The First Annual(Virtual) G+ Bloggers Conference - Using G+ to Find and Engage with your Readership

Good morning, Google+. This is Chef Dennis Littley, and I'm here today with the G+ Food Blogging Community for our first annual virtual bloggers conference. And today we're going to kick off the conference, and we have a couple people in the house with us today. I'll introduce them first. We have Martin Shervington, who's going to be speaking on the topic today. Mark Traphagen has joined us too.

Hey, you pronounced my name correctly, that puts you way up in my book list. Double plus one and a recommendation.

Well, thank you very much. I heard it a few times, so that's not just on my own. Very good. So we're going to start right now and we're going to get into it. The topic for today is using G+ to find and engage with your readership. We're also going to speak on a couple other parts about G+. If you have questions put them into the comment bar and we will get to them as soon as we can. And enjoy the show, and I'm gonna turn it over now to Martin Shervington.

Hi, how you doing, Chef Dennis?

Very good.

Good to be here. And, uh, shall I give a little bit of background on me you wanted first?

Yeah, that would be great.

So I am a blogger, I'm a writer as well, and I studied organizational psychology, so I'm very much looking at how to influence and how to get engagement and how to communicate, particularly around using Google+. And that's why I spent the last year and a half of my life studying this platform, like Mark as well, and really trying to work out what's going on. So when things change, what does that mean? But particularly when it comes to what people relate to. And so I guess that's really where I start, is looking at what content we put out there and how we build our networks and what that then means for that content when it hits that network. Do people engage with it? And what does that then lead to? So in a way, I guess that's what we'll probably be unpacking today, is that whole process of the relatable content, whether people are engaging, and then where does it go? Oh, you've gone silent, Chef Dennis.

Thank you very much. I did mute myself so I wouldn't make any extra noise and I forget to take myself off. Alright, so that sounds like a good place to start and if you could really tell us what do you see as— I have a lot of friends that won't come on Google+, they're using Facebook, they think that is still the place to be and I always tell people, I say I never encourage anyone to leave any community that they have there. If you've got people following you there, you need to keep with them and keep engaging with them. But if you're using Google+, a lot of them are still trying to use it as Facebook, and it's completely different to me. It doesn't seem to work. What do you think is the best way to engage with people? And I'm talking about people that you might not know, because you want to build a following from people that you don't know. The people you already know are yours. You just have to keep them. But you want to get some new readers, you want to find new people and bring them on board. So how do you engage with those and get them to become readers?

Okay, shall I tell a little bit about how I started and how I did it? Because that might help for people to understand the process I used. I began blogging within the Google+ platform, the social destination aspect, and I very much spent my time in the platform. And I mentioned in the platform because I'm going to talk about search in a second, but I spent my time in there and built up a small audience. An audience of people who said, yeah, we like what you do, Martin. And so every time I would bring out a blog post, probably once a week, something new, people would engage. They'd post one comment, a lot of comments, and a lot of conversations start to happen and building relationships. Now that was very much using Google+ within the Google+ platform as people think about it. Now I spent months doing that, maybe even 6 months, and during that process, and this is a big tip if people aren't doing it already, I regularly built new Engager Circles of people that I didn't know. It's exactly as you're saying, Chef Dennis, about people who you don't know, the new audience. Well, as soon as they started to interact with me, started to engage, I would not only do my best to reply to comments and go and have a look at their content and build a picture of them, but I'd also build a new Engager Circle, and I still do this now. And when I put them in there, they know that that they've been added to a Circle, they get a notification. And I would then send a message to them privately as a group, usually less than 100 people, so maybe 50 to 100, and say, hey, I've put you in a new Engager Circle. I'm about to share this publicly, and you're in it, and would you like to receive future notifications from me? And now it would be by email. And a lot of people out of those, let's say 100, would say yes. So what I was doing was building a really dedicated little list of people that on a weekly basis were quite happy to receive a notification, and that became a hub for me. So in terms of getting more engagement, that was something that I did. Permission marketing is the methodology. So I used that within Google+ for quite a while and started to find that the engagement was going up.. And as soon as the content landed in people's notifications, they would go and have a look at that content and engage with it very quickly and often getting quite a lot of shares. So after a little while, I would then do a blog post from my website. And this is probably about 6 months after I really began blogging within Google+. And when I started to do that, I found that the engagement was just as high. Even though it didn't have the big attractive image that was embedded in the post that I used to use on Google+ within the platform. So it's on my website and it has a thumbnail, but people were still engaging because I was using the same methodology. I was saying to people, is it okay if I send this notification? And I sort of punctured through the attention block with all of the other things that's going on. So after I started to do that for a while, I noticed that my search results for particular keywords were really starting to lift up because the amount of engagement I was getting from all of the shares within Google+ was reflecting in Google search. And so going back to your original point about Facebook, this is a huge difference. You don't get that on Facebook. You know, you don't have the ability to influence your search results essentially through engagement of your content within Google+ as well., but also with engagement around your content on your blog. So that dance between Google search, my blog, which is martinsherington.com, and Google+ was something that I then spent quite a lot of time playing with. And that's what I still do very often, is understanding how that works. And Mark knows a lot more about search engine optimization than I do. But what we're all finding is that it's a very potent mix. To have your Google+ profile, to be blogging and have that there, and you'll find it in search. But I didn't start with that. I kindled the interest. I found my audience, and all strangers, nobody that I knew. But I spent a lot of time and found the ones that related to me and I related to, and that's how you build relationships.

That's great. We did have a question from Becca Heflin. She wanted to know, she says, you were sharing within the Google+ platform.. But what exactly does that mean? Are you sharing purely with a setting of public, or did you also create a group? And if so, how did you get people to find and join that group?

Well, so the first thing, I post pretty much all of the time public unless it's a message to a particular circle of people. So posting public gives me the greatest reach, the most likelihood of getting the search results in general search. In terms of, was there a community? If you're talking about, when you say group, talking about community back, I'm not sure. This wasn't involving communities at the time. And very much with the blogging, it doesn't need the communities in order to make it work. Because the communities are places where lots of people can put content, whereas this is focused on my profile primarily, where it's myself that can do it.

