The Bloggers Guide to Using Google+ Effectively - Image Sizing & Distribution

Hi there, I'm Chef Dennis Littley and I'm here today with my co-host Jean Layton and we've got another episode of The Blogger's Guide to Using Google+ Effectively. And today we're going to talk about images, sizing them, distribution, and just overall give you some good pointers for how to get your images the most bang for your buck on what you're doing on Google+. So I'm going to turn it over as usual to my co-host Jean Layton in just a minute and she'll get you started. With her diagrams and circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one to be used. Now, not as evidence against us, that's Alice's Restaurant. I digress as usual, sorry about that.

I love that you have these great references, Dennis.

But anyway, I'm gonna turn it over, and if you have questions, please leave them in the comments section and we will get to them. So Jean, it's all yours.

Hey everybody, welcome to another Monday. I have the joy of having snow on the ground outside. Yesterday I was playing in it way too long and I managed to yell a little too much. I've got a touch of frog this morning and I'll apologize in advance for the lack of my typical voice. We're going to move forward anyway. The thing you have to remember about Google more than anything else is that it's a visual platform. Everybody who originally got here, the tech people were the first guys in and then the photographers found Google. It became a place to share those incredible images that we all seem to find or create as we're working. Knowing that a visual platform like Google, there's so many things they do for us automatically or automagically if you are an Android base. You can upload your photos and auto-upload all your pictures on your phone if you're an Android. They will make the 5 in a row move into movable GIFs and all of that. I don't want to really talk about Android platform, although I have definitely drunk that Kool-Aid as well. I upgraded to a Moto X when my iPhone died. Wow, it's so important. But what I wanted to talk a little bit more about today was the visuals that you have to have ready on your site to be awake, aware, and a part of this community. So I'm going to start off by screen sharing from my post on Wing Woman Productions. The example I picked for what not to do. And I'm not picking on this person, it's just he's got a lot of followers, and because he's got a lot of followers doesn't mean he stays up on the technical details of being on board. So I want you to take a peek at this first— oops, sorry, I have a Pinterest button that automatically does it. I want you to take a peek at this first one. This is Robert Scoble's profile. You can see he has a tagline, "The age of content," and it drags off into Neverland. The worst part is his second line does the same. He hasn't sized his image well for the actual size of the profile. I'm guessing that the reason he hasn't done that is that he has been on Google+ for so so long that he sized originally for what was the correct size then and they have changed that sizing. It has also happened that he does not use an image of his face. He's one of those guys that Google kind of knows who he is. This is the gentleman who runs Rackspace. He uses a caricature, I guess, is the best way, of him doing something. But look what happens when he posts. That's what the second image is. This is what happens to his image and his background image as he does a post. This is from August of 2011. Yes, very, very early in Google+ land. His images are conflicting pretty badly. He actually steps on his own tagline, which is not what you want to be doing. So those are my examples of what not to do. These are actually still live. I'm sure Robert has somebody who could probably update his image, but with 4 million followers, who cares? He can do basically what he wants to do, because if you're out to follow him, you know why you're following him already. But I wanted to show you what happened way back when. It used to be Ronnie has held on to his, that we had 5 little images, 5 little places to put individual pictures and then we had our profile image which is the image in the circle. Most of us, when they gave us the option of one larger image, jumped over and took the one larger image. Ronnie was kind of smart. He didn't do that. Dennis Littley. If you go to his site, his profile, his little 5 images are all movable GIFs now. The blocks tumble into these results. It's a great way for him to show his prowess in setting up technical details because he created these 5 GIFs. He's got them uploaded into these spaces and he knows how to teach people how to do this. The Hangout Helper. I have to admit Roni is one of my favorite people because he's an incredibly generous person about his work. The next place we always seem to talk about with images is posts. Peg Fitzpatrick wrote this post back in October 2013, Her Recipe for the Perfect Google+ Post. I've actually embedded this post in my post because there are so many details that she mentions and then the comments come in. So if you want to learn how to do this, we'll be doing this on an upcoming show. I'm not sure exactly how far out, probably a month out. But this brings everything. It brings her post and all of her comments to the post. Onto my post. So I'm not duplicating her work, I'm bringing her work as a whole here. She knows it's here, she's actually kind of happy about it, which was nice. And you can follow along through all of the comments and be able to go back to the answers she created for some of the questions. I think at one point I asked how to make the pin it for later part because Her pin it for later image, which is part of her formatting for her Google posts, is not this image. It's a different image. I wanted to know how she had a second one. She actually had a different image on her original post. She's created a circuit of her post on her webpage, pinned, then she takes that URL, puts that URL into her Google post. And has a different image on her Google post in this case. But that's one of the things that to be able to drive— we're all trying to get eyes on our work. By using a big image, and she gives in the post, she gives an image size of 1000 by 600, and that seems to be her ideal size. I had somebody ask at a different time, how do you get to have one of those really big images that goes 2 columns wide on Google? The first thing is you have to have that big an image in your post. Then Google, through some algorithm of their own, I have no idea how they actually choose, but they do bring those larger images up to that double column site size. Sometimes I think it just depends on whether or not they're hungry, they bring up food images. If they're worried about the Ukraine, they bring up an image from the Ukraine. I honestly don't know how they pick it, but I know at lunchtime—

I think they have a wheel, Jean, that they spin. They just turn to their Vanna and say, "Vanna, spin the wheel," and it picks one.

