Good Day Google+ - Bridging the Gap

Hey everyone, I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and I've got a special treat for you today. Well, I don't know how you're going to look at it, but I think it's a treat. My friend Mia Voss is in Los Angeles, and she had her special ears on today, and I thought I'd sing a song that I had sang to her the other morning that I told her I was going to do on my show. So here you go, bear with me please. And it's— who's the leader of the club that's made for you and me? G-O-O-G-L-E-P-L-U-S, Google Plus. Google Plus, forever let us hold your banner high, high, high, high. I know what you're saying, Chef Dennis must be high to be singing that today, but no, it's just Friday, I'm in a good mood. It's good day Google Plus and I'm so happy to be here with you. So I'm going to run through my guests real quick and then we're going to get on with the show. So thanks for bearing with me there, guys. I appreciate that. So let me start on my side anyway, what I can see, and that today I have John Dietrich with me, and he's here. Thanks for showing up, John. How you doing?

Be here. Thanks for having me on.

My pleasure. And you're coming from Mississippi, right?

Yep, that's right, right in the middle of Mississippi, up in Jackson.

And not too far really from me then. And we have Joanne Woolley. And Joanne, where are you at?

San Diego.

Beautiful San Diego.

Ah.

I have so many friends there, I do have to get out there sooner or later and visit everyone.

It's the vacation spot.

I know, perfect weather, at least I'm told. You know, we're entering into summer here in Orlando, so it was paradise all winter, but I think now it's going to start to get really hot. So anyway, it is what it is. And today we have a special guest with us, Jim Shankle is joining us, and he's going to talk to us a little bit about what he's doing that's so special this weekend. But we're going to come back to him as soon as we run through the crew.

And you're Arkansas, right?

Yes, a beautiful day in northwest Arkansas. Glad to speak to you, Chef.

Sounds good. I'll come talk to you in a few minutes. And Jason Frasca, and I know where you're at. You're in Jersey.

Yes, yes.

I know a guy that knows a guy. That's right.

Finally got a beautiful spring day, Chef. Thanks for having me.

I'm so glad to hear the weather's finally breaking up there. Everybody's been saying how cold it still was, so it's insane. Coming to us from the beautiful state of North Carolina, we have Bradford Lowery. How you doing?

I'm doing great. We're right here in the Sandhills. I know you can't tell from my accent that I'm from North Carolina, so I'll do my best. I'm definitely not from Jersey.

I saw the Jersey Boys last weekend. That was so good. It reminded me so much of— I'm not from New Jersey, but I lived there most of my life. It was just a joy to see and remembering all those things. Alright, so I'm gonna turn the floor over to Jim Shanklin. He's gonna tell us about something special he's doing this weekend with Razorfest.

That's correct, Chef. Champions for Kids Razorfest, 10th anniversary. I've gotta just come on and shout out and leave. I've gotta go about 20 minutes down to Razorback Stadium here in Fayetteville, Arkansas. And what we're gonna do is today we're gonna take the technology that Ronnie Benser has developed and the Hangout Mastery team in the control room If anybody saw what he did at South by Southwest in Austin last month, we've taken that technology a little bit further working with Ronnie and his team. We're going to wander around Razorfest today and tomorrow getting interviews and getting some stories. What I like to say in the company that my wife and I started, that's Gplusedutainment.com. And what we want to do is help the not-for-profit sector using this technology. We're going to test it out this weekend at Razorfest. What we want to be able to do is to have a company based on web-based interactive activities, experiences, and stories. And so we're going to take our equipment. I've got a young man who's going to be helping me out, Yoon Kim, on the camera. We're going to go around and speak to everybody we can. We'll watch the setup of the event today and then again test it. My biggest concern is bandwidth. There's another technological issue. If we've got some technologists out there in the audience, they can help us out because each week we want to be able to advance this. I'm using an iPad as opposed to a cell phone that they used in Austin. The good news is it's much more stable. It's an iPad Mini. The bad news is it only broadcast— I'm broadcasting from a Mac here, Air, but the bad news is you only get two-thirds of the screen and you end up with black bars on the side, so I suspect it's defaulting to the camera square. So in any event, we'll work that out. But we'll go down with the AT&T hotspot with the 5 gig update upload, see what we get. We'll be inside the stadium, outside the stadium, This is a big deal because it's sponsored by Walmart, Tyson Foods, Unilever, and Kellogg are the main name sponsors. Tomorrow, we'll be interviewing from— this afternoon, we'll just, like I say, just be finding out what we can find out and testing. Tomorrow at 10:00, we will be in the nonprofit area speaking to them about what they do for kids, about 5 or 6 of them there. Then we're going to go up and have some interviews with some of the sponsors, talk about why it is they support kids, what it is about it that has attracted them to this event. And then we'll end up in the Tyson VIP room talking to everybody we can, asking the same kinds of questions. But I'm kind of going on. I'll finish up with this and just say the key thing is I really believe that we can— I'm a venture capitalist, so I start businesses, but this is an unusual thing that my wife and I just really felt compelled to do. To help the nonprofit sector. But right now, most events are publicized only in their local market. But through this technology and getting it on the internet live and then on YouTube forever, then— and especially using Michael Mason's new PlusMyReach measurement technology for Hangouts on Air and this mobile Hangout on Air, we really feel like we can potentially move the needle on this. And in turn, because you're gonna have much, much greater reach out to the rest of the world. And then if we can also on top of that, which seems to me logical, but I'm not always right, we can then get the social media people from the sponsors who, you know, would want— you know, we're gonna have a lot of content that they can slice and dice and put out. Then it can spread pretty virally, pretty big. The more eyeballs you get on this stuff, the more value it has to the sponsors, the more sponsors you'll get the next time for events, for charities, and they'll be able to raise great amounts of money. That's the theory. We'll see if reality works starting this afternoon, but it's been fantastic working with Lonnie's team. We've got some really great people on my website. I show the technology. We try to lay everything out to be wide open so anybody can use it. But I would warn you that it's complex and everybody needs to use Ronnie's team in support of this in the control room. They're going to be in the engine room running the engine and steering the ship and I'm going to sit at the captain's table entertaining the guests.

