Good Day Google+ (Episode 9)

We're posting to public. We're live. Hey there, I'm Chef Dennis and today it's Good Day Google+ and today is kind of a special day for us here. It wasn't planned that way, just how it turned out, but we're having a social media palooza with my guests today. I'm going to take a minute and introduce my guests. We have Christine DeGraaff.

Hello, good morning.

And we have Neil Fari. Is that correct, Neil? Okay, and we have Rebecca Raddus.

Good morning, or afternoon, I guess, in your case.

Afternoon in my case, yeah. Uh-huh.

Alrighty, sorry about that. Hope everybody else can hear that. I had a little overlay from the thing running.

Yeah, good afternoon.

Here it is, right, afternoon. Alright, so today We're going to have a little talk about social media, Google+, and life in general. Anything else that interests us or that you guys want to talk about is fine with me. If you haven't seen the show, just sit back, relax, grab something to drink or something to eat. If you have questions, put them in the comment bar and we will get to them, or if you have any comments, put them in there and we'll get to them as soon as we can. So we're going to start, and I'm just going to go from my one side and start with Christine. Christine, tell us a little bit about yourself, what you do, what you do on Google+, or anything you'd like to let us know.

Sure, my name is Christine DeGraaff. For about the past 15 years I've been a web developer. Recently kind of left my own business and put it aside because I really wanted to focus on social media. I spent so many years focusing on building up clients that I had let my own presence and brand slide. When I discovered Google+, I loved it. Well, actually not the first time I came here, but when I came back. And I just have really, really dove into it and wanted to learn everything that I could. I think that it's so neat how it provides so many opportunities to meet people, to be on Hangouts like this, to be on a Hangout with Rebecca, to be on a Hangout with— this is my second one with Neal, I think, and my second one with you. Chef, and I just think it's such a great opportunity. I recently, actually yesterday, announced a partnership with Circlescope. It's a tool to manage your circles on Google+. I'm very excited about that. We're redeveloping right now and going to relaunch in January. So more to come on that.

Sounds good. I do love Circlescope, so I'm anxious to see what you can do with it. We can get it to be a little bit more aligned, user-friendly.

User-friendly, yes.

User-friendly is what I want to say because I have had a few issues with it, but I still do love it. Alright, Neil, all yours.

Hey everybody, my name is Neil Faree. My main site is Fareemoney.com, and I bill myself as a social, local, and video SEO consultant. That's where I drive my revenue. 100% of my clients are mostly doctors, dentists, and lawyers, all small businesses. In the old days, back in what, 2007, '08, where I learned my craft, I came from the make money online world. So I started as an affiliate marketer, thousands of hours on the Warrior Forum. Some of you probably have experienced that. These days though, my clients call on me to help them They only get to become clients if they're on WordPress because that is my platform, that's my only skill set. I don't work with Joomla or HTML5 yet. But my clients look to me to help them with their social and their local and their video SEO challenges because they're all— it's all-encompassing.

What do you do with video? Talk to me a little bit more about your video SEO.

You know, it took me— it seemed like forever to get 500 subscribers to my video channel, and I just passed, I think it was 60,000 views. Video optimization, you know, it's a— the H1 is key, uploading the closed caption is critical, being able to geotag the content with your longitude, latitude so that it pulls in your local listing. Because like I say, all of my clients, they're brick and mortar guys. The vast majority are professionals. Doctors, dentists, lawyers. I got a couple fence contractors, that kind of thing. But when the video's cut, it's the optimization, kind of like just WordPress on-page stuff. It's the same thing, only different, skewed for YouTube. The new integration between Google+ and YouTube hasn't posed any serious challenges yet, and it's really the commenting system that integrates the two. So I'm watching that.

Are those more professionally recorded videos then?

It's all over the map. Most of, like, most of the lawyers, they have a professional come in, shoot the video. We're targeting an H1, a keyword phrase that really matches up to the blog post article that this formula that we've had pretty good success with is you embed the video into the blog post article. I'm a big fan of SlideShare to bring that content in. So now you've got multiple high-profile web 2.0 properties feeding onto that single entity, and it's amazing the search results, how fast that will get ranked.

That's good to know. Yeah, I'm still such a novice on YouTube and on videos.

Well, you know, Eric Enga, I saw a report from him a couple of weeks ago. It was amazing. 40% of all the videos were viewed on a mobile device this year.

Wow.

40%. Yeah, the game is definitely changing. It's going to be interesting to see where it's going.

Yeah, the footprint seems to be the Mini. Not so much the Droid or the iPhone 5, but the iPad Mini. So it's critical, that's why WordPress is so important to me. I use a responsive theme that runs on Genesis.

Right, that's what I do.

Just so that, you know, because I don't have a .mobile version of, and most businesses, I don't know about you guys, but most businesses, they don't want to foot the bill to have two different instances of their site, the mobile version and the regular version.

I had actually thought of doing that, and I talked to someone, I was all set to do it, and I talked to someone and they said really that they thought the wave of the future was going away from that, from the mobile versions.

