Foodie by Glam - Community Education Series

Hi, I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and tonight we're here with a community education hangout, and we're gonna be talking to our friends from Foodie by Glam. And tonight with us we have Alexa Malott from Foodie, and you might remember her if you remember Food Buzz. She was with them a while back, and we have Benjamin Rao from Feed a Baby Chili, and he's also with Foodie. So I'm gonna turn it over to them, and they're gonna explain to you exactly what Foodie is. It's a, it's a completely redesigned site. It's really great. I think we're gonna benefit a lot from it, from using it, and they're gonna talk you through it and hopefully show you some screen shares, and we'll take some questions after that. Now remember, they are part of GLAM, but they are not really connected to the GLAM network. So if you have questions about the GLAM network, we're not really going to be able to answer them, but we can provide a link at the end of the broadcast to tell you where to go to, you know, to get some questions answered. Alright, so I'm going to turn it over. Alexa, Ben, it's all yours.

Hi guys! First of all, it's a total pleasure being here. We'll be taking questions all night and— well, not all night hopefully, but for about an hour, and hopefully Chef Dennis Littley can help moderate that and we'll get some of your questions answered. We basically wanted to take this opportunity to show you Foodie, um, to, to really, you know, help get some perspective from those of you who are food bloggers and who are looking for new and exciting platforms. Um, we would really love your initial feedback. We would love it if you, you know, took a look at the site, visited it, um, and, and really gave us some of your thoughts. So with that in mind, um, we're gonna go ahead and take you a little bit through, through what Foodie is all about. So one of the first things we want you to know about Foodie is that it's really a place to share, discover, and organize recipes and restaurants. So unlike other platforms, there is the ability to bookmark— we call it bookmark recipes— into the Foodie system, and then also collect those recipes into larger collections. We're gonna walk you guys through that with kind of a really useful screen share. But you can also interact with restaurants. So there's the ability to indicate if you've been to a restaurant or you'd like to go to a restaurant. All that's possible on the platform. If you're looking at Foodie or you are familiar with the Foodie platform, you'll notice it's a highly visual platform. And we built that with food bloggers and people who love food in mind. Obviously one of the best things about food are great pictures. And in the about— let's see, about a week or so we've been live, week we've been live, we've seen so many amazing pictures. Show up on the site, and we're really excited about the overall quality of pictures and recipes that are showing up. The other thing that we'd like you to take away from this is really that Foodie is growing and evolving, and being a part of Foodie now is a great way to, you know, give feedback at a very early stage and sort of maybe be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. So, you know, I think this is a great opportunity to get involved at a at the ground floor of what's hopefully going to become a very, very robust and viable social platform for people who like food. And Chef Dennis was kind enough to mention it earlier on, but we are a— we are part of the Glam Network, which many of you might be familiar with as an ad network for bloggers. That's not necessarily our role on the team, but if you're interested in ad network opportunities and things like that, we'll share a link later on and you can investigate those on your own. So do we want to go ahead and kick off our demo?

Sure.

Let's do it.

So let's see if I got this right. Screen share. Start.

Do you see the screen?

Yep. Yes. Okay.

Fabulous.

So when you— let me refresh this. If you go directly to foo.com and you're logged on as me, this is what you see. So as you can see, there's what we call a waterfall of tiles of two different kinds of content, and those would be recipe— restaurants and recipes. And so when you first log on, you can sort of see sort of all of the things that have been posted to foodie.com sort of in order, and there are sort of different ways that you can look at this. For example, if you only want to look at the restaurants you can click on this link here, and it will show you all these lovely pictures of restaurants that people have been sharing. And if you only want to look at recipes, you can filter it this way. And then the final way that you can filter is by this icon on the left, and that will only show the activity of the people you are following. Because I'm following a lot of people, it looks pretty much the same as it does for everything. So one thing that you'll notice is that in the caption it will tell you sort of who posted this thing, what they did, and sometimes it'll say that they added it to— here, Greg Henry added this recipe to something called Simple Meals. And this is what we call a collection. So if we click through to Simple Meals, it will take us to this lovely board of all of these different recipes. It's a big collection. Yeah, that the lovely and talented Greg Henry has put into something that he perhaps plans to make as simple meals.