That sounds like a plan and I wish you a lot of luck with it. We will definitely try and hook up tomorrow at some time. I will be at Celebrations for the Great American Pie Festival.. So in between some of my interviews that I'll be doing that we will push out later, they won't be live, I'm going to be trying to do some live spots there as well. So we'll see how that goes.

Well, great, Jeff. Thanks very much. I appreciate you letting me come in and shout out, you know, let's do an event within an event tomorrow and within an event.

Sounds like a plan.

All right, thanks very much.

See you later, Jeff. All right, thanks, guys. Thanks for listening to that. And before we go on, I do want to mention that my sponsor for today is PlusMyReach.com. And I'm also going to have a coupon for that at the end of the show. I'll put in the comments section where you can use it for free for a month. So we'll get that going at the end of the show. Alright, so now I'm going to turn over the show to our guests. And the whole theme of the show today, I mean, everybody has done something. And when I started— I don't have themes ahead of time usually, but when I started looking at everybody that was on the show today, one thing hit me, and it was like what you did to make that step to become successful. We've all faced problems and we all have issues about, you know, what we needed to do, and it seems like you all overcame them in ways to, to make the jump to become successful in the niche that you're doing, or you're on your way to doing it very well, one of the two. So, you know, I want you to talk about what you do and what you like to do in your projects, but I mean, maybe with a little thought to that about, you know, some of the obstacles you faced and how you you know, what you did to overcome them, what your thoughts were. So I'm gonna start off, and we're gonna go ladies first. I'm gonna let Joanne go because I know watching her on Mia last week, I learned a lot about her, and I really thought it was interesting some of the things you do with your sign language.

So, uh, oh great, well, thank you, Chef. I think being a mompreneur, there's a lot of us who get started with the mindset that, well, first comes mom and first comes kids. And then business comes second. However, that made me grow very slowly, and if anyone knows that Southern California is very expensive to live, so we need two incomes. And I left a really good-paying job in order to be home with the kids. Well, I had a mind shift about, just about 3 years ago, that if I really wanted to make something out of Sign4Baby, I was gonna have to realize that I was a business owner who happened to be a mom. And luckily my kids weren't babies anymore, so I felt comfortable and I had reached that stage that I could actually make that shift and sort of work my business in a more savvy way. Good.

So, and what made you come up with the idea for your signing? You were talking about that. I want to talk more about that.

Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up signing, so to me it was nothing new or interesting, because my mom is deaf, so I was her mini interpreter, if you will, from a very young age. And of course I was gonna have my kids be able to talk to Grandma and teach them to sign. And I knew this concept of Baby Sign Language. It's existed for a good 20, maybe 30 years now, and it's just been growing and growing steadily in popularity. And what I became witness to was that my children had a really great way to always be able to dissect what it is, the message they needed to get across, even when they didn't have the sign for the actual word in question. I'm trying to think of a really good example. One's not coming to me right now, but the other thing was that they had a lot of empathy. So I find that communication, being that it's the thing that separates us from the rest of the animal world is the thing that kind of leads us to being empathetic towards our fellow humans. So when I decided to leave my job on 07/07/07, I had to kind of figure out and dig deep to find what were my skill sets and then what were the things that I was really passionate about. Being a mom, it was easy to pinpoint that I was passionate about being around kids and babies. And then my talent has always been that I could communicate and help other people through sign language. So that's how I got started.

Now, when— what is the age that they can really conceptualize sign and start?

You know, that's debatable, and there's a lot of books that are on the market, and there's a lot of information on the internet, but I disagree with what some of those books and articles on the internet say. Being that I signed with my children from birth, I really felt that with that repetition, all that eye contact, that they really can understand it very early. In fact, my youngest one was able to sign milk at 8 weeks old. So, if that gives you any indication as to when can they start to understand. Very, very early.

Hmm.

So, so, by age 1, how literate were they?

Amberly and I were having full dialogue conversations, and the only reason that I bothered to write down the list of her signs was because I knew one of the pediatrician at the checkup that they are going to ask you, "How many words does your child have?" And I counted her words. She had 13 words. That was very, very clear. And then I thought, well, gosh, the pediatrician's gonna have no idea how much we really conversate. So I started to make a list of her signs, and I'm sure I missed plenty. I only was able to come up with 50, but those were the words we were using every single day— signs, 50 signs.

So she could speak 13 words?

Yes.

She could give you the signs for another— that's amazing.