I think you're right, because I know at lunchtime, it starts at about 9:30 in the morning you start getting a huge food image. Then that kind of tapers off at about 3 in the afternoon. I think it's kind of they spread food through lunchtime, which is awesome. The rest of my post actually has links out to different posts other people have written about ideal sizes for your Google+ cover. Your profile, your lower third for Hangouts, and to templates for those as well. So if you're comfortable working in any of the online image creators, there's the Pixlr people and there's the Photoshop people. All of these dimensions are held within these other posts. The dimensions change fairly frequently. I mean, I have seen Hangout lower thirds change at least twice in my year and a half here in Google land. The covers changed at least 3 times in that time frame. Profile pics have changed twice, if not more. Whether or not they're square or whether or not they're circles has changed as well. I would go to these other sources for for the actual physical dimensions. And there's one that includes also Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and I think Tumblr maybe is the other one. And so that's the Social Media Cheat Sheet from the Pint Group, and they're a British company. So that gives you all of the where to get the images. And then the thing that you really want to make sure of with images is that A, they're yours. There's been a lot of conversation in Google in the last month about how to source your images so that you're not violating copyright. And I was so thrilled to see that conversation start here because so many of us have been ripped off on Facebook where somebody swiped our image, taken our recipe, and off they go into some crazy page that has no reference to us. On Facebook, they don't seem to have a back way of verifying anything. They do here on Google. Google knows who put that picture up first. And yes, they are going after the worst offenders of grabbing images and not crediting them. So it helps to be on Google because When you put an image up and your site is indexed, Google knows that image is from your site. And if you've set up your authorship and you've set up your publisher, you're actually able to have that follow-through of, nope, it's mine and don't play with it.

So, Jean, have you noticed that when you hover over an image now, it actually says your name's image? It, uh, actually, that, that's something I noticed the past few days.

What you've put in as the caption?

No, it just says your name and the image. It doesn't say your name of it, but it says your name, like whatever your name as your Google+ name is.

Oh, ah.

When you hover, at least for me it has unless, you know, and sometimes I do get some things ahead of time, not always. But when you hover over a picture, let me find a picture of mine to make sure. Like I shared something this morning and it says Amazing World Photos. It says Chef Dennis Littley's Photos. So when you hover, a big black bar now appears and says that.

That's interesting. No, I hadn't noticed that. But I think you do more work with images because you're so conscientious about pasting other people's food images. And a lot of the times when I do an image, I'm typically just sharing the whole post and I'm not putting it through my photos. Yeah, that's interesting to know, so it's right there.

Yeah, so that might be another way of them reaffirming that it is someone else's image if they're using it.

It's really nice to have that layer of comfortability, and I know the photographers moved over— a lot of the photographers shifted over to Google because Facebook's terms of service changed at one point. Facebook was saying, "If you upload it, it's ours to play with," basically. I'm paraphrasing. All the photographers said, "Oh no, that's not what's going to happen." They shifted and discovered that Google has this amazing set of tools. You can see the— let's see, what was the last one? The kissing hearts. If you uploaded a kissing picture within the week of Valentine's Day, you got these dropping hearts. That would automatically, automagically appear. There was the Shake to Snow. If you had any image that had snow on it, it would increase the amount of snow and it would all start dropping. They like to play with all these automatic enhancements. If you do panoramic shots, they will make the panoramic shots an active GIF. So play with it. That's part of the joy of being Android and Google+. Let's see what we've got in the way of questions.

We haven't got a whole lot of questions up here, just a couple comments.

Kirsten wants to make your dessert.

Yeah, I saw that. Let's pull that up there. "Making images mine, the dessert behind Chef Dennis Littley's head is something I would like to make mine." Oh, I posted my tiramisu today, a whole post of it. And she's talking about that. I also put that up as my new image.

Yeah, you're making everybody hungry.

That's the idea. That's the idea. I do get some remarks from people that at 3 in the morning their time when I post things up, you know, my time 8 o'clock, they curse me for wanting to go to bed instead having to eat. But I always say misery likes company, so. If I'm going to be hungry, I want everybody else to be hungry. But Google+ is really, you know, is the place to be if you're a food photographer, if you're a blogger, because it is a food porn community unto itself with such benefits of being indexed on search engine. Your pictures get more movement. I mean, it may not be like Food Gawker or one of those places where you're sending 500 hits to your blog immediately for posting it, but over a period of time, you know, you really get a lot more action from it. So, and if you also— did you share in your post about how seeing how many times your image was viewed by clicking on picture?

No, I did not actually, and that's— I was just popping over here to take a peek if I'm— I don't have the black bar yet.

