with, and she recommended using my face so that people could connect with my brand, with me as the person, and that seemed to work for me. I mean, you might find something differently, but I've been talking with her a lot about that, and I experimented, and the more I use my face and my name, the more I feel like they associate me with that even though my brand— and even just stuff outside of our food community a little bit, even people that don't have blogs and they don't frequent blogs like the ones that we write, when I meet people in the store or my friends and family, they love the fact that I have a blog because I share recipes. I take ideas from them from my— pardon me, but my Facebook page and my blog, and I can compile them all in one place. And the thing that's actually drawn me to Google+ is actually Dennis Littley. He's explained how easy it is and how we can all kind of congregate together. So people like me that use Facebook are starting to integrate more into Google+. And if we have something very user-friendly like a food community, I feel that more people that are interested in food will start integrating more and more into Google+ and maybe even phasing out Facebook, because as we know, food is the one thing that brings us all together. In a hospitable way. So from all around the world, we can kind of make that transformation. And I think Google+ will be a great community for us to all come together.

That's a great idea.

That's what I've been saying. I'm telling you, we're going to have to just all get together one day and do one universal post where we're calling everyone to come join us.

That's a great idea.

I'll have to write a post on that.

Let us know when you're going to do that. We'll write one. Okay.

Sounds good to me. I'll send it out to all my food circles anyway.

I also wanted to go back. I love that you guys are talking about the Plus profile versus Plus page issue, because I think it's something that we've been— on my team, we've been talking a lot about the benefits of either pushing more of your profile or your Plus page. Because we know that— I know that for one, there's a little bit more capabilities. As far as social extensions on a Plus page. And so I'm not sure. And I think we decided that it's up to, of course, you guys to see which is better to either just keep going with a Plus profile. Because as you mentioned, a lot of people do identify you as an individual, as the writer, as a contributor to a blog, and see more of your personality and are more attracted to that. But I think there's something to be said about also not ignoring the kind of brand page or brand of like your blog as a name and ignoring that part. Because I know that there are more, a few more capabilities in kind of pushing that and adding more social capabilities to that too. So I think that this is definitely something I don't have like a complete answer for, but I like hearing more discussion about that just to see what the community what the community's opinion is on that topic.

I have something about the page which I've just learned. The business pages, if you can get 1,000 followers, there's now— they've opened up verification, Google has. So you know how with personal profiles they'll verify you whenever they verify you? With a page you can request verification now, and I'm going through that process right now. And for some reason they didn't see my link from my page to my site, so I have to prove that I own the company before they'll verify. But that's a nice thing, verification is nice to have.

Verification is great. I have been advising people, I go the way of identifying. I think it's great for people to see you. I mean, I always tell people you have to have a picture up. You know, if you're afraid to show what you look like, you really shouldn't be in this business.. So put a picture up, put facts down about yourself, fill out your profile. But as an individual, I mean, I'm always saying, you know, I think you're better off using your individual profile, putting your brand under it. I mean, it does— it's a little more difficult to get started as a brand unless you're Kraft or the Food Network, because in order for people to follow you, for you to follow people, they have to follow you first.. And it's like that one friend tells two friends tells two more friends. You can't get to that point if you can't follow people. And as a brand page, you can't. So you have to wait for them to follow you. Plus again, it's that individual, that personal touch. We're food bloggers. We run a personal thing. It's one of us behind the wheel. And the more people get to know you, the more they trust you and the more they want to see you and the more they want to read you. Again, I always urge people to tell something about yourself. I'm not saying to divulge deep dark secrets, but share a part of your life with them occasionally and let them get to know you as a person. They'll connect more with you and your recipes will start to mean more to people. I think Google, like I said, I have gotten more, a wider variety of people to follow me now from Google Plus, all walks of life. And the big difference, like when I was on Facebook, I still am but I don't use it much, was that I felt I was more national. By being on Google+, I'm global. I really am and I can see the difference.

So you're finding that people that are following you on your Google+ profile are coming to your website and signing up there to do like RSS feeds or by email or that kind of thing?

I can see a pretty good amount of traffic coming directly from Google+. But the big advantage of this all has been my organic hits. They have— I can't even— 100 times, 200 times of what they were when I started in July when I joined over a year ago. It has just really, really multiplied. So that is one of the major advantages. And then that starts to relate to hits to your blog in different ways too. People, once people find you, half the trouble is letting them find you. So once they find you, then it's your job to keep them. To engage them. And a lot of engagement, you know, if you're just posting recipes, you know, some people look for that and they just want to see a pretty picture or recipe and that's the end of it. They don't want to read anything. And other people want to get to know you on a personal level, a little bit so they know about you. Someone is telling their cousin or their sister or their brother or their friend, I found this great blog, she bakes all the time, she lives in Colorado and does this for a living too and likes dogs or likes flowers or whatever. A little personal, something about you to make them relate and want to think of you more as a friend.

Dennis?

Yes?