The dot-mobi? Yeah.

And that I'd be better off just with responsive, so save me some money.

Well, you can get there faster, but I would imagine that HTML5 is going to have a significant role in that. We'll see.

More to learn. Rebecca, so thank you so much for coming on today. Such a joy to see you here.

Oh no, thank you. I'm just thrilled to be here with all of you. A little bit about me, Rebecca Radice, and nobody, Chef, pronounces my name correctly, so I'll just put that out there. I get Radice, Radish, you name it. But I just recently left the corporate world Started my own company. It's a digital marketing company and my goal really is to assist business professionals that have an established offline reputation and teaching them how they can transition that into a social media, a valuable online presence. So it's a lot of what I do on Google+. I talk a lot about social media, but pretty much anything that has to do with building your personal brand online. So anything from blogging, which I'm an active blogger as well, and definitely believe in everything Neal was just talking about and how powerful a tool it is for businesses today to really get found online and set the tone for who they are, what their business is all about. So like I said, a lot of what I do in my day-to-day is exactly what I share online. It's all those things that I'm talking about to other people that they find very interesting, and I find interesting as well. It's definitely, I think, a huge challenge that probably all of us are seeing still today, that businesses are so struggling to figure out how to use video like Neal was talking about or use WordPress or blogging or social media especially and definitely Google+. So I am out there singing the praises of Google+ on a daily basis and trying to help others understand why they need to be here every single day.

I think that's the big thing and that is what I run into the most is people not understanding how important it is to be on Google+. I mean, you talked about branding and I want to touch on that again in a minute, but brands, I talk about this all the time, they just don't seem to see the importance of Google+. At least in the food world, on our side of it, most of them are hung up on Twitter still and they use that and they think that is the end-all. Trying to drag them onto Google+ has been really tough. Have you run into anything the same, Rebecca?

Oh, absolutely. For me, I really see it more as a Facebook. Issue. They finally kind of figured out Facebook. They're getting traction on Facebook and that is their main source of interaction. Getting them to make the move over to Google+ is almost next to impossible. I try to explain to them that if Facebook is your sole main form of communication, you're building your house on sand. That rug can be pulled out from under you so quickly. And so helping them understand that there's so much more out there and available and that, you know, as we all know, not everybody is spending their time on Facebook or on Twitter. You really do have to diversify and make sure that you're getting your message out through multiple channels. So yeah, I see the same exact thing. It's almost like kicking and screaming, trying to drag them over.

Yeah, I did that with my food bloggers and still a lot of them don't understand or see the value. They just have found a home on Facebook and are just really hesitant to make the move. Christine or Neal, do you find the same thing? Have you noticed anything with that?

Absolutely. I mean, I do think for the very small business— I mean, I live in a town of 4,000 people. We have some tiny, tiny little businesses like a little deli that has a probably a 2-mile reach. I think for people like that, obviously having the local page on Google is important because people could be searching by mobile, but I think a lot of their actual customers are probably on Facebook and not really on Twitter, not really on Google+. So I don't know that they have the time or the need to really put a big focus on it. But I mean, I think that anyone outside of that, you know, that's not that limited and that small, really needs to focus on Google+. But on the other hand, I mean, like you said, I do think that they need to be building other ways to reach their customers because at any time, like Rebecca said, the rug's pulled out, they don't have a mailing list, you know, they need to make sure that they have that information and aren't just relying on Facebook to reach people. How about you, Neil?

You know what, my strategy, it's not— it's totally transparent. I do it by showing them the results that I get on my own footprint. Because I kind of tell them that, you know, you're going to— you have to talk to 3 or 4 SEO guys before you pick one. And if they can't do it on their own footprint, then how are they going to do it for you? The trick is though, in my view, you have to be on Facebook still. You can't kick Facebook to the curb just yet. I mean, I don't use it for my own personal revenue. I use it to stalk my 3 daughters mostly. Because maybe you guys are familiar with Friends and Me. Are you familiar with that API tool?

Absolutely.

So I use, I publish to Plus and then I syndicate with Friends and Me to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. The same thing. Sometimes I'll put the non-share hashtag in there. But the challenge and the value of what Google+ has now, if you get someone to circle you on Plus, from that moment on your content gets preferential treatment forever and ever, amen. Because 99% of the public, they don't know to hit the globe to hide personal results. So the personalization is just immensely useful. So yeah, the takeaway for me to the guys that I work with— and Kristi, remember when we did the cult, or you did the cult session, you know, Mike Eline and his guys Circle of Legal Trust. Yeah, Circle of Legal Trust, COLT. Very tech-savvy law guys. Their challenge is it's a bunch of lawyers talking to lawyers. They need to be talking to us because you never know when you're going to get in a car wreck or, you know, get bitten by a dog or whatever the case may be. So the issue is what the small business and big brands alike You get someone to circle you on Plus, your content is going to show up higher in the search results unless they hit the globe and hide personal results. So like I was doing with you, Dennis, when we talked, you know, to do kind of like the intro deal, you type in Social Link Wheel, if I'm in your circle, I'm automatically at the top. The same thing for Content Marketing System, the same thing for Get Ranked On Page. Just a whole host of targeted long tails that I need to get found for. And if you've been following Amberland, David, you read Semantic Search, the content, your body of work, when it's resonating from multiple Web 2.0 properties, all showing back to your site, your authorship, all that body of work is going to give you the power that you just couldn't do, you know, what, a year, maybe 2 years ago.