Now Tony said he has it, so it could be coming out slowly.

Yeah, with all posts of any sort, you can see what's called the ripples. I don't think we've actually talked about the ripples much, but I'm going to go back to screen share. I'll show people what we mean by ripples because with ripples you can see your effect in the world of Google. By who's sharing it. I've got the spinning beach ball. By who's sharing it and who's sharing it out from there. There are a couple of different ways to analyze it beyond that. NodeX3 is one of them, and they're in the midst of doing something today with Martin Shervington, which is going to be interesting. But when you click on this little drop down on any post and I just picked randomly one that had a good image and down at the bottom you click on View Ripples and what it'll do once it's churning through, it'll flip it around and let you see what's happening from this one image. And that's the way you can start to see the traction you have with an image. You can start to see how it's being shared out through your community. It only follows the public posts. It does not follow into private communities and show you what happens within those private communities, which is one of the better reasons why you want to dump it into the public stream. These ripples only work in the public stream.

A lot of times people will save something for themselves. You'll see 24 total shares and think, wow, it was shared 24 times when in essence it really was shared 12 publicly. Some people just share it to themselves so they have it saved like if they wanted to make it sometime.

Yeah, and see what happens, so the post I picked is Karen Ganrud's post. She made this amazing whip mocha and caramel tart which I have to admit looks awesome. Rukhsar Das then reshared it and Aghvia Enghun reshared from Rupa and then June D'Arville reshared it and Adrienne Urban reshared it and you can keep going and then Home New Mom. So there's those drops. That's what it starts to do. If you get a post that's been out for any amount of time, you can start to see all of the circles From a strategy standpoint, what I do is I'll look at one of these ripples and I make sure that I have all the people who are sharing for me in a group, in a circle, that I can say have shared my work. That way, when I start to see those people doing that pretty routinely, I reach out to them and I make friends because these are people who for whatever reason like my work. And just like any other networking community, if somebody likes your work and is already sharing it for you, of course you want to go and say hi and find out about them because they're probably fascinating people. All these ones in the middle, these people are sharing just to themselves or reshared to just their community, and they have— that reshare has not yet been activated to another reshare. Now admittedly, I picked a post that went live at 10:14 and it's 10:20. This is not something that I would have expected to see a ton of reshares of reshares yet because it takes a certain amount of time for it to drop into people's boxes and keep going. This is a beautiful image. Even if you don't want to eat chocolate mocha tart, it's a gorgeous image. It's eye-catching. And I bet she's gonna get a ton of things, a ton of reshares. Now there's a lot of photographers who work in HD, and that's what this one is, and that's how he put up a big enough image that it could be 2 columns. And I can guarantee the ripples on this one is probably going to be bigger because it's the kind of thing that it opens up in another window, so I have to let it do that. So he only has 2 public shares so far. It's kind of interesting. But it'll continue. That's the— the ones that are landscape tend to continue for days and weeks.

Yeah, they'll go on and on. And the one thing to remember about these ripples too, it's a good way for you to check who is sharing your work so you can go thank them for sharing it too. 'cause you do want to thank the people that have taken the time to share your work. So they'll continue to share, and everyone likes to see their name and to get some public— not publicity, but some notoriety from doing it for you. And again, you might end up making friends with them. You don't have to follow them right away if they don't look like they're in your vein of what you do, but it's always good to thank them.

Yeah, it's always good to say thank you. People love to hear thank you. So the other thing I was going to go back to about images is if you are a Pinterest user and you like to pin other people's work, if, if that's part of your strategy to create a community or create a— the nice thing about having If you work in Chrome, you can get a Pinterest button extension. If you use that with Google+, it gives you an entire page of images in one click. I'm going to do a quick screen share again because this is what, by hitting the Pinterest pin button, on my— I work in Chrome. This is what I get. I have an entire page of the images and I can pin any of them. So from a strategy to be using your time effectively, if you get that Pinterest extension on your Chrome browser, you can pin any of these images at once and then move on to the next page. You can create your ability to talk about lots of products or lots of images. And, you know, of course you want to make sure you're not dumping them all on the same board all the time and all of that, but that's the thing.

Okay, now, Jean, on images themselves, we also have the ability to see— like, I just want to throw a quick screen share up. I don't do this a whole lot, but on mine. And here I have a picture of the tiramisu that I posted that Kirsten was asking about and mentioning. But if you see here, you'll see photo details. And on photo details, if you open it up, it tells you, you know, what the size of the image was, if you gave it a name, the file size. And a lot of times the camera information will be in here if you have it in there, but what it does is it also gives you the views. 24,986 views on this image. And if you go into some of your images, you'll be amazed to see how many they really get. So that's, that's kind of a neat tool there.

It is. The other thing you need to be cautious about is it'll tell you if you have a cell phone and you're taking your pictures on your cell phone and you have location activated, it will put the location down on those images. So if you're somebody who works from your own home and you don't want your address or your ability to be mapped put onto all your images, make sure you have your location sharing off. It seems pretty basic, but I know for an awful lot of people, because apps say I have to have access They give access and then they forget that everything in that stream of pictures is going to get tagged with a location.