It really, really blew my mind how much we were talking to each other, both back and forth, having dialogue.

I would have to think that her whole— her learning curve had to increase greatly because of that, because she's learning to rationalize at a very early age. That's amazing.

Exactly. One of the things I've read, and it seems to be so true from babies that I witness in my classes, is the synapse connections that are firing off in the brain when they're really young die off when they're not stimulated enough, which is why there's so many programs to reach the preschool age and the toddler and the baby ages. So with Baby Sign Language, you're giving them that extra stimulation that is activating both sides of the brain, because communication— and sometimes I get this mixed up— communication, I think, is on the or language is on the left side, and then vision is on the right side. And so you're activating both sides of the brain, which is not too many activities that do that.

Hey, Joanne, can I ask you a quick, quick question?

Absolutely.

I've got friends who have a daughter that's autistic, and she's almost 1 now. And it's interesting because they're having to learn how to interpret— how to interpret her communication. Because she's not trying to communicate through the formation of words, but rather through sounds and the visual, you know, the expressions of her face. Is there any way— is there any correlation between signing and autistic children? I'm just thinking in a conversation I recently had with them of what she can or what her limitations are, and it seems like signing could be an answer.

I don't know.

Yes, in fact, there's a lot of instructors who come from a background where they helped children who had developmental delays or speech delays and find that autistic children really benefit from being able to have this kinesthetic way of communicating where they don't have quite the verbal capacity yet. So they really, really excel in being able to connect through sign language.

That's fantastic. I will see them this weekend and mention that to them because I know they, they probably have a lot of opinions coming at them right now, and so this may be something they haven't considered. Thank you very much. That's fantastic.

Do you think at a point like that you would develop your own signs?

You know, there's another company that's trademarked and it's called Baby Signs, and the women who founded that company really did go about making up signs along the way, and for a lot of us who do teach this, and we kind of disagree with just making it up. If you're gonna use Baby Sign Language, why not borrow from the beautiful ASL that's already in existence? Because then you have a lifelong tool that you can really use.

All right, I've got a question for you then. Have you ever seen two babies signing to each other?

I have. It's not too, too often because a lot of babies, until they get to be more like 18 months, 24 months, do what's called parallel play, where they look at each other and they play side by side, but not so much interacting together. But I have seen it on occasion, and one of my favorite, favorite memories is when Amberly— oh, I want to say she was maybe 22 months old, and Kyle finally, finally was signing at 7 months old. She came over when I was showing him the sign for water. She never bothered to sign to him until she knew that he had a sign, which his first sign was milk. And so when I was then showing him water, she came over and she goes, "Mommy, let me. Mommy, let me." And she's being the little teacher. She's like, "Kai Kai, water, water." And it was like this amazing thing to watch take place, one, for their sibling bond, and to see her be this little mini teacher. And she's not even 2 years old.

Amazing. Wow, this is a whole new area. I'm really interested about this. We're going to have to talk about this more offline another time. Thank you. Great stuff there. Let's move on to Jason. Jason, you sign in a different kind of way. You sign with Evernote.

I don't know, Chef, how I follow that up. Joanne Woolley just blew us off out of the water there. We could just focus on her the rest of the show and we'll all pack up, right? —just be in the audience.

Now you've done some great stuff too. We were talking yesterday and I think it's going to be a topic for a whole other show but you found a way through your own innovation to take a company that you remember you told me you worked for and bring them into like a new era of being through Evernote and that to me was just amazing too.

Yeah, so I was running family business and private investigations, and I had built a case management CRM system in FileMaker in 2005. In 2010, it had become a bottleneck in our IT department, which I was running, and it was preventing us from really moving forward in all aspects of our systems. I couldn't upgrade our hardware, I couldn't upgrade any of our software. I was buying new computers and rolling back the operating system to accommodate the FileMaker systems.. And I couldn't upgrade even our cameras. I want to upgrade all of our surveillance cameras to HD video, and I couldn't do that because we needed to hold back our video software to accommodate this FileMaker bottleneck. So long story short, I had one day I had an epiphany where I could actually create a case management CRM system in Evernote. And this is in like 2011, so Evernote had been around for a few years. I had like most people when it first came out, tried it, abandoned it because I knew there was value there but I couldn't figure it out. Then I'd come back to it a few months before I had this epiphany and was diving in personally now and using it for work as well. But I had this epiphany one day and I realized that my solution was right here before me in Evernote. The FileMaker database case management CRM system I could have upgraded and solved all my problems right then and there for over $20,000, but I knew it would be obsolete the minute I did that investment. Instead, I did it on Evernote for less than $500 myself, and in 2 weeks deployed the entire system company-wide. And from there, it just opened up the floodgates. We were able to just kind of roll forward technologically and do quite a few advancements and lead in our and innovate in our industry. And it was dynamite.

So that was definitely a life-changing moment for you then.

It was, it was. You know, since then I've sold my partnership interest in the business, and once I left, I relocated to New Jersey, actually, or back to New Jersey. And yeah, it was kind of a fresh start. I was looking for a new career move, and I was getting involved in the entrepreneurial startup scene here in New Jersey, which I'm very active in right now in meetups and such. I just found myself starting to blog about Evernote. People were starting to take notice and were interested in my concepts and some of the things I was writing about. Then I found Google+, which you asked me about yesterday. How did I find Google+? Well, it was just an SEO move. I learned that there was a nice link between SEO and blogging. I posted a link and got crickets, but then I noticed that there was a whole lot more to it. The next thing I know, it was this whole dynamic, quality social platform that I've never stepped away from since. It's been an amazing ride.

It's been a great way to engage and interact with people you would have never met before.

It's been incredible.

That alone is— will always have a special place for me because of that. So you guys have any questions for Jason about Evernote? We got one of the experts here about it, so if you have anything you'd like to ask him, leave it in the comments, or anybody on the panel has a question, please go ahead. Can I? I have a quick question about—

you said you started joining, I guess, the startup scene in New Jersey and doing meetups and stuff? Yeah. I just went last night to a meetup here in Jackson, and how does that fit in with what you're doing? Can you talk about that? Yeah, sure.

So I'm a co-organizer at one of the local meetups here in New Jersey. It's focused on entrepreneurs, so entrepreneurs— by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs. It's called Launch NJ, Launch New Jersey. We're actually working with a local university here called Drew University, and we're actually co-organizing a pitch/miniconference based around technology and entrepreneurism May 3rd, so in about a week. So if anybody in the audience or watching this HOA is in New Jersey and is interested, we'd love for you to come out. LaunchNJ.org is the website. And so that's one thing, and the other thing, John, is I'm working on two startups myself right now. So one of them is in legal services and the other one is in event management platforms. We are still in stealth mode on that one, but I hope to have an MVP by the end of the spring and we are super excited about that one. That one is sexy, the legal services one isn't quite as sexy but is very much a need and you know both of them take the angle that is core to my DNA which is optimizing. You know, that's kind of who I am, that's kind of the way I approached running my business before, that's kind of the way I approach Evernote and the way I'm approaching these startups, which is optimizing and solving inefficiencies. Cool.

Well, I'd be willing to bet that my friend Tina Willis, who's an attorney, might think your legal one was pretty sexy too.

She's my bud too. Tina Willis has been awesome, super supportive, and I know that she'd welcome me back on her way to discuss it when it's ready to launch.

Oh yeah, Aaron and Steven Feuderall would be out selling it big time.

They're dynamite, I love those two. They certainly are.

Alright, well let's move over to John since we were talking to him. John, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're doing now and what you've done to overcome some of your— to bridge those gaps to reach success.

Yeah, thanks again for having me on. I remember when we started out here talking about bridging those gaps. I guess a couple months ago I left my day job, so to speak, and have now jumped into freelance work, you know, doing web design, development, that kind of thing. And so bridging the gap, I have done really using Google+. So at the other company I was using Google+ to help, you know, like Jason said, for SEO. That was my first interest, was to come and see how I could build the SEO for that company using Google+ and those connections. And so over about the year or so I was there, I met a lot of people and started connecting with people that I would never otherwise have had the opportunity to meet and connect with. And so using those connections, I've been able to begin to build up a portfolio of people who can use the services that I can provide. Recently, the Google+ for Business community, Stephan Hovnanian, I think everyone has probably come across his name, invited me to become and help them moderate that community. Those connections that I developed with Stephan over the months and whatnot allowed me to become a moderator there and then help out. I can help him, he can help me. It's a really nice way, I think, of being able to use those connections to not only help myself but to help others. One of my primary interests for Google+ is how businesses can use it, how best can they connect with people. And so that interest led me to a relationship with Lee Smallwood, who runs the NodeX tool. And Lee just— sort of brought me onto the team a couple weeks ago, and so I'm helping Lee to spread the word about Node-X, and I'm learning about Node-X myself and how it can apply to understanding relationships, you know. So I think that that combination of tools, you know, the business side and then the Node-X side coming together to help really scale up ability of connecting people with other people. When I first started out, you know, I was just kind of connecting just as I went along, you know, kind of without a framework, so to speak. And NodeX has kind of allowed me to put a framework, Jason, like you said, to sort of optimize and sort of put it to a scale, you know, that I would not be able to do otherwise. And so that really has kind of been a thing that I've latched onto. I really like that, and I like to spread that information, share that information with people. So I think it's kind of been a good fit for me with NodeX to help others learn what I've been learning about building connections and bridging those gaps and things. Going back to bridging the gap, it's quite an experience jumping out of a day job. I've got 3 kids and a wife and a mortgage, and it's I'm sure the rest of you all have experienced at one point or another in your lives, it's tough, man. It ain't easy, but it's been a really rewarding experience. I've gone out really and built even stronger relationships with those people that were there before, and we were acquaintances and whatnot. Really, it's been amazing who has come out and said, "Hey, John, I like you. I know you, and I want to work with you." It's been really great, really, really nice to have that experience.

I'm telling you, we are building such a wonderful infrastructure here of people. Google's doing some changes and everybody was up in arms. Starting last night, I got emails. Oh, God, yeah. It was getting insane. I'm saying, just calm down, calm down. I called this morning. I wasn't in a real good mood. When I'm a little testy, I'll write down things that make I shouldn't, but I was referring to it as yellow journalism.

I like what Stephan said this morning. I just ran across it. He said it's all about the people we're meeting here. I love Google+, believe me. It's allowed me to do things I would not otherwise be able to do, but it's the people ultimately that I've made connections with that matter. I have their email address. I have connected with them on LinkedIn or whatever. Those are the relationships that matter. Google+, I hope it stays, and I think it probably will in one form or another. But if it goes away, we're still people and we're still connected.