I know one thing I found really interesting was, you know, I'm new to this area down in Orlando, and I'm looking for businesses, and when I search for businesses, half the time the first thing that comes up is their Google+ page, is their Their local listing. Their local listing. Yeah, their local listing.

Local listing is so important, I mean it really is because so many people are searching, you know, for— on their mobile device, especially for, you know, if you're in a town, if you're not familiar with a town and you want something to eat, I mean the local listing is probably what you're going to choose. You're going to pick one of those ones at the top. So yeah, that is definitely critical.

And you know what, it's the same thing. If you think about, you know, besides your flagship site, whether it's WordPress or whatever it may be, your second most valuable digital asset is your local listing. And you know, like we all know, for that listing to have the oomph that it needs, you need to have citations on Yelp and Merchant Circle and Yellow Pages and all those industry Yellow Pages. It's the same thing in social. If your profile— see, now we've got authorship. So now when you look at your About tab and you've got your authorship code pointing to your SlideShare, your YouTube, your Twitter, your Facebook. Matter of fact, if you were to do a search, a hashtag search on Google+, #Tier123— I did this yesterday just in case this would be appropriate. That's my social footprint. Now it's extremely robust, but I tell you, it took a while for this to percolate, but are you guys familiar with the About.me social platform?

Yes.

I'm not kidding you, probably 3 to 5 every day I get this because I've got the settings comes in. People will add me to their Facebook or add me to Twitter. And that's the kind of follower you want. I don't do that, you know, tweet at her and all those other, you know, tricks to get people to follow you just because they can. I want people to follow me because they read that About profile and say, wow, this guy seems to have something together. So they're going to start tracking.

Well, and I just couldn't agree with that more, Neal. I think that leads back to the idea that Less is more these days. It's better to have, at least in my opinion, a smaller following or a smaller community that is completely loyal to your business or brand than building the big numbers that I think many years ago we all thought we had to have.

Yeah, I made that mistake like probably a lot of people did. I In the old days, a couple, 3 years ago, I did the tweet adder and did all that nonsense, and it just cluttered. Now I would much rather have 2,000 strong relationship potentials than 20,000 whodunits with, you know, the anonymous looking deal. It's just—

absolutely.

How are you getting people to look at your About Me?

You know, I don't know what— I don't know how that— I just looked because knowing that I was going to have this session, I kind of just drilled under the hood and looked at the analytics for— because I've been there a while, probably 10 months— 2 months ago in the 10 previous months, the analytics bar was like, you know, 5 and 10 views a day. Yesterday there were 390 views. I don't know how— I think it's both a lot of it is because of the maturity of the property itself, not my profile, but just the About Me profile. But yeah, it's, it's just, it's amazing to me. And it's the same thing like on Zurplee. These other— these are, these aren't— these are kind of like build it, do it right, optimize it well, have it sync up and look like your other web tool properties, and then it's, it's— you can leave it alone unless you change your value prop or your tagline or whatnot. I don't know about why About.me does that, but I'm not complaining.

Well, and I would imagine you have it on your Google+ profile when you're talking about optimization.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Rebecca, I wanted to ask you about— you use Pinterest with Google+ a lot.

I do.

I try to make it a habit but I always forget. I need to focus on that. Do you find that drives a lot of traffic?

Yeah, it has made an unbelievable difference in the amount of traffic I'm seeing, mainly to my website obviously but to Pinterest itself. The amount of pins that I'm seeing, the amount of repins or shares, even tweets. It's a powerful tool. What I have found is obviously we're just such a visual society and those images that I'm making for Google+ play just as well on Pinterest. It's not as if I'm having to do a lot of additional work. But yeah, it's so amazing that I— speaking of analytics. I was looking at my analytics yesterday. While Google+ had moved to number 1 in referrers for me, Pinterest overtook it this last week.

Wow.

So yeah, it really— that to me speaks volumes into what kind of traffic you can truly see if you commit to using it. I know so many people are still trying to wrap their head around Pinterest and what the value is. To me, if you're blogger, you're out there actively creating content, unique quality content on a consistent basis, you have to be utilizing Pinterest. It's a no-brainer at this point.

How about—

go ahead. I'm one of the ones that kind of completely abandoned Facebook. I jumped ship to the point of it was either/or, Google+ or Facebook. Or Facebook, not both. Do you think it's important to still keep your feet in there pretty strong?