She just wanted to know if you had created a group that you then sent the notifications to.

I created a circle. Yeah, yeah, so I created a circle of people up to around about 100 that I would then notify, but I'd all ask them, I'd ask them all, is it okay if I send the notification to you? So that was one of the big things. But when you say I was sharing within the Google+ platform, what I mean is I was just blogging without involving my website for the first period of time, and then I would blog using my website and share that embedded link, the link from the top, as part of the Google+ post. So that way it links back to my website and then has benefits to the site as well. But to start with, I didn't do that. I just shared the content within Google+.

So you were actually just blogging on Google+ then?

Yeah, to find the audience, because the psychological leap that's needed for somebody to click an embedded link and go to your website, build a picture of it, there's something different that happens. There's a risk. One of the things I would say is what you're trying to do when you're creating content is reduce the social risk of people when they see it. This comes down to relatable content as well. Shall I dive in on that? Shall I explain what I mean by that?

Yeah, please do.

When people put anything out on Google+, they are measured by themselves as to whether people respond to it through +1s, comments, and shares. Those are the primary mechanisms that the people have. Who's got a network of people, and they've built that up, and they put something out, and there are no +1s, no comments, no shares, that means something. It means that people didn't relate, or that there's too much social risk for them to show that they +1'd or they commented or shared. There's something going on with that post. Now, there's lots of parameters. There's times of day and times of the year and all of these things. But generally, if people don't relate or the social risk is too high, they won't +1, comment, or share. So let's now take it back a few steps. When people have— and that network size could be anything from 100 through to a million— but when people start out, their network is formed, is based upon the type of content that they're sharing. If somebody is sharing lots of food stuff, then they tend to find that more people relate to them and add them in that are into looking at the images of food, talking about food, connecting around those particular subjects. If somebody's into cars, then their networks can be formed around that. So the content and the network have a relationship. So for instance, if I post lots of blogs on food, the network that's related to me during this whole time are going to turn around and go, why are you posting stuff on food all the time? You're not that into food, Martin. We didn't follow you because of food. We want cats on a Saturday. Come on. That's what we do. And that's because you get used to certain patterns within the network because there are groups of individuals that relate to you on different days, on different content, and so on. So one of the big things I look at when I'm helping people and coaching people around Google+ is relatable content for your network. And if you have relatable content, it will fly. And the usual tips around it are have a beautiful image. Something that makes people go, wow, I just want to plus that, I want to comment on it, I want to share that, I have an emotional response to it. So I think that that then helps to guide you, and you get so many bits of data that go off in your head when you build up an image of what your network relates to. And it's almost getting your eye in, if that makes sense. You don't have it necessary to start with, you don't know what's going to be the most relatable stuff. But when you do get it, you can find it a lot more easy to get engagement.

Excellent. We do have some questions on it, and one of them was about sharing. I know you did talk about sending out notifications, and this is like a big sore point with a lot of people, that people randomly send out posts to their circles, everybody's getting notifications, not necessarily— and I think the big key was you said you were asking them first. And it was to a specific circle. It wasn't to all their circles. It wasn't to people— because it's kind of redundant. I mean, you already have them in your circle, so if you're sending out your just normal blog post to public and then to circles, you're like, you've got those people already. You don't want to do that.

Absolutely. So I wondered when I was saying it, I was thinking, oh, this might be a little bit too far to be saying, which it might have been. So I'll explain it again. When I post, I will share to public, and there's no need to share to extended circles or circles if I do that, because it's already the furthest reach. So if that setting's there, that's that. But very often, if I do, let's say, something on travel— because I've been doing some travel events within the Plus Your Life community— and I built a circle of people I said, who loves the idea of luxury travel? Who wants to talk about it more? And I built that circle. I then send a private mail to those people. I haven't shared the circle publicly yet in this example. I send an email to them— sorry, a notification to them, which check the email box, they get the email, and I say, hey, I'm just about to put the public circle out. You're in it. Would you like notifications again? I'm not going to do it if you don't say yes, but if you'd like notifications from me again, then I'm going to put you in a circle. Because you're going to get the stuff first. You're going to make sure you don't miss anything. And you've got a certain percentage that will say yes. So you get a really strong opt-in. Now, yes, you've got to notify them by email once in order to make that work effectively. But people like being put in circles. So when I share the circles publicly, people then go, ah, he's kept his promise. He's put in a circle. And— What I've done along the way is find the really keen ones. And if you do those—

It's very much like an email. It's an email list, it's an email newsletter.

Absolutely. It's a niche email list that you can differentiate. And this is how I use Circles. I have lots of Circles that are specifically for a very small audience. But it only takes 50 people to engage on a post, and suddenly you find that the activity— you can move it to the hot list very quickly. You find that that gives it a lot of life. You don't need 1,000, 10,000. 1,000 people. And this is the great thing, you don't have to have a network of anything over 1,000, 2,000 people just to find those key ones for that content. And because of What's Hot and Recommended as a system, you find that the content that you've put out, if those people relate to it, they engage and they share it, it can end up on What's Hot, which suddenly takes it out of your network and it can go viral. So you're Good quality content can take on a life of its own without having millions of followers or even tens of thousands of followers, but you have to nurture the relationships. And this is one process that I use to nurture the relationships of respectfully asking, would you like to receive a notification in the future? And if they say yes, then you're allowed to do that.

Great. We had a question from Adam Holland, and he said he wants to know why then should he add or build specialized circles? I think you're answering that with what you just said. It's to find those niche areas of people. I mean, there's still a good reason to put people in circles just so you can identify them as well.

Yes, absolutely.

Becca Heflin, now food blogging is a little bit different than other blogging in the fact that we're developing recipes, we're taking pictures, and all those are owned by us, they're copyrighted by us. We've got a lot of problems with other sites posting things and saying that they're theirs and just like pretty much stealing all our work. So Becca Heflin had asked, when you talked about blogging, using the platform to blog from, how would we approach it as food bloggers? I mean, in that respect.

