The Bloggers Guide to Using Google+ Effectively - HOA's with Ronnie Bincer

Hey there, I'm Chef Dennis Littley, and today we're here with the Blogger's Guide to Using Google+ Effectively, and we've got a great show for you today. We're going to talk about Hangouts On Air, and who better to talk about them with my co-host Gene Layton is the Hangout helper himself, Ronnie Benser. Ronnie, thanks so much for being here today.

It's my pleasure, thanks for having me.

And we also have a guest in with us from across the pond, Phil Ashton. He's a learning his way on doing Hangouts, so he wanted to sit in on this and learn from the master himself in a live Hangout. So Jean, thanks for stopping by today too, and we're always good to see you. And Jean is going to relinquish her role as talking about the Hangout as she usually does. You know, I just sit here and look pretty for everyone.

I get to look pretty this week. We'll let Ronnie do it.

The two of us get to look pretty and we're going to let Ronnie do all the talking pretty much. So if you have questions, ask them in the comment bar and we will be happy to get to them. As soon as we can. Alright, Ronnie, it's all yours, my friend.

That's it? Just go right for it?

Go right to it. Hangouts on Air, buddy.

Okay, Hangouts on Air.

It's only a half hour, Ronnie.

It's only a half hour, so here we go fast. Just to remind everyone, there's a difference between a broadcast, which is what a Hangout on Air is, versus a regular video call or a Hangout video call. And because the Hangout video calls are just you and your friends chatting together and it's not being broadcast. The Hangout on Air, you start the process slightly differently, but once you're inside the room, it looks pretty much the same. But the key is when someone who's the host, the person that starts it, they have a button that says Start Broadcast, and they can actually turn it on, and now it's become visible for everybody in the world to potentially see. And the guests that are in the film strip have a little indicator in the upper right corner that says Live. So that lets them know it's being broadcast, so you know not to scratch your nose too much or whatever you might be doing, because you never know, you might be in that main box, the main window, because the host of the Hangout has that control. It's kind of like they're the cameraman or the camera person. They can click on you and feature you, and that, even though you might not be visible to other people in the film strip, You are still the primary star at that moment in time because you are what's called blue boxed, so you're in the main camera view. If the host is not doing the blue boxing, then it simply does like a regular Hangout does, meaning it'll switch the camera based on who's talking. So it's very, very similar to a regular Hangout video call, and you guys covered that— was it last week?

Last week.

Last week, okay. So the Hangout video call where you're meeting with up to 10 people in this room pretty much exactly the same, it's just the very beginning of it starts differently. So let's talk about how you start it. So you would go, if you're, if you're the host, it's your job to be the producer, the person running the show basically. It's going to not only be on you to start it, but it's also going to go to your YouTube channel. So what happens is when it's broadcast live, it goes out through a YouTube channel and it has to know who to connect with So it's going to choose to connect with the YouTube channel that you, the host, have created. So before you're even able to do one, you're going to need to connect your YouTube channel to your Google+ profile or your Google+ page, and that's something you may have not done yet, or maybe you have. Bottom line is they do need to be connected. So once they're connected, then you go to the leftmost sidebar, and Jeanne has this in her post, so you're going to want to check that out. In the leftmost sidebar, you slide down to where it says Hangouts. And then in the Hangouts area, you have a page that'll give you a blue button that says Start Hangout on Air. And do we want me to share a screen with that?

Okay, I've got it coming up.

Okay, so there it is. So I'm gonna leave it to Chef Dennis because I think he's the host here. He's running the show, therefore he's blue boxing or controlling what you guys viewing right now are seeing. Right, Chef Dennis?

I got it there.

Excellent, good. And I'm pointing out to you this, those of us that are in the film strip, we don't know what the host has actually clicked on. So this is just one of the odd things if you're actually on the inside of a Hangout On Air, is you will see what you see that's slightly different potentially than what the host is pointing out. So that's just something for you to realize. So right now we're looking at what you see when you first start through the Hangout menu, you have a blue button which that little orange arrow is pointing to. It says Start a Hangout on Air. If you've been around a little bit, it has changed names every once in a while. It used to say Schedule a Hangout on Air, but now it says Start a Hangout on Air again. So basically you're gonna click on that and scroll down a little bit, Jean, if you would, and that'll bring you to the next thing, which is this right here where you give your Hangout on Air a name. And this is going to be the name of your video. This is the title or the name of the video. So that's the very top area. Then below it you have some text where you can put in description text and talk about what the video is about or what your show is going to be about. And then you got two options: one, now, or to the right of it you have a thing that says later. So you can say, I want to go live right now, I'm ready to start, or I want to plan this for later in the week. So if you were to click on later allows you to choose a date and a time for when you're starting. And I don't know that you have a screenshot for that, but that—

I don't.