Well, you know, I do, and I think we talked about that, and maybe I'm not sure if it was you or Neal that said it, that there's still a lot of value over on Facebook. And for me, it's a totally different space. It's a lot of friends that I have been friends with since childhood or high school, whenever. So it's a very different group of people than more industry-specific that I've connected with on Google+. I'm sharing very different content for that reason. So yeah, to me I think it's really important because right now the majority of my friends, my family, they're all still on Facebook. They have not made the move over to Google+. So it would be hard to keep up with them in the way that I do on Facebook. And for businesses, I still think, you know, I call Facebook the entertainment capital of social media. People still go there to be entertained. So for businesses, it's still important to be there to make sure that you're providing valuable content, but that you're also interacting on that level that, hey, we can have fun too type of level for a business. That really allows, in my opinion, consumers to get a completely different look at who you are as a business professional, as somebody that owns a business, that maybe a lot of times we're doing over on Google+. I feel that there's definitely a different way we're positioning our content on Google+ than on Facebook. So yeah, all of that to say, I think there's a lot of value maintaining a presence across whatever social network your clients, your consumer is actually on. And I think that's the problem too, is people try to spread themselves out all over the place instead of just identifying where's my time best spent. So there's that piece too.

You know, a technique you guys might want to try when you're in the qualification process with a new client is have them type in their full name and then their brand name and what shows up on page 1 and the pecking order. Because I'm amazed, I mean, I like LinkedIn, but I'm really not that— I mean, I'm way more active on Google+ than I am LinkedIn, and YouTube's my deal, and then Free Money's my, you know, that's my my flagship, but LinkedIn is my number one. And according to Google anyway, when I type in Neil Farhi, LinkedIn shows up number one and then my Google+ profile. And I want, you know, Plus to be above. But that will give you kind of an indicator of that company and that personal brand, what Google, how Google is looking at them. Very few times, and if their Facebook profile is ranked there Like we know already, it's too soon to kick Facebook to the curb just yet, in my opinion anyway.

You should not leave any social media that you have a following on. That's something you might not spend as much time on it, but if you invested time up to that point and you have any kind of decent following, you need to stay there and work with the people that you have there too.

If nothing else, bring them to Plus from that.

Absolutely. Neal, we've had a lot of questions here, so I'm just gonna pin this real quick because Kim was the first one. She wants to know a little bit more about.me, and a few others have said, is it about.me.com? They're not familiar with it and something they want to know a little bit more.

Actually, I believe it's about.me, isn't it?

It is.

Let me just hit it real quick. Mine is about.me forward slash— I hit this one and then it's Local SEO Pro. So it's about.me.com.

About.me. Okay, sounds good.

Now, and the trick there is just edit your settings, you know, you do the profile settings deal so that— because I configure everything gets dumped into filter, color-coded filter folders in Gmail and I have all of that dumped in organized by social alerts for my monitoring and listening stuff. And then if I get someone that— because what's cool about About.me is if they like your page, you get a notification. If they like your profile, you get a notification. If they follow you on Twitter via About.me, you get a notification. And it's just like on Plus when someone plus ones you or leaves a comment, you're crazy not to acknowledge that social interactivity. It's not professional courtesy, it's just good business. So it's kind of a pain in the you know what because you have to do a lot of individual guerrilla stuff, but I'm amazed at the connections that I've made from that.

Absolutely.

And its twin is called Xerplee. I've got a profile on Xerpley. It doesn't get— or ZeeMe is another one of these. It's like a digital resume kind of thing, but you build it, construct it. You don't do a copy— I don't do a copy-paste kind of thing. I kind of tweak it because how it lays it out. I hate when one word is on the last third line, so I'll wordsmith it so it's laid out well, you know, balance-wise. But yeah, it's— well, what's the elects on this sucker?

$14.50.

It's a good one.

Sounds good. All right, here's another question regarding local listings. What if your business has to go with a PO Box?

That's not going to help you very much.

No, no, no, that's— I'm even worse. Because I work out of my condo, I had to hide my address in my Google+ listing. It took me 6 months to get my local listing to show up and to even get verified, and then to get my vanity URL. Finally, Google cut me some slack. Yeah, PO Box is kind of a death wish for your G+ local listing.

Absolutely. It's also so important, I didn't realize this either at first, but to make sure that you're very, very consistent with your address, the way that you display it everywhere, so that Google can recognize, you know, if you're typing it, if you're spelling it out differently in different places, it cannot pick up that.

Even like tweet versus texting.

Yeah, it's very important to be very consistent with your name, with your address, you know, so that Google knows where you are and who you are. When I had my web design business, I kept changing my mind about did I want to call it Web Sketching, or did I want to call it Web Sketching Web Design, or did I want to call it Web Sketching LLC? And I changed my mind quite a bit, and I had it like different everywhere, and I actually wasn't understanding why I wasn't showing up in and I had my address, you know, sometimes had it as A-V-E and sometimes as Avenue, and, you know, I just kept changing my mind too much, and it was a mess, and to try to straighten it out. So it's very important to be consistent.