Can I ask you a question? I mean, you're pretty active on Google+ and you've got a lot of followers. When I was on StumbleUpon, I found that I met, like you're saying, people from all walks of life, and I built a really good community and got to know everybody. And I tended to get a lot of traffic from StumbleUpon because they shared it with this person and the other. Do you find— like, are you getting involved in Hangouts from other communities so other people from other areas are getting to know you? Or how are you getting so— how did you get so many followers?

Well, I had an advantage for a couple months. I was on the Google Follow List. I just came off today. I'm so sad.

I don't know what you mean by Google Follow List.

I was one of the interesting people to follow.

Which Google? I didn't even know there was a Google list.

If you go to the sidebar on the left side, you'll see an Explorer. It used to be on the right, now it's on the left. And if you click on Explore, you'll find about 10 lists of interesting—

We have them across multiple verticals and categories. We put suggested users in art, music, food, etc.

But do you advise getting it? Like, I really enjoy meeting other people from other areas. You know, I just find I end up seeing pages that I never would have searched myself, you know, because other people are sharing them with me.. And that's what I found with StumbleUpon, and I kind of get the feeling that could be the same here at Google+.

It is. It is, absolutely. I've come across people across the globe that I never would have seen or found in any other medium than Google+. I've got to tell you, it's awfully impressive.

Yeah, so that really interests me, like meeting other, you know, I mean Of course I want to meet everybody in the food community, but it's nice to meet like the photographers and the people that grow flowers, you know what I mean, or paint or whatever.

That's exactly what I'm saying is that we want the community to connect with each other as a support system and as a group of our peers. It's like leaving comments. We get comments on our posts from each other. And honestly, it's just us connecting with each other. It doesn't relate to hits. It doesn't relate— you know, we're not going to make each other's stuff half the time. We have our own agenda. We have what we do. So I mean, it's almost a game. I come in for you, you come in for me, but it doesn't relate. It doesn't really help you. I mean, it creates— it gives you a bond and community. That's a good thing. But what we want is we want all these other people on Google who are in art, who are in photography, who are in tech, who are in every other walk of life to come on board.

Right, so Dennis Littley doesn't know how to bake or doesn't know how to cook something and they need to come and they need to learn. Like I find my comments on older posts are from people that are actually making the recipes and reaching out, asking questions.

And that's exactly it. I mean, there's nothing more fulfilling. Like, I've had a couple posts where people have actually made it right after I posted it, come back 3 hours later and said, "I baked that cake. It was incredible." You know, I was like, "Oh my God, thank you, thank you." That's what you live for. I mean, and you want regular people. You want just, you know, everyone out on the street who doesn't do this for a living or who isn't, you know, the way we are.

And then we're also giving back too, right, to the other communities because we're going to learn things that we don't know anything about either, right? And we're going to comment.

Absolutely.

Hey, I will gladly show Peter Photographer how to bake a cake if he will help me nail white balance.

I know, I love following the tech. I mean, I'm on here for hours and my wife will hear me howling from the other room because I just read something. I just find more stuff on Google, and during the summer I don't think I left the computer. Most of the summer I was just constantly reading different people, and very entertaining.

I like your idea, Dennis Littley, of the cooking together. I've done a lot of that via Skype with some other communities, and we do little cooking groups, and everybody's in their kitchen, they have their laptops in there with their thing, and this is so nice because you can allow so many more people to come in.

Right.

Instead of having to pay for the big bigger package to get more than 5 people and it's just, this is a much better platform I think.

I do do this on chefhangout.com, I'm one of their chefs and I teach through this medium and it is a great way to do it. I set up 2 cameras, I'm still trying to figure out how to switch them a little easier but we teach cooking over this so it's the perfect thing and the whole idea with this is I had a family from Amsterdam and the other two people were in Dallas and we cooked something together. It was the funniest thing because we were doing buffalo chicken wings and they show up with legs and I'm going, "Oh my God, those are the biggest wings I've ever seen." And they said, "Oh, we couldn't find wings, we got legs." So I'm thinking, well, I can go all spastic on them and it will probably make a great YouTube video or I can just go, take a deep breath and go, "That's okay." It'll still taste good. But the whole idea is when we cook together, like, if you can draw families or friends together from around the world and show them how to make something or make something together, and then they sit down and enjoy the meal together, you know, then, you know, it's, it's really, really gives you a lot more you can do than just Skype.

I think it'd be neat once we get the group really up and running and going is to have, say, okay, this week, you know, Garrett is gonna be doing, you know, something, and we're gonna all cook together. And then the next week, you know, Brooks is gonna be making something. And so we have a list that you can go to maybe to sign up as we do it, you know, so that everybody's getting a little bit, you know, of that, that time.

Now the good thing about this too, and I, for some reason I couldn't get it today, was there is a box when you create the event, there is a box on there to make this a— what is it now? It's on air, which means everyone else can view it besides the 9 other people in the circle with you.

So anyone can join in?