We still have made those bonds now that they're not going to just disappear because any social media— and really, in Facebook and Twitter, you lose people there and it's like you don't even know you lose them. It's a little different.

Never connected with people through social media like I have on Google+. I was never really interested in social media prior to Google+. I was like, I don't know, I don't care to tell everyone what I'm eating for lunch or whatever on Twitter. I mean, that's fun and all, it just wasn't terribly interesting to me. But Google+ has allowed a kind of dialogue and a real framework for relationship building that attracted me initially, and it's been great.

Yeah, I think that in itself has been a bridge over a lot of gaps. So, you know, you want to talk about bridging the gap?

Yeah, absolutely.

All right, so let's go to our last member of the panel, and Bradford, uh, let's talk a little about you and some of the things you do. You really intrigue me sometimes, nutrition and fitness, and throwing people at me to look at, and I'm like, wow, you never cease to amaze me.

I've never met a project I didn't want to do.

Even if you're all the Swiss Army knife of law, you're becoming that. It must be a North Carolina thing or South Carolina.

I don't know. I think it's a glutton for punishment thing is what I really think it is. Let me say right before we get started, Jim Shankle is one of the kindest and most innovative men you'll ever meet. His project and vision for not-for-profits is legendary. I've gotten to know Jim this year really well, and I'm telling you, he really has put his whole heart into this thing. So I was so glad we could feature him. And I'm so happy to meet Jason, and I'm so happy to meet Joanne. I— definitely, Joanne, we've got to talk again. I used to have a Hangout series called Healthcare Hangouts on Air.. I would love to revise that and talk more about what you do. Uh, which is— maybe get some other pediatricians on with it. And then, uh, John is one of those guys that I've had in my Google+ expert circle since the first day I came on. Um, and I don't think I've ever talked to him, just always knew he was in my stream. And it goes back to relationships, sometimes not one-on-one, but secondary, because I knew him through Mark Trabhagen. Those guys, and when they give their stamp of approval, you add them. You know what I mean? I'm really happy to meet John. Bridging the gap is a great phrase, one that is close to my heart because it connects with what we do at Doctors Health. Our tagline is Bridging the Gap Between Medicine and Nutrition. Doctors Health was founded in 2010 through Dennis Littley, a good friend of mine who's an orthopedic surgeon, who was looking at something his patients could do outside of prescription medicine to prepare for surgery. What we found is that there was such a gap between medicine and nutrition that the two hated each other. That really happened in the 1980s when nutrition came into prominence, and medicine looked at it and said, "You guys are making too many outlandish claims. We don't want anything to do with with you guys, supplements, basically. The supplement side looked at medicine and said, you guys are a bunch of bureaucrats, you're capitalist pigs, you know, and all that, and so we don't want anything to do with you. And so they really split. And so the purpose of Doctors Health was to bridge the gap between the two, and we did that by looking at the basic nutritional needs of patients. The first major product that we had is called Rapid Recovery, and it was a blend of the vitamins and minerals the body uses specifically to regrow soft tissue. And we would begin patients on it 2 weeks pre-op, and then they would stay on it 2 weeks post-op. And the idea was to close the surgical wound faster and reduce the chance of infection because, um, secondary surgery rates are so high with hospitals due to infections that people get while in the hospital. It had tremendous success rate. It had even greater success rate beyond surgery with diabetics because it did so well with diabetic foot ulcers, diabetic wounds, and things like that. Anyone with immune deficiency disorders. It did great in the fitness world. We had a lot of triathletes beginning to use it because it was a great muscle recovery product because it dealt with those microtears so well. From there, Doctors Health kind of expanded with other physicians into bone health. We're looking into heart health, just so many different areas. We work directly with medical doctors, once again bridging that gap between the two. How that got me into Google+, at the end of 2012 I met a guy named Joe Napoletani who introduced me at a lunch with Mark Trabhagen. Because we were wanting to introduce or get our website rolling and get more visibility. And through that we learned about Google+. So we came onto Google+ really as the platform for the company and as the face of the company. We did some great things, grew really quickly. When community started, we jumped right in and organized some communities. You may know us from Fitness and Nutrition Community.. That's been a really popular one. We're growing right now at about 1,000 people a month. We just crossed the 21,000 member mark. In 2013, we used that community in partnership with Mark Traphagen as a case study for search. One day I just Googled fitness and nutrition and like on the 4th page, boom, there was my community. I'm like, whoa. So I called Mark, I'm like, Mark, I just found my community on search.— and I'm non-SEO, so I get excited about the simplest things. So we started a strategy to see if we could influence, and it was a strategy of articles. I got my moderators involved talking about fitness and nutrition, engaging more, and we ultimately got the community as well as several categories within the community to rank on page 1 in a search for fitness and nutrition. Awesome. It didn't really do any— yeah, it was. It didn't really make us any money, but it showed us we now knew the steps to take to do it again, which was really important. And so, and that really benefited the community because Mark graciously put that as a part of his SlideShare presentations that he did. We were at some of those events that he goes to, that kind of thing, so that was great. Then we started the Healthcare Q&A Community, which we were desiring to bring a community together where people who had medical questions could find authorities to answer those questions, whether they be RNs, physical therapists, physicians. The community hasn't really played out like we had hoped our vision was, but it has still been successful. We're maybe 12,000+ members. We did get on the suggested community list for a little while that helped us. I've got a great person, Joanne Thomas, you guys might know her. She's amazing. She's one of my all-time favorites here on Google+ and she's a moderator there as well as a couple other RNs. From there, Chef, let's see, I met Larry Fournillier and started adding food people to my stream. I was non-SEO and my stream was packed full of SEO. So every day my stream was like this, over my head, you know, and I'm too old to figure it out. That's why I trust people to do it for me and then just tell me what to do. When I met Larry, I was open to this culinary world on Google+ that was amazing. I mean, some of the coolest people in Google+ and some of the greatest photographers on Google+, some of the most interesting people on Google+ were right there in food. With him, I began to add more and more people. That's how I met you, Chef, was through Larry and some others. From that, I just added more and more people and then ultimately met a guy named Henry Deschamps, who is the CEO for the Mast Farm Inn out in the mountains here of North Carolina. He had created this amazing network of North Carolinians on Google+. One of those pages and communities is North Carolina Chefs and Restaurants. So he kindly allowed me to team up with him to try to present a program where we can encourage North Carolina chefs and restaurants to add Google+ to their social media outreach. And you and I, Chef, have worked on a video which we got to keep working on whenever we have time to try to start this, this ground roots program to introduce Google+ to more restaurants and more chefs for them to add it on and show them the great benefit this has over other social platforms. Let's see, what else? Oh, from there— from there—