Yeah, and, you know, to take— to peel the layer off the onion one layer deep, I would recommend you go get the actual longitude, latitude for that geo and then be proliferous across the board. Every image that I upload to Flickr, which is my image marketing platform, I drop in the longitude, latitude, and it's amazing the difference that it makes. And image marketing has become much more proliferous shortly, maybe not, you know, this year, but next year, like in your new article today, Rebecca, for 2014 strategy, you know, it's, it's, it's key. I love it when I see my images show up on page 1. I just love it to pieces.

How can the longitude and latitude help you?

Because it's geocoding, and Google knows that everything I do it on the images that I post to Plus. I hit Photo, whatever it is. You hit the Photo Properties, and I just type in 1827, and it drops in my longitude and latitude. I've coded it, and I let the browser— you know where it asks you, Google wants to track your location. You know, I don't care about the NSA, they're going to find whatever they want anyway. Yeah, track me down to longitude and latitude.

Well, and now as of this week, you can pin that to Pinterest.

Yes, yes.

So very exciting.

I played with it, but I didn't spend enough time just yet. But you'll see, you'll see on YouTube when you optimize that submission You have to go into the advanced settings and then you can drop in your longitude and latitude. I mean, you just have— it's the same thing like on an image on a blog post. If you put, you know, 12345 image.jpg, there's no value in that. There's, you know, the bots just don't recognize it. You get no on-page SEO value versus if you name it and the keyword that's in your H1 If it's there, it's not like you're gaming the system, but it just tells the bots this is what this submission is all about. And geo is so key. I mean, maybe not for the big brands if you got a national footprint, but for us little guys, absolutely.

Would you think geo is important then on images in your blog?

No, no, no, I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to geotag an image on a blog.

Rebecca, did you— you said absolutely, or—

What's that?

Did you— I mean, did you comment on that? I thought I heard an absolutely. I wasn't sure.

No, not on the geotagging itself. I was commenting on what Neil was saying just prior to that.

Okay. Yeah, I'm still trying to learn more about this. I have, you know, I'm like a novice. I blog I blogged, I don't know, for the right reasons, and then I just started to enjoy it so much. But I try to learn every day because there's so much out there that I miss. We had a couple nice comments here, and I just want to throw one up. Let me find it here.

Stephen—

Stéphane— Stéphane was making an observation, and he said, regarding PO boxes, sometimes you can use your post office's actual physical address or consider using a UPS store or some type of virtual office space you can get cheap. That's a good idea.

Good idea.

Great idea.

I learned so much from him, it's amazing. From Stefan?

Yes, he is a wealth of knowledge.

Absolutely. Here we go, here's another one. Yeah, the name, address, phone number, that's what it is.

Yeah, talking about the NAP. First I thought it was the other one that you were mentioning.

Yep, very consistent, definitely important. I know I'm still not doing that, I'll be honest, even now with me. I mean, sometimes I put Woodstown because I'm not trying to reach a local audience right now, but sometimes I put Woodstown, but sometimes I'll put Greater Philadelphia area. To me that sounds better. Nobody knows where Woodstown is.

I know. I know only because I've—

I think that one is probably like the only one.

There actually was an ice cream place there. I don't know if it's still there.

Richmond's. Yes, no, it is not. No.

Oh, I used to love that. But here's a good comment here. And let me put this up. And English is saying, I had the hardest time with deciding to go with my real name for my vanity URL on G+ because I am Ingleshta everywhere else except for LinkedIn. Still not sure how I feel about associating G+ with my name because of security issues. Would anyone like to tackle that and why it's important to use your real name?

Well, from, from a branding perspective, it's incredibly important to have that consistency. So whether you're branding your business or branding your name, you need to choose it. You need to decide which direction you're going, and then everything needs to have that same name as well as that consistent look and feel. You want to make sure that, A, as people are Googling, as they are researching, that it's really super easy for them to find you and to know exactly how and where you are. There's nothing worse than making people hunt and peck to find you and to track you down. And I think that's a big mistake I see people make, is they Kind of like you were talking about, Christine, with, well, am I this or am I that as far as your business name, people do that online and will start maybe moving towards their name or maybe moving towards their business name and you need to pick it. I'm sure Neal will really hammer that home from an SEO perspective that just in getting found, how important that is. But to me, from just a branding level, It's so important to be consistent.

Now branding, are you focusing more on branding, continuing your brand as your name or your business name?

My name. I guess I was smarter than I gave myself credit for when I first started many years ago and I have just branded my name all the way through so I'm definitely not going to change that. I think that would be a big mistake in deviating from that at this point. I've worked so hard on it that it's what people know, and why push people away from that?

And that's something that's a little more challenging for women because I'm getting married in May, for example.

Pusher.

And I currently am known as my ex-husband's last name. Ah, you know, and if it was my maiden name, that'd be one thing, but I kind of feel like I want to change it to my next husband— last husband.

Next husband, I like that.

Next husband.

No, that's an excellent point too. That can really be a struggle. So yeah, you do have to think of it from that perspective too. If something were to unfortunately happen, how would you continue on and would you be comfortable with that?

Right, so I'm actually still not exactly sure what I'm going to do. I think you would—

It's funny, I'm sorry to interrupt you, it's funny that you mentioned that because I was teasing my husband the other day. We had the same exact conversation and I said, you know, if you ever get a wild hair and decide to leave me, I'm keeping your name. Right, it's how I branded myself. It is what it is at this point. But yeah, for you, that's— it's really tough.

Of course, I don't have now, you know, and I actually have a secondary profile that has my married name, and I missed out on getting the vanity URL for it. So, because somebody else— it's a very common name, that's one thing too, you know.

Yeah, well, and that's another great point. How hard is it going to be to compete with your name. For me, my name is spelled so differently that it wasn't too hard, but for some people, like you're talking about, you have a common last name or common first name and last name, and it can really be a struggle.

Sure, yep. Yeah, right now, I mean, this name isn't too common, I don't think, but it's going to be Taylor, and you know, that's Oh yeah.

Well, maybe it's just Christine DeGraff stays your stage name.

Right, right. So yeah, men don't have these kind of problems, I don't think. This is an extra layer of challenge. You know, I think my daughter is 18 and I've been pushing her and got her on Google+ because, you know, I think it's important. You never know. It's never going to hurt. To have a following, to have that knowledge of social media. And, you know, so it's in her maiden name. So if she ever gets married, I don't— I feel like people would be more comfortable continuing with their maiden name, but continuing with your ex-husband's name is kind of a different, different thing, you know.

Well, and think about it too, you know, you bring up another great point, which is we have a whole generation that is growing up on social media, so their social footprint is their maiden name.

Absolutely.

Like your daughter. Of course, some of them may want to lose that social footprint, depending on what they've shared. Yes, run as far away from that as possible.

Yes.

You always have the option to lose it if you want to for that reason.

Well, and you know, the business application of it If you look at how, or at least how I do it, when you're trying to decide, you got a shortlist, you start with 5, you get down to 2, just like we use in the local listings. How many 5-star reviews does that property have? And if they've got a bunch of them, then, you know, good for that one. It's the same kind of thing. They'll type in your name and they'll see how does that— how does Google render your your brand, your personal brand, versus the other guy who's competing for that same piece of business. So I, you know, I try and eat my own dog food, and if I don't look good, then you just gotta fill that bucket so that it has the right stuff. Kinda like in the, you know, when you try to get those reviews that are much better now on a local listing. It used to take months for that to show up, but with Authorship now I got a review last week that showed up in like 48 hours, and that didn't happen 6 months ago.

Somebody quote him on that, "I eat my own dog food." I like that. Yeah, I love that.

That's a good one. Now, do you think that leaving reviews for local listings or places you've been will help your profile if you leave quality reviews about items? Is that something else that would be good for you?

I do it just because if it's a really good service, like when I went to the Tesla store right around the corner, these guys were so slick, so cool, I left them a review. I was going to ask you guys, do you open up on your personal page, not your business page on Plus, do you activate your plus ones and your reviews tabs or do you hide those?

I have my +1s open. I'm not sure about reviews, but I think all mine are open.

I think the +1 is such a great technique. Not very many people do it, but to me what it shows is that's how you get to know somebody. That's what they're +1ing out on the, on the real web, and that's how you can find that commonality. I've made more connections because I spend, you know, 10-12 minutes to see, you know, what excites this person, where are they spending their time, not on Plus, out on the internet. It's a great point. And people know, you know, they can tell that you did that when you ask, when you bring something that they've done into the conversation. It's just, it's A fact.

I like that as a tool. A lot of people were complaining when Google started showing things that I +1 in other people's streams. I like seeing what my people in my circles +1. I seem to see more now than I ever did because they started doing that. I felt like I was missing so many things before. Some are repeats, granted, but still I like that feature.

Well, and the guys that plus one only their footprint, I take that into account as well.

I don't ever plus one my own stuff.

I'm not sloppy like that.

It's like bad karma plus oneing yourself.

I don't do that.

Here's a question that I see, she labeled it as a question. How important is identifying your specific location? I notice on your profile, she noted Orlando area, Chef Dennis Littley. What are the benefits to listing where you're at? She lives in in a small town. Any benefits to that, does anyone think?

For a local listing or—

for her personal listing. Like I have, I used to have Philadelphia area, now I have Orlando area.

I don't know about the personal. On the local listing, unequivocally yes, but personal—

yeah, local listing, I mean, you need your address so that you're going to be found when someone's, you know, searching your area for, you know, so if you're a brick-and-mortar, brick-and-mortar definitely needs a street address, you know. I actually spoke with Stefan Hovnanian about, you know, should I put Woodstown on my hovercard or, you know, does it look better to put Greater Philadelphia area, we kind of went back and forth on that. I think he chose on his to put his greater area and that's what I chose as well. I just feel like, you know, we're trying to reach a much more global area now and there's more likelihood that someone's going to understand where I'm at seeing Greater Philadelphia than they're going to, you know, seeing Woodstown, New Jersey. On the other hand, you know, I don't know that I want to put Philadelphia because it's not true, you know, I'm not in Philadelphia, I'm 20 minutes 25 minutes away and I'm in New Jersey. So I use the greater Philadelphia area.