Right. They can't join in, but they can watch it live.

Oh, awesome.

And you can actually put the— I think you can put a box on the sidebar of your blog. I saw that on one blogger that was having one, and you could watch it in a little box on the sidebar as it was going on.

Yeah, you can embed the link onto anything.

There you go, that's the word, embed.

You can have like the Hangout running on your site?

Yeah, people can go to your blog to actually watch it. When you go to launch a Hangout on Air like this, before you actually go broadcast, you'll have access to the link and you can embed that on your website, people can watch it on YouTube, they can watch it on your Google+ page. And anybody can watch wherever you want.

That's awesome.

You just have to mark that— what is it? It's on air, is it called?

Or—

yeah.

And make sure you have the link embedded on your site. That's awesome. Well, it's been great, guys. I have to go get my children. It's nice to meet you all, and I hope to see you all again. Enjoy your day talking.

Thank you. Thanks for stopping by.

Take care.

Nice to meet you.

Nice meeting you too. I don't know how to get out of here now.

Just X out.

There we go.

At the top.

See you later.

So that's great. Anybody else have anything they'd like to say? Diana, it's nice to see you.

Thank you. I figured out my problems, my technical problems anyway.

OK, I was going to say, well, start working on mine next.

Not all of them.

Is the doctor in? So we were talking about— food porn before too. And I wanted to recommend, I'm starting to post just the image with a link behind it, and I'm getting a lot more response instead of putting a link up with a little bitty picture. So if you're not doing it, I would advise doing that. That's one thing. Sharing, I don't know if everybody's sharing stuff, but you want to share other people's work as often as you can, as time permits. And of course the +1 is always a nice thing to do too.

And I always recommend using the hashtag because as everyone knows, those hashtags are the easiest way to find and filter all of that content. So if we do like—

I've started using them, yeah.

Which hashtags would you suggest?

I know, I mean, there's the very broad ones out there that that are as simple as like #foodies or #food that you can grab on to the popularity of those, but then you can also of course create your own hashtag. Let's say that you, you know, 6 people every Tuesday are just going to do a recipe share Tuesday. You can hashtag Tuesday food or Tuesday recipe or Tuesday food porn or anything that you like so that And one day you all agree that you're going to share a picture and then hashtag it so that people can start to see that, oh, this is the thing that's trending. This is the thing that's going on right now.

I think as you start to type also, it gives you some options as you start the word. Some that I don't know if they're already in there or what, but if you start typing a word, it might continue it with what is already there, I'm thinking. Because then if you click on it, it puts it in bold right in the hashtag for you.

Yeah, they autocomplete current hashtags. I know Zagat, the brand, they've got like 2 million followers on their Google+ page. They do often weekly hashtags, and those are great to piggyback off of if you want to expose to a new foodie audience. Because typically all the community managers around the country will actually jump on top of that. Like, we have Burger Week coming up, and we're all going to be posting content around that. So if you guys have recipes for perfect burgers, that would be a perfect one for you guys to kind of jump on and take advantage of. I think right now we are in drinks week. Everybody is talking about cocktail recipes.

Okay, that I did not know. That's good to know. And I know someone right next to me that has a good burger recipe too, right Brooks? An award-winning one.

I did get one.

So that's good, yeah, hashtag Like I said, I just started using those and I see them more, so I guess that's a good thing to start. It is.

It will open you up to a whole new channel of possibilities. I did a post with the hashtag #autism a couple weeks back and I had no idea what would happen afterwards, but it opened up a whole new channel that I may not have discovered had I not used a simple symbol in front of a word.

Very good. Anyone else have anything they'd like to talk about or bring up?

If I can go back and touch on the decision to go with just a profile versus a page. This is my second time coming back to Google+. First time I was overwhelmed, I had no idea what I was doing, so I left. But I came back and on your suggestion, Chef, I did go with just a personal profile A, because there's a lot more to me than just cakes, but B, I found on the prior run when I was managing a profile and a page, it was a lot to juggle, double posting, and it was confusing. And I love the simplicity of just putting the brand underneath the person and going that way. It's really working out wonderfully for me.

Yeah, I mean, not that brands don't have their place, but I just think for us it's probably a better idea to be more of a person than a brand. I mean, we're not a conglomerate. We're not, you know, the Food Network, or we're not selling a product the way a brand would as much. So for them to connect with us as a person is just one more step of them, you know, seeing us as someone they can they can count on. That makes sense.

It does.

And it is good time management, especially when you have kids.

Yeah. And there is no sense to double post. I mean, it really becomes redundant then that you are putting too much up.

Okay.

Well, I think this was very productive today. I am very happy that we got together. Anyone else has anything they'd like to share, please do now.

I'm good.

We're good?

I posted links to the authorship, everything in the actual event page. You guys can go back to that invite and I put them in the comments. And you can always reach out to me too with questions.

Very good.

Thank you, Chef.

Thank you, Chef.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. Great seeing you all, and I'll see you soon.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.