Good Day Google+ - Getting down to Business!

Hey everyone, welcome to Good Day Google+. As I love saying, it's always a good day when I get to spend time with my friends on Google+. Today I've got a great lineup for you. I'm going to introduce them real quick and we're going to come back and talk to them a little more. As always, if you have questions for any of them, leave them in the comment bar underneath the show and we will get to them as soon as we can. Let me just start over on my far end, on my screen anyway, and that is Lori. Hi Lori, she's from the Interior Design Community. Great to have you with us today.

Yeah, super happy to be here, always love it.

And you're up in New Hampshire, so things warming up there finally?

Yes, finally getting warm, finally getting flowers on trees. The kids actually went in the pool this weekend. It was freezing, but they did it.

Very good. Yeah, we've been in the pool all winter now. Just walking out there, it's just getting too hot now.

I feel sorry for you. No, I don't.

And then next to Lori, I have Megan, and Megan is from Yummology. And are you in Canada?

I'm in Kansas.

Kansas?

Oh, you're—

Close to Canada.

Close enough.

No, I'm a food blogger out here in Wichita, Kansas, and learning more and more about Google+ every day. Just happy to be here with you guys.

Is this your first live HOA?

This is my second live HOA.

Okay, I was going to borrow a term from my sister Thelma from the Mia Voss Show, which is we were going to pop your cherry for the show, but evidently that's not possible for this show.

Sadly, it's been popped.

So we'll move on. And Ryan, I know yours is back. I've seen you, you're becoming a regular HOA, HOA as we like to call them. HOA. Next to Megan, I have Ryan. And Ryan, it's great to have you here today. And you are in what part of the pleasantly heated world?

I am in sunny Silicon Valley.

Ah, yeah. So you know good weather all the time.

That is correct.

Glad to have you with us today. And you're a designer. In fact, you work on logos for me. And we have to finish working on those so I can get them up, I'm happy to say.. We're going to talk to you a little bit more about what you do. Then we have my friend, Chef Tom Pastor. Tom, you're in California, right?

I'm from California. I am in Bend, Oregon now. Been here for about 4 years.

I was all confused today. You're in—

I'm in California today.

How's Oregon?

It's beautiful up here. We never have clouds in the sky, only rains at night.

Really?

It's awesome. I live in the desert, so it's a— we're not famous for our desert area, but that's where I live, and it's just gorgeous over here.

Sounds good. I have to get over to the West Coast sometime. I've been out there a few times, but very— just one, like San Francisco, and from the airport to where I was and back to the airport again, so I never really got to see much of anything while I was there. So looking forward to doing a little more traveling, coming out to Oregon and Washington State. Sounds good. Alright, so today on Good Day Google+, we're just going to talk about what we do on and off the Plus, anything we have going, any projects we're working on, or any other shows we have going on. So it's your format today, we'll talk about anything you want to talk to, and if our viewers have questions, like I said, just leave them in the comment bar and we'll be happy to go over and answer them. So I'm going to turn it back to Lori for a minute and we're going to talk to you about what you're doing. In your interior design community or anything else you'd like to chat about?

Yeah, our community, we have— we started the interior design community the day the community started, and we've grown to, I think, over 18,000 members, and the community stream moves really fast, and we get out of the spam as quickly as possible. We have 11 moderators who are all real experts in their industry, in the industry, and quite prominent, visible in trade events like Kitchen and Bath Industry Show and, you know, the High Point, some of the big shows in the interior design world. And, you know, it's just grown like crazy. We have a lot of interest from brands. We do get sponsors for our show, plus we also, we also get called to do Hangouts live from events quite often, live from trade shows because A lot of the brands and a lot of the trade shows themselves too, they love the idea of streaming. Everybody loves the idea of it. We actually just had a huge comment stream about it on Facebook where people were talking about Hangouts. And some people have been reluctant to come over to Google+ because they love Facebook. And we try to keep telling them and promoting to them how different it is and what live streaming can do and all the great things that have happened here on Google+ because of live streaming. I have conversations, I have a business partner outside of interior design community, Michael Mason with PlusMyReach, and we have a tool that measures your Hangout engagement, and he's in the Canary Islands and I'm in New Hampshire and we talk every day, and that would never happen without a tool like this. We chat and there's a big record, you know, our chat history and Hangout history goes back months at this point. And you just couldn't get that kind of global interaction. And so it's exciting. We love it.

Yep.

Now tell us a little about Plus Your Reach. I know you've been involved with that. We've been talking about that for a while.