Stephon actually picked that up with me when we were doing hovercard things. Yes, he saw I had Philadelphia area so that was pretty cool. You could always put Cowtown too and I don't know how many people would know that.

Yeah, I'm only 1 mile from there. Cowtown is the oldest running weekly rodeo in the United States. And they also have a flea market and they've had some celebrities go there because it's that famous. It's really, really neat to go to a real rodeo. So I've been there a couple of times.

And Christine, we did have a comment here I want to put up for you from Craig and he says, why don't you just rebrand yourself as Christine Rocks?

Well, you want to know what's funny is when I couldn't I couldn't get Christine Taylor on my other profile, it made me add something. I put Christine Taylor rocks.

Excellent. I know, I think it was, I'm trying to think, I put I love Google after their name. I had them on the show, I can't remember now who it was.

Yeah, because there's so many people that had to add something to their name and they were very upset about it and I tried to change I changed my name a little couple times to— don't do that. You'll really mess yourself up. Google might at one point not let you change. But I thought, well, okay, so I'll just put Christine Tay, and then that way when they make me add something, I can add the L-O-R, but it doesn't work that way. But yeah, so I suggest if anybody has to add something, pick a word like, you know, like rocks or, you know, something, an action word, a verb, whatever it is. Loves Google+, you know, whatever.

Here's another. Craig's on fire today. I have to put this up. When I think about you, I plus myself.

Oh my God! I love that guy.

He's just having too much fun.

The thing that this comes up, I have a page called My Music Hangout, and it made me add something to the end. I was very upset, so I put My Music Hangout rocks. Rocks, and Craig's actually going to be helping me get that going. Another— I want to do one quick shout out to Shannon Hernandez, 98KUPD in Phoenix, Arizona. He's a DJ that I have coming on, we're interviewing him on Sunday. So trying to get something going.

Craig is a good guy.

Yes, he is, he definitely is.

Yeah, great guy.

So that's going to be very exciting. But that's what the whole Rocks is, because I couldn't think of what to put, so now I just put Rocks for everything. If I have to add something, it's going to be Rocks.

There you go, it's consistent.

Let's hope you don't get a call from Chris. Now what show are you having him on Sunday?

My Music Hangout, and we're going to just talk about music and talk about future plans for My Music Hangout. You know, it kind of just started, I was sharing music on my personal profile, but I really like heavy metal, I like sharing it quite a bit, and every time I'd start going on a tangent of sharing, I'd start losing 100 followers. I said, okay, well, this really doesn't have a lot to do with— you know, it's just a part of me, but it's, it's, you know, and Steven again, you know, he's the one who told me about curating, you know, pages, content pages. And I'm like, well, I share so much music, I'll start a page for it. Next thing you know, it became like we had a community going with it, and now it's got 20,000 or so followers. And so now I want to do something with it.

It's taken on a life of its own.

Yeah, it's just growing, and, you know, I'm like, wow, I don't know how that happened, but okay, I'll go with it.

I love music.

They do.

Yeah, it's a great connector.

Yep.

And now when you start seeing me sharing music some nights, it means I've had a beer and I'm feeling happy. That's the lightweight that I am, and I'll start sharing some pretty strange stuff from Queensryche to George Strait, so you never know what's going to go up.

And yeah, it comes to, you know, like as I said, when I start sharing the music, I usually listen for about 2 hours at a time. I was sharing every song, so that's 4 to 6 minutes. That's a lot, you know, that's a lot of sharing. And on Google+, I mean, sharing is good, but oversharing can be not so good, you know.

There is a fine line.

That's a really good point. What's the audience's take on content curation versus creation?

And sharing it or just the difference between the two?

Well, not the difference and sharing it, curating the content. Like Scoop.it is my content curation engine versus Flipboard and I mean, there's dozens out there, but as far as curating content, you know, I use Feedly so that I can see what's trending, what's getting the most traction, you know, and this is at 6 o'clock in the morning where I build it and then I drop it into Hootsuite. But in terms of content curation and syndication, what's your appetite opinion for that?

My opinion on it is as long as it's clear, like I've seen people that share things without giving any attribution and at first I think that they created it and then when I dig a little deeper I realize they shared it without giving credit. I think that there's no, you know, it's great if you're great at curating content as long as you know you're giving credit where credit is due.

Well, and it's not only a big no-no like you're saying but it's a huge missed opportunity. Because the whole idea behind it is to create that relationship, to reach out to somebody and say, "Hey, I read your article, it was fantastic," and then sharing it with all of your followers and putting context around that. So helping people understand why you're sharing it, why you think it's so great. I think it's incredibly important. We're all content creators. But I think it's equally, if not more important, to share other people's content and to do it in a strategic way. Obviously you want to share content that is relevant to your followers, to your fan base. You want to make sure that you're staying on target with the message that you're trying to put out there. But what an enormous opportunity to be able to connect with influencers, you know, within your industry, within your niche, in a way that we never could have done without social media. So I think for people that think it's all about them and it's all about their content, they're really missing the boat.