Okay, so that basically allows you to say, you know, my Hangout On Air is going to start next week on Tuesday at 3 PM, and it's going to be based on your own time zone. And you can say it's going to last 30 minutes or going to last an hour or 2 hours. You can list in it whatever you want, even though it doesn't affect the broadcast. You can start early, you can end late, it doesn't matter, it's just there as a reference. But one of the important things which Gene has put properly in there is when you are making the initial post, this is what you're doing, you're making a post, you have to invite the public. If you don't invite the public the very first time, you pretty much, um, gotta start over. So this is really what you're doing is you're building a Hangout on Air event when you do it this way.. And this is the standard way nowadays. So you always want to invite the public first and then you click on the little button that says share. Once you've done that, it's actually created a Hangout on Air event and it will show up in your stream. It's also available for others to find on the event page. So once they've come to it, she— Jean's got one that's called test. She's looking at it from the inside. We're sort of jumping around really fast here. Cause I know we have a short period of time. So we have the ability to be in our own event when we're ready to start the show, and that's where Jean can move her mouse over to where it says Start. There's a blue button that says Start, and honestly, that's a bad name. I don't like that name, but that's what it is. Because you would think that starting means I'm ready to go live, but that's not actually what it does. It starts the process of building the Hangout on Air. So we're gonna— when we click on that, it opens up what's called the— what I call the green room. It opens up the interface of the Hangout on Air, which, if you scroll down a little bit— yes?

Okay, I actually did a screenshot that shows the— this is in my stream last night, and then did something about the details. So that's the next picture.

Okay, so we're gonna go Did you edit and add in a—

I was just going to talk about it more.

Just talk about it. Okay, so back up before we start our show, before we do the start part. Jean went in and was able to go to the event itself and then under the details area there's a dropdown where it lets you edit and she basically was pointing out this is—

This is where you put in all of the date/time A second way of putting in the date and time.

Or you can make edits and modifications. Basically, I would come here and do edits by adding in a banner because they've recently allowed us to add the big old banner that goes all the way across the top. This is how you add it in by doing the edits of the detail area. Let's say we've made it pretty, we've set it up the way we want. Scroll up just a little bit again, Jeanne, to the start button. Up a little, there we go. And so you're gonna— now it says Showtime, we're ready to start the show. The show's gonna start at 1 PM, let's say, so at 12 noon, an hour ahead of time, I will come in, I'll click that Start button, and it brings me to the place where I see that big green icon that she's got there, and then it eventually pops up to where I can invite my Filmstrip guests. These are the guests that I want in the show, not those watching The people watching were already invited through the event creation, but now we're bringing them into the Hangout on Air. And so she can type in names, or we can type in the names or circles of people that we want to bring in and invite them. Or what I actually do is I skip this. I click where it says Skip. I get in alone and I turn on all the tools that I want until I'm happy with it, and then I invite in my guests using the invitation option within the Hangout interface. So Jeanne's showing now that it's— she's turning on tools like the Hangout Toolbox, and that's some of the tools that I'll do ahead of time. And then—

Really bad image.

There's an image that shows the tool, the lower third, which is what many of us have here, and that's part of the Toolbox. And so then go ahead and scroll down a little more. So I can see what we're talking about.

The next one's just the Hangout Toolbox.