We do have some questions now too, Gina. I'm going to go to Kim real quick on hers. Do you have G+ auto-enhance feature clicked on high, normal, or off for photos you submit? When and where do you do that? You know, I have it on normal, and sometimes I don't like the auto-enhance, but it tends— you want to have to look at some individual, some photos individually. But that'll go into your settings on your profile under settings when you click on that part of your page, and you go back there and it'll let you address how you want them.

Yeah, I think I have mine on sometimes, or maybe actually I may have it up on high. Because when I put a photo in, for me, I really like those animated GIFs. I don't necessarily drop them into the stream all the time, but I like to see them. And realize that motion always captures people's eyes. So if you have something that's really gorgeous that motion would make sense, like A friend of mine uses pouring caramel onto a dessert. Well, if you have a GIF of that caramel pouring onto your— I think she did it with an ice cream sundae or something. That will absolutely capture more people's eyes than just a static image of the caramel falling out of the— so it depends. You can tag it and toggle it back and forth.. Alright, here's another one from Raw Skin Citicals.

Thank you. A few questions: is there a way to share photos and/or posts on Google and Facebook or Twitter at the same time? And I think you have a way for that, don't you, Jane?

I use a tool called Friends Plus Me, and Friends Plus Me allows you to set up your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter Facebook page. Yeah, and you can drop a post into Google+ and it automatically shares it out. I love using that. I'm very conscious that every public post goes out to every public social media, so I very rarely post anything that's kind of off topic. And when I do, there is a way. You just do a hashtag #ns, no share. And it'll stay just on Google+. Although I have to admit, there's not much I say publicly that I don't want to have out in every possible way. And then the thing about sharing out to Facebook or to Twitter is you have to drop back into those platforms to respond. So that's part of my work flow, is that I'll drop in things for a couple hours or 3 hours, and then I take 10 minutes and go check Twitter and Facebook and make sure that there's not a conversation starting there without answering because there's nothing more frustrating for people to answer a question that you may have posed or mention something about the beautiful image you just dropped in and get back crickets. They hate that.

So absolutely. All right, they have a couple more questions on that one. And that's the one is also, Chef Dennis, your video feed quality is really clear. What equipment are you using for such a clear picture, if you don't mind sharing? And we are both using the C920 Logitech camera. The difference is, is I live in a 55 and older community where I am probably the only one uploading at any given time. The others are going— still aren't real sure about computers, so I'm very fortunate in that respect that I have most of the bandwidth to myself. So I won't take credit for everything.

Yeah, and I'm on a DSL line, and I'm at the point where I'm going to be upgrading my router. That's the next step for me to see if I can get mine to improve. It's just frustrating for me.

I think for HD you need 1.3, an upload of 1.3 kilobytes a second, or what is it, a second or whatever that term is, megabytes a second, whatever it is. You see how much I know about it. Okay, how do I embed a URL link, the last part of their question, how do I embed a URL link with a photo where if they click on the picture it takes them to an external link Or is that possible? So can we embed links in our photos on Google+?

I don't think you can embed it. You can put a URL in the caption of the photo, but I don't think that makes it an embedded live link. Actually, I'm going— give me a second, I'm going to go check something. I uploaded yesterday an image of my banana bread roses and I put the URL as part of the caption. I'll go see if it's live. It was my first time doing it. Keep playing without me for a second.

Okay, well we have another question here from Kirsten. It says, Jean Layton, the ripples are cool. Okay, so I still want to understand, sharing your own stuff is bad, sharing other people's stuff is good. Good. So how do you get your stuff out to the public without sharing it first? Just share others' work copiously and hope that someone will share yours? Well, no. Sharing your stuff is good. Oversharing your stuff is bad. So what you want to do is you want to share your— use a basic rule of 1 to 20% of the work you share should be your own. The other 80% should be someone else's. And you always want to share images that you know will be reshared. It's got to be a win-win situation for everyone. So if you share a thumbnail link, you know it's not going to be reshared, you know you're not going to get +1s on it. Find the most dynamic images that you really like and reshare those as your reshares because they're going to get traffic for you, which in turn is going to give traffic for the person that posted it. So you're winning, they're winning. So, you know, it's good for everyone at that point. And, you know, reshare yours— not reshare yours, share yours that one time, and every time someone reshares it, you're gaining ground. And when they comment on it, it's popping it back to the top of the stream, so you're getting that extra benefit too. So if it's good, it will be reshared and commented on, and that's pretty much the rule of thumb. You know, not all of my posts get the same results. Some get better than others, and it's just how we how we shoot, the day we shoot, or if sometimes we think we have a dynamic image and no one else seems to think so. So, you know, it just kind of goes that way. But, you know, share yours, share others, and, you know, when you share others too, what happens is they're gonna start to share your work too. It still is that, you know, being nice to each other, you know, one hand helps the other hand. So, you know, by sharing other people's work on a regular basis, if you find people that really do great images, they're going to start resharing yours. And if they don't, you might want to start looking for new people to share, you know, because it should be some reciprocal in this. You don't do it for that reason, but I mean, it's just like thanking people. It's nice to be courteous and to be good to the people you're plussing with.