Yeah, so this is a great way. My personal favorite way to use Collection is I have a giant collection called "To Try," and I collect literally every recipe that I just think about maybe I want to try one day. And I have more detailed collections for things like cocktails or restaurants I like, but We've seen people use collections in a lot of creative ways.

So for example, if you go to my profile, you can see sort of thumbnail views of all of the different collections that I've made. So one example is I started making a collection to remind myself of all of the recipes that I make that my daughter does not reject. So as you approved, keeping track of anything my daughter will eat enthusiastically that is not hot dogs or candy. So how do you add recipes to a collection? So incidentally, you can make a collection of restaurants or recipes. So for example, I made a collection of molecular gastronomy restaurants in San Francisco. These are all restaurants. And you can also mix recipes and restaurants if you'd like to. So just to walk you through really quickly how I want to add something, let's say I want to add this beautiful Chocolate Devil's Food Cake with Marshmallow Frosting. I would click this plus icon, and this is for add to collection. And so I can either add to one of the collections I've already, I already have, or I can click plus new collection. Why don't I call this Super G+ Hangout Collection? Why are you collecting this? Because I love cake. Okay. And now we have a collection that has this one item, and then I can enter a fabulous Description. Okay.

Collection is complete.

Collection is complete. So in order to add things to a collection, you can either add things that you already see somewhere on Foodie. Maybe you see it in the waterfall, or maybe you see it in someone else's collection. Or you can actually add your own recipes to Foodie. And the way that we sort of recommend that you add a recipe Foodie is using a tool that we call the bookmarklet. And this is something that ideally would be made really prominent when you join the site, but I think it's important to point it out to you. If you go to this little gear icon, it has a pull-down menu, and the third item down is bookmarklet. So that will take you to this page where you can basically drag this icon to your toolbar. And I actually already have it up here. Bookmarklet. So let's say I'm cruising around on— see split?

Yeah, I don't know if they can see that.

Oh, the top part? Yeah. Can you— Chef Dennis, can you actually see my toolbar as well?

Yes, I can.

Okay, great. So the bookmarklet I have right here, and let's say I am cruising around on Chef Dennis's blog and I see this amazing recipe for a grilled cheese sandwich. So I click through to that recipe, I see that there's a really nicely, beautifully formatted recipe down here, and I want to add that to Foodie. So the way I do that is I simply click bookmarklet. So the tool thinks about it for a while and then says, congratulations, you're the first person to bookmark this recipe. So I can tell others why I'm adding it. Because we all love Chef Dennis Littley. I can choose it to a collection, Super G+ Hangout. I can choose a photo. And I hit Done. All right. So now let's go back to foodie.com. So here it is. So now other people can add it to their collection, they can love it, they can say that they made it. And then if you click through, the thing that's really nice about using the bookmarklet is it does a few things. One is it provides a link to Dennis Littley's blog here. It only shows the ingredients, so it does not post the entire recipe on our site, and instead it encourages people to view the original recipe by clicking through the blog. So let's see, the other main thing—

someone just asked really quickly, what is the etiquette on adding a recipe from your own blog? It's totally acceptable. We definitely encourage you to go ahead and do that. It's definitely considered an okay thing to do. Another way that I use it a lot is that just as I'm browsing other food blogs, I find recipes that I like from them and add it in. I think it's just a nice way to help share their recipe, hopefully to a larger audience, and send traffic to them as well.

And there are, I guess, two more simple actions that I'll show you before— I think it might be a nice place to break for a couple more questions.

Yeah.

Yeah. So that is to comment. So here's an example of Boat in the Pantry adding this chocolate Devil's Food Cake. So you can add a comment here. And also, you can follow people and they can follow you. So if I were to click through to this profile, voilà, and they will get some sort of notification here. Quote in the Pantry is also following me. Yeah, okay, so I didn't want to take too much time with the demo, but I think this gives you a pretty good feel, hopefully, for how the website works. And I think this might be a good time to break for a couple of questions.