Before we go on any further, speaking of which, we have a question here from Kim Boltman that ties into that, and it's, "Have you been able to influence North Carolina chefs and restaurants to revise their menus or to be more healthy?" I guess she's asking with some of the things you're doing.

No, we are not there yet. We're probably a long way from there. We right now have a lot of great restaurants that we represent through the community and through the page and some great chefs that still haven't come over and created a page on Google+. So we are in the very beginning stages of this project.

What do you think is stopping them from coming over? I'm curious to know.

Chef Dennis Littley can answer this more than I can, but what we found is there's the hesitancy hesitation on the part of the chefs when it comes to the time management for it and they just don't understand it. One of the projects I have with Chef Dennis is to kind of break it down to the top 3 reasons why you need to have Google+ and break it down very simply. But Chef Dennis, I mean, you can extend that answer. You had some great ideas of incorporating the staff into Google+. I don't think they see the benefits of it yet.

Now, you know, it's still a way off, but I think anybody that does jump on the bandwagon with it and start using it for their brick-and-mortar place is going to start seeing some amazing results. And I know as a chef, the last thing I would want to do is, is, is try and take time to do some kind of social media in the middle of my rush. Well, you don't have to do it then. You can take 3 minutes before, sit in your office, record a quick live video and just push it out, tell people what your specials are for the night, you know, or what you're doing. Absolutely. Yeah, let your servers talk about their desserts, you know, their natural hams. Let them eat a piece of it and swoon. Or let your sommelier talk about wine, or your bartender mix a drink. I mean, there's a lot, a lot you can do, keeping them to 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 1-2 minutes, you know, real quick things that would I think it would entice people to come in if they had a video library.

Yeah, and you know who's really doing it right? If you want to know somebody who's really doing it really well is Chef Dedisi with Parkview Patio out of DC. This guy begins early in the week testing dishes for his specials on Thursday night, Friday night, and the weekend, and he'll post pictures of what he's working on on Wednesday or through the week or some period of the week to let people know with the address of Parkview on there that this is what I'm working on this week, these amazing pictures with what the ingredients are, and it's fantastic. And you know what? He didn't pay for it. He didn't pay anybody to advertise it. It was free. And, you know, Chef D, you and I have talked about this time and time again, these free resources that Google has done for these small businesses could be an amazing step for them locally. Yeah, that Google+ local page is—

if you're a small business locally and you have no exposure to Google search whatsoever, if you create a Google+ business page for your local business, it will show up in search. I mean, on page 1 if people search for that type of restaurant or whatever. People are doing that more and more with mobile. If you just have that Google+ business page presence, you'll be found. I think that's a very quick, easy thing to say to someone who's maybe a business owner or says, "I need to see some money or some traffic in my door to spend any time with this." There you go. That's an easy one. Exactly.

Exactly. The big thing is they're not coughing up big bucks to do it either. It's just a little time to fill out that Google Local page.

And there's nobody tighter with money than a restaurant owner.

Yeah, I know one, you're right.