So, yep. Okay, so I'm looking looking for the picture. It's just upgrades because I don't have any of my automatically uploaded backups past February 1st, which means that picture I put in yesterday— oh, wait a minute, what is that? Oh, how wild. Okay, I just discovered there's a calendar. If you click on the little link that looks like a in that square of 9 buttons, there is a calendar that shows you by month. That's pretty wild. Things we discover. But it's still not showing me my— I want all photos. Maybe that's my problem. It's just showing me highlights. You can get highlights. So that means that the highlights are going to show you what people have clicked on a lot. And then you can also— they have a video recognition software that recognizes your face. And so in people's photos, you can tag people just like you can tag people on Facebook. So if you go to a big conference and you start to be in those images where there's, you know, 5 or 6 people in a lineup and everybody snapped a picture, you can be tagged by other people with your image. So if you're a concerned social media person, realize that that can happen in Google as much as it happens in Facebook.

Here's a quick question, it's not really on what we're doing, but it is, how effective from a business standpoint is integrating Pinterest for images? So if that means using them As part of your business tool, I would think it's a good thing.

People always want to see what things are. Is that one from business?

That's from Roskens Citicals again.

When I want to buy a product, there are 3 things I always want to know. I want to know what's in it, I want to know who made it, and I want to know how much it costs. So how much it costs is easily looked up, always. You know, you can get a ballpark idea of price. If nothing else, you go to Amazon and get a ballpark idea. But what it is and what's in it, I need to see the product. So for any business, having images of your product on Pinterest allows people to talk about your product in a way that will organically share it. For us bloggers, our product is our recipes and yeah, you absolutely want to be on board and pinning it and you want to be able to pin other people's products. It is so funny, I cannot find this photo. I can't answer the question about the URL. I'll come back to it in the stream once we've ended the show and I can find my image. I don't really think it can be embedded though. I don't think it'll be a live link. Although somebody with any kind of programming smarts, I'm sure if you did maybe an a reference and put the link in, I bet it would become live. But I would find somebody who knows how to do that.

There's got to be somebody out there that knows how to do it. We'll have to check that too.

I've never tried to do that because with the friends and me, what happens is as things go out through friends and me, plus mentions become just a plus in front of people's names. It's no longer an active link. If I do an symbol, it does not become active on Facebook. If I'm trying to ping somebody on Facebook, I have to go to Facebook and edit the post to ping them. If that's part of your strategy, you may want to start out at Facebook because having to share it out and then edit it is just as inconvenient as going there. That's where I'm at with it. Personally, I drop everything in here. I drop everything into Google+. Nothing starts at Facebook anymore.

You don't want to schedule on Google+. That's not a real good thing. Scheduling elsewhere doesn't seem to affect it as much. Yeah, there's a nice comment from Mona Holmes. The both of you are just amazing, so full of good information. Keep it coming. I love all that you do. And thank you very much, Mona.

You're welcome. So yeah, oh, sorry.

That's okay. Here's another one from Kim Boltman. Jean Layton, I have no idea when you find the time to be a doctor, gluten-free doctor, a mom, a G+ guru, and technical savvy to boot. But I truly appreciate you sharing your time and expertise.

Thank you, Kim. Google+ has become my hobby. I have to be honest. I used to knit a ton. I still knit occasionally. You'll see me at conferences, my knitting needles in hand. I really like things that make my brain move to new places. I've been playing with Google+. To me, it's not really work. Chef and I had talked for— we've talked for a long time and realized that one of the things that was stopping our friends from coming over here was that they didn't have the step-by-step, oh, what do I do next, you know, the training. And you can read a lot of the, you know, like What the Plus book is an awesome, awesome book to read, but it's a little bit above the matter-of-fact getting set up and a lot of things have changed since that book was written. That's the thing about Google+ platform. Everything keeps moving and you have to just kind of flex with it and move along. I'm having fun. This is a great stream for me. I doctor because I always doctor and my kids understand that when I'm on the I'm on the air, I'm working.

That's right.

Although today they're a little bit sad because it means there's no bandwidth for them until I'm off the air. It's a day off from school for them.

They can go out and play in the snow. Yep. And here's another question from Adrian. She wants to know again, what was that program called for sharing?

Friends and Me. —and I'll put it into the comments. Okay.

