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The Great Feeling of Talking to Stranger

Natchaya T. — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:12:55 +0000

I am always that type of person. I appreciate every time I get to talk to stranger or exchange a little interaction, such as smile, when our path cross. For example, when I sat next to one guy on the subway train. Yes it was a little bit nerve-racking when the back of my head was trying to figure out what did he want from me? But I pushed that thought and we talked. And it turned out just to be a nice conversation on our life in a 10 minute subway ride, before he got off and farewell wish me good luck. Or when I was walking down the street and saw a man with a cute dog, this is a nice opportunity to reach out talk to stranger and they are not afraid of you, and you are very likely to get a positive reaction from them, talking about their dogs and cats. Another time when the lady was bringing her cat in a cage, the subway train was so crammed up, it was a usual atmosphere of people sitting standing tightly next to each other. But I didn’t feel any of that, the stations passed by so quickly when you share little smiles and nice chat with someone. Then we parted..but with a little bit of that Daisy cheerfulness added in me.

I just got that feeling once again, on the internet, via Google Plus.

I have written many times that G+ is about strangers meeting up sharing and starting to know each other. And in G+ it is like you have dog or cat or something, when you approach people, they react to you, in a very human way. And you can just pass by. There are tons of things you can view, see, and read. You can comment, they may respond, and if you don’t want continue, then it’s like another subway ride that we get off at our own destination. Path crossed, leaving a nice feeling behind.

Like this snapshot on the upper right corner, I came across a beautiful photo that I was entranced by for a long moment. I carefully look at it and I had this peaceful feeling from it, so I comment on the photo. A moment later I got a notification with a note saying “very kind, Natchaya”. Do you know the power of hearing your name..from a stranger..as a sign of gratitude.. It always makes wonder for me. But this is what I enjoy. Just that instant of great feeling sharing a nice little thing with strangers, makes me feel so human.

Connecting Communities via Google+

Natchaya T. — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:08:32 +0000

I’ve been writing things about G+ as an owner of the page either a company or a personal account. But there are other ways people can use G+ and one is to develop communities on G+ platform. Organizations, politicians, artists, celebrities can create their own communities, increase their fan base and connect to people within their community all over the world via Google+ such as this Photography Site.

Basically, Google+ serves as a third party site that no one has affiliation with. Until recently, there is no way to add people and organize them into group. Let alone finding people in the first place. Now with Google+ it suddenly becomes possible and even easy to locate all photographers in the world and directly connect each and everyone and also share all kinds of things that photographers would care about. Plus, think about organizing group meeting? There could be an arrangement of webinar but Hangout is already integrated in the system, free, and so easy to advertise and make notice for everyone to come and join.

Again, I must highlight that G+ is different in terms of connecting people because G+ let you find people who share the same interest with you easily. So launching a community is a great idea because you will attract even more people and you put yourself standout and easy to find with Direct Connect. And when one photographer +1 the community page, other photographers who are also his friend will see when he search anything related to photography in google.

With the use of hashtag and real-time search, you can find community that you belong to fast and easy. Now you can easily find the topic that you are interested in Google+ and it keeps updating right at the minute you are looking at it. I’ve been using that a lot and it’s as entertaining as knowledgable. You can find the page, post, comment- anything at all that have your search word in it. Also with circles and +1, People use G+ as their newspaper, circle the people they believe sending a good feed, and streaming along the news and post that tailor to your need and interest.One G+ user said she had been away from neuroscience for years, when she got to G+, she found a community of neuroscientists who discuss current findings critically and thoroughly.

The same goes with other communities whether it is a non-profit organizations, there are numbers of them now in G+, or a community of people with other kinds of passion.One thing you only need to do in G+ is get out there and engage. Start finding what you are interested in and put your actions and thoughts into words and share with other people. That’s how your own community will grow.

Google+ for New User

Natchaya T. — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 20:01:39 +0000

For a quick easy understanding, I’d like to share the popular diagram that helps you start using G+ in no time. Thanks to +Gabriel Vasile

Introducing Ripples!

Natchaya T. — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 19:43:55 +0000

A rippled effect is a particular feeling or effect that spreads through or to someone or something. How about a ripple of information on the internet? When a post goes viral, have you ever wondered who started the post and how wide it spreads? Never before this knowledge is available to us publicly, but things got changed when G+ launch Ripples, a visualization tool for public shares and comments.

This is how Ripples look. Maybe you wonder what these circles mean? and those small circles within big circles? You see Dalai Lama is in the middle because he launched the post. Then the post got shared by many people. Those people with big name and big circles are the influencer, the people who most shared with other people then those small circles, and those even smaller circles within circles are the people who continue sharing the post.