Yeah. It kind of came naturally. I have been working off of our blog before, and I did Twitter chats. Quite a few Twitter chats. And there are a couple of hosts of Twitter chats that had hash tracking data and tweet reach data. And I've forever wanted the same kind of data for our Hangout on Air. Who was engaging in our event? Who's engaging in our event that has a lot of followers? Who's engaging with our event regularly? How big is the reach? I mean, it is a social network, so how many people possibly could have viewed the brand? And I think that really helps you if you're going down the route of trying to monetize. And the neat thing that we have as an advantage as Google+ hosts or Google+ even YouTube channel holders is that, you know, you get those people who watch it live. They're awesome and you definitely want as many engagers as you can get. And they get a lot of benefit from being able to ask questions live. But there's a whole group of people who watch the video after. So to be able to know all of this data from cross-platform, you know, Google+ and YouTube, and who your engagers are, where they are, and what matters to them helps you actually grow your audience better. And the more I wanted it and asked everyone for it, I could never find the right product. Then I met Michael, and he's a programmer, and he just took the challenge and ran with it. And it's been 3 months, and he's He's making the site fantastic. We have so many different Hangout users and brands that are using it already. It's got some really great growth potential. It's exciting.

Yeah, I'm really happy to see something like that. This is still all new to me, but everyone always talked about tweet chats and the power of tweet chats, and I never really understood it. I just had to think that Google+ was still so much better and had so much more to offer because of Powert State Evergreen. So the fact that you, you know, thought about this enough to get this for us, I mean, it's just amazing. And Michael is just— he's something else. You know, you don't challenge him anything, he's going to build you one. You don't tell him something can't be done because he's going to build it.

It totally came out selfishly. I really wanted it for myself, you know, and then, you know, it made sense that a lot of other people would too. So I mean, it's only natural that we're putting a lot of time and effort into these hangouts. We want to make them good, you know, and We want to make sure that the people who want to be, you know, notified get notified, and the people who don't want to be notified aren't notified. And we grow our base, and, you know, we want to be able to report that data back as our audience grows. So I think it's, it's a win-win for the audience and for the host and everyone to have that information.

So, Lori, can I ask a question?

Yeah, absolutely.

When you package up —like your live streaming and your YouTube content and everything for sponsors—what are sponsors more interested in at the moment? Are they interested in the sort of live component, or are they more interested in having the library in Google+? Or both?

I think they're equally interested. And I think that they are a little nervous about it being live. And if it's a big brand and you have that in your media kit that you can— we did a whole— we actually did a whole series, and we're still working on it. We've done, I think, 3 or 4 video series about the steps you need to take to get monetized. And I'm sure you've had the same— it's very similar to a blog monetization or Twitter chat or any other endeavor where you have an audience and a brand wants that audience to remember that they are that brand. I mean, you don't have to necessarily have the brand all around you and you're talking about the brand 24/7. And you don't have to change your content. Just because you're a brand. It's like you wouldn't want to write a blog post about how awesome, you know, Dole pineapples are if you don't like pineapples. You know what I mean? You want to talk about the things you're normally talking about, but, you know, if a brand can reach your audience and you have a big audience, you know, then it makes sense that they'd want their product to be featured or to be a sponsor of that event. Getting back to your question, I'd say definitely equal, but you present it different ways. Once they get to know you, I'm sure they get to know you with your blog, they know they can trust you. They know that you're not going to go on to a live broadcast and say a swear word or do something that would hurt their brand. Not intentionally anyway. Yeah. Stuff like that. They're picky about who they work with, but once they work with people They like to work with— it's like the same thing with blogging. They like to work with someone they can trust. But they love the fact that once you talk to them and you explain all of the benefits about Google+, because when you invite people, they get an email. That's so different than a Twitter chat. You can't email anyone on Twitter. You can with Google+ Hangouts. When they are watching the event, they can participate live, and you can pull the comments onto the screen. When afterwards, it just grows and grows. So they love the evergreen quality. And that it essentially is two platform at once. I mean, they're immediately reaching Google+ and YouTube instantly. So it's good for them. And video content, as we know, just it has great search results. Yeah.

So are you embedding on your site as well what you're doing on YouTube? Is that on your site too, or are you just keeping it on your YouTube channel?

I do embed, but you have to also know that your embedded views don't always get counted for your Google+ channel. So I do try to push people to the YouTube channel. So it's tricky. You'll notice that you'll have an embedded post and then you know you've gotten a ton of hits because you've gotten great traffic there, but for some reason your YouTube hits don't go up. So we, we let— we do point people to the blog a lot, but I really prefer going over to YouTube so it counts, you know.

Got it. So if it is embedded in your blog, then it's not necessarily getting the hit on YouTube, is that what you're saying? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, everyone seems to be having the same problem with embedded posts. It just don't— your data doesn't go up fast enough. And people are saying that YouTube does cache it and then eventually they add it later, but I haven't seen that happen.

Well, that's good to know because I've just started doing that as well. I never had before, but with the show I'm doing with Susan, I've been doing a post on them and adding it in there.

So yeah, I mean, it makes a great blog post, right? And you have this great video and then you can just like really recap it quick, you know, easy. You know, I am—

I don't know if I'm allowed to say or not, but we are testing one other aspect of it that you asked me, that Michael asked me to do, and that's tying in really, really well because I always do a post the next day. Yeah, follow up with it. And yeah, to be able to show a brand what else that does on top of it would be excellent.