I'm just reading your question as well, Becca. So if you're— so there's a couple of bits here. With copyright, if you share your image which you own the copyright for, it doesn't matter if it's on your blog site or if it's on Google+. The first time you share it, the first time it's out there, it's very straightforward. It's yours, and there's no issue. Then the next layer down from this is that if you, on your blog site, have it as a featured image and you share that URL, or anyone else does, into a blog post in the link section, then that featured image is going to appear. And so your image that you've got the copyright on is going to appear, and it's got the blog next to it. And it's usually just a little thumbnail, which is, you know, again, it's fine. It's from your blog, and that's OK. The next one, if you have a non-embedded, but you actually add the big photo into Google+, and it appears as a big image and looks beautiful, and you share it, and you disable the ability for people to reshare the post, then you've shared it, you've got the authorship on it, and people can comment and +1. Next one. If you don't disable that and you just have it as it always is, unless you take that action, people can share it. And if they share it, your little picture disappears and their name and picture appears at the top, and your name just appears underneath it. And they take up authorship of that. And that means that it can appear, all other things being equal, in Google search, and they're essentially the author of that new post. Not the rights of the image, however. You still own the copyright. So the next scenario is when it can go wrong. If a person— it doesn't matter if it's from your website, or it doesn't matter if it's on Google+. And the interesting thing, I did law before I did psych, so I kind of explored this area. There's a whole blog post, about 2,000 words on this on my website. About copyright and Google+. If you post on Google+ and it has a big image and somebody shares— sorry, and somebody goes in and right-clicks it and downloads it onto their computer or off their website onto their computer, and they re-upload that as their own, and you haven't given permission, and they don't state where it's come from anyway, but even if you haven't given permission, it's the main crux, that is a copyright infringement, essentially, or potentially, if the owner says that it is. So that's the challenge. And so really, if you understand the process, then you can understand what the risks are. As soon as it's on the internet, somebody can take it and use it as their own, and then you have to report it potentially. That's the real thing, is if you don't want it to have that risk, then you don't share it.

That makes sense. And I think we're, we're at risk of that even with us just on our blog posts of our blog. I mean, people can still come in and lift our content whether it's— we do it on Google+ or not. But as long as we do it with the authorship intact, we should be safe. Now I find that interesting what you said where we— I like to have my things shared. Sometimes things get shared a lot, but I hadn't thought of the fact that the person that's sharing it is actually taking authorship for it then.

Of the post. Of the post. Yeah, but not the copyright of the image.

Right. Can I chime in for a moment on that? Just an added thing, it can be in some cases, it depends on how you feel about it, and I understand the respect of some people don't want their things copied at all, but it's inevitably going to happen as we're talking about when you're in a social network like this. It can be seen, and I'm approaching it here again from the SEO standpoint, as an opportunity in many cases. A lot of times it's done innocently. People just don't understand, they think everything that's on the web is free and available and you just use it. It's not done maliciously. What we do a lot of times is if somebody uses an original image of ours or of a client of ours, we reach out to that blogger, that website, and we say, hey, instead of threatening to sue them or tell them to take it down, we say, maybe you didn't realize, but this is a copyrighted image, it belongs to this author, would you mind giving credit and a link back to their original site. So not only is the credit established, but you've perhaps gained a valuable link, which from an SEO standpoint would help the authority of your, your site. So it can be an effective form of link building. We actually do this sometimes for some of our content creators where we regularly do an image search and find sites that have posted their images and then reach out to those people. We find quite often when it's done been done innocently, not maliciously, the website owner is very happy to put up a link. And that actually ends up benefiting the original creator.

I think that's great, Mark. I think that's the most polite way to deal with the issue as well, but whilst knowing that the copyright is owned by somebody else. So people have to acknowledge that when it does happen.

Yeah, we do have a big problem with that. There's a lot of that, especially on Facebook. There was a ton of that going on where people were taking images, taking recipes, posting them, some even going as far as to remove watermarks from them, crop them out or Photoshop them out and saying that they were theirs. So, you know, it gets really ugly on the food blogging side of this and has been. So I think that's where a lot of the concern is. That's where we differ a little bit. You know, almost no one minds if you give us credit and you link. It's just like wholesale copying that kind of gets us upset. And that's what a lot of these sites have been doing lately is they've just been—

My suggestion is that you spell out your name in the food, arrange the noodles on the plate with your company name.

Good idea.

Alright, well let's move on a little bit more to getting our readership. You talked about the circles, Martin, and bringing them in. How do we excite people on Google+? What do you think is the key? How do you attract them?