And then Adrian asks— they're awesome— question for me: Does the 80/20 rule apply to what you share on your page? I've seen pages sharing almost only their own content on their pages. And yeah, it should apply to everyone. Some people don't feel they need to share everyone else's work, Adrian, and that's just, you know, how some people go. If you look on my page, I probably share more than 80/20. You might find days where it's like 2% is my work and the other 98% is everyone else's work. So I don't have a problem with that because you just have to remember one very important rule about Google+ is good content is good content no matter if it's your content or someone else's content. So by sharing good content, people are going to follow you just because you provide a service. You're giving them something interesting to look at. You're giving them good information that will help them. You're providing a service. So it's just like writing your own blog. People follow you on your blog because you provide information and a service. So you're, as a curator, are doing just the same thing on Google+. If you only provide your own work, people will go, oh, you're not very social, you're not an engager. It's the person standing on the table at the cocktail party and yell, "Look at me, look at me!" That's all you want to do. So those people don't do very well on Google+. They may initially, and unfortunately a lot of them are the ones with the best images. So I really won't share their things anymore. I used to, and I tried to help them understand, and most of them just didn't want to understand. It's always the excuse, "I don't have time." Well, yeah you do. Because you're on Facebook, you're on Twitter, you have time, you just need to manage it and you need to find your priorities. And then you have the people that only share certain other people's work. Well, Google catches on to that eventually too and your growth will stop because pretty much if you're sharing the same 10 people's work all the time and they're sharing yours, you almost become a different kind of a spammer. It's almost like you put that black hat SEO onto a different category. You're trying to gain something by playing a game. So they catch on to that and your growth kind of stops. They may not react to you as a spammer, but you're not going to gain the benefits of it. So you really want to be out there, and by sharing other people's work, something else really auto-magically happens, and that is you connect with more real people who think like you do, that you like, that you enjoy spending time with online, and relationships build, and through those relationships, opportunities happen that you would have never seen otherwise.

The other thing to remember is that you don't have to be one-dimensional here. It's not that you have to take 20% of your food blogging work and share 80% of other people's food blogging work. You can take 20% of your food blogging work and push it out there and talk about other people's knitting, SEO, Ukraine, you know, you can show you as a multi-dimensional person who happens to food blog rather than a food blogger who focuses on nothing but what's currently in season from your geographic area. Talk about the farms you go to, talk about, you know, you can still talk about your topic but come at it from all the aspects of your topic. If you're a baker, start talking about all the different kinds of sugar that you use and why you choose to use those types of sugar. I would bet that Domino's might be interested in talking to you, you know, that kind of thing. You know, there are, there are so many ways to talk about what we do without having to talk about this recipe.

When you do find something else that interests you, add an introduction to it. What you'll see a lot of the SEO people do, or those type of bloggers do, is they'll find a post that they really like the premise of, or they really like the post, and they'll end up writing an intro to it that's longer than the post. So when that goes into the search, you're actually— they may end up higher in search for that post from someone else just because they wrote a really good intro to it. So it keeps things moving in a good way, and you know, you're sharing someone else's work at the same time. So you're winning, they're winning. It's always going to be about everyone winning. If it's just about you winning it won't last too long and it won't go over well. Kim has another question here: where was that calendar button, Jean Layton? On photos.

So you are in your home stream, drop down on the left-hand side to photos, and then look up on the upper right-hand side. There's the image of you, and then there's a little 9 grayed-out boxes in a square. Click on that and it'll show you where your You have a calendar at that point that says you can go back to January of 2012 or whatever. I have to be honest, I had never seen it until this morning. Whether or not it's always been there, I don't know. It's an awesome way to be able to say, "Oh, I did the recipe testing on this back in January and now I can go pull my production steps out of those images." I have to tell you the honest truth. If you blog on Blogger, dropping your images correctly sized into your post is incredibly easy. Incredibly easy. I'm halfway tempted to be moving back to Google. Halfway. I'm still having a conversation with my IT guy because he's like, "Nope, you want to stay on WordPress." I'm like, "It's hard to work on WordPress." We're still talking.

I know, I'm still waiting for Google to automagically change Blogger to make it even more special.

I would bet that they're going to. I think that they realize that if they can get people to curate on Blogger rather than on anything else, they get what they want out of the situation. They can find the people who are the experts who are talking about a topic, who are promoting other people's work, who are sharing good content without having to worry about searching somewhere else.

Andy Lines is in the house. Hi Andy! And it's yoo-hoo to Mark Seidel, you are a-mazing, just saying. And yes you are, Mark Seidel, we all agree with Andy on that one. And here's a comment from Kirsten, uh, Gene Layton, now if the Google Glasses could keep your hands free, you could be knitting while doing this. Though it appears that you, like me, cannot talk without your hands.

Yeah, I'm from the East Coast where you have to use your language, and I'm one of 6 kids, so being able to do hand gestures is incredibly important in my conversation. But the idea of Google Glass is incredibly intriguing to me. The $1,500 cost is making it not happen. But the idea— I have a friend who actually bought Glass, and she bought Glass with the intention of being able to do recipe videos while she's cooking. Right now she's in the process of launching a new product, so I don't think she's actually worried about that aspect right this second. But I am really watching to see what happens for her because she's an amazing woman, Erica Kerekes. Her new product is Not Ketchup. I can't wait to get my hands on a bottle. I've been debating whether I want to order it, but I'm about to start traveling for the month of March. That just makes it hard to test anything. I won't be home. I'm speaking at IACP about Google+ in one of their little roundtable things. I can't wait for that. I'm going down to the Natural Products Expo West. If anybody has questions or wants to be able to try and see what Expo West is like, I'm actually going to be trying to do some short videos of Expo West. I've got press pass so I can do that. If you've never been to that event, it's 4 football fields on one floor and then 2 more down below. It's an immensely large show and it's all about food and supplements and that kind of thing. Wow, that should be fun.

