Food Bloggers Community Hangout -how to use Google+

Community Hangouts and give some feedback on how we're doing this or what we're going to do with the community. I don't see any Google reps on with us today. Last time there were 2 Google reps, so that was really nice. They helped us out and gave us some hints on how we were going to— how we could do things. So I'm just going to go over some of the same things I went over in the last Hangout. And one of it was really like the use of circles. Proper use. We got somebody just joined. Hi, Jennifer. Hi.

Hello.

How you doing?

I'm fine, how are you?

Good, thank you. We just started, so you didn't miss much.

Okay.

We have a little feedback coming from you too, so if you could mute yourself while you're listening, I would appreciate it. And I can just see your forehead, so drop your camera down a bit.

Yeah, because I just got up and you don't need to see what I look like.

Alright, so moving forward, let's say we start talking about circles. And the circles, you want to set them up with your food bloggers so you can go right to them when you want to go to your stream. Because in the top, if you'll notice, when you go to your homepage, at the top of the page there's a bar, and in the bar you'll start to see your circles. You'll see ones that you use the most. Like mine are food bloggers, so that'll come up first. So if you click on that bar, on that section, then your stream will show you nothing but food bloggers. Okay, so this is the way you want to set up. If you want to make this into more of a community, I mean, I encourage everyone to get out and check out all the other really neat things that are on Google+. Some of the tech people, the photographers, I mean, there's so much to see and do here. But if you want a place to communicate and to have it be more like a community, this is definitely the place to do it. And what you want to do is you want to set your circles up so you can view it properly. Now if you want to make some smaller circles, you can do that too. Like if you have a circle just for your friends that you want to keep track on a little more closely, or if you want to segment the food bloggers up into vegetarian, vegan, or just, you know, different ethnic types of bloggers, you know, you can do— you have that capability too. So you can really tailor your stream to what you want and what you want to see. And that really will give you a good opportunity to view what you want to view and to keep track of your friends. And again, this is about making a community and about building it and getting the best use out of Google+. Now, once you've got your stream going and you're viewing your food bloggers, now is your opportunity to +1 them, to share, and to comment on them. So that's the other thing you want to start doing. And when you leave comments, I would suggest that you put in the and their name with the comment. Okay, if you do that, then that's giving them a little more notice and a little more recognition out there. Okay, so those of you that don't know about that, that's a good little tip for you to start doing. So if I see something from Helene, I would put a +Helene D'Souza and then say, I really liked what you posted and thanks for sharing it. And that way it's going to register on Google like a little mark by her name, and she's going to eventually get more hits from the search engines because she's getting more mentions. So it's like a little added incentive that Google is adding into this for us. So the more you are mentioned, the more you are liable to get more hits on the search engine. So I urge you to share and to comment and to leave those little pluses in front of people's names when you do it. The other thing you want to do is I see a lot of people sharing limited.. And when they share their posts or they share someone else's posts, if they share it just to their circles, it's not going to get as much view as it would if you shared public. Now there's one very important thing about this too. When you share just to your circles, now I want to reshare it, I can only reshare it to my extended circles. So if you're just resharing to your extended circles, then you lose the opportunity to get it out into the stream and have it be more public. Okay, so that's something everybody wants to do is make sure you're sharing public. Alright, now the other thing about that is when you share to your circles, you're also sending everyone a notification. Alright, now the notification is fine if it's just going into their little inbox up top, but if it's going to their email, then people tend to get a little more upset about all the extra emails that you're sending them. And that's something that you can also take care of by going into your settings on Google+ and unchecking the send emails for notifications. Like, I only get emails for two things: when someone adds me and when someone mentions me. And that's really all you need to know. If someone's leaving a comment, when you go back on, you'll see the comments. If someone's sharing something with you, when you go back on, you'll see what they shared. So, and that'll help limit the number of emails that you're getting into your box too. Alright, now the next thing you want to do is when you are posting, I advise people to post their image, not just the link. Okay, so when you post a link, what happens is just like on Facebook or other places, the little picture appears with your little blurb about what you're sharing. Okay, so you're much better off on Google to share an image because Google is really a food-driven community. And they love food porn. So if you share your image and then put your link in under it, type a little blurb about it, you're going to start to see that you'll get a lot more notice of what you're actually sharing. You get a lot more pluses on it. Because you're giving them more of a drool-worthy image than just the little bit, the little link that you're giving them. So that's another tip. For things for you to do. Now, so you're sharing, you're gonna post your images instead of just the link. Okay, it's gonna start to get you more notice. Now say you want to communicate with one of these other food bloggers but you'd like to keep it private. You don't want to necessarily let everyone in the world know that you're asking them a question about how they made the cake or what they added into the frosting or what that glaze was. So you can very easily send them a private message. It's just like you can send it to your whole circle, you can send it to one person, you can send it to the world. So to send it to just the one person, you would just do a plus in front of their name and then type what you want. And just make sure that you don't have public in that box as well, or any other circle. So you can limit who your messages go to very easily. So, you know, you have a tool here that allows you to communicate with other food bloggers or other people to share things with the public, to keep in contact with all the other food bloggers. And it's really a good way to build a nice community here. It's everything we ever had with other communities with FoodBuzz before they destroyed it. It's a great way now to connect and to really draw us all together. And Google, like I said, is the perfect place to do this because They love food. They love food porn. And they're really embracing us. So I figure we need to give them a really good showing here and put our best foot forward. OK? So do we have any questions on any of that yet? Or anybody like to say anything? A couple of—

For the sharing— Yeah. —Chef, for the sharing future I had with the pictures, I had problems because I always wanted to share from my page, because like that at least people would see that how many people have shared it and reshared it on Google+. I see. And if you do that with the picture directly, you put the link, you add the picture in Google+, after that the shares are not shown on the page, which is not very useful at the end.

Okay, well that's a good point. You understand what I mean? Yes, yes I do. So you're not showing how many shares, and I understand that, and that explains why I don't see that grand total shares on some of the things that have gone so well on Google+. So that's a good point. Exactly. I think you just have to weigh the options at that point, whether, you know, it's worth getting more notice, because I think in the long run By sharing it, sharing the image, and if it goes public, you're liable to end up getting more readers. You're liable to pick up people on Google+ that are going to follow you that may not have followed you without that impact. And they're liable to go to your— they're going to go to your blog to see it. And really what you want is you want the traffic. So that's going to provide you with the traffic. And you want new readers. And I think that's going to provide you with new readers. The seeing shares on your page is a good thing, but I think it just makes us feel better. I don't know if it's as productive.

Yeah, but at the end, one has to think too that people, they look at this too. If they see there are not many shares happening, they will not feel like going more towards Google+. They'll rather go to Facebook because Facebook is showing 80 or 200 or 1,000 likes and shares. OK. So I think so it has a certain amount, I feel. Okay.

I get nothing from Facebook really to compare it with. I mean my hits on there are actually— I've started sharing the pictures the way I do on Google+ on Facebook and I'm getting a lot more from it now. I never used to get it. Now what you might want to do then is share your photo at some point besides just sharing the link. Like you can share a photo album. So if you don't feel that's a good way for you to go, now later on in the day or the following day you might want to share a photo album of a few of your pictures. And again, that's what's going to draw the people in to follow you and that's what's going to really gain you some more momentum. So that way you'll get both. And it's not a bad way to get yourself out there. I generally only share something once, but I think sharing it twice isn't a bad thing. Sometimes I see people will share 5 or 6 things every day of the same thing. And I think that kind of starts to get repetitive and people will start to ignore you. It becomes spammy. That's really it. And I have emailed a few of the bloggers that do that and told them this is basically spam what you're doing. You don't want to do that. You don't want to overload somebody with all of your posts. I mean, if you're sharing other people's posts, that's one thing. You're giving them something else to read. But if you constantly just hit them with all of your stuff, there's no real reason. Like if they go to your page and all they see are your posts, it's just, you're just self-promoting. You're not really an interesting place. They're not social. Yes, yeah, and really they want to see, you know, they may really like your stuff, but if you send them somewhere where they're gonna find something that really wows them or really gets them excited, then they're gonna come back to you to see what else you're gonna show besides your stuff. Hey, Shawn?

Yes? Well, you know, I think also people are comparing Google+ to Twitter and Facebook where if you follow a significant number of people on Twitter or if a significant number of people follow you, you feel like you have to send something out 5 or 6 times a day to get it noticed. Whereas Google+ is so much smaller right now and so much more intimate, there's so much more visibility. They may not realize the rules, same rules don't apply.

It's not that the rules don't apply. I think that it's just a completely different animal. And I think, I mean I have read things on Twitter that say you should never share anything more than twice. True. That it starts to burn people out. I know on FoodBuzz, part of the problem with those inboxes were people were sharing the same things 6 and 7 times a day, just desperate to get people. And at this point I think what we're doing is we were aiming at the wrong audience. We were trying to get our fellow food bloggers who we need to be in this community and we need as peers, we need to talk to and to bounce things off of. But they're honestly not the readers that we're targeting. We want real normal people to come read our blogs and to come see what we're making. So that's another, you know, good reason not to try and repeat the same things we've been doing.

I think that's a good policy across the board for social media, is to not just aim at other food bloggers but aim at the larger food community. Community in general, yeah.

And I think honestly that's what we do because we're always looking for that someone else to reaffirm that, oh, you did a good job, and someone that we know and we respect, someone that does food and that we can say, oh boy, they liked my stuff, that means I am doing well. Okay, so it's that pat on the back from one of your peers, and it means a lot and it's a good thing to have, but you know, we would get caught up in those comment games where I comment for you, you comment for me. I mean, I'd have 150 comments on something, but all I was doing was leaving comments all day long and I wasn't working on anything else. So you'll notice that your readership and the hits on your blog will go up when you start putting your focus into other areas of promoting yourself. Here's the one good thing about Google+ that you won't find on any other social media. When you post something and say, Casey, you come back and you leave a comment for me, that pops it back to the top of the stream. So that's already like posting it again a second time. So when you leave a comment for someone, not only are you leaving a comment and helping them, you're driving their post back to the top of the stream. So more people are going to get an opportunity to see it. Does that happen with +1s as well? I don't think so. I'm not really sure and I've been meaning to ask that of a Google rep and when I see them I never can remember to do that. But I know when other people comment, I don't think when you reply to a comment on your own post, I don't think that drives it up. Otherwise we would just be commenting on our own posts all day long to pop them back up to the stream. So I think that's one of those fail-safes that they built into the system.

And it's something that Facebook is charging you for now. To keep your post fresh and on top of the stream that's coming in, you have to pay. So like you've said, Google+ is a good place to invest our time and energy.

Absolutely, absolutely. And it's also, we're in the beginning stages.. There's a lot of people on Google+, there's a lot of people that have left it and got frustrated. One of the big keys of frustration is that they've never really set themselves up properly. They have nothing in their profile, they don't have a picture up, and they're not social. They just expect everyone to come to them because they're there. You'll see a lot of the bigger bloggers that are out there have never have no presence on Google+. They've come on, nothing has magically happened, and they've left. Let me tell you, it's not going to magically happen. It's being on here and it's working, and it's really deciding if this is what you want to spend your time doing. Okay, because if you can do that, you can you'll get results from it. The hits that I've gotten from Google on the search engines have just gone through the roof compared to what I was getting before I really became active on here. It takes about 3 months before you'll start seeing. Yes, Brian? Pages. Is anyone maintaining a separate Google+ page in addition to their personal profile? I have one. I don't have one for my blog. It was for something completely separate. And when Google was on, the reps were on last week, we did talk a little bit about that. And one of the problems with a brand is you cannot follow anyone until they follow you. So they're making it really difficult for brands to pick up any kind of momentum. I don't think it's intentional, I just think it was probably how they set things up to keep the spam down. Because I think if people were setting up brand pages it could get ugly real fast with them just sending out, following tons of people and sending stuff out. So my efforts would be better spent just maintaining my personal— I think so. I advise bloggers to use their personal page and for a couple reasons. If you put your personal page up and run a tagline under it or works at and the name of your blog, just make sure that when you go in your profile you have links. I come on a lot of bloggers sometimes and I know they're bloggers but there's no links to their blog in the profile page. Put a link to everything that you have, your LinkedIn, your Facebook, your Twitter, your Flickr account, any account that you have that's relevant, put a link into it. Okay, because also when the search engine is rolling over your profile, it's going to see those links. Okay, so I think it's got to help you in the long run too. But if you maintain your personal page with your, like you said, your tagline with your food blog, you're personalizing yourself to the people that are coming to read you. Okay? You're making yourself a real person. And by being a real person, you're going to entice people to look at your recipes more than they would just seeing the Food Network or the Cooking Channel or just something from Allrecipes. Something that isn't really a personal, a personal thing. At least that's my take on this. And that falls into Google authorship. And we talked about that a little last week. And if you go to the last event I ran, Google left some links in there to go to for authorship. And authorship isn't really that difficult. You just go to your— you can Google authorship and it will take you to what page you need to go to. But it's just a matter of filling in the relevant information about you. And I think they are verifying more people now too. So you can possibly get yourself verified. Certified at the same time. But what authorship will do is that when someone searches you— It takes 3 weeks. 3 weeks? Okay. When someone searches you though, they will get a picture of you next to your recipe. So that's like a bonus. So when the search engine starts to roll— now if I see a list of recipes and I see a picture of someone, I'm going to think again it's more of a person and that's who I want to go to rather than just a generic recipe page, someone who is just posting recipes without any content or without any real interaction or social aspect of it. Does that make sense to people too? It also adds a link to more of your content, so other things that are by you, which is really nice. Yes. So I mean, it's a win-win situation. And that's really what they're giving us. They're giving us a place to be a community, to grow, and to actually get our content more visible and to get ourselves out there more. And again, it's just a matter of being consistent and work. And when you post, there's another thing to remember. Everything that you've posted up to this point can be reposted on Google+ because it's all brand new to these people. And the more people that you pick up as readers, you know, a year from now, and that way you could post more consistently. Say you only have time to actually make something twice a week or once a week. That's not really enough visibility and enough posting on this. So you want to go back into your archives of other work. And you want to start reposting some of your older posts. Okay, when you do that, you're sending people a consistent stream of your work, so they're more likely to keep you in their stream and follow you more just to see what else you're going to come up with. They want consistency. Again, I've got so many bloggers on here that post once a week, 2 times a month. They'll skip a couple months and they'll come back, and they wonder why no one's following them or why they're not getting anything. Well, that's why. It's like anything else. You didn't magically get to the point you're already at. It was a lot of hard work and posting. And if you just want to post the link, it's not difficult. You just copy and paste it, and that's still better than nothing. If you put that in, at least you're sending something out to the stream. And while you're there, take 10 minutes, +1 your friends, share a few things, and then log off. If you say, I don't have time to do that. Well, if you spend 10-15 minutes twice a day on Google+, you'll start to see a lot of results. And once you see results, you're going to want to be on more. Then you'll find time. It's kind of that catch-22, but you have to spend time in order to get the results that make you want to spend more time. Okay, what else did I have? Google talked about using hashtags last time. And that's a good way for more people to find your content if they're searching hashtags. So if they just click on a hashtag, say you made brownies, so the hashtag is brownie. And there's a lot of pre-made hashtags, so if you put the hashtag in front and start typing what you want, you'll sometimes get some options. Might be brownies, brownie recipes, or, you know, some different types. So you could put brownies down, you could put chocolate down, you could put desserts down. So if someone just wants to type in desserts in the hashtags, then yours should come up. Food porn, anything along those lines that might fit. With apples and pumpkin stuff, I've been putting in autumn or fall or fall baking. You know, like I said, it'll give you ideas. Once you start the hashtag, a lot of options will come up. And that's another way to get yourself found by new people. Your stream is going to see you, but say someone real quick just goes in there and wants to search a hashtag, they might find you and not have been a follower before. So that's a good way to get some new followers. Okay, one other— anything on that or any questions? Nope. Okay, we also talked to one of the community managers and they also owns Zagat. I don't know if everybody knows that. Zagat and Google are one and the same. So if you go to your sidebar and you hover, I think it's over more, or no, actually above more now, there is local. They've changed it. And if you click on local, it'll open up restaurants in your area. And if you've been to these restaurants, they're looking for professionals like ourselves. They consider us professionals. To leave comments and reviews of area restaurants or businesses. If you use a particular hair salon and you like them, you can leave a review for them. If you go to an automotive place, you can look them up on Google. A lot more businesses are on Google, and a lot more people are looking for reviews from people that might really know what they're doing or responsible people.. So that's also another good way to get you some bonus points on Google+ because your name is associated with that review. So it's one more time your name is mentioned. It's this game, the more times your name is mentioned, the more opportunities you're going to have. Google, you're being seen again over and over again. It's that algorithm that they use. So it's like a bonus point for you. And it also makes the people at Google happy because it's It's part of their company, Zigat, and they're looking for us to use it. I also urge you, if you have a Google office in your community or in your area, to contact them. Casey and I were at a meeting for Philadelphia's Google, and it was really an eye-opener. And they talked a lot to us. They actually provided refreshments, which was totally unexpected. So they had— There was beer. There was hors d'oeuvres. It was like they just didn't hand you a bottle of water and send you out the door, which means they have money to spend. And they talked about co-sponsoring events with us or doing them. I know in some of the cities, the community managers with ZAGAT are doing cooking demonstrations. So if you can find time to work that in or you can find a way to connect with them, that could also be a very good thing for you. You. You know, for 2 months they had me on the interesting people to follow list. And part of it was the different hangouts that I was doing with the food group that I work with, with thechefhangout.com. And Philadelphia actually I think pushed me a little, helped get me on that list. So they rotate different foodies in and off that. And you know, it could be a good opportunity for you to get on that list too if you're very active and work at it. It's kind of a nice thing to tell your friends that you are on next to Anthony Bourdain or Rachel Ray or Martha Stewart. Okay, and I think that is about all I have for now. So if there are any questions or anything you would like to cover, please feel free to dive in here.