It's different stages. I think that when people start, the most important thing to do is go out and say hello. And I always think of it like you just arrived in a new neighborhood, and what you don't want to be doing is going around going, "Here's my business card, this is what I do, here's my business card," and just handing that out to all the neighbors. What you want to do is to go out and go, "Hey, I've just arrived, what's going on here?" And have a look, and look at people's content and engage with people, and that's it's that way around. The first thing is engage with other people first, because otherwise it doesn't matter how good your content is. If you haven't built a little bit of a network, and if you haven't built up potentially those circles and get the engagement levels up, then you just post. And I've got to come up with a decent joke for this, because if you post and there's no one there to hear it, I mean, it's that kind of like, does it make a ping? I don't know. But it doesn't work. To simply think that your content is good enough to fly. It's like, no, you've got to go and find people that relate to you. I think that's one of the big things. So once you've done that initial phase and you've started to build up, and I know somebody in the comments is saying 50 people, that's all you— if you have a good circle of 50 people that are happy to, and this is picking up on your point as well, Adam, that if they're happy to receive notifications, you've asked them. Are you OK if I notify you by email for this content? Because you'll get it first. Then that's all you need is 50 people to go, wow, amazing. Comment, comment, comment, plus one, plus share, share, share, share. And you'll find that before long, at the moment, the way things are with the algorithm, you've gone on the What's Hot and Recommended. That's how these things are. And you become able to step outside of your networks, whatever your network size is. So that's— what was I coming around to say? So yeah, once you've done that, it comes down to the nature of content that you want to be known for. And if you are blogging on food and you have a speciality and you have people who really relate to Italian food or to Thai food or to healthy food or whatever the subject is for you, you'll then be able to build your network that match that content and dance with it. Now this is something I worked with Larry Farnellia on over the last year really, and I showed him the methods I've really been talking about, how to get on What's Hot, but part of it was how to run campaigns. I don't think I've ever told people this publicly, but I'm going to tell you how to do it. Have a think about containing little projects in your posting. So think about it like a 4-week stretch of content and explain to people what you're thinking of doing. Find out if that's a good idea. For instance, the 4-week healthy living challenge, and we did one of those with Larry. Larry's a good friend, so it was a very easy one just to sit in a Hangout together and go, okay, why don't you look at it this way and that way? And the project worked. And what you can do to make it work yourself is ask people, do they want to join you on something? And you've got to be in the middle of it. You can't just be posting content and running. So you're going to say, over the next 4 weeks, we're going to do something together. Who's in? And if you do that, you can then build a circle of the people that say yes. And you can even say in the email— sorry, you can even say in the post, I'll build a circle and then I'll notify you every day for the next month and we're all going to lose weight, get in shape, eat healthier, eat less salt, eat less sugar, whatever it is, whatever challenge you set. We're going to eat more sticky toffee pudding, whatever, I don't know. I'm not huge on my desserts, but whatever you want to do, if you ask your audience, no matter how big or how small, Are they with you? You'll find the ones that are. And it's not a perfect science because it's quite an art because it depends on your network, it depends on you, your personality and how you are with it. But over time you'll find that more people will say, yeah, I want to join with that, and they'll be for that period of time led by you. And if you contain these things, it could be a week, it could be a fortnight, it could be a month. If you contain it in time, you know where you're going for that period of time. You know what the purpose of your blogs are. You can be tying it back into your website. You can be moving lots lots of people off to your website, you can be doing lots of other things. You can add in Hangouts. But all of that starts to work together. The content, your network, your engagement, you've got to engage as well. All of that can work so that you get an audience who's responding really positively to what you do.

Excellent, excellent advice. And I think the one thing that when you said about circling 50 people and all it will take is 50 people, well it's those 50 people that are responding to you that are +1ing that are leaving comments, that are sharing, that are driving the traffic to your site because everyone else is going to see this. Once it goes on the hot list, once it keeps moving like that, every time it pops back up to the top of the screen, that's where you're gaining new readers or new people to say, "Hey, let me take a look at this guy. Let me see what he's doing because evidently he's a little popular." I think that's a good way to build. It may start as 50, but it's not going to stay at 50 very long. It might be that specific circle is going to stay at 50., but it's going to add to the people that are circling you. Do you think that's a fair assumption?

Absolutely. And I think if you go on What's Hot and Recommended every day, then potentially you can have an extra 100, 150 people— sometimes some people have more, but let's just say 100, 150 additional followers by being on there every day.

Absolutely. Okay, we have another comment here from Heather King, and she says she finds the best way to gain views and people putting them in her circle is to reshare photos from other food bloggers on Google+. Her readers enjoy seeing things from other bloggers, and then people that read their blog see me sharing and add me to their circles. So they're followers then. So that's—

I think sharing other people's content, it gets you engagement as well if it's good quality content. I mean, because we're talking about the change shift of ownership, of authorship that occurs when the post is shared, that becomes your engagement. They're your shares, they're your +1s, they're comments on your thread. So in a way, all you've done is just say, hey, I like that, and the person gets benefit that you said, hey, I like that. But it's yours then. For that period of time, you are the one who's— I always look at it like a party. Each thread is like a party., and you're the one that's in charge of the party, and you've set the context by that image, by the text that's on there that you've added as well, and you're able then to engage with people within that context on that party thread. So I like curating people's content, and you often find that it's almost expected then— I think this is what you're saying as well, Heather— is people enjoy seeing certain other people's content, but you've decided which ones you see. You become a good curator. Curator. You don't share everything of theirs, but you share 1 or 2 or 3 things over a period of time that you think are the most valuable that your network is going to want to see.

Absolutely. I've always said the same thing, is that good content is good content, whether it's your content or someone else's content. If you're sharing it and you're providing a service then to people that have you in their circles, and it's a good way to attract new people to your circles by sharing good content.

Really interesting you say about it being a service. If you don't share it, people in your network won't see it unless they're following that person or unless they're in some other— but most of the time you've got to think in that sort of term is I need to share this, I need to show people this because I relate to it so much. And I think that's one of the— I mean, Google+ has just been designed so cleverly to enable information to flow into the post to flow, the connections to happen in such a strong way. And if the content is good, share it.

Now here's a question. We're talking about sharing content. In terms of authorship and in terms of author rank and in terms of them deciding that we are now an expert in certain things, if we share, should we try and stay with sharing things that mostly what we write about too? So it stays in the same venue?

If I was to give a broad brushstroke to that answer without getting into the different bits that you've mentioned, I'd say share what you like, post what you like, what you relate to, be an authority in being you. That would be my thing that I would say. Now that would be the broad brushstroke. If I was going to get down, and this is getting into Mark Traffigan's territories here, In terms of being an authority, I think within that, instead of looking at author rank, because I think that's something other, but in terms of being an authority, which we know what an authority is. If you're in a community, you know who the people are that are the— and in the real world community as well, who the ones are that are good with gardening. And you go and ask them, what's going on with the plants this season? And you know they're an authority because they've talked about it. Other people have said they're an authority. They know what they're doing and they build a reputation. It's the same online. And if you have an expertise and you can go, using a Murray Smith term, an inch wide and a mile deep, and if you can do that within the context of being yourself and you become naturally an authority, then it's likely, it is my view, that Google is going to be able to see that because lots of other people are going to go, that person's an authority. In this particular subject matter. And it deepens every time the connections happen. People keep saying, "No, that person there," and they keep on linking and sharing and linking and sharing all of the time so that you are seen as an authority, not just by the community, but by the algorithm that's reading whether that content is most important to appear in search, because search, it seems more and more, is going to be populated by people who are authorities on particular subjects.

Very good.

Do you have anything to add to that, Mark, you think?

I think Martin said it so well, and this is what I counsel people as well, is just be real, be yourself. That sounds kind of just like fluffy New Age advice, but it really works. If you are yourself, the things that you are an authority in, you are going to end up talking about a lot, you're going to post a lot, but you need to be a real person too. I'm always comparing what's happening on Google+ to just good old-fashioned networking, you know, like our dads did it. Our moms should have been allowed to do it, but they didn't let them in the club back in those days. But when you joined the Lions Club in town or the Rotary Club, you go to meetups, what we call meetups now. Back in the day they would have been social events. You go to cocktail parties. When you're hanging out with people, You're there and obviously you're there to represent yourself, represent your company, represent your expertise, the offerings that you have, but you enter into real conversations with people as you're standing around with your cocktails. You talk about other things, oh, you've been to Alaska too, I was there, how did that go? People want to know you that way. I'm thinking right now about experts that I follow on Google+. Follow them primarily because they are experts or authorities on a topic, but over time what makes my connection with them is getting to know them as real people. I'll just sort of give a quick example of Scott Monty, who is the social media director for Ford Motor Company. I followed him because he's the social media director for Ford Motor Company, but discovered over time that he's a nut on Sherlock Holmes, and you know, something that I've kind of gotten into recently. We've been connecting on that level, and that makes him more real and more solidified in my mind. But the final thing I'll say just from the authorship standpoint and the search standpoint, what I think this person who's asking the question is really concerned about, Google is getting better and better all the time at sorting out signal from noise, and it's part of what they're doing with Google+. They're watching these connections. They can tell that they want and expect us to be real people here and to share about a diversity of things. But over time, the data is there. If you stand out on certain topics, if when you talk about certain topics and share about those, that's when the lights really go off and when the buzzers sound and people are +1ing and commenting and engaging. They can see that and they can establish and understand who you are and what you do that's really meaningful to other people. So I wouldn't worry about it too much, I guess what we're saying.

Very good. I mean, that's good advice. I mean, I think normally we're going to gravitate towards what our main interest is, but in order to find more people to connect with, I think you need— everybody's got other interests too. And I always tell bloggers, you know, you've got the food people already, you know, stop working them over. Go to other things. Do you like gardening? Do you like knitting? Do you like cars? Do you like photography? Find other communities to join, engage with those people, get to know those people on that level and connect with them in that way. Because one thing with food is everybody eats. So I mean, we, we will get you one way or the other. If we throw something pretty up and you're following us, you know, you're— we're gonna get you as soon as we show some nice food. So we don't— I don't think we have to worry about that quite as much in that respect, and we should go after some of our different interests as well. But I think normally, like, I, I share probably 90% of food stuff, and then anything else that does grab my attention, I will share. So, Martin, we have a question here from Becky Rosenthal, and she wants to know about— you recommend starting hash— using hashtags for a campaign, or any tips on hashtags?

Yeah, so hashtags. The first thing, if you're looking within the context particularly of blogging, but particularly food blogging, is to know what trends are occurring regularly on each of the days. And if you can start to see that on Monday it's— I don't know what there is on Monday. I don't want food for the— but whatever the— I can't even think of a word beginning with M that I can use for Monday. What do you have? What food begins with M?

Meatball Monday. Meatball Monday.

There we go. Is that new? We just made that up. Becky, you've got the first hashtag, Meatball Monday.

Right.

So you've got Meatball Monday. If that happens, then you can join in on that hashtag by obviously adding the hashtag to the post, nice pictures of the meatballs, and you share that. You're likely to get more shares, more comments, more +1s, because it will hit that stream of dedicated content relating to hashtags. And it's the same sort of principle as Twitter. Once you get the idea of what activity levels there are, it goes back to the point I was making about a little group of people, whether it's a circle or not. In order to make a hashtag trend, you need— I'll give you the figures— you need, and I can't remember who was saying about the numbers earlier that didn't believe me, you only need, you actually need a lot less than this on certain days, but you only need say 50 people that are posting on a particular topic on a continuous kind of like morning session basis. I say continuous, maybe 2 or 3 posts, but those posts have been shared and there's motion happening, and it will start to trend. So it's only 50 people that you need, and last summer about 15 of us were getting things to trend. So I mean, I played around with that. I'm a bit of a Star Wars nut, and so I have a Star Wars Tuesday trend, and it still trends.

I love it.

So people share a lot of Star Wars pictures. It's very relatable because there's a huge fan base of Star Wars. And so that's the first thing, is that if there's a bunch of people that relate to that and that will all join in, then that really works well. And the hot topics trends, Becca, you just mentioned, they are on— not only on here, actually, but they're on What's Hot. If you go to the left-hand bar and you go to the little flame that says What's Hot and Recommended and you click that— you'd never guess that I've created these videos lately, would you? Because I can go through in my mind, I can tell you everything where it is on the whole platform.. But you click that and you will then see on the upper right-hand side 10 trends, and they'll be going up, going down, or staying the same. And if you click those— so that's on the What's Hot and Recommended page— if you click on one of those, it will take you to a dedicated stream as if you'd searched for that hashtag at the top of the page in the Google+ bar. Now this is the really cool bit that's coming next. A lot of people don't realize how great the search function is. You can then come across to— this is all on the blue bar, so you've got the hashtag and it's a whole stream of all of the content. If you come across and there's a dropdown, I think it says "more," you can then filter for that hashtag relating to people from your circles, for instance. And when you do that, you can find the people that relate and that are using that hashtag that are from your circles. Straight away you've got a way of filtering and going, who from my circles is into this particular thing trending on this particular day? I think that's one of my favorite discoveries really of how to find people that like the stuff I like too. I could carry on, but there we go. That's answering the question hopefully. Maybe coming back to the should you start them? Have the group of people that relate to the content first. That would be my advice. If you try and start one and it doesn't lift, it's kind of like, it's a bit of a waste. It's better to get the group going, and using Hangouts is really powerful because if you have 10 of you in the room that all say, "Yeah, we're going to do Meatball Monday," then suddenly you've got 10 people that are influencing their networks and it all starts to move.

So a good way to start that then is to get some people behind you, I mean, to get some of your people in your circles. And I always tell people to create a circle with the people that they absolutely connect with. And generally that might be up to 20 people at the most. And that's, to me, that's a lot. I mean, that I talk to, that I want to talk to every day. I want to know absolutely everything that they're doing all the time. But if you took those people and you could all agree on something, you could pretty much start something like you said, trending just within your group and get it hot. So you could affect a lot of things just by using that, using the power of your group. Now here's the question: would Google do anything about that, or would they see what you were doing?

You're not spamming. I think this is the thing, you've got to always be watching, you know, when does it become spam. And if you are simply hammering out or putting multiple hashtags within the post in the in order to get it to trend. The outcome shouldn't be the trend occurring. The outcome should be that the content, the information flows through the network, more people join it because they relate to the trend topic and the content. That naturally allows the trend to occur. That's how these things happen anyway. That's how trends happen. Meme— the memes essentially, so the units of thought or behavior that transmit. So more people join in. On these and go, ah, I like to have this thing on a Monday or Tuesday or whenever. So they all engage with it, and that allows the information to flow through the network. So it's almost— it's always thinking, is this good quality content? And it just happens that lots of people are doing good quality content on a particular day using a particular hashtag, so it's a little bit more focused. But I do have a tip on the coordination, which Mark and I are very very familiar with. It's not just the visual Hangouts. If you have a group of people, doesn't matter if it's 5, 10, 50, or up to 99, then using the Hangout, which is not the video call version but the Hangout chat version, you can have up to 99 people in it. So that is a great way of having a little group, and you can keep it active all of the time, and they can be your main people that are chatting on particular subjects. And you can name it and you can say this is Meatball Monday. You could have chosen something else, Mark, but Meatball Monday.

Actually, Becky said Meatless Monday. That actually is what trends, is Meatless Monday.

That sounds more likely than Meatball Monday.

But then I'm sure you're going to have like the battle of the trends. You know, you're going to have Meatball Monday versus Meatless Monday.

It could be Meatless Meatballs too, you know, vegan meatballs.

Why not? So again, it's another way of communicating with a group around a particular topic, around a particular theme at a point in time.

Yeah, I don't think a lot of people realize about that chat box now because I've been telling people, and you can actually still do the video portion of it, although only 10 people can enter, but people could drop out of it and other people could enter at the same time. It's just not a Hangout on Air, it's just the chat Hangout.

I forget all the terminology that Ronnie Binzer came up This is the video call. That's as far as we can go. We probably all agree.

But that's a great way. I know I had belonged to some Skype groups and they had the same thing. Pretty much you would just keep the thing running all the time and people would ask questions or give little bits of information. So this is basically the same thing we can do with this, or it's like a smaller version of a Twitter chat, I guess, actually too.

And it's a great way, other than just, you know, having that social function— and I think this is what Martin is alluding to— it's a great way of coordinating efforts. I hear in the question that was asked that started out this part of the discussion, I hear a little bit of fear that I sense out there a lot these days. People are aware that Google is really trying to crack down on spam. That's a great thing. They're going after it like they never have before. They're getting better and better detecting spam that's really spam.. And they're getting good at that right here inside of Google+ as well as out on Google search as well. What it makes people afraid of is they can be afraid to do anything that sounds like we're getting together and we're going to make an actual effort to make something happen. And that shouldn't be a fear at all. If what you're doing, like organizing a Meatless Monday, or I'm going to start Meatball Monday, I'm going to get that trending. I'm going to take on those meatless Mondays.

That's it, we've got a job on Monday, Mark.

What are we going to do? Yeah, go meat. But if you got behind the scenes, got a little chat group going, you know, people that you know have that mutual interest and you say like, okay, all of us on Monday at 10 AM, starting at 10 AM Eastern time, we're going to start posting meatball pictures and hashtag #meatballmonday and that sort of thing. As long as people are, you know, I heard the fear that— will Google see that? Will that be manipulation and they'll penalize us or ban us? As long as what you're doing ends up in being something that other people like, like if we create this meatball trend and it's going out there and people like it and they bust into the show, you know, I want to be part of Meatball Monday, Google doesn't give a whit how it started. They really, really don't. They love that as a matter of fact, because that's what they want to see happening in this network. As long as what you're doing is not creating something false, something manipulative, something that is just purely commercial intent, you know, kind of thing. But if you're creating real engagement, real network, real fun out there, or impact— doesn't have to be fun— that's what they want to have happen. And if you're doing that through some coordinated effort, more power to you.

I think it would come down to that being actual accounts. Too, don't you think? I mean, if your account is legitimate and you're posting regularly, it doesn't really matter as much what you're doing as a group. You're going to drive the traffic. But I think where it would come into play is if you have some of these groups that are just putting up spamming accounts and trying to do the same thing. They're going to get whacked anyway.

The truth of the matter is, while we're on this topic, that there's been some really good articles out there recently in research that— everybody talks about viral things and viral videos and things like that. The vast majority of things that we see go viral these days went viral on purpose. That doesn't mean the original content might have been, you know, the double rainbow guy might have actually seen the double rainbow and actually got that excited, but at some point if you trace it back, somebody intentionally or somebodies, some group of somebodies intentionally began to blow up that video.. There was a good study on the Harlem Shake craze with that. They traced back and they found that the Harlem Shake was like a minor viral for several weeks. It was popular among a small, very niche group of people, and then a couple of corporate sites went out there and decided, "We're going to adopt this and blow it up," and that's when it goes viral. So Google understands that happens, and they're not opposed to that as long as the end result is it produces something that people like and engage with. So don't fear it so much.

Very good. We have another question here. Well, actually, Becky wanted to know if she should include their brand in a hashtag, and that ties into what Becca also wants to know is how many hashtags are too many?

If I pick up on the brand, if you want to search for future content using the hashtag search of your brand and then go to the same bars mentioned earlier and look for posts from you, for instance, then that would be useful. But to use it for a trend, you've got to think, will people relate to it? It doesn't really serve that great a benefit. Let me go to the next bit and try and explain why. How many hashtags should you include? If you include one, that is the thing that you want to make sure Like, for instance, you look into the trending and you see what's on a particular day and it's meatless— just to balance it out for the vegetarians— it's Meatless Monday trending. And you decide to hashtag Meatless Monday because you want to make sure that that post goes into that hashtag stream. Google now will decide if there's other hashtags that it thinks is relevant for that post, and they're going to appear. And you can remove them by clicking the little X, but they will appear on the upper right. So in a way, you don't need to do loads and loads of hashtags unless you think— okay, that's that bit. You can add more hashtags, but the purpose has to be you're looking for people on the other side of it that are going to be searching for those hashtags. So if you're just throwing hashtags up there and making it look a bit clumsy as a post, and there's nobody searching for those hashtags, then you might not find as much benefit. That would be my take.

Now I had read somewhere, and I don't remember where it was, that you should put up 3 hashtags. I don't know if there's any truth to that or not, but anything after 3 kind of got, like you said, just clunky or messy.

You can put— I mean, Google, I think, very often you find that there are 3 on posts because of the way they do it. But sometimes if you think of— let's take a picture of Trafalgar Square in London. And you've got lions in Trafalgar Square. So the first thing, if you took that picture and you put it online, you might decide to— and they're not real lions, just to explain. There's no real lions in Trafalgar Square. They're statues. But you might decide to put #TrafalgarSquare. And then you might decide to go #London. And then you might decide to put #lion. Now even though it's not a real lion, it's still a lion. Or you might even add— statue if it was relevant, and you could go 4. That would be wild. Crazy day on the hashtags. But it's all related. It's all relevant. And when people search in the future for lions, they may look at it and go, okay, I was hoping to see something that was a little bit more animate, but it's not spam. You still related your hashtags to the content, and that's the big thing. And that's what Google will want. That's what people will want in search and generally to find. Not Google, people. People want your hashtags to be relevant to the content matter. So if you do that, then it's fine.

Alright, well, do you think the hashtags would be like your keywords then?

Yeah, I would say in that way they are.

And I would— that's a good segue to what I was going to share here quickly is that I'm beginning to think of them that way, especially since a few weeks ago, as Martin just explained, Google started automating hashtags and even adding hashtags that they think are relevant to your post in that upper right-hand part of your post. Sometimes you'll see hashtags added in there automatically by Google that aren't words you put in your post, but they are words that Google sees semantically related or searches that they have. What that tells me is that Google is using that data. I always, whenever I'm doing anything with Google, I always think of Google never sees a bit of data it doesn't want to do something with. That doesn't mean they are doing something with it right now today, but they could be in the future. So here's my take on this, this is purely speculative, but to me hashtags have gone way up in importance because I think it's possible that Google is watching that data and it's a way of them helping them to categorize yourself. What should Mark Traphagen be about? What should we emphasize from him. The hashtags may be a way that they're even trying to automate again in analyzing semantically my posts and figuring out what are the topics that Mark Traphagen is about. And then of course they can see from that what are the topics that Mark Traphagen is about that people most engage with. And now you've got a useful signal that they may be boosting my content now or in the future on the topics that are most important to me because I've helped them to understand who I am topically. Does that make some sense?

Absolutely. So then would it almost be better to let them choose your hashtags?

I think a little bit. I think you can guide it with your own hashtags, but I'm more interested in just the fact that they are trying to choose the hashtags means that they are trying to understand your post from a semantic viewpoint. They are trying to understand the range of what it's about, not just one thing, and that they are interested in categorizing those. And for me, my knowledge of the way Google operates, what they do, that always, you know, a little tick mark goes off in my mind that they are going to do something with that at some point. So I can be a part of that by using hashtags intentionally. Not only do I have all the benefits that Martin spoke about immediate benefits of hooking up with people that right now in the real world are searching for it or in the future. But also I may be helping Google in its task to try to present me— because that's ultimately what I see. If I'm doing the things that Martin is talking about today, it's all about Google is trying— wants to promote me. They really do. Not me personally, they don't care, but they want to promote the people who other people recognize as being the most engaging, the most interesting, the best authorities on any given topic. And I think the hashtag is just one more way that I see that they are working on that, to understand who is what topically. So I think by using the hashtags effectively, by not overusing but using them strategically, effectively, I'm helping them in that task.

Excellent. Can I give one extra tip on that?

Oh, please do.

If there's two topics trending on hashtags on a particular day, and let's say I use the example of Cat Today because I do Cat Today. So I have Cat Today and we have Superman trending because the Superman film came out. It was Man of Steel actually was trending. I looked for an image and then I memed it all up. I added lots of text to it so there was no copyright issues. And I had a cat in a Superman outfit, which is ridiculous, but it's fairly entertaining. Not necessarily for the cat. But I used to hashtag— it was all right. No cats were hurt in this meme, let me just say. But I then used #cataday as a hashtag and #manofsteel as a hashtag. That then means that when people search for that hashtag on that particular day within either of those streams, they could get that image. So if you think of the applications for this, and you have got something trends— Meatballs Monday trends— but something else is trending at the same time, you can then be looking at what content you put out that relates to both of those hashtags. So you finding ways to double hashtag content gives you an extra shot into two streams at exactly the same time of activity. I've never told anyone that before.

Wow, so if I'm doing a chicken parm and I put it in a Superman outfit and call it chicken parm of steel, I might get a double benefit from it.

Super chicken parm, I mean, we could come up with anything. It would be great.

You know, I do think we need to look at those trends more, and that's something I don't do, and that will give you an insight actually to what people might want to see more as opposed to, don't you think?

Yeah.

What is trending?

And on the daily trends in particular because they're ones that happen week in, week out, there's patterns that are occurring, you join in with them.

Very good. I know food does have a lot, Foodie Friday has one, we do have a bunch of different trends for that.

Yeah, perfect.

All right, well I think we're coming to the close of our session here, I don't see any more questions. We had a lot of good ones.

I can see one from Jason. I don't know, I know he'd probably be upset if we don't ask it. I don't know if you want to ask that one.

Yeah, I know this may have been covered. Should I make a community for my blog with a G+ page, or is it better to join a community to promote my brand? Good question.

So to start with, my general advice is build a community when you have an audience that will want to be posting within that community. Or when there's no other community that's available to you that you would want to join to talk about that particular subject matter. Because there's now 60,000, 70,000 communities on Google+, there's a lot of activity. And if you are trying to take people's attention from those communities that are already well established to your community without you having a network that relates enough to join necessarily, then it's going to be hard work.. And once you've created the community, you run it. And if you find that you've got 20 people in it, it becomes difficult to keep the energy in it. So in a way, I'd say the first step is go out and find out if people relate to your stuff in the community. You've got to be a bit careful. This is where spamming is— particularly careful. I wouldn't say necessarily just push your blog. I'd say look at what other people are posting and make sure you read the guidelines, the terms really of membership of that community, and post relatable content for those communities. And when you get engagement up, you can then start to build up your next step, which might be that if you're allowed to post blog content, then that's fine. I tend not to encourage it in the communities that I'm in, which is why I flag it up here, but some communities will be fine. But it's not trying to create a community too quick. That's my main advice on that one.

Yeah, I think one thing that people don't realize too is how much work actually goes into running a community, and you don't know that going into it, and it is a lot of time, it's a lot of maintenance, and I think you really need to have that following. If I can bring someone up, David Leite started his community and he's got a huge following, so he did a good thing. For him, it was the next natural thing to do. Was to start a community because he has these followers, he has these people that make his recipes that do them. So I think if you've got that kind of a following, that type already that is reading your blog and I mean you really got to have enough traffic to support it but are making your recipes and sending them in on a regular basis.

That's the bit, Chef Dennis, that's exactly it. A community is for other people, not just yourself to post content. So if your intent is just another place for you to post content, well, no, really, that's a page or your profile. A community is everybody's place to be posting content. You can be leading and you can be putting the most content, but I like that example of people sending in recipes and sending in pictures of the recipes that somebody's making. That's perfect. That's user-generated content, which is beautiful. But it's almost to start with, I'd say, Jason, Thanks, Jason appreciates it. That's good, we're on track. But it's taking it easy and taking it steady for the first however long, a few months, and understanding what works and understanding the different roles of a page, a profile, and a community.

Very good. We have one last question we're going to take, and it's from Stephanie Red Cross, and it's, what's your daily process for managing your Google+ account? Respond to notifications? Talk with your community, watch trending topics, your blog, etc. I just keep wondering how much time I should be dedicating to building my presence and networking on Google+.

Okay, I'm going to answer the last bit first. The last bit is, based on my experience, I've spent a tremendous amount of time on here and I've had an amazing experience, and I prioritize this platform to learn inside out because I believe that the benefits of this over and above anywhere else, particularly at this moment, is the one that's gonna shine, you know, is gonna keep me going for a long, long time, and that's particularly because of search and because of YouTube, which we haven't really touched on as well. So I focus a lot of my time. Now, in terms of my daily routine, I deal with notifications first, which is the worst advice you could ever give people, because everyone says, "Don't do your emails before 10 o'clock in the morning." It's like, no, the first thing I do is go and find out what's going on and answer people and try and engage with the, the urgent-y sort of stuff. And then from there I do usually a good morning post. And the night before I would have thought through if I've got a blog post coming out, I normally put it out in the afternoon UK time because the US is more awake then. So my days then start to move towards that blog post. So the content that I put out, if I'm running like one of my own little campaigns and I have something that I'm going towards, will usually have a vague relationship with that content. But the time that it takes is determined by the time that I have. If I'm consulting, I'm not plugged in, and I can't be dealing with notifications and going to threads and talking to people. You just— I'm in two states. I'm either in it or I'm not, in that sort of way. And so if I haven't got the time, then I try and post if I can find something good, but I almost would rather put quality out. I mean, last year I think I'd probably post anything. Because I was still learning. But now I'd rather put things out that I really want people to see, so I don't stress quite so much about if I'm not posting the same. And then you have little flurries, and then it all works. So I think that it's almost— don't give yourself a hard time about any of it. Just relax and enjoy, particularly the first phase and getting used to it. But as much time as you have to invest, I'd say I don't think this is going to be a bad investment. There for social networking.

Absolutely, absolutely. Alright, well I think we're going to wind this first session up of our virtual conference and I thank you guys for coming. Martin, it was great to hear you speak and you really offered a lot of great advice.

Thank you, thanks for having me and thanks for the questions, I really appreciated them.

Mark, thank you so much for stopping by and helping us with this, it was nice to have you in the Hangout with us too.

Great to be a part and I was here to learn more from Martin as much as anything anything else because I always do when I talk to him. He's one of the smartest people on Google+ as far as really seeing, getting the insights of what makes this thing tick and what makes it work.

That's very kind. It's always great to be with you as well, Mark. Always enjoy it. Thank you.

That's one of the best things about Google+ is there are so many brilliant people here that are willing to talk to us and help us. This conference is coming off because of that. It's a monumental event and it's because there's so many great people on Google+ that we can draw from and that are willing to speak and talk to us and our friends. I appreciate that and thank you guys so much. I'm going to take a little break and get ready for our next session at 12 o'clock my time and we're going to come up with, I think it's podcasting, I think it is, I'll have to check to make sure. Come back and see me in about an hour, have your questions ready and we'll go on with our next session. Thanks for coming.