Let's see what else we got.

Here, sir? Oh, you go ahead.

Sunny says, Sunny says, Sunny says, what if you see the same thing being shared by 10 different people? I don't want to remove them from the circles they are in, but I don't want to share certain content because I've already seen it 10 times myself. Does that make sense?

Oh, it absolutely makes sense. What I do, Sonny, is I go back to the original sharer and share from them, and then at the bottom, before I actually hit go, I put /h/t and the names of the people who shared in the middle. And /h/t HT is hat tip. It's kind of a way of saying thanks for bringing this to my attention. It pings them that you saw it and it tells them that yes, it was content you wanted to see. But it means you only share out once from the original person and it goes into their ripples. You can hear the strategy is I want the original sharer to get the understanding of where it went.. But I also want the people who hit the in-between to know that I saw it from them so that they know that I'm acknowledging them. That yeah, it was great content and thanks for bringing it to my attention. The hat tip is just one of those Google+ things. It's just saying thank you in a different way. That's the thing I love about Google+ is people are really polite here. There's not the slamming and shaming.

I just like saying things. And there's nothing— it certainly doesn't cost you anything to add that hat tip in there, and it's just a good way to form another bond and make a new friend, or to make a friend feel special by acknowledging them. So it's a good thing. And Adrienne brought up a point, she said she meant as her page as opposed to profile. So that changes things a bit, Adrian, because I am not one for promoting your— and again, it's my opinion— for promoting your page as much as your profile, then I would not use that 80/20% rule there because that would mean you'd be spending extra time on your page that you could spend on your profile engaging and getting new followers. So that would be my take on it. You'll probably find just as many people saying exactly the other thing, but it depends on which one you want to build. And for me, I, you know, I go back to my days when I was in the martial arts, and I was gonna take all these different kinds of martial arts and to make myself even, you know, better. And my one instructor said, you have to think of it as digging a hole, and if you dig 10 holes, you'll never reach your goal. If you dig that one hole and spend that energy on that one hole digging straight down, you'll reach your goal much faster. It's the same thing with Google+ and pages. I'm not telling you to abandon your page. You can post onto your page, that's fine, you know, but I would not spend that time there. I would spend it on your, on your personal page.

What I do with my business pages is I share publicly into my profile stream first, always, and then I reshare from my public profile stream to the page to curate so that my pages are nothing but my work in that particular narrow focus. Because I figure, my theory is, if somebody's following my page, they're following my page for a very narrow focus. I curate for that narrow focus and only that narrow focus. If they want to know me, they're going to come follow me as a profile. I have a page for Gluten Free Doctor. All you'll see there is gluten-free food. I do share other people's gluten-free food into that stream because quite honestly, I can't possibly create everything in the world gluten-free. There's a lot of fascinating people out there. Then I have another page for Wingwoman Productions, which is my Wingwoman Production post every week. Probably one of the most inactive pages on Google because it gets one post a week. But if somebody wants to be able to see just that narrow slice on Google+, they get it there. I encourage them to pop on over to my site, but that's what it is. So that's how I use it. You're your person.

Yeah, and you know, like I said, you will find other people saying exactly the opposite and you can always find people, like on any topic, that will give you conflicting. So it's what you feel comfortable with. And Mark Seidel, automagically, I'm telling Ronnie Benser.

He knows I will always use that phrase because I love that phrase.

It's magic. Yeah, it is. I think we need a Google Urban Dictionary. Automagically it just should say, see Ronnie Benzor.

There is a dictionary on Wingwoman Productions. I started a dictionary because there's so many of these terms like hat tip and hurl and shoo and automagically. Yes, there is a dictionary and I keep it up to date so whenever I see something new pop up in conversation, I go and put an entry in. Hurl means hang out in real life. It's not the other option.

Yes, I know I say that to my wife and she goes, "Oh my God, that's such a terrible name, Hurl." Have you added my HOAS as HOAS as people who appear in a lot of shows?

No, I don't think I have. I've got to go back and edit.

Okay. That's always my favorite and thank Craig Fifield for helping come up with that, although his description I think was a little different. It's G-rated.

My dictionary is G-rated.

Alright, well, it'll be left to your imagination. Andy Lines, did you already talk about it if it's best to post a blog post here on G+ with just the link and an image versus sharing right from the website's page? I love to share folks' work from their blog websites and happily share a quote from the blog, but I'm not going to stop and upload an image.