There's nobody tighter. So that's been a great project that we've started and, you know, getting them to improve their menus. Improving your menu would come, I would think, with the popularity of the menu because then you would have more people demanding that a menu be changed.. And so that probably is a component to come a little down the road, but definitely more options there. And just recently Google came out with— what is it— Google Menus, where menus can actually be found in search. Yep, you're right. And so that's just another part of the tool that they could use. Before we move on, Chef, one thing that I would love to add is the latest project we're working on. Is called Who's Who in Food on Google+. It's a page I got— I was so excited with meeting all these great people in the culinary Google+ world, and so many of them were sharing each other's food and recipes. I started Who's Who in Food on Google+ as a Rolodex of all of these people. Alright, we don't use the page to share recipes, we don't use the page to talk about culinary articles, anything. All it is is highlighting profiles. So if you go to the page, all you're going to see is that profile, a snippet of their profile information, their introduction, and that's it. But you can go to that page and you can scroll down and you can find the best of the best who represent food on Google+. The plan is, and I've already done it one, is to then create a circle share that is culinary specific. And we don't add people unless they are in the industry in some form or fashion, either blogger, chef, cook, entrepreneur, business. And the circle only features people— so when you, when you get that circle, you'll know this is only a food circle. Right? The next step, in the next few weeks I'll be rolling out a new Flipboard magazine to feature the recipes of the people who are with us. I love Flipboard. I've got a magazine for our communities. I've got a food magazine already. I've got Gusto and Sweet that I've been running for a while now. I love the Flipboard aspect of it. So if anybody wants to spice up their stream with some great foodies, Join Who's Who in Google Plus, and I only— I started what, 2 weeks ago, Chef D? 2 weeks ago? We're like 300 members, but— and they're from everybody, from Larry to Chef D to Giselle Achakkar, Jackie, my most favorite Malaysian princess, all the way down to people who only have 50 followers, but you look at their website. They're amazing people with amazing websites and amazing food. We want them to get more followers. We're all about promoting Google+ for these new people. That's my spiel, Jeff. Thanks. I'm done.

Thank you. I want to do a couple of quick shoutouts here too. Mia Voss was in the house and she's on her way back to see Mickey and she just wanted to say hello. And in case you don't know, I'm Luis, she's Thelma, and we are Thelma and Luis. So Larry Fournier is in the house. Thanks for stopping by, Larry. He's loving the show. And we've got Coach Moore. Coach Moore, you got a picture! I'm so excited. I'm excited to see you finally. I've been asking you about that. I'm glad you could put a picture up. So we've got a couple great people in the house. Kim Boltman's here, and Kathleen DeCosmo, my friend, is here, and she had a question for Joanne.

What is your most special sign moment? Oh gosh, there's so many.

There's so many from class, and then of course each of my children. It's just embedded in my memory each time they signed for the first time. They did all sign milk as their first sign, which is like the easiest thing for babies to do. And when I think of it, like, I feel like, oh my gosh, I'm right there. I can remember it so vividly because it's the big aha moment for both mom and baby.

Yeah, that would be a good one.

What's the G+ sign? Yeah, this is the letter G.

That's the letter G, and this is the letter Plus. Sign plus.

Well, I know the Facebook sign.

Ah, good one, good one.

Yeah, my signing is limited to New Jersey stuff.

I don't think we can show them on here.

Is that a different show, Chef?

You know, I actually was thinking about that this morning with Google+ and, you know, just being that my mom's deaf, it kind of makes me think, I think they're the reason why we have FaceTime now, because deaf people wanted to be able to communicate face-to-face on the phone, and really it started with them, so they didn't have to go through a relay operator. Well, one downside to like the Google+ Hangouts, in all honesty, is it's a verbal communication thing. If it's a panel where there's people who don't sign, so they would really be able to speak with each other. Unless Google+ gets closed captioning, that would be really awesome for their HOAs.

That's a great idea. Yeah, so I don't know who you ping for that. I don't know, I'll try to bring it up somewhere. That would be wonderful. I guess we could get people to sign for us like they have on Saturday Night Live too.

Oh yeah, like an interpreter. I always enjoyed those.

Probably not the best kind of signing though, so we won't go there. But great, we have Kathleen says thank you for sharing that aha moment. She's in here. And Coach Moore also had a question about what was the news about Google. Coach, the news was that Vic Gundotra has left us and we have a new president, David— I'm trying to remember his last name. We have a new head of Google+ and there's going to be a little bit of shake-up and changing. When they started it, I don't think they ever expected it to be a social media like it is. It was an experiment in a way for them to improve search., and this byproduct of it has got people that love it, love it, and people that hate it are wrong. But I mean, sorry, I shouldn't have said that. But people, you know, that just don't understand it or don't see the value of it or are like celebrating in the streets today because they think it's the death of— we've become part of the Walking Dead sequel. So, you know, that isn't going to happen though, I don't think. I hope not.

I wonder how many of those are funded by Zuckerberg. They get a check in the mail?

You know, I honestly don't think he could care less. He's got so much money, and at his age, he's just living la vida loca, you know. I don't think we bother him one little bit, as we shouldn't. So anybody else have anything interesting they'd like to talk about? We have a few minutes left before we come to the end of the show? Any projects somebody's working on?

Oh, I'm excited about something. I have my very first webinar happening this week. Ooh! So— Tell us more. That's awesome, Joy. Yeah, I'm excited. I had put it off for a really long time because technology, to be very honest, really scares me and I get very anxious about it. But Eileen— oh, and I'm forgetting her last name— Maybe one of you guys know Eileen, and she's a big Mia Voss fan. So Eileen, if you're out there, shout out to you. But she got me to sign up for LeadPages, and that helped me figure out how to connect the dots and make this webinar happen. So Google+ is responsible for me bridging the gap to move forward on my project.

There you go.