It is fun to play with it for a while but if you have no intention to use, then it’s nothing. However, if you suddenly post a video or something of your own and you want to see how people react to them, how they share to other people and to other people, things got much more interesting! Apart from that, there are statistic available if you want a more analyzed data. Here is how it looks

That’s not all. Now that you can now identify who have this big impact on information sharing, you can contact them directly and make your post spread even wider. Ripples connect people and help you improve your content. You don’t need to know everyone who share the post, but you can see what they think about it, and how they share it. That’s valuable information especially for marketers.

Find Your Niche Target Market Now With Google’s Ripples

Using Google+ Ripples to Connect with Influences

G+ for School

Natchaya T. — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 10:12:53 +0000

What features and how many ways we can use G+ in school? As a teacher? As a student?

For me, what popped out first in my mind is the fact that I will have no fear in whatever I post, even if I have my teacher in my contact! Isn’t that a blissful feeling? You don’t have to think and rethink twice of what you really want to post, too much homework!, that teacher is hot!, or I hate this subject!, there you go post it! then choose circles! Then you can share all these posts with just your friends, not teachers- no fear.

And of course, vice versa, teachers do not have to worry to add their students, because students are still going to be students in G+, not “friend” like in Facebook. And if you just have a blast on Friday night and want to share your fun photos with your friends, no fear, you can still keep your teacher image, and keep your party photos in between your friends. Phew!

Now let me get to more serious discussion. Really, what you can do with G+ in your classroom?

Sparks! Sparks is a great way for your to catch trend of the moment. But it’s not just news, blogs, information in general. You can specify the subjects or areas that you are interested in and join other people who same the interest. You might want to share what you find with your students and prepare them for next class discussion. Sparks is a great way to start interesting conversation.

Hangouts? It may sound weird, if you gonna do Hangout with your students. But if business can use it as office hours, why not school as well? Here is one example of a Hangout of Stanford Professors Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun doing a virtual office hours answering the high voted questions.

For students, it is a great way to do group work. Hangout with extras offer many tools such as google doc and YouTube, so you can watch some videos related to your work, and start writing together via google doc.

Huddle? Yes, huddle is like text message in mobile phone. So you don’t need to have their numbers to text them. If you go on a field trip together you can ask them to come back by simply sending a message to all students in your circle, hassle-free.

These are just some example of how to use features from G+ in education. I think what I get from learning about G+ is that we are already provided with the tools. So our duty is just : Be creative!

G+ Business/Brand page: Marketing Transformer

Natchaya T. — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 09:04:39 +0000

Not so long after the launch of Google+ Business/Brandpage, Christian Oestlien, the Google+ Project/Ads guy as he called himself, gave a presentation about how G+ page can transform business marketing. He first pointed out 4 marketing issues of the present day

1.Fragmented Marketing

2.Recommendations lack staying power

3.Comments, not conversation

4.Impersonal messages

5. Limited insights

He said that G+ Brand page can transform the interaction and engagement by helping brand connect to people on a personal level. So how do G+ solves these issues and bring positive social change?

Well. Starting by taking a look at Fragmented Marketing, Oestlien explained that power of search influence social, and social influence search. When brands have their own page in Google+, people can use “direct connect” even on Google search to go directly to any brand page. That’s make connecting to brand easier. Customers no longer need to find web address, nor search and browse then choose. Google+ just make brands closer to their customer with one direct click.

Oestlien then talked about bring power of sharing and recommendation to surface. Thinking about trying to remember the restaurant your friend recommend but it just stuck in your head. +1 fixes that problem by letting you +1 anything and save it in your own page and whenever you need to check it, you go back to your own +1 page, which of course you have make special circles for restaurant, hotels, and etc.

Now Oestlien presented some figure about us. Statistics show that 90% of people rely on their friends ad 84% use online sources before making purchase decision. Then G+ combines this two facts, come out with the idea of +1. So as I presented before in another post, whenever you search on let’s say a Thai restaurant, and then you suddenly notice one restaurant that happen to have your friend face right next to it. How likely you would click and check that one out? of all the others?? Very likely, isn’t it? So with +1, your friends recommendation will always be available, whenever you need it. For business owners, +1 help generate more traffic on your sites because whenever people search for something related to your product, you can standout by this recommendation power of +1.

As for comments, Oestlien stated that 95% of posts or comments to brand go unresponded. So when the brand do respond their followers/loyal customers/fans, these people really appreciate the act. Many businesses have grabbed the idea and start making use of Hangout feature to reach out to people who are passionate about their brands.

Macy has launched a hangout of fashion blogger to advise winter fashion for its customer.

Disney promotes its new movie “The Muppets” using Hangout On Air.

Even Google+ themselves launch a Hangout Helpdesk offering advises for those people who want to set their business page.

When you use circles, you tailor the message to the right people and keep them interested. Google+ realizes that it is impossible to post one thing that all people will like. Circles can make conversation more intuitive by organizing people according to what they are interested in. For Dell, they have circles for hardware junkie and news release. So everyone gets the information that they only interest, just like the real world.