Andy, what I do is if I want to give the person the best possible pop in Google+, I do download an image and upload it. I can download and upload a much larger image than that thumbnail. You can see in the Google Stream where the thumbnails are falling and where the other images are falling. If my goal is to give them a big pop, I download and upload. If my goal is to simply share their work, I will click share and go for it. I have to admit, I do more of the second than of the first because of the time.

It all comes down to the time you have and what you think is best. It's just, you know, if you're sharing it, you're curating it for yourself, you're trying to help, that's fine. You know, do it that way. And I think sometimes in subjects other than food, it's not as critical, but they just don't seem to respond as well to non-visual stimulus. You know, it's like anything else. And again, going back to a good portion of Google+ is men, so, and everybody knows men do not respond to things that aren't visual. You know, fire good. Okay, so that kind of philosophy.

Speaking of images, because we're now getting close to the hour, oh my gosh, Chef Dennis has got one of my favorite, favorite visual people coming on his show on Friday and you need to talk about Adam.

On my show this Friday?

Yeah, isn't it this Friday you've got Adam Barnes?

Adam Barnes was last Friday.

Oh, shoot. Shoot! Okay, everybody go look at last Friday's show. I missed it. Damn. He was good.

Actually, Adam was— was— he was taking it all in. He was— he loved the show. He's never really been on with other guests, and he had a great time talking and listening to other people too. And we had a surprise guest. We had Matthew Rappaport joined us from the Huffington Post. It was very kind of him. And in fact, I put a picture of him eating bacon up on my page you might like. It was a nice GIF of him stuffing a piece of turkey bacon into his mouth. Ew! Yeah, it was very, very cute for him. But yeah, he came to us from the Huff, and he was in a position that made him look like CNN. There are people going by him on each side, and it was really fun. But yeah, Adam had a good time.

I'll have to go back because Adam is one of my favorite food stylists. I mean, I've got a quartet of— if I see their name, it's like I automatically know I'm going to love their work. But Adam's one of my favorites.

He's been so busy on 2 new books that he has not been on Google+ as much as he should.

And that's true.

Okay, so let's see if we have any other questions here. Some remarks, people thanking you for the hat tip.

If anything, you know, if you guys you see anything on Google+ and you don't know quite what it is, by all means check the dictionary first because I probably have explained it there. But if not, let me know and I'll figure out what it means and I'll get back to people because not knowing the language is really difficult. There's a lot of language within this platform that is very unique. And it all depends on which circle of people you're talking to, because I'm sure the photographers have a whole different set of language. And I follow a fair amount of the photographers just because I love their pretty pictures.

It's just like learning, taking the time to learn. Ronnie Binzer does a great job because Google won't tell you. He asks them all the time, what do you want to call that? And it's pretty much, well, this is what it is, what do you want to call it? So it's like, ah, now we have to come up with a name. It's like we never had a name There's a little 3-prong tool in the comment tracker that we always say, click on the thingy or click on the prong. I actually named it Bob and that was after Mia Voss's 3-legged cat. We call the tool Bob now just so we have a name to call it. I don't know if that's catching on but I figured that was a good tool.

It will now. It's going to go in the dictionary. There you go, Bob.

Bob. Bob approves too.

It's a bunch of engineers putting together a platform and they're not the people that want to label things. They'll tell you the code behind it but they're not going to give it a name.

Ronnie does. If they did name it, you probably wouldn't like the name anyway.

Exactly. Next week's show is about Google Local which means it's the setting up a page, a business page for entities that actually have a physical location. And as I'm doing the more recent research about Google Local Pages, if you have not already set up a business page, you may want to wait until after the show because everything I'm reading is saying that anybody who has the possibility of ever having anybody come to their place of business, and that could include your home, you want to set it up as a Google Local because of the tools it opens up to you. That's going to be a complex show, just warning you. But if you have a bakery or you have a restaurant or you have a bar, you absolutely want to be set up as Google Local.

It's also a good opportunity for us who may not have those, who want to understand how to use use Google Local to leave comments and leave suggestions and reviews. Reviews. Because that also becomes a big part of who you are and helps your authority. You can review any business, it doesn't have to be a restaurant, it could be any business, a tire service, anything that you go to. You'll find people are so sick of Yelp because Yelp has got so colored and jaded and it's ruined people and nasty. Google, you have to be a person. Nobody's going to take an anonymous comment to heart. It really is a better use of a referral program.

That's the thing, it really takes it to, I'm talking about this, I'm claiming my personality about this review. It's an amazing thing. Okay everybody, I'll keep answering questions if if you have them in the comments.

We're going to call it a day because we hit an hour again.

We hit an hour again. We keep saying it's going to be half an hour.

I know, but I think as we move into more subjects and we're going to start going in deeper into blogging things too, so once we've covered all of the Google+ world and they'll always be there for you to go back and recheck, but we like doing this so we're going to keep doing it. If you have suggestions or topics for shows you want, just let us know. But for today, Jean Layton and myself are going to say goodbye and thank you for stopping by today for the Blogger's Guide to Using Google+ Effectively. We'll see you all real soon. Bye everybody.