Yeah, I think Chef Dennis was nice enough to ask, uh, when you do need to have a separate account on foodie.com if you are interested in being part of Foodie. Sign-up process is relatively easy. You'll need to connect your Facebook or Twitter account, but we're not posting anything on your behalf. So that's not too much of a concern. It just helps us make login a little bit easier for people.

We have a question here from Judah Lenahan too when you're ready.

Oh yeah. Judah asked, how does it know where to make the cut after the ingredient list? If I don't use a recipe plugin on my blog, will it post the complete recipe then? No, actually. The tool is smart enough to know what a list of ingredients looks like versus a list of steps for a recipe. So the tool will actually be able to tell just what the ingredients are versus what the recipe steps are. We're still fine-tuning that tool, so occasionally it might miss an ingredient or it might have a little bit of a strange list, but they're being fine-tuned and improved. So, you know, we're working on that actively, but in general it will never take your entire recipe and put it on the Foodie site.

Just to give you a little bit of insight as to how that tool works, one of the things it looks for is quantities. On the list. So, you know, it's always looking for the— in the beginning of each line, 1 cup of this, 1 cup of flour, 1 tablespoon of sugar. So it does tend to have problems with recipes where the quantity isn't at the beginning, but that is definitely one way it knows what part is the ingredients and what part is the recipe. The other thing that I want to give you guys a heads up about is special characters. So if there are any, you know, accented characters or ampersands or plus signs or anything in the recipe, sometimes it has a little bit of a problem processing it correctly. The workaround for that is to go ahead and add it, and then you can sort of edit the recipe. Actually, why don't I show you what that looks like?

Good idea.

I think in this case I can only edit. Let me find a recipe that— oh, so in the meantime, there is the star here, and for the time being, this is the way that we denote collections that have been featured by Foodie Editor. Which is currently being managed by me. So, for example— actually, let me find another one. So, here's a recipe that I entered a different way. Instead of entering it automatically with a bookmarklet, I was able to enter these steps. And in this case, what you can do is— actually, I assigned this. Never mind. I wish I hadn't— I wish I had come with these examples better prepared. So, another way you can add a recipe is by using this Add Recipe feature, in which case you add the independent steps. And when you do this, you can actually go in and edit the steps after the fact. The one thing you can do if you've entered something with the bookmarklet is you can change the photo and the description and the title. That's right. So if, for example, it didn't pull in a photo, you can add one here and you can edit these things.

Yeah, pretty straightforward. And I think really the bookmarklet is one of the best ways to add recipes, whether they're your own or from around the web. But again, if you're having specific troubles with the bookmarklet, which hopefully should be a pretty small portion of people, definitely feel free to reach out to us. We'll provide an email address on the event page that you can contact us with. So that pretty much is a good run-through of the Foodie Plot. We might want to show you very quickly— oh, we should restaurants actually, so I think we're good there. In that case, I want to talk a little bit about the future of Foodie, because while we're out of beta, we are definitely still working on a lot of exciting products to add. And one of the purposes that we wanted— one of the reasons that we wanted to have this conversation with everybody here is we're really looking for feedback, early-stage ideas and thoughts and ways that we could make this better for you. So definitely feel free to use the site, offer plenty of feedback. We have a help tab on the right-hand side of the Foodie screen at all times, Foodie browser waterfall view at all times. So definitely feel free to use that. You know, we're here to help, and there's some exciting stuff coming down the pipeline which Ben can talk a little bit about.

Sure. One of the things that we're hoping that people can have generate some excitement around is this thing called Foodie Adventures, where people drawings or contests for which people can win prizes. So to give you— we're hoping to hold these at least once a month. And to give you a little preview of the next— of what the next one is going to be, I'm going to go back to screen share mode. And I'm going to take you to a featured collection called Play Ball. And so one of the things I've sort of been playing around with is this idea of opening day. How, you know, we've just had opening day for the baseball season. There are a lot of farmers markets that are opening up, and also that's kind of been opening day for Foodie as we've been live for a little over a week. So one of the ways we're celebrating this is to create this collection where I've added recipes from— that were inspired by different ballparks around the country. So for the Phillies, I put a cheesesteak sandwich. For the St. Louis Cardinals, you know, St. Louis is known for these toasted raviolis. And I'll gradually sort of be filling these out to hopefully have a dish that represents each ballpark in the country. And within the next couple of days, if you're a user of the site, you'll get an invitation to create your own collection that will contain this hashtag, ballparkfoodie, in the description, where you add one or more of these items to your collection and then maybe add some items yourself. And for the people who sort of complete this little activity, which we're hoping should be pretty straightforward and pretty easy, they'll be entered into a drawing in which 5 people will win a $50 gift certificate to a Major League Baseball stadium of their choice. So that's one example of a prize that we can— one example of a contest and a prize that could occur on foodie.com. Some of them will involve different, you know, like exploring different social activities on the site. Some of them may involve submitting your own recipes, recipes from your blog. To the site, and the prizes will vary depending on what we're up to.

And then we also have the cookbooks, our iPad cookbooks that we've been working on. Those have been really exciting. We've done about 3 or 4 editions now. We have another edition for local spring flavors coming out in late April. And the iPad cookbooks are a really cool opportunity. We are doing activations around them, or adventures around them, So we're encouraging food bloggers to create collections featuring recipes around a specific theme. For example, grilling is going to be upcoming for the summer. We'll have a holiday desserts one around Christmas time. And what we're looking for is people to create collections of recipes that they love and then their own recipes as well. And the recipes that the food bloggers own and have the rights to are eligible to be entered into the cookbook. And the cookbook is really seen fantastic growth in the iPad store. We've had over, again, for just a couple months old, we've had over 3,500 downloads. We've been in USA Today. 35,000. 35,000, excuse me, 35,000 downloads. USA Today. So we're really looking to kind of help food bloggers find a little bit of entry wedge into the tablet market. If you're just starting out, obviously mobile is probably not something that you're, you're really investing a lot of time and effort into, but we'd love to help sort of enter into that market with you. So it's been kind of fun to work on the iPad edition apps, and those have been really successful.

A couple other things to note is that I believe all of these so far have been featured in the iTunes Store, so they've been called out as being the best apps in their category, and that definitely drives eyeballs and recognition to the app that The app does link out to the individual publishers, and we've also had some nice press. Alexa had mentioned USA Today, but also Mashable and network affiliates where they've actually called out bloggers by name and by URL in the articles.

And we're going to use Foodie to hopefully create and collect those recipes around those themes. So stay tuned. If you're a member of Foodie, you'll get emails about these opportunities. So that's the best way to keep in touch with kind of that schedule. And we did have a couple questions and they're kind of related to the recipe bookmarking. So I wanted to back up a little bit. Emily, you'd asked, so if people bookmark recipes into Foodie and there's way for interesting steps, is there anything that prevents them from copying and pasting? Currently, no, we can't obviously scan the entire internet and identify copied text yet. But certainly, you know, we're closely monitoring these recipes. We're looking for people who might be doing that without permission. We'll be taking those types of things down. If you find something on Foodie you'd rather not be there, you can send a note to Foodie editors or use the feedback form and we'll remove it as soon as we can. So that policing is definitely there and we're well aware that people are sensitive about seeing, as they rightly should be sensitive about seeing their content on these platforms without their permission. That being said, if someone does bookmark your recipe into Foodie, only a very small amount of, information, just the ingredients list shows up. And of course, it always— click— perspective, I can understand how that'd be a little rougher. And then Gail asked, can you create a place where you can put recipes that you might not want to share, as in like a private collection? Currently we don't have a private collection feature. It's not in the pipeline, but if that's something that we get a lot of requests questions for, we can certainly talk to our engineering team about it. Kind of an interesting idea, like you're throwing a surprise party and you don't want people to see the recipes that you're going to use. And then Laura said, if you add a recipe without using the bookmarklet, does it still include a link to your blog? If you copy and paste the blog URL, it could potentially work. I don't know if it would link out, but—

Yeah, it'll appear. What will happen is that the URL can appear in the steps, but it won't be a hot link. So someone— would have to basically copy and paste that link into their browser in order to go there. But, you know, if that's only, you know, there are only two steps, and you say, "Please see the rest of the recipe," and then supply the URL, you know, that is one way to go.

Yeah, definitely. And then thank you, Bobby, for the very sweet compliment. That's very nice of you. Bobby likes foodie.

So is there any advantage to copying and pasting, putting it in step-by-step instead of using the bookmarklet then if you're not going to have the hotlink?

I would definitely recommend using the bookmarklet. The step-by-step is just a workaround if you really, really want to share a specific recipe but the bookmarklet is not working for you.

Okay.

But I would say the better workaround is to email us and we have a list of sites. We, A, could help you troubleshoot why the bookmarklet is not working, and B, we are creating a list for our engineering team to go through of sites that are having trouble with that.

Great, thank you.

Great, well, if there's any other questions, you know, we'd be happy to take them about Foodie or how to properly leverage it for your site or your blog. In the meantime, you know, we would love to hear, you know, either on this event thread or we were thinking about sending a survey after this. We'd love to get your thoughts on features and ideas and things that would help you as as a food blogger, that's kind of our main goal, and Ben and I are really advocates on, within the Foodbe team for those, for basically the food blogger's voice, so we would love to hear any of those.

Do you have any plans on working something up for the Android tablet too? I know you said for the iPad, would we have cookbooks for that available, or would they be able to use, get them on that with an app, or?

Yeah, it's a great question. We don't have any Android stuff in the works currently. I think that we know it would be a big goal for us, but after the Foodie launch, I think we're going to regroup, focus on the iPad for a little bit longer, and then eventually hopefully do something on Android. And then Laura asked, does the bookmarklet work on an iPad? It should.

Yep. Yep. Okay, great.

Well, what other things can we expect? Do you have any— I know you said there's a big future ahead of us now. You just rolled out with Foodie, and I'm sure you've got some plans. Are there any opportunities that are going to be besides the recipes for food bloggers, or anything you see happening down the road?

I think that the biggest things coming up are really the adventures. So that's the ability to, you know, weekly activations, or not weekly, but maybe twice a week. We would have the option for bloggers to participate in fun challenges or adventures in exchange to win prizes, as well as the cookbook. In terms of actual features, there's honestly a ton of stuff happening behind the scenes that is kind of the geeky stuff. So all of the fine-tuning and making sure the bookmarklet works and refining our search is a big goal for us if you've tried to use that. We know that it needs improvement, and our team is— it's a much bigger challenge than you would think. So our team is really working on that right now. So there's a lot, a lot, a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff happening. But I also think this is a great time for us to regroup, get some strong early user feedback, which is why we're talking to all of you, and then take that feedback and hopefully get some more public and consumer-facing features in the works. That's really the goal.

I would say the one thing I would add there is that as The editor, I'm always looking for interesting content to feature, whether it's a featured start collection or whether it's something that we'll share out in the newsletter that goes out to all the users.

Definitely.

Okay.

Well, it looks like it's going to be a really fun site to be part of, and, you know, it's— I love the new— the way the pictures are cascading too, and I think we are going to see more— Pinterest went to portrait style. As opposed to landscape too, because you get a much better image, it looks like. So that's, that's pretty much what you guys are staying with too? I noticed like all the pictures were kind of portrait style, up and down.

Yeah, yeah, right now our design team is happy with this layout. It seems to be working really well with most food photographs. So yep, the aspect ratio is pretty constant for now.

Okay, they look great. Great. Alright, I don't have any other questions, guys. Have you got some questions? Oh, here we go. Cindy Kirschner just wants to know if there's a print feature for cookbooks.

Is there a print button for cookbooks?

There is. So for each recipe, you should be able to share, um, hold on, I'll go put that right now. Right, so this is what— yeah, it may be hard to see.

Extremely hard to see, I'm sure.

So with each recipe there is a share button that allows you to share it to social, that allows you to email the recipe, and it also allows you to print the recipe.