To make marketing even more effective, brands need to know people feedback of their contents. Ripple is the feature that offer this valuable information, and this is available for everyone. With Ripple, the brand, or anybody actually, can find out what is popular, who are sharing it, how people react to it and much more. Ripple will help brands understand how their content get spread and who influence it. It is not the brand that influence the spread, it is the people! People give in detail timeline of how much time people spend on the content when it is peak, what people comment about it, and even comments that are related to it. With this information, surely the brand can become a much more intelligent user of social media.

So with the marketing issues above, here are the solutions!

1.Fragmented Marketing–> G+ Page, Direct Connect: Bring social to everything that you do with your marketing today

2.Recommendations lack staying power–> +1 : lets you carry recommendations and surface it when it matters most.

3.Comments, not conversation–>Hangout: lets you engage face to face for people who are passionate about your brand.

4.Impersonal messages–> Circles: lets you organize people that follow you to tidy organized audience.

5. Limited insights–>Ripples : deep insight on how your products are shared and used.

It’s only a few months and this is what G+ brings to change, I believe there will be more and more useful tools rolling out. Keep updating!

Oh before we really end, don’t forget to check out profile picture in G+ page by clicking on it example is Mr.Christian Oestlien himself.

Hangout and Watchitoo, what’s the difference?

Natchaya T. — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 06:23:20 +0000

I’ve been wanting to write the comparison between these two for a while, seems like this is a good time now that G+ just rolled out some more options to use with Hangouts. So let’s see…

Watchitoo is a platform for multi streaming collaboration that offer a service of online video conference of up to 25 people participating and thousand people could enjoy being viewers. Another great thing about watchitoo is that it doesn’t require any download and it can be put on any website!

So watchitoo and G+ Hangout pretty much do the same thing. Yes I really think so with regard to how they work and what they do. Maybe a little bit different on that Hangouts is completely free…

However, they start to go on a different path recently, or specifically when G+ Hangout start to let people dial-in anyone through their phones! For Free in U.S. & Canada! and at very low rate to other countries in the world.

Before I go on introducing new options with Hangout which will probably make the two somehow further apart. Let me just say that I view Watchitoo and Hangout somehow a different kind of tool.

Watchitoo’s purpose is really getting people to collaborate, meet, chat online. It’s a product we can use for business or personal life. I especially like that we can put on our own website ( just how much I like it, I mentioned twice!)

But Hangout, apart from working very similarly to watchitoo, is still just a part of a whole picture. It is a product in a much much bigger product, that is Google+ . So to use Hangouts full potential, you have to see it as part of the whole new experience in online interaction. How? You are about to find out

Ok! So I mentioned that we can now call other people who don’t have internet. Of course, the video feature wouldn’t be available. But how nice to have whoever you want to join in the meeting no matter where you are? even without internet??

Apart from that, have you ever ended up exchanging strings of messages with your friend, in text, twitter and Facebook when you initially just want to drop by say hi or comment on their status? Well it happened to me many times, and after typing for a long while, I realized I should just call them. It would have been much easier and faster.

That’s where Hangout come in! With new option, you can start a Hangouts with your friend by just clicking Hangout icon directly below their post. So when you see them announcing something great and you want to share your excitement with them, you

can do that via Hangout. Definitely,seeing them and hearing them face to face is much better than reading the messages!

Moreover, with Google+ messenger on mobile devices, online video chat is not limited only to the laptop or computers, users can click on the Hangout in G+ messenger and start video chat. Did I mention that you can have up to 10 people all at once? Even in mobile phone??? YES.

Just to be sure we are not missing out on this one. Google+ just turning in more people who can use Hangout On Air and integrate with YouTube so once the Hangout session ends, the user will automatically receive their full-length private video record in their account.

What’s not to love?

Google+ Hangouts Get Mobile (and Antlers) (gizmodo.com.au)
Multiple ways to use “Hangouts” (readnatchaya.wordpress.com)
Getting Started With Google+ Hangouts and How to Host Conference Calls (vikitech.com)

You don’t need to choose Google+, sooner or later you’d end up using it.

Natchaya T. — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 03:01:41 +0000

This is a really good youtube vdo that summarizes Google+ in a very entertaining way!

G+ for Business

Natchaya T. — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 01:07:39 +0000

There are various aspects for businesses and brands to gain advantages from Google+. First of all, Google+ page makes business social. With features like Circles, Hangouts, and +1, companies can developed closer relationships with their customers through their brand page. You can make the most out of your marketing campagne by using Circles to target your audience by location, age, gender, interest, or any other useful waysThen you can send specific information, new products, or special promotions that is relevant to each circles. Google Plus site suggests many ways the business can add their customers to the right circle. Adding to this, businesses and brands can personalize and enhance their customers’ relationships by using Hangouts in numbers of ways. As a face to face real-time interaction, Hangouts can be used to launch product demos, Q&A or feedback sessions, public tutorials or customers’ support (as in the case of Dell). Moreover than that, for companies who do not have big budget like Apple, they can use Hangout