Yeah, I know we've all met a lot of different people through here that have helped us move in different directions. So, you know, I think that's the big key to it. And it's like anything else, we network, we learn from others, and that helps us move in the directions we may not have known we were moving in or wanted to move in, you know, until we met those certain people. So it's a great way to spend some time and improve your business practices. So, glad of that.

And it helps that so many great influencers are so open to talk to and to communicate with you, you know, and that's just a big plus. It's rare to have anybody say no. You know, I can leave Ronnie Benson a message and it may be a while because he's so busy, but he's always there. I mean, David Amerland, as busy as he is, he's never said no to an opportunity to ask a question or to answer a need. I mean, there's some great people on here who are so open to help. Absolutely.

And if you haven't picked up David Amerland's new book, please do. I'm just about through it and if you have anybody interested in using Hangouts for business, it's a great way to approach them with it and with this book. He's in Sunnyvale, California. I was talking to him this morning briefly. He's having a good time there, I hope, but business as usual for him. Let's go through the panel one last time and we'll see anything else you'd like to tell us about or what you're doing and then we will call call it a day for Good Day Google+. Joanne, we're going to come right back to you. Now you have your webinar and when is that?

It's happening Tuesday night, 7 PM Pacific Standard Time.

Do you have all the information on Google for it?

Yes, I posted a link this morning so it's on my profile.

Okay, great. If you want to drop a link in the comments, please do. I will. We're very happy you could come by today. It was really nice talking to you. We're going to have to chat soon.

More. Thanks, Chef Dennis. My pleasure.

Okay, and Jason, thank you so much for being on today and sharing some of your time with us and your story with us. Any last thing you'd like to leave us with?

Yeah, sure. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Chef. It's been dynamite listening to everybody. And my call to action, I guess, would be I have a book out, Evernote Success: Strategies and Tactics for a Successful Evernote Environment. If you're interested in Evernote, learning how to get started, figuring out a better strategy to manage your Evernote, it'd be a great book.

Pick it up. I have it thanks to you, and as soon as I finish David's book, I'm anxious to get started on that because my Evernote skills are— I shouldn't say I have— there are none. So I'm very anxious to start getting into that book because everyone loves Evernote and I don't have a clue. I'm anxious to hear what you think. I'm anxious to get started. John, it's so good to see you today, and hopefully we'll get to hang out some more. Hope your business from home is working well, and if anybody needs you for something, what kind of services are you providing now? Well, thanks for asking.

I've got my G+ Geek, it's kind of my video blog where we do Hangouts and help with little 3 or 4 minute snippets on how people can better use Google+. Just generally, like we've said, it's difficult sometimes to kind of learn this new platform. There's a lot to it, but we hope to provide help for people that need little snippets for how to use Google+ better. My primary source of income, I guess you could say, is building websites. If anyone out there needs a website built, contact me. I really enjoy building them and helping people learn how to use them. I found that if you just build someone a website and kind of leave, they don't, you know, it's not helpful. But sticking around, you know, if someone doesn't know a lot about the internet and how to use websites and things like that, I can certainly do that for you. And then Node-X, if you all, anyone on Google+ really wants to learn how to either break into a niche or become more influential within your niche, that tool is really an incredible way to do that. And so it again takes a little bit of a learning curve But we're offering what we're calling the NodeX Discovery Tours, and they are a real way to find, you know, start a NodeX project and then have Lee Smallwood and myself walk you through that project and see the kind of information you can get out of it. And it is truly incredible what you can do with that tool. So that's nod3x.com if anyone's interested. Thanks a lot for having me on again.

Oh, my pleasure. Thank you. Bradford, anything you'd like to leave us with? Any new projects or things you're thinking about?

Well, hey, thanks, Jeff. This has been great. This is one of my favorite shows, one of the HOAs I'd rush back to the office to watch every week, so it's definitely a pleasure to be here and meet everybody. I guess the most current project working on, I've just teamed up with my partner Joe Napoletani and his company Plethora LLC with Cindy Malkany, and I'm mispronouncing her last name. I know I'm mispronouncing it, so I'm letting her know I know I'm mispronouncing it. But she has created a fantastic website called craftbeveragejobs.com. It's a jobs board website specific to get people in the craft beverage industry jobs, and it's an amazing website and it's brand new. We've just teamed up with her to start promoting that website, so I would encourage people to go take a look at that, craftbeveragejobs.com. We do have a craftbeveragejobs.com page on Google Plus, and if you know anybody in that industry, which is about to explode nationwide, we think this is a great opportunity for us to connect people with jobs, which is really important in our day and time.

Sounds good. Yeah, I'm even starting to see craft sodas now. I know craft beer has been around for a long time.

We cover beer, soda, coffees, the whole aspect of the industry.

Yeah, I know craft coffee. I buy my coffee specifically in one small town in Florida where they roast it, you know, daily. And, you know, it gets a little expensive, but it's the best damn coffee I've had, so I keep going back. Alright, well, thank you all for being here and for putting up with my singing this morning. And thanks to PlusMyReach for being my sponsor, and I will drop the coupon in for anyone who would like to use it. If you're doing Hangouts, it's a great tool to see how you're engaging. It'll be free for a month if you want to give it a try. Thanks for stopping by today. It's always a great day on Google+ when I get to spend it with my friends.

See you. Awesome. That was great singing, Chef.

Thank you. Sing us out, Chef.

Go ahead. Boom, micka, Google+ Club, Google+.