Oh, you did a great job.

Thank you. Thank you. The next Hangout I'll be having will probably be later at night. It will be about 8 o'clock, and I will try to catch more people at a different time zone. The one before this was 4 o'clock. And then after that, what we'll do is we'll try and set up some type of ongoing community Hangout. Or feel free to have one of your own. They're easy to do. Let's go over that a little bit. When you go to your sidebar, you'll see Events. So what you want to do is you want to click on Events. The page will open up. There's one thing you need to do, and that is— let me see if I can share the screen with you. Where is it at? Events is right here, and you would click on Events. It's loading.

Hopefully it will load.

There we go. And you create an event. Now I don't know if it's going to let me do this right now. Yep, there you go. You come up here and you change your theme. You go through the different themes and you can pick out what you want to use. You can come in here and you can find some featured themes, stationaries, or you can upload one of your own photos if you like. Now the only thing with one of your own photos, it's got to be this size. Now if you want this to be an on-air hangout, which means people that don't get into the hangout can still watch it live, you want to come down to this event options Click on Advanced and then Make This an Event On Air. Okay, see that little red box comes up. Now if you come back to do this after you set it up, it wouldn't let me do this last week for my other Hangouts. So do this before you do your invites. Okay. And then from here you put your date in, calendar comes up, you put your start time in, And this will be the time in your time zone. That will come up. And the location bar is where I put the link once I do the hangout. Details, you can type in everything you want about this. And then invites, you can invite the public, you can invite your circles, you can invite individual people. So at that point it's up to you. Alright, and that's pretty simple. So now you have your event created. And it will pop up. And all the people you invited will get a notification up here in their notifications bar. And then they can decide whether they are coming or whether they may be able to go that. Or you will start to see your stream of comments on it. Okay, and then when you create your Hangout, when you go to start your Hangout— come back to— oops. Try this again. There we go. Okay, now we are back. So when you go back to your Hangout, at the very top of it in the bar, the HTTPS is what you want to copy and paste in the location. So I put it in there and then I also put it in right below, right at the last comment before I start so people have two places they can see.

So Chef, so that's literally when the event is starting is the only time you can give them that URL, is that correct?

You can send it out whenever you want to send it out once you begin the hangout. Okay.

You can't send it out with the invite?

No, you cannot. Okay. No, it can only be— you want to do it maybe 10 minutes, 5 minutes before because it will send them an email notification that it's starting. Like I had a glitch, I lost my event page and the Hangout was up but it wouldn't let me bring— come back up with another page so I had to sign out and start over again so there were two links. There was another link at first. People were clicking on that and nothing was happening. So there's also a box up at the top above the picture that says, uh, "End broadcast" on it now, but it says "Begin broadcast." Okay. So once you get everyone in and you're ready to begin, click on "Begin broadcast" and that'll start making your YouTube video. Okay. When you're done, you click on "End broadcast" and that ends the video. Now you could keep talking after that, but say you just wanted to chitchat after your video was done, you click "End broadcast." You're still in here, everything's still going, the people that are watching you live are still watching you, but you're done with your productive part of your broadcast and you don't really want anything else on it to show on your video. Because believe me, everything will come up on your video whether you want it to or not. So you can use that as a way to stop it if you want to do anything else. And then it goes up on your YouTube page. I think I have it set up, it goes to Twitter. I don't know if it goes anywhere else, but I mean, you can have that go where you want it to go to let people know about it. If you have a Google account, you automatically have a YouTube account. I'm pretty sure everything just sets up for you automatically. They are integrating everything together, and there's more to come that they're going to be giving us. So this is a good tool. There is also— I don't have the link right now, but there is also a place to make a promo. It does a 15-second promo for you. You put some music in the front of it and you invite people to your event. It's like letting them know about it. So that's something else cute you can do if you feel like you want to do something a little creative. Stand there and give them a little 15-second promo on what you are going to be doing. And you can share that. So that's another way to get people to see you and come to your event. Alright, I think that's about it. Anything else? Anybody? Questions? Concerns? Everybody's good on setting the circles up for their— so they can get their community rolling? Hey, Chef. Yes. Janet Lynn has been typing in the chat box. I know. And if you scroll up, she had some kind of rice dish she wanted to advice about. I'll talk to her privately about this. This really isn't the time for that. This is sometimes where we get people that are confused with what we're doing and what the purpose of us here is. But I'll talk to her later. Okay, well, good luck out there. If you have any questions or you need help with anything, I'm always here to help. You can send me a message, easy enough on Google. Just send it just to me. You can email me, whatever you feel comfortable with. I know I was a little unsure of doing that private message at first. I was sending emails. I was afraid I was going to hit the wrong button and everybody in the world was going to see my message to someone. But it is pretty safe. I'm sure Google can get in it, but I don't think we have to worry about them. All right, my friends, thank you so much for coming on and have a great day, and I'll see you all soon. All right, thank you. Bye-bye.