Yeah, and we know that. I mean, we're measuring the engagement on the event page, but you know, you share the event, your friends share the event, and then you have all of these different— we know how many shares there are, and we can tell you who is sharing it, but we can't tell you like how many comments came in through the shares also and create that, you know, pull that data also, because they're not maybe registered with our service. So being able to put it into a post also, put your posts in there where you could literally go through and measure the engagement of a post also would give you a much bigger view. Plus over time, you have your posts, you have your Hangout. You want to know— I know the same things that I do, which are like, who are my engagers? Like, who are the people who are constantly plus wanting my stuff and commenting on my stuff. And you think you know, but it always is a surprise. I mean, once you really look at data, you always are like, I'm really shocked that most of my customers come from Texas. You know what I mean? Like, it's those kinds of things that analytics do that without that information, you have no idea. You're really acting blind.

So I want to shout out here to Scott Scowcroft is in here, and he's saying One thing about Plus Your Reach are Michael's deliverabilities. Really impressed by how he's able to quickly figure out how to harvest data.

Yeah, he's pretty amazing. I mean, most programmers you meet, and I've met a lot, are, you know, kind of geeky and introverted, and they don't really want to talk to you. And Michael has a personality on top of being able to code, which is really helpful and that he listens. He's very understanding and listening to a lot of points of view. But even, you know, honestly, even any of the beta customers or customers comes with something that they'd like to see in the product, he was very good about thinking about how that will work and trying to implement that as quickly as possible.

Yeah, he is pretty awesome.

Yeah, shout out to Michael Jason.

Alright, let's move over now. We'll talk to Megan a bit. Megan, why don't you tell us about Yummology and some of the things you have going on.

Sure, um, Yummology is a food blog that I started, uh, I started it a couple years ago really kinda casually as a place to just sort of park all of my favorite recipes. Since August, so almost in the last 9 or 10 months, it's really grown into a full-time job, which is fabulous for me. Um, you know, right now Yummology is doing a lot of sponsored content with different third-party agencies and such that come to us asking us to curate recipes for different brands that they work with. Also working on content agreements with larger online magazines like PopSugar and SheKnows. And it's been a lot of fun. It's been a great learning experience in terms of learning about the blogging world and how blogging has really just exploded as a profession for a lot of people. And also learning about social media and the different opportunities that lie within it. And that's kind of why I'm thrilled to be here today is because I really do want to learn more about Google+. How to use it as a blogging tool and a sponsorship tool and a revenue tool and, you know, just kind of pick your brains and figure out how best to move forward and expand the current brand of Yummology. You know, right now it sort of lives within the blog and the different marketing and PR efforts that I have in place through social media and through different news channels. You know, I've done a couple of magazine interviews and a couple of I have a monthly news segment that I do here in town locally, a cooking segment, but really kind of want to expand that reach and expand the blogs to include more video content, and that's why I'm here today.

Video is king, so I mean, that's a good place to start. You know, people really— ranks very well, and tying it in with Google is just a really excellent way to get even more, more eyes on your blog and what you're doing. So let me ask you a question. When you start— you said you just started your blog not that long ago, or how long has your blog been going?

August, really, I mean full-time professionally August last year, so almost a year.

Okay, how did you find the people that came to you to pay you for blog posts or to curate recipes?

Sure, it really kind of happened organically. It was strange. I started working with— I reached out to to the larger sites and magazines like SheKnows and PopSugar, and they threw me some sponsored content as part of my initial agreement with them. I would send them a recipe or an article, and every once in a while they'd reach out to me saying, "Hey, we have a sponsor that we work with who would love to see— expand their reach and use your site and have you post a sponsored recipe on your site as well as on ours." It started that way, and as I kind of built that library of sponsored sponsored content, I tagged it every time I posted it on social media. I think some of these other media groups, one in particular that I work with is We've Made Media, reached out to me and asked me to join their library of bloggers that they work with. They've been throwing me sponsored content ever since. It's really just a matter of finding those groups. Registering with them, and then they're pretty good about sending you regular opportunities. You know, you apply, you go through a formal application process with a Google form, Google Doc, and send in all of your numbers and your reach and everything, and depending on that and on the fit, you know, your brand's fit with the sponsor's brand, they'll usually come back to you and say, "Yay, nay, here's how much it pays, and here's when it's due by." Have you found many of them asking about Google as, you know, as that part of your social media package? You know, I mean, I have a Google+ page obviously, so that's on there. And I always include those numbers anytime I'm applying for something. But they really don't ask that much about Google. And it's a shame, because I really don't think that many people fully understand the capabilities of Google+. Like I said, I'm learning more and more each day the capabilities of Google+. But with these Hangouts and everything, that's part of, again, what I'm hoping to be able to package for the sponsors that I work with eventually. Is, you know, a live stream and a YouTube and video element as well.

So yeah, I know a lot of what I run into with the problems is you really have to teach them what they need to do because so very few brands or PR agencies are Google savvy, right? See the value of it. So that's a battle you face with a lot of them, at least in the food end of it.

Yeah, and I can see that being something that I would have to initiate, a conversation I would probably have to initiate with with them and working with them, because it really hasn't come up at all very much.

I actually have a sheet on my media kit that I'll share with you if you want, Megan, that has why Hangouts are so cool for brands, because they don't get it yet. I mean, they're not on Google+ personally, like for fun, so they don't get it. But once they hear the why it's so great and what it can do, they always listen because at the end of the day they care about being able to come up with great content that people would want to watch or want to click on.

So I think that you're right, it's like no, there's just so many PR agencies I've talked to that are like, "Oh, well my friends aren't on Google+, they're just not there yet." No, no, but I mean I really do feel like with everything that I'm seeing within the food blogger universe and seeing how other bloggers utilize it, I do feel I feel like it's popular there and it is growing and it is going to be the next page in the chapter. It's just a lot of those outside countries, you're right, they haven't caught up yet. I would love to see that sheet if you have it, that would be great.

Yeah, absolutely, I'll share with everyone, no problem.

I have a question for you Megan. So you may have noticed there's a lot of other food blogs out there and I'm a little curious starting in you said 2 years ago, it was already a super crowded space. What have you done to differentiate yourself from everyone else?

You know, it's hard because, you know, everybody has a chocolate chip cookie recipe, right? Everybody got a, you know, favorite pasta or whatever. So how do you sort of put your own spin on it? And again, I think it's part of building your brand. What do you want your brand to be? You know, if you focus primarily just on the food and the cooking, I mean, that's a huge part of it, don't get me wrong, but you need to have a voice, and I think you do need to have some unique shareable content. And, you know, one thing that I've tried to do just for fun because I enjoy them is with my social media pages, I always try to incorporate little memes or snippets or things in there as well to get people, you know, just sort of get them motivated for the day. There's always sort of like a motivational post every morning, or I call them the daily bites of inspiration. And that's just something that I've done to be different, because a lot of bloggers, it's just the food, and that's all you'll see is a lot of their food content. But I like to try and pepper in some personal anecdotes. And I have a 2-year-old, so I have rants about toddlerhood and parenting, and that is in there as well. Bear with me. But yeah, it really just is about developing a voice, a voice for your brand and a look and a feel and kind of living up to that, I think.

Does that make sense? Yeah, and you said a really great point that you have like your follower count and then you have to follow through. And I think that's another thing that some bloggers will do is they get into blogging, they get out of blogging. You have to be regimented and you have to go after it first. It's not going to just people are going to call you and say, "Hey, I'd love to sponsor your blog." I mean, they might, but it more likely happens that you go to them and pitch, like, "I'd like to work with you. I'd like to do that." And that you did that, that's awesome.

Well, and I'm still doing that, to be perfectly honest. I mean, I'll find a brand that I love. I reached out to a couple of people yesterday that I came across, and I just said, "Hey, you know, you guys have this great product. I'd love to have the opportunity to work with you." experience your detox cleanse and all of that fun stuff. So I'm still reaching out regularly.

Well, I think that's part of the business, is that you're always selling yourself to somebody one way or the other, whether it's a brand that you're reaching out to or someone you're just talking to about, you know, hey, what do you do for a living? So you never know who's listening when you're talking. Right. Mm-hmm. Alright, well, let's move on now and say hi to Ryan. And Ryan, like I said, we talked before, you do some graphic design work and you do logos and all kinds of other neat stuff. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're doing?

Alright, hey everybody. First of all, thank you guys for having me on. It's always awesome to get to know new people and reconnect with people that I've had the privilege of hanging out with before. My wife and I run a company called Reformation Designs. We started it here in Silicon Valley in 2011. And we specialize in pretty much all kinds of media production, whether it's graphics like the lower third here or your event banners. We're starting to promote more helping out Hangout producers. So if you're looking to get started with doing your own Hangouts for your brand and that kind of thing, definitely let us know. We love working with people like that. What we do for logos, as Chef could tell you, because we were finishing up a project with him right now, one of the things that I like to do whenever I'm designing something for a new client that I think really kind of sets us apart from a lot of the other people in the design community is after we have the initial concept ideas, I will then do a private Hangout with the client and share my screen so that it's kind of like a co-creation session together. So that instead of going back and forth over email or over the phone like, oh hey, can you move this thing down to the left, can you do this, blah blah blah, it's actually you get to see live my creative process. And so you really end up with something that you're looking for. And so it's a really personalized process, and so we're really We're really proud of that. But on top of that, yeah, we do a lot of stuff with video, video editing. I'm actually— a lot of people don't know I have this deep-seated desire to be able to do voiceovers and cartoon characters and movie trailers and stuff like that. So we're going to start doing some stuff with trying to promote more, helping people people get their Google+ Hangouts event trailers, like actual trailers to promote. Say you're going to have some special guest on and you really want to get the word out there. We're going to help people out with getting those trailers done, that kind of thing. But I can do all kinds of fun voices, so if you have any specific requests, now's your opportunity to— What's your favorite voice? My favorite voice would— It would have to probably be a draw between the typical movie trailer voice, between that one and like, hi, my name is Ryan Rhodes with reformationdesigns.com, like the cheesy radio. It's like, I mean, those are probably my favorite. I love it. Primarily because no one actually talks like that. I mean, people throw I throw the word authenticity around on here all the time. But it's just, I'm in the advertising industry, obviously, but a lot of it, it just kind of makes me laugh, so I try to basically make satire of it as much as possible, just to have fun with it. So—

Well, that's pretty cool. Well, thank you, Ryan. I know, you know, and I can vouch for your method of doing the logo work because I saw that firsthand and I was amazed. We were on for a long time, it didn't seem like it because we were constantly working and seeing your workspace and how things flowed so easily. I was completely lost. I'm mesmerized by Photoshop, but when I saw you using Illustrator, I had no idea what was going on, so that was really cool. So I had fun with that. Alright, so let's—

Yeah, we actually had— Plus My Reach, we had Brian on and he had So many people super excited about the logo deal that you did, so it was— you picked up quite a few customers. They all want Ryan's logos, your package, remember? I remember, yeah.

I can't wait to get Ryan's package.

I'm sure it's— Yeah, we're also— another thing is Lainey Sullivan and I from Those Four Girls, we're actually co-authoring a book that we've got in presale mode right now. It's called Stop Wasting Time and Burning Money. It's definitely a different take on the whole self-help get stuff done route because we actually talk about our own infrastructure, our own processes. We share a lot of the resources that we use to get stuff done. It's not just like this rah, rah, rah, motivate yourself in the morning. It's like, okay, here's how to motivate yourself. We're going to have a whole bunch of worksheets included with it, all that kind of stuff. You can preorder that at our website.

When is that? Is that out now?

It's available for preorder now on my website at reformationdesigns.com. Basically, it's still in process. We're still formatting it and finishing up some stuff. If you preorder it, it will automatically deliver to you after, whenever we release it.

We're talking ebook, paper book?

It's an ebook, it's an ebook format right now. It will automatically deliver a PDF, an EPUB file, and I think a .mobi file, so you can use it on your Kindle, you can look at it on all of your ebook readers very easily. And once we have everything finalized and set up, then we will be submitting it to some self-publishing stuff so so that people can get hard copies of it also. Excellent. And our plan is to do an illustrated version with a friend of mine who's a cartoonist and comic book artist after we do this one. Sounds good.

One quick question, since you are a logo designer and a graphic designer. I was on an earlier Hangout with Mia Voss and we never really talked about the subject because there were so many other interesting things being said, but Canva. What do you think of Canva?

I think Canva is a wonderful tool. I use it myself. I have, you know, I have an account. I'm not of the persuasion that design should be democratized, personally, because I think it's an art. I think it's an art form. I'm totally all about people having the ability to create things very simply. I mean, a lot of my work I actually do on my iPad or on my iPhone and then take it into Illustrator, blow it up, and I that kind of thing. But I think, like I said, I really like Canva as a tool. I'm not particularly fond of some of the way it's marketed, like, well, now everyone's a designer, because I mean, that's just not the case. But other than that, I think it's a great tool.

Someone had mentioned that it was—

I have something else to say, because I come from the graphics, we own Customize Walls, I own Customize Walls, we come from the graphics world also. Ryan and I actually talked about this. The problem with Canva, I love, I actually use, I'm one, I use it too. I think it's great. I think people can get in really big trouble for sharing other people's images and pretending that they're their own. It's nice to be able to create your own graphics easily. The problems can arise when your graphics look like everybody else's graphics really easy. And you can tell, unless it's like a pro user, like I could use Canva and you wouldn't be able to tell it was Canva because I actually can take it back into Illustrator if I want to. I can do a lot with it that you couldn't do. But some people, the way they use it, so basically like they'll go in and add, you know, do the little basic tutorials. They'll add a text or they'll put in, and it starts to get to a point where your stream looks like like Canva, you know, because everybody's using the same tools. And there's others too, there's like apps for your phone too, like I have, I have, I like them, it's not like I don't, there's Rona Design is another one, an app for your phone that's really good, and she's got great graphics packages, it's more, a little bit more girly. There's Word Swag, which I love, you can put in like any quote and it makes you can change the colors, it's cool, you know, but you can tell. I can tell when I'm seeing a WordSwag image, I can tell when I'm seeing a Canva image, I can tell when I'm seeing a PicMonkey image. Like, you don't want it to be the only thing you're sharing is other people's graphics.

Right, and that's exactly— I'm glad that you brought that up because I didn't want to say something and like make people want to stone me or lynch me because 'cause I know that it's a big thing here right now. Everyone's like, Canva, Canva, rah, rah, rah. And like she said, I'm all about using it as a tool. What I don't like is, again, like Laurie said, whenever I go on my feed now, it looks like that. It looks like everyone's just slapping a shape down, slapping some text on it, and hooray, now I have a perfectly branded thing. If it's not looking like you, if it's not looking like your brand, then it's not going to do you any good in the long run. And so I would always encourage people— yes, I mean, of course, if you're going to be sharing, like, blog posts all the time and that kind of thing, you're going to need visual elements. And it would benefit you incredibly to learn how to do this stuff on your own. But at the same time, like, if you're going to be doing something like a logo or If you're going to be doing something that you want to really stand out from the crowd, then you really should probably consider hiring a professional.

That's why they're out there. You do something on your own and you find out how quickly you should have hired a professional. I saw a sign that said, "D-Y-I becomes O-M-G very quickly." Very quickly. Very quickly. All right, well, let's move over to Tom. Tom's been very patient here, and would you tell us a little about what you're doing? I know you have a new book out and some of the fun things that's going on with you.

Yeah, actually, I thought I was gonna have a big announcement today, but I'm still waiting on a phone call, so that's gonna have to wait. But the— I did this last year. I wrote a book about beer and dessert pairing because I was doing, you know, I'm a chef I was doing an event for a local dining club, and we were going to do 6 courses, but only desserts and beer. I was— considered it a challenge because it sounded like way too much sugar and way too much alcohol that people would be able to get through it. So I was looking for all the resources that were available, and there weren't any. There's a couple of great books on beer and food pairing, but they barely touch on dessert, and they even don't go too deep into any subject, so— or any category of food. So I figured if it wasn't out there, I should write it, and I spent quite a bit of time researching it and going through those tests, you know, throwing myself on the sword, learning how to— or learning the pairings that are good and bad, and it was a A lot of fun, as you might imagine. A couple taxi rides, as you might imagine. And don't drink and drive. And really worked with a friend of mine who does a lot of beer education, but didn't know much about pairing, and we dove deep into styles. We— there's some 101 stuff in the beginning of the book. That will teach you about the basic styles, you know, how to serve beer, store it, and mostly that stuff. I didn't go deep into history because the meat of the book is "this goes with that." So if you have, you know, if you have, let's see, like an Eclair, you know that those would be amazing with Framboise. It'd be great with stouts. Brown ales, barrel-aged of those types of varieties, and you wouldn't accidentally put that with a sour ale because that wouldn't be a good pairing. So that's really the depth that I took it into, and it works out to about 100 pages of material. I still don't have a print version because I'm still updating it. I took a note from Guy Kawasaki, the way he's doing APE, his latest book is that he's just fixing anything that changes. Anytime there's something new, he updates the book. So if you own the Kindle file for him, you just keep updating the Kindle file and you always have the latest material. And that's my approach with this right now. So I have— I'm adding artwork periodically, and if you have the Kindle file, you just update it. And you'll have the latest version all the time. When I'm finally satisfied with it, which I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so it'll be a while, then I'll make a print version available. So really, the fun part of that is that it's— and Ryan can probably speak to this too— is that having written a book is so fulfilling. I mean, it is, you know, it's that thing like people say, "I did this!" People say, "I want to write a book," and they don't even approach it. It's the same thing when people say, "I want to run a marathon," and they don't realize that almost everybody can run a marathon. They just have to do the work. And almost everybody can write a book. They just have to do the work. And the, you know, it's a matter of choosing yourself to do it. And that's just been such a fun process. I'm getting a friend of mine excited about it who's got a popular blog and assumed that he just didn't have the time for it. And I looked at his blog and I'm like, "You've written 40,000 words. You've already written a book. You just have to repackage it." And, uh, so the, uh, you know, hopefully we get, we move forward on his project because it's going to be awesome. And, you know, he makes a product that he can't make enough of, so people want a piece of him, and we're hoping that, you know, we can move forward with that to let other people have a piece of him through his book rather than just wait in line for his products because he can't make enough. You know, he's a craftsman. So the— on my site, I've been having fun lately just sharing things I've learned along the way, you know, tools that I've found, like OhmWriter. I'm in love with OhmWriter right now. If you haven't used it, I highly recommend it. What is it? OhmWriter is— you ever been distracted when you're trying to write? Anybody? Oh yeah. Well, constantly. Exactly. So OhmWriter shuts down everything except it gives you this beautiful backdrop, and there's like 7 to choose from. You put on your headphones and it has, you know, some of them are music, some of the sounds— there's one of just riding on a train. You can just hear that low rumble of riding on a train and it shuts out the rest of your world. It's so cool. And the really cool thing is it's a pay-what-you-wish product that starts at $4.11.. And I would pay $80 for it and be happy with it. So I wrote a blog post about it trying to get people to buy it. It's not an affiliate link, although I wish it was. I wish they had that. But, you know, finding those tools, sharing that process, and sharing the process of using Fiverr, which probably is going to make Ryan cringe.

Yeah, it will, but that's okay.

But I had a good experience on it, so it was fun. And I can imagine— you can see that there's going to be a lot of bad experiences on it too. But so that's been a lot of fun. And today I've put up on Google+ and my personal Facebook page— I'm trying to get people to help me decide on who's going to narrate my book, because I'm going to come out with an audiobook before my print version. And it's gonna be short and sweet, only about an hour, and it'll come with a big fat PDF of the whole thing so that you don't miss the information.

I might be interested, Tom, if you don't have people lined up.

I have a— I've received about 10 auditions on ACX. Okay. But you can throw one in there if you'd like. It's a ACX is an interesting process too, which is— I don't even know what that is. Amazon owns it, and it's something— Creation Exchange. And they will make audiobooks. Basically, it allows you to share your royalties or pay a flat rate to the narrators, which is great because I'm bootstrapping and I'm willing to sign half the royalties away in order to just get it done, right? And get it done professionally. Or I could just pay a flat rate, which for my length is about $100, which I might do that too. I'm a little undecided, but it is a really neat process. And there's so many confusing ways to go about writing a book that it's been fun to explore them and to kind of share the path with other people that are coming down the road.

But again— Tom, have you heard of Leanpub?

Of which? It's called Leanpub. Leanpub?

Yeah, L-E-A-N-P-U-B. I don't know how you're formatting your book and that kind of thing, but Leanpub is what Lainey and I used to format it. Basically, you can set up a whole landing page and run it like a buy it in progress type thing. Or you can launch it all at once. Basically, you write it in pretty simple language. It's called Markdown. If you want to make things bold, you put asterisks around them or whatever. It will actually create the PDF file for you. It creates the EPUB file, so then you can take that, submit it to Amazon, and you keep— if you sell it on Leanpub, you keep 90% of the royalties. But then you can also sell it on other places as well. And then there's another software for formatting stuff called Scrivener. I'm going to check out the OmmWriter though, because that sounds amazing.

Yeah, OmmWriter does not do anything except tune out the world. That's the rub. So there's no spell check. There's no interesting formatting. You can change the font to make it more readable, but it doesn't do what Scrivener does or Word. You do need to move it to another file, but I found it's awesome for doing blog posts. Sure. And the— or anytime where, you know, I've got a 7-year-old and, you know, it's— it can get noisy sometimes, so it's a great way to focus. The— yeah, I haven't used Leanpub, but Scrivener, actually, also, I was a little disappointed with it. It was something that pretty much everybody said was God's gift to writers, and I can see that in a way. It's an interesting tool, and I'm going to dig into it more, but I like how Joel Friedlander, who's a big guy, or big name in book publishing, he wasn't a fan either, so it was kind of validation for me that I wasn't feeling it.

I don't like the design of it. It's very— it doesn't look very good, so I don't like to use it personally.

But it was, you know, it's a good tool for certain people. The format of my book required a ton of tables to make look good, and that's another challenge because the tables look awful on Kindle. And so that's something I'm currently working on to try to refine that a little bit. But I first released it without tables, and it was hard— it wasn't very usable. So I needed to put the tables back in, and so now it's a little ugly. But I'm still working on that. So there's a lot of challenges that are ongoing, but having written a book is so awesome, and I have others on the way. I can't recommend it enough to anybody that hasn't done it.

You mentioned Choosing Yourself. Do you know James L. Tucher? It sounds familiar. He actually wrote a book called Choose Yourself. I thought that that's where you—

Oh no, actually, that's why it sounds familiar. Because it's one of those things I thought of on my own, and then I was looking, I'm like, I wonder if anybody owns this domain, and I looked into it and I found his name that way. Yeah, I actually just downloaded that on a Kindle. I don't— I haven't read it yet. It's good, you'll like it.

So Tom, with a book like that, with a beer and dessert pairings book, do you find— do you call the brands out by name ever, and do you find that that causes causes any sort of proprietary problems or hiccups or anything like that, or do you just sort of stick to the different genres of the beer?

I do both. So there's— I use some beers as specific examples. I didn't want to write a cookbook, I wanted to write a guide, but I knew that some people would be dissatisfied if there wasn't recipes, so I put 12 recipes in there. So you can do one a month They're seasonal recipes, and with each of those recipes I put 2 specific beer pairings. So Sierra Nevada Porter was one of them. You know, so I mentioned Sierra Nevada by name, and I mentioned some other breweries by name that just as a quality reference in another section where I talked about the size of the brewer doesn't matter. It doesn't We've got what they call nano breweries now that make tiny batches of beer, and then we have places that make thousands of gallons at a time. They can both make some of the best beer you've ever made. I used— I listed about 4 breweries by name in that example, and I reached out to all the breweries right before hitting the publish button, and all of them were were thankful to be included, except for 2 didn't respond. So out of the 20 or 30 breweries, they all showed interest in the book and they want paper copies for their lobbies, but they— yeah, they were all pleased to be in there. As long as it's good press, I don't think anybody's disappointed.

I'd imagine that was the case, but I just wasn't sure if there were any sort of formalities or anything that you had to go through with that.

Well, there might be now that you bring it up, but I wasn't too careful.

We can—

Forgiveness, not permission. You aren't recording this, are you?

No, no, no, don't worry.

Ask for forgiveness, not permission, right? Yes. Okay.

Better that way. You know, I would hold out to see if you could get Patrick Stewart to narrate your book.

That would be pretty cool. Or Morgan Freeman.

Morgan Freeman was recommended this morning, and I thought that was pretty good.

Morgan Freeman, Morgan Freeman.

I was gonna say, Ryan, can you do Morgan Freeman?

On occasion.

I'm still working on that one. Actually, you know, I was, uh, there's out of 10 auditions, there's only 2 that really sound close, and it made me think maybe I should just open it up to females too, to have a woman narrate the book because it's not Although I want somebody that sounds like me, I thought, you know, that might be interesting. It was one of my favorite audiobooks I've ever heard. I was so into it, and then when I heard the author, he had a completely different accent, didn't sound at all the same. You know, the narrator was a strong, like, firm guy, and the author is this kind of weaselly nerd. You know, PhD voice that, you know, it would have been awful if he narrated his own book. So I'm so glad he did it the way he did. I guess it doesn't mean they need to sound like me, they just need to sound interesting.

That's all. I see this selling huge at wine and beer stores too, like right on the counter. Sony, I mean, we just went to an awesome wine shop when we were in California, and they had like a whole wall wall of refrigerated beers and then tons and tons of wines. And they had a little wine bistro area, just limited menu, including desserts. But you could pick your beer, pick your wine, and they just opened— it was like a corking fee, even for the beer. And I think shops like that would be awesome for that. I even think Urban Outfitters would eat that up. College kids. Oh, absolutely.

In the orientation packet, just stick it in there.

Yeah. Well, with all the craft beers out there now, you know, it would be huge and exploding. I mean, you gotta pair them with something. Desserts are always a good pick, so I think it's a great idea.

What's surprising, like, how educated the beer market is now. I mean, even young kids really start to pay attention to it. I mean, when I was in college, We drank whatever was cheapest. Same here. In the keg. You know, but I think people really care now. I mean, even college kids seem to care.

That's kind of the premise of my whole position. In fact, you know, it's that I was trained in wine at culinary school, and I loved it, and I still like wine. It's a lot of fun, but there is just not the versatility that there is in beer. And I know that a lot of wine people would challenge me on that, but I'll get in the ring with them because there's— each ingredient in beer can be adjusted before making it. And when it comes to wine, it's which grape do you use and how do you squeeze it? And, you know, there's differences in yeast in different parts of the world that come out, and the process of aging that makes subtle changes, but there's only so many places you can affect wine. In beer, there's about double that on a normal beer, and there's all sorts of extra ingredients people add all the time to make it more interesting. And barrel aging is going nuts right now. You can't buy barrels anymore because brewers are buying them all up and aging beer in them. It's hard to be taken seriously if you're not aging beer in a barrel right now. There's so much going on, so much explosion that it's a really exciting place to be and just on the fringe of the industry, but it's a lot of fun being there and, you know, going to these special events that we're doing. Like, we have Central Oregon Beer Week this week and it's ends up— wraps up on Sunday, but it's 9 days of beer events, 3 or 4 events a day, and that's just in my local area. And we're not the only place doing this sort of thing, so it's pretty exciting time for beer.

Yep, beer is the new wine, so there's a lot of things happening with it. Alright, well, we're coming to the close of Good Day Google+, and we're gonna run through the panel once again and If you have anything interesting going on or anything you'd like to share with us, now is the time. So Lori, anything new on the horizon or anything you'd like to share?

I'm always caught off guard when you ask me this. Every time I'm like, what do I have new?

What is your favorite swear word then? OK, we'll do the higher skill.

I don't know. I really am one of those cursing is a crutch for the crippled conversationalists. I don't swear very much.

Berk. OK, now. Any industry shows coming up soon, or—?

My dog, sorry.

Oh, that's good. He's getting into it. All right, we'll move over to Megan then. Megan, anything you'd like to leave us with?

Just that this was great. I mean, it was really wonderful meeting everybody and learning more about all the different technical aspects. And technical advancements that are taking place, as well as, you know, in the food world with Tom. That was wonderful. And just hoping I can get our Google+ Hangout up and running eventually, but we'll definitely let you guys know. So keep an eye out.

I'm sure, you know, it's just a matter of practice and going out and having fun, so I'm sure you'll be fine. Alright, Ryan, anything you'd like to leave us with before we go?

Yeah, make sure to go to our website, reformationdesigns.com, and pre-order our book. I really think you guys will like it, and if you enter the code FIRST50 when you go to checkout, you'll get it at half off for the first 100 people or so that preorder it. So I think that there's still some more of those left. And if you guys are interested in getting any branding, graphics, video work, or anything like that done, and you mention this show, I'll give you guys a $50 discount off of my regular rate. So thank you guys for having me on.

Very good.

Nice to have you. Tom, thanks so much for being here. Anything else you'd like to leave us with before we sign off?

Yeah, I'm looking for a lot more reviews, so if anybody reaches out to me on Google+ or through my website, at least through today, if I don't get too busy, I'll do it through the weekend. I'll just send you a PDF of the book. It won't be the Kindle format, but I'll send you a PDF of my book for for free in exchange for an honest review, hopefully 4 or 5 stars. But I definitely want more reviews on Amazon because it helps a lot for the visibility. So if you reach out to me through Google+ or my website, I will send that to you this weekend.

Sounds good. Good to know. Alright, so thank you all for joining us today. It's— we've got a lovely weekend coming up. I hope everyone gets a chance to out and get some fresh air and get out in nature and just enjoy the day before— well, for us, before the summer gets too hot, or whatever part of the world you're in. Let's get out and enjoy life a little, breathe some fresh air in. Make sure you come back to Google+ bright and early on Monday, and we'll have a lot of new stuff for you. Have a great weekend, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye.