Good Day Google+ (Episode 5 part 1)

Hi everyone, I'm Chef Dennis and today we're here with Good Day Google+ and I have a great show for you today. I've got 4 guests on today, it's a power show for us and I'm going to start and introduce everyone. We have Denise Wakeman, Jenny Kelly, Martin Shervington, and Mia Voss was kind enough to jump on after her show so thanks for stopping by Mia too.

Thank you for having me.

The whole basis of the show is everyone's going to talk a little about themselves and we're just going to have a good time asking questions. So if you have questions for any of our guests as they're talking, just put them in the comment bar underneath us and we will watch and answer your questions as soon as we can. So let's just go, I don't know if we're left to right here or what, but let's start with Denise. Denise, take it away.

Hi there, hi, I'm Denise Wakeman and what do I do on Google+? I follow people like Martin so that I can learn what to do. I've been working online since 1996. I've been around for a while, so I tend to be an early adopter on sites like Google+. I love hanging out with my pals. One of the people I met early on in Google+ was Stepan Hovnanian, who I think you all know. I saw him on a Hangout with Chris Lang. I was so impressed with him, I immediately reached out and said, "I have to know you." We've become really good friends and colleagues. Through Stepan, I've met a lot of other people. I just think that this is one of the most terrific platforms. I work with people, work with entrepreneurs and solo business people to help them boost their visibility and use social tools on the web. I've been doing that for a long time. By having the opportunity to experiment and learn and connect with all the smart people over here on Google+, that's giving me a lot of— motivation to get the rest of my community off of or away from Facebook and places like that and get them over here. I just completed teaching 2 webinars this week on an introduction to Google+ and then an introduction to how to set up your first Hangout. Everybody was just so excited. I had about 80 people learning and now they're excited to get started. I'm excited to introduce them to you as well.

Thank you so much for that, and I hope to have some new friends here on Google+. It's always nice to connect with each other and get each other's friends. All right, Jenny.

Hi, I'm Jenny Kelly, and I started off by being a food blogger on iloveflavor.com, where I dress up in costume and make flavorful video recipes, which is so much fun. And I continue to do that. And that actually got me to land my job now as a social media strategist for fairmarketing.com, which is amazing because a couple years ago I worked in the oil and gas business as an internal auditor. No one dreams of being an internal auditor when you're 5, but I landed it because I was a finance major, and I decided to become a YouTube star and went viral. And one of those— one of the parts of being on YouTube is Google+ was one of the other products of Google, so I definitely jumped on it. I loved it from the start. It's my favorite social network. I'm very passionate about it. I've met so many new people. You can do Hangouts. I met Dennis a long time ago, chefhangout.com, which was amazing. You got to use this new Hangout functionality that's better than anything that I have ever seen.

So it's—

I absolutely am a big advocate of Google+. Post my food things, my silly costume things, I'm able to check in, I'm able to do reviews online and share my videos. And also it's a— Google+ for me, especially my personal account, is a great playground for me to test out new things, see what's working, see what people actually like to see so I can actually help my businesses that I do social media for. So it's a great tool and I just like to really connect with people because people love to be on that one-on-one. It's not— I don't know, it's just different. It's homey. So I love it. It's great.

Great, thanks Jenny. And Martin.

Hi Dennis, how are you? Well, Chef Dennis. I always call you Chef Dennis.

Dennis is fine.

I like the formality of Chef Dennis. I'm Martin Shervington. I run 2 communities on Google+. Unless you're in the UK community, in which case I run that one as well, but it seems to run itself. We're very polite. We talk about the weather a lot and post pictures. Very easy, that one. And Plus Your Life, I post on inspiration and TED Talks and RSA Animate talks and things like that and get people talking around personal development. And there's a website which is plusyourlife.com as well, which is bringing all of that content into one place for people to find. And as well as that, I run Plus Your Business, and that's another community for people looking at using Google+ for Business, and that has a resource center at the website. And I also have martinshevington.com, which is probably what most people know me for doing, is having a lot of content on how to use Google+, the psychology of Google+. And I too, same as Jenny, I use YouTube as well alongside, and the two together are fantastic. I don't know if everybody needs to hear— if you don't know me, then you probably go, that was a very I wasn't that enthusiastic, but I wax lyrical of why I love Google+ so much in pretty much every interview. But it's been about 20 months for me, and it's been an amazing journey. And I learn every day, and I appreciate Denise Littley, what you're saying. But I kind of just do what I do, and I just love the fact that people seem to relate to it and enjoy it. So thanks to everybody for engaging.

I have to unmute myself, sorry.

Thank you, Martha.

We've got all kinds of things going on today. There's movers, there's cement people, there's picking up cars. It's just crazy here. Mia, and she's part of our Must See HOA TV for Fridays now. We're creating quite a lineup here. Hopefully we'll get Google to start scheduling something. I was just reading something about with the HD quality that it's showing on a big screen much better now. So maybe we can start replacing some of this daytime stuff that they have on.

Although HD scares me a little bit. I kind of want to pull back from it, you know what I mean? Not in HD. Hey, so thanks for putting me after Martin. Goodness, I have to follow up on— that's a tough act to follow. So hey guys, I'm Mia Voss. I'm out of Denver, Colorado, and as Chef said, I have another show called the Social Media Power Chat that I just finished up. And I think you're coming on in a couple weeks, is that right? After you move?

That's correct, yeah.

I'll be down in Florida. Get you on Florida time.