Have you guys seen Mark Traphagen's Flipboard?

Yes, definitely.

That's what I mean by that. I need to buy my— I need to get Santa to bring me a mini for Christmas so I can use it.

I love Flipboard.

Yeah, great, good.

Well, you're a Feedly user, so yeah, you'll love it. Very, very similar.

I like how you described that, Rebecca. That was really a good way to put it. You're missing an opportunity. Because too many people just either share their own things or they don't credit who they got it from, even if it's just a hat tip, you know, to let them know where the stuff is coming from. They really are missing an opportunity at engaging and meeting new people and broadening their scope, their amount of followers they have by doing that.

Yeah, that's a great point. And to Christine's point on not giving proper attribution or credit,. And you said you'll read something and then all of a sudden realize, well, this isn't their stuff. So you're losing all of that trust that you're trying to build up as well because you're certainly not presenting yourself in that authentic light when people all of a sudden realize, well, yeah, they're sharing a lot of great stuff, but they're pretending that it's theirs. Instead of, like you said, even just a hat tip or saying, hey, somebody else originally shared this, found it, whatever.

I think some of them are doing it so that people will think it's them. I think most of them, it's probably just they just don't even realize that they're pretending. They take a credibility hit in my eyes.. I think a lot of it comes from actually sharing from— it's sharing from— what are those content curators? I can't think of one off the top of my head. The one that you mentioned, Neal.

Scoop.it. I love Scoop.it.

Scoop.it. Like they'll share from Scoop.it onto Google+ and then somehow it loses the who it was from and there's just, you know, so it looks It's like they're sharing something of their own at that point.

That's why the insight is so critical, is that you frame it. I try and find a decent call to action. Sometimes it's really hard, but if you just say why this is good, then that's the impetus for them to click through.

Right.

Rather than just dropping a link and running off. Which I see a lot of too, and there's just zero value in that, in my opinion as well.

It's like just today, Wade Harmon, he's one of the sharpest guys out there.

Yes.

He does variation of theme, but what he did today that was so cool was— and he takes the time, that's what stands him out as unique in that— is he's a master curator. You know what you find— what I find myself doing is go for it, Wade. You do the heavy lifting and I get all the value.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

He gets value too though.

He does, of course he does. I mean, he's really— he has a knack for it. And so automatically he gets— everything he posts I read, or I get the notification anyway. He's in that my notification circle. Stefan turned me on to a while back. There's those guys that they just, you know, the cream always rises.

Yeah, the people that you always want to read their content. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, what some people tend to forget is good content is good content. It doesn't necessarily mean it's your content. So sharing, you know, as long as it's in your niche or what you're used to sharing, is find some good content to share. I think Wade or someone had put down that it was 80/20 was a lot. Someone just mentioned the ratio. I know I probably only share about 3 of my own things a week if it's that much. Good advice. We're coming close to the end of our show. It's been a really fun show today and a lot of nice comments back and forth. See if there are any last comments, but not really. Does anyone have anything else they'd like to share with us before we go off? Christine?

Yeah, how do we get you on the Ellen Show?

You want to get me on the Ellen Show?

We need to make everybody— everybody, call to action here. Go to Twitter, tweet to Ellen that she needs to have Chef Dennis Littley on her show.

That would make my life complete. I'm working on the healthy glow being down in Florida, so I'll look good when I go on.

So I think I need to think about—

we all—

we should all think about what show would make our life complete.

I want to be on Jimmy Kimmel.

I think I'd like to be on Ridiculousness. I love that show.

I have not seen that. What is it?

Well, it's kind of silly. Okay. Or maybe I should be on Jersey Shore, I guess. Someone said to me one day, they're like, oh, you're from Jersey, do you know Snooki? I'm like, no. Jersey is a big state, you know. I don't know everybody here.

You haven't been there long enough, that's what it is. That and what exit are you at, that's the other question.

2, yeah, I think.

Well, thank you all for being here. If anyone else has anything else they'd like to add? If not, everyone, thanks so much for being here for Good Day Google+. We had a great time today. Christine, thanks for taking time out to be with us. It was a pleasure seeing you again.

Thank you, thank you so much. It was so nice to meet Rebecca. Thank you Thank you for facilitating that, and good to be on a show with Neil again.

Neil, thanks so much for taking time. I know you're kind of particular about whose show you go on, and I really appreciate your presence here.

My pleasure, man. I enjoyed it. Learned some stuff too, which is always good.

Always a good thing. Rebecca, it was very nice meeting you in person here finally on the show. I've been a fan of yours for a while, so thank you so much for coming on.

Oh, likewise. Thank you, and so much fun. You know, you talk to people every single day online, so fun to finally get face-to-face with all three of you.

Very good.

Definitely.

Well, guys, thanks for coming by. It's been Good Day Google+, and we hope to see you again soon. Have a great day.

Bye.