Yep, there's a little ribbon icon on each recipe that lets you do that, so that's the best way to access that. And then Gail asked a very heavy question. Where do you see this going? She likes that it helps promote linking to blogger sites, and how do we see ourselves in a few years? Honestly, we see ourselves as a really, really useful platform for bloggers to both distribute their recipes, as a tool for them. I think what I'm personally most interested in and what I'm really hoping to gain from our first sort of early months is what sort of utility we can provide to bloggers, what kinds of problems we can help solve for them.. And I think those things are things like distribution, traffic, as well as, you know, what are the hardest parts of blogging in terms of the technical stuff. You know, that's something I think that Foodie could eventually become a platform for. And that's really what our team is focused on.

Are we going to keep this strictly to food photography, to either restaurants or to recipes? I mean, we're not going to— I mean, it's not going to become like a Pinterest.

No, I mean, we're called Foodie, so it's going to be pretty hard to put a bunch of pictures of shoes on there or crafts. But we, yes, so we're really focused on food, on recipes, and on restaurants. There's other aspects of food. For example, you know, we've thought about, and it's definitely not official, but we've thought about integrating things like products, you know, that people really like. If people want to connect around those, that's a possibility. But right now it's food and recipes.— and we don't have plans, immediate plans, to add any kind of other elements. We would never really veer from things that are related to eating.

Okay.

Are there any plans for any brand involvement at all?

Definitely. We actually launched with one sponsored, what we call sponsored collection. So the Growing Season, which Ben showed a little bit earlier, was sponsored by Naked Juice. So what we're trying to do there is really tightly controlled integrations of brands into collections that make sense with our editorial calendar. So we create featured collections, those collections are around a theme, the brand aligns with those themes. We may activate food bloggers to create content on behalf of the brand and the theme, and of course those contributions would be paid or compensated in some way. That specific part of it, for now, you need to be part of the Glam Network to participate in. Down the road, I don't know, there could be possibility of that changing, but that's kind of how the process works now.

So that would be definitely another good perk of being with Glam then, is we'd be able to participate in the brand involvement with Foodie, where if we— right now we can't if we're not with Glam, right?

Right.

So that's good. Okay, makes sense.

Right, and I think Jennifer has asked a question, is there a way to see what's been shared from your site? Not currently. I think in the long run that would be something that we'd love to give bloggers analytics to see what's being shared and what's popular on Foodie and what has the most comments and things like that. I think that'd be a really useful tool for people. We don't have that now, but that's a great feature request and something we're thinking about for the future.

Yeah, I have seen a few cases where I'm searching for a blog name to see if that person is on Foodie, and it does pull up a few hits. But, you know, we are still refining search, so hopefully that will become easier in the future.

Future.

Definitely.

Okay.

All right. Well, sounds good. I think we had— we got a lot of information for tonight in a short amount of time. And, you know, I'm sure you're going to have a lot more questions later. So people can leave questions on this page here if you come back to it later, and you guys can monitor it for a little while. Or you can also just connect right with Ben on G+. Or, you know, and I invite you guys to leave some stuff in our community, you know, when you have something going on. If you have any questions for him, you know, we can direct them to him. So we'd like you to be an integral part of the community and see what we can do to work together towards our common goal of great food.

I love that, Dennis Littley. And if anyone's tuning into this later and maybe the discussion thread is a little bit older, feel free to plus mention me if you have any questions related to food that I'd be happy to answer.

We just got another question. Did you see that from Jennifer?

I saw that. For a username change request, you'll have to contact support for now for username changes. So just a quick heads up that that's what you've got to do for now.

Okay, great. Alright, well, thank you so much for coming on tonight. It was a pleasure having you, and you really showed us a lot about Foodie, and I wish you great success because I think it's only going to benefit us in the long run too. So, you know, partner up together, guys. Get out there, join Foodie, start using the bookmarklet and leave your recipes and pictures up there, and let's start sharing. And hopefully some of us will be in that next cookbook for iPad. I think that sounds really like a great a great deal. My wife does have an iPad, although I'm on Android, so she can always download it. Old habits die hard. Alright, so thanks again for coming, guys. You like to say anything else before we cut off, or—

That's it. Thank you guys so much for your time, and I hope to see you on Foodie.

Alright, great. Thanks so much for coming. I'm Chef Dennis Littley. This is part of the Community Education Series, and we'll see you again next week. Alright, so take care.

Bye.

Bye.