Oh yeah, it's the same as the norm here.

Yeah, that's true, it is East Coast time, but probably not soon enough with the winter. So I started the Social Media Power Chat about 3 months ago. I was bored in a networking meeting and was just thinking up stuff, you know how you start brainstorming, and I thought, God, I want to do a show where I just get a bunch of people on and We just kind of bounce back and forth, very similar to your format here, and talk about all things social media online. But I will tell you to get on the Google+ Kool-Aid, as I say. I have drank gallons and gallons and quarts of Google+ Kool-Aid, and I love it. It is my world. I love it now. It's the first place I check in the morning. It used to be Facebook, and it's really changed up my life quite a bit just from the engaging. The transparency is awesome. You really can see what people are about. The engagement is off the charts. That's my story, I'm sticking to it.

Well, it's good to hear other people say the same thing that I've been saying. We're all kind of preaching the gospel of Google here, as I like to say.

We do. One of the things that I do is social media strategies as well. I work with serial entrepreneurs, and I was just telling a group of realtors yesterday, like, you guys got to get yourself over to Google+ because it's not as loud there. If you've got a niche or something you really want to promote, that's the place to be. Hopefully they're going to listen because I was really preaching it.

I'm telling you, I know we just keep telling them and sooner or later everybody's going to be over here and they'll be leaving those very quiet communities over on Facebook. Twitter just doesn't seem to be the same anymore either. We just need to get the more major brands over here and companies over here because they seem to like those other places better. I think we're all working on educating brands on what to do. Martin, that's one of your big specialties too, isn't it?

I was going to say, but the great thing is, somebody said to me in the summer, "We want the brands, we should go out and get the brands." I'm like, "Don't hurry, this is fine, you know, let's get everything established, let's get ourselves all settled." And I imagine it like the town square, and if you have your stall and you're all set up, then when people arrive you're ready to go. And I think that's the opportunity that we have by learning the tools and by displaying what we're interested in and building the relationships, and then having a good network and reciprocation flowing, information between— all of this that we'd be doing on Google+ ends up being that we know what's going on. We understand it. So when people do turn up, essentially they've got to start. They've got to start that journey. But the journey we've been on for a while. And I think that those of us that are working with companies— I'm working with a couple of big brands at the moment. And they don't see it necessarily because they're seeing the same filters as they did for they did for Facebook and they did for Twitter, and there are differences, and they don't see the opportunity. And it takes time to really almost like uncouple the thinking from that old way, or different way, not old way, it's a different way, because I think that all of it can run very well in parallel. But using Google+ for engagement and building a community with a little c or a big C around what they do is what we can help with, because often they won't see that there's a real community with real people connecting on here. And that's what, if you're consulting or you're coaching, you can help people to get very quickly. Because if you don't have the models and you don't understand why certain things work, why people respond in this way, and how you can make your own content be socially viable— that's a weird phrase, I was about to say— but you know, work socially as well as then leading to people going to the websites, leading to search results potentially as well, and that whole dance. If we can help people show that because we've been doing it, then we're in a really good position.

Absolutely. Anybody else like to chime in on that?

I just like how Martin says don't. It's your accent, honey. You know I'm going to give you a little shout out.

I know, you can't help it.

I know, it's fabulous. I love it. Sorry, Jenny, I just jumped in.

Oh no, you're fine. With my company, with fairmarketing.com, like the way that we initially usually get people to do Google+ because I'm a very big advocate, I love Google+. I see, I like it, I really start off by saying it's a lot like Facebook, you can get into it if you need a comparison because it's hard to change for a lot of companies or even get into social media. But also, I mean, Google+ is a Google product, it's an SEO goldmine. Whenever you're logged into Google, which most people have Gmail anyway, and it forces you to do that Google+, it's going to force your post about something that you're passionate about or the keywords that you're using, the questions you're using, that Google actually ranks you. That's a huge factor for your brand and your website. So we actually, that's our major push and that's kind of how we get those sparks to get those major brands. Whether or not they're on social media or not, it's one way to push them above the rest and not only share their passion, which is why they started usually their business in the first place, but get even more customers, more friends, more followers, and more business contacts, which can turn into real-life friends and connections. So that's kind of our gateway and what I usually use. But change is hard, it's difficult, but once they actually— you hold their hand and show it's really not that scary and actually show them. Usually I'm on a chalkboard writing big bubbles and circles. Which I'm very visual obviously because I started on YouTube. But once, you know, they, once, just like, you know, you try things a couple of times and once you do it yourself, you're much more willing to do that. But that search Google pushing to the top, that's just incredible to see your name above in the organic listing. So that's my number one seller usually.

It is, and I'll jump in there real quick, Martin. I agree about building the audience and the engagement. And for me personally, for my business, I actually almost focus more on Mia Voss and not the Mia Connect because it's just been so organic and easy for me to do and kind of have my message come in there. But Jenny, I agree with you too. It's such a no-brainer for people and there is some resistance for sure with clients, but when you tell it to them that way, like you were just saying as well, it's just a little bit of a learning curve and we all don't have a lot of bandwidth for new things. But once I got over it, same thing, I came back in last June and was like, what's going on here? And left. It was a ghost town, although I didn't know about all you cool cats. I came back in January and I'm like, "Oh, this is awesome." I had to just get over it. It's such a no-brainer.

I work primarily not with big companies but with people who are solo entrepreneurs or authors. They've got their own little business. I pretty much use the same gateway because people know about search engines.