Okay. Just for turning on the lower third. Get your name up there on there. That's called the lower third, right? And then scroll a little further down and now we're on the interface. There we go. If you move your mouse when you're inside the Hangout, just like a regular Hangout, if you move your mouse you get to see the tools. So it's important if you're wondering where the heck are all those tools. It's because you need to stick your mouse on top of the interface and wiggle it. Just wiggle the mouse. And once you wiggle it around, then you get to see, like at the very top, there is a red telephone thing. That's for hanging up. You wanna leave? That means you're gone. Bye-bye. You click that. To the left of it, you have a bunch of other tools. The leftmost one is how you invite more people into the show, into the film strip. So that's another way to get them to be coming into the Hangout. Okay, they're not the viewers, they're the actual members of the show. So, and then there's other tools that you'll see on the left side. Those are what are called Hangout apps, and the one that most of us are using is the one that looks like a red toolbox, and it's called the Hangout Toolbox. That's what allows you to put that name down on the bottom, the lower third. So then if you want to close that image, I think you're in—

Yeah, it opened up on me.

Yeah. Then we'll scroll down a little bit more and—

and then I went into a— the post goes into a script that I sent out to a group of people who were in a series of hangouts I did. So talking about all the prep for somebody who's going to be a filmstrip participant.

Fantastic. So you're giving instructions like, look at the camera and don't look down at the filmstrip, maybe, or— I thought you said something about a double chin. I was just skimming.

I did. Yes. Put your camera high. I was working with Mostly women, and the image is important, so get your camera high enough.

Positioning your camera is important. The other key that's a big one that a lot of people don't realize is if you can try— it takes a while— but get your mind into the fact that you need to look at the camera in order to let it look like you're actually looking at the people. Because if you do what everyone else does, the normal thing is you're gonna wanna look down at that film strip, and now you see the top of my shiny head. So if I'm doing that, it's not a good idea. You want to try to spend your time looking at the camera when you're actually talking, and it's, it's a skill you have to learn. It's an acquired skill. So with that said, what you've done, you started the process by building what's called a Hangout on Air event, or sometimes we call it a scheduled Hangout on Air event because you can schedule it a week or however long ahead of time. Then you invited people to come watch it from the outside. They're actually watching the event, but built into the event is a Hangout On Air. Then comes showtime, right before showtime you actually start the process, you get into the interface, you invite in your guests, you make sure all the tools are good, you make sure everybody's happy, and then you have a button on the bottom in the middle that says Start Broadcast. And until you hit that Start Broadcast, nobody's seeing anything. So just realize that, because a lot of people don't realize when you start a Hangout On Air, you think you're going to be live right away. You're not. You control as the host when you go live, and only the host has those controls. The other people that are guests, they're just like in a regular Hangout, so they don't have any of these extra controls unless the host shares some of them with you. And I don't want to get into that techie stuff, but the host only alone is able to start and end the show. And with that said, I'm gonna bring it back to questions or other comments you guys might have. Because once it's gone live, it's now streaming live, it's also going to be recorded and when you're done and you've ended the show, it then will automatically turn into a video that sits on your YouTube channel that you can promote as often and as anywhere you need to do it.

So Ronnie, there's one, how to link your Google+ to your YouTube. We have not covered that prior in this series. And I know you are the YouTube expert.

That's a great question, and it'll take a long time or a short time. It depends on whether you did a good job to begin with or you kind of made a mess. And I tend to work one-on-one with people cleaning up messes. That's what I— part of what I do for a living. So the answer is, how do you connect the two? Well, automatically your Google+ profile will create its own YouTube channel. Automatically, and hopefully that's the right one. But if you've ended up with 3 or 4 or 5 different Google+ accounts, you now have 3 or 4 or 5 different YouTube accounts. You might not even realize it. So one of the tools, or one of the things that I suggest people do, is figure out which is the main account that they want to use based on potentially, do they have some value already on YouTube? And if they do, they want to use the account that's automatically connected to YouTube.. If not, it's a much more difficult process to try to take a channel that's connected to one account and move it over to another account. It is possible most of the time but not always. And so it's a good idea if you can to try to figure out, okay, if I've got value on a YouTube channel, which Google+ account is connected to that? And then see if you can start working there. Even though that sounds backwards, that's kind of what I would suggest.

Can I ask a question at this point? Something that some of the people watching this might be thinking of is when you first start on Google+ is should you use your personal profile or perhaps your business page? And that might be, you know, where people jump off from that might then also influence which YouTube account or channel they may want to use. I mean, I've started using my personal profile Hangouts on Air rather than my business one.

Yeah, and unfortunately there's a, there's a, how would you say, a mindset that needs to be changed, I think, for most people when they come into Google+ because they think, I got a business and I got a person and I don't want the two to be the same. And that's not the way Google+ likes, unfortunately. So as a result, they're going to encourage you as much as they can to make you be working as a profile. And if you have a separate page, you can do that, and your page can have its own YouTube channel, which is phenomenal and wonderful. At the same time it doesn't work. Okay, it just doesn't, at least from our experience being around here for a couple years. You've really got to get known as a person first before you can start promoting your brand. That seems to be the way it works. If you start as a brand only, you will be like some of the many casualties of Google+ that say there's nobody here, nobody cares, because they're not getting interaction. It's primarily because people care about people more than they care about business at first. Once you've established yourself as a profile, then it's easier to make activity work for you as a page. But this is a whole other conversation. I don't know if you want to go there, Chef Dennis Littley.

You're nodding. We have been having that conversation, Ronnie. It's something ongoing. It's the hardest thing for people to get their grasp because it's that Facebook mentality that we have all come over with where we have to be a brand, we have to be a brand. And no, you don't. You have to be a person.

Yeah, and the What ties into it, which is a little nerdy but I think you guys have covered, is the concept of authorship. I think you've— I'm pretty sure you've talked at least a little bit about the concept. Okay. Because a person profile can have authorship, whereas a page cannot. And so that's one of the keys, just to put the nail in the coffin and say, this is it. You've got to start as a person before you start promoting the page if you really want to have some good traction here. So with that said, Yes, you can have a Google+ account connected to a YouTube channel, and it can be a profile or a page that's running it, but just realize it's a little harder to do if you start out as a page.

We had a couple of tech questions. Raydel, do you have to download the Hangout Toolbox app? Yes, you do once. After that, it's in your choice of tools. And you saw on the slide, I have a lot of tools that I can choose from. And use several in most Hangouts and just a couple that are just odd. I have a sign language tool because my daughters are in a sign language class, and so I would use that for them to do their homework, basically.

Great. So there, yeah, when there's on the left-hand side inside the Hangout interface, you have a list of apps. If you don't have the Hangout Toolbox in there, you can basically go to the very bottom, there's three little dots You mouse over that and it lets you choose more apps and you can grab them that way. Or what's very common is you just get into a Hangout with somebody else that has the app. All they've got to do is turn it on and it'll pop up a little blue box saying, "Ronnie's using the Hangout Toolbox, do you want to use it?" And you say yes and then give it permissions to do it and then from then on you have it. So once you load it in, it's part of your computer, actually it's part of your Hangout. And even if you're using multiple computers— yes, I like automagically too— even if you're using multiple computers, it stays with you. So it's really tied to your Hangout account, not so much your computer. And a lot of people think when they're downloading something it goes to their computer. It actually, in this case, is just going into the Hangout interface for you. So yes, and automagically is a word I don't know if I coined it, but I've been saying it for—

You coined it. It's your word.

30 years ago I started using it because I think it's amazing. It's automatically and magically. So it's automagically.

Here's a question from Kate McDermott: Can the name of the video be updated later?

Later? The answer is yes, of course, but when's later? After you're done recording and it's now sitting on your YouTube channel, you can go modify the title or the name of the video. But while it's live, you cannot change it.

And you could change the name of it before it went live too in the event.

Yes, if you have access to the live events area of YouTube, you will be able to go change the title as well as the description text. But many people, when they're first new, do not have access to that area, so I wouldn't stress that, or I don't.

And here's one other one.

Andy loves Filmstrip guests. Yes, she does. Sometimes I forget that these terms aren't Google+ wide, but I've been following Ronnie for as long as I've been on Google+ and he puts language with the terms so easily that that's what I call it. Green Room, all of those terms we keep using are coming from this guy.

I've made up names for a long time. A while ago, probably about a year and a half ago now, they came out with a whole new interface for Hangouts. And I asked the Google people, I said, what are we calling these things? You just threw out 17 new things. What are they called? And they asked me, well, what do you call them? I said, OK, I see where this is going. So I did a Hangout, and I said, let's just name these things. Here's what I call this, and here's another name. And I just tried to establish it because I do enough training And when people say, you know the thing, I clicked the thing but the thing didn't work. And I have no idea what thing they're talking about. So we have to have some terminology to reference and so I've hopefully come up with some that are useful.

Ronnie, we have a question from Andy here. Can you, speaking of branding, would you please show us how to add a customized banner for a Hangout? Or you can talk about how to do that if not.

And the famous mwah at the end.

Mwah. Yes.

Actually, I did a show once with Andy and I think it was Tom, he's gonna— I don't remember who the other person was, but we talked about how do we put in, like I put in a customized version of a lower third where two of the other folks on the filmstrip right now have it standard and Phil has another customized. So basically within the toolbox you've got the ability to click on the very top and turn on the standard. And the standard is what Chef Dennis and Jean are using. And it's pretty easy to do, you just type in your name, type in a subtext if you want, like the link to your website address or something like that, and you turn it on. And you can change the color of that strip and it automatically or automagically goes and finds your profile picture and sticks it in there. So it's pretty cool, very, very easy to do. But when you want to go to a different level, you have within that toolbox a section called Custom Overlay. And just think of it this way, it's a full-size picture. Even though all you see here is on the bottom, the size of the graphic takes up the whole screen. That's a real big important fact to understand. So because it takes up the whole screen, it has to have a layer or a level of transparency so that you can see my face. Otherwise it would just be a big block. Covering the whole thing. So this is actually one big old image, and at the very bottom is where I put in image text or pixels, and it's saved as a PNG, a PNG format. The size I use is 1280 by 720. That's the size of a full high-definition video—1280 pixels by 720 pixels, 1280 wide, 720 tall. And even though only the text on the bottom is visible because that's where I designed it,— it still has to be the full size. And that's called a custom overlay. And the advantage of the custom overlay is you can brand it, you can put anything in there you want, make it look anything like you want, and save it. You can even save it as a preset so the next time you come into your Hangout toolbox, it's there for you to choose from the list. So hopefully that's enough for now.

I have a feeling she was actually asking about a banner for a Hangout event. Oops. No, that's okay, but I— because that's a whole other story. All right, Dennis. This is the time to start talking about how you do all your training.

All right, yes, okay, so we'll use this as a plug for me. If you go to thehangouthelper.com, that's where you can find easy access to my website as well as to a membership site which talks about how you get into the Hangout Mastery Group. That's where we go into lots and lots of details. I do a lot of posting publicly, and I've been doing it for multiple years, so you can still find stuff for free. But when you want the deep dive— in fact, all of you guys, that's great, all of you are part of the Hangout Mastery.

All Mastery people. Yes, highly recommended.

Thank you, thank you. The key is, that's a wonderful community that you can go in and interact with all the people there. Everybody's very, very helpful. With each other, and I love that about the Hangout Mastery. But before we get too far into just the promo of, of me, okay, let's talk about that banner. The new version of the Hangout On Air that you're building through the method that we just talked about is allowing us to add a very big banner along the very top, and that was not available until just last week, okay? So this is sort of up to date, and that banner— I'm gonna look just to verify. It— there it is, it's 1200 by 300. I have a bunch of numbers on my whiteboard here. 1200 by 300 is the size of that banner that can go all the way across. So you can make your own customized banner. You can also pick and choose from the built-in ones. They give you a bunch of neat ones to use, or you can make your own. If you make your own, this is for the event itself, not for the lower third where I was talking about, but the event itself can have your own branded banner, and that is something you do when you've created your Hangout On Air. You've created what's called an event. You go back and you edit the event, and it allows you to add in what's called an event theme. That's the name of it. Even though everyone else in the world calls it a banner, the Google people call it a theme. So you're going to look for an event theme and edit the event theme, and that allows you to add in your own graphics, and if you make one that's 1200 wide by 300 tall, it will fit perfectly. So that's, I think, what I should have been talking about earlier. But you got to learn about the lower third too. And she did say—

she was happy about that— love the answer, I was wondering about that too, double the fun.

Okay, she missed the moi. Normally there's a moi with everything, Andy.

I think she got too excited with the double. She may be doing a cloud clap in the privacy of her own home. We'll leave it at that. Adrian Urban, I think Jeanne was the only one that got that. I sometimes have trouble—

I was on that Hangout.

I sometimes have trouble getting completely into an HOA. For example, today I came to Chef Dennis' profile, started listening but was unable to interact. After monkeying around, I finally clicked on a link in the posting and was able to interact. What is the right way to get in, to get into an HOA so we are really present and interacting?

Okay, I believe that one answer is understanding what into an HOA means, because some people believe that into a Hangout On Air or an HOA means into the filmstrip, and that's not necessarily the case for most people. It's usually limited to a small number of people because there can only be 10 at the most. And if there's 10, that's usually too many, okay, to have everybody talking during a show. So normally, being into a Hangout On Air probably for most people means into the event. So you're part of the event, so you can be typing text where other people are typing text. The easiest way that I would say is if you see the big banner, click on the banner. If you see the title to the Hangout On Air event, click on that title. It'll take you into the event. However, it's still okay if you just see it in the stream to start adding text right there because that's one share or one version of this same Hangout On Air event and if the host has done like Chef Dennis has, he's grabbed comments from anywhere and everywhere we can think of, we're going to be able to find your comments whether they're with the rest of the group or they're just out on the outside. But if you're trying to be where everybody else is or the majority of them are, I'd click on the big banner picture, that'll bring you right in or click on the title and that'll bring you into the event and then you'll see the long list of all the other people adding comments and things. So hopefully that's the real answer.

Very good. Yeah, I think that's what she was saying and that's the problem that a lot of them have is they want to be able to engage with everyone too, they're leaving comments and they don't know why no one else can see them or no one else can answer them so that would—

yeah, and being on the big event page where everybody else is, is also phenomenal place for networking because now you can see other people that are interested in what you are. You can base on their comments whether you want to interact with them or not. And so it's a phenomenal place for networking before, during, and after the live show. So it's a really great place to be when you're trying to network with others.

Can I mention that you mentioned at the beginning, Ronnie, about when you set up your HOA to always make sure the first time you set it up, it's public. I guess that's because there's quite a few tools that may not work if you make it private or to a specific group. Yeah. One scenario I'd just like to mention is, say if you've got, like I have here in the UK, a business networking group where there's about 30 members and you want to have a monthly HOA, but you're not going to have all 30 of them in the film strip. You may be going to have about 1 or 2 or 3 or even a special guest. So you're going to set up the HOA as a private event because it's a business group where people are members. So you set that up. There's going to be certain things that aren't necessarily going to work, and one of them is going to be the comment tracker. The comment tracker, right. Yes. So is there anything else that won't necessarily work if you don't make it a full public event? —public comment tracker.

When you create your event initially, you're creating a Hangout On Air event. When you make it public, then everything works, all aspects of it. When you make it private, there are certain tools, like the comment tracker, that won't work. There's another aspect, in essence, when people try to share that event, they can't share it publicly because it was private. They're not allowed to share it publicly. So if you did it by accident— It's one of those things you pretty much need to start over. So you need to make your Hangout On Air public initially if that's your goal. If it's trying to remain private, then you're fine. Just realize there's certain things, and those are the two things primarily. I mean, you can't reshare it publicly, and the tool, which is called the Comment Tracker, is not going to be able to work to grab comments because it can only grab public activity.

Okay, thank you. Alright, here's a question from Nazim.

Headphone versus non-headphone approach, pros and cons. Yeah, good one. And how much time you guys want to spend on these? Because we're, you know, at the half-hour point. I'll answer that question, but I'm just curious how long—

because we usually go over about 15 or 20 minutes.

Okay, okay, plan for half an hour to keep it under an hour. Okay, so headphone versus non-headphones. If you have hair, headphones aren't as much fun. Because, you know, it just messes with it. But I have no hair, therefore headphones fine for me. So the key though isn't just so much whether it's a headphone or earbuds. Like Phil, Phil's got a nice head of hair, so he's got some earbuds in there, okay? And I'm just picking on him that way. The key is you want to separate your speaker, which is your earbuds or your headset, from your microphone which is on a headset, it's built in, but they're automatically separated. If you are using your laptop, for example, that's where the biggest problems come in because it brings an echo. The echo that happens with the laptop can be eliminated by simply putting in earbuds, and then you use the speak— or the microphone that's built into the laptop. But if you have a chance, you're gonna— you'd be better off having a separate microphone because it tends to give you better quality of sound. And so I, I go the relatively cheap route, which is a $30 headset, but I have handy to show people in the box a more expensive thing called a Snowball, which is what Phil is holding up as well. This is the box for it. Yes, it's called a Blue Snowball, and that's about a $60 to $70 item which allows you to have a better quality sound. But the key is separating— you do want something to separate the speaker so it's not feeding right into the the microphone, and that can be accomplished very easily with a headset or with earbuds and a separate microphone to give you better quality.

I think Nazim, I don't think saw last week's show, and in last week's show we covered microphone, headset, lighting, all the basics for the video call.

Okay, sure. Yeah, so it's the same thing whether you're annoying in a Hangout or you're annoying in a Hangout On Air. Actually, it's worse on Hangout On Air, right, because more people can see you being annoying, and you don't mean to be annoying, it's just, it happens because of the echo. So another tip that ties in with that is when you're not, when you're in a Hangout or Hangout On Air and you're not speaking, you can always click on the mute button to mute yourself, and that's a great idea in case the phone rings, the dog barks, somebody yells at you from the other room, whatever, you don't want to necessarily have that sound coming in when you didn't expect it to come in. So muting yourself is a great idea, and then unmute yourself when you're ready to talk.

Very good. There's one from Andy. When you set the event time period for 30, will the broadcast automatically end at 30?

No, it will not. It is scary though. Yeah, it does, because it makes you— you're not so sure, and I've had that question a fair amount.

But what it will do is it'll end your event in people's calendars, so they're not going to know if you've gone overtime and are still answering questions. It'll drop out of their Gmail calendars.

Right, so one of the keys is you want to try to have the event time be as close to what you expect it to be as possible. And you actually can choose from the drop-down list where it's based on every 30 minutes, or you can type in any number you like. So I put in 48 minutes, 0:48, and that's a 48-minute hangout. So you can type in any number you want, but by default you can just choose— you just choose the menu, but it doesn't actually start or end related to your time, that's based on you pressing certain buttons is when it starts and when it ends is you press the button.

Okay, it looks like we've actually handled most of the questions, Chef.

I think so. I think so.

So next week our show is semantic search and we have another guest coming. We have David Ammerland joining us to talk about semantic search, which is a whole big question of how do we make sure that people find our work on Google and on the web in general. And David is the gentleman who wrote the book, so we've got him coming.

Here's his book right here in case you want to see that. Called Google Semantic Search. Really, really great guy. He's very, very good at explaining what it is too as well. Yep.

And once again, Ronnie, for your Hangout Mastery Group, it's easy to find if you go to the Hangout Helper, click on that link and go to his Mastery Group. And if you do Hangouts, if you do them with any regularity and you want to keep up on things, that is the place to really be and to really learn. And we help each other. Like Phil was asking a question, I told him I was going live today and he wanted to pop in, he could come in. So you know, you'll have the help that you need besides just learning from the master himself. It's a great thing.

Thank you, very much appreciated.

You're welcome, I'm glad I got to meet you in person too.

There's links to both the helper group and the mastery group within the post as well with Ronnie's name in front of it. You've got links, lots of places. The least I could do, Ronnie.

We would all drop down and go, we are not worthy.

Thank goodness for Ronnie, let's put it that way, guys.

Thanks, and one big thing that's coming up soon is I'm going to be going to Austin, Texas for what's called South by Southwest. Woo-hoo! And I'm going to include as many of our Hangout Mastery folks to be part of the production while we're out there on the streets. We're going to have other people in the film strip interacting with us live while we're out there on the streets. So that's going to be fun and I hope— actually Jeanne, I know you're interested. Yes. So we're going to get you involved as best we can. That will be coming up pretty soon. And that's going to be the very beginning of March, the 7th through the 11th.

Sounds like fun.

Yes, I get to overlap that with another conference, so it'll be fun. Alrighty.

Alright, well, thanks everyone for stopping by today. Ronnie, thank you so much for being here, you were a great help as usual. Phil, it was nice to meet you in person. Thank you. And Jeanne Hall, it was a pleasure to have you here with me. You do make life so much easier.

And you for me. Thank you.

So we're having a good day here, and thank you for stopping by to the Blogger's Guide to using Google+ effectively, and we will see you next week with David Amerland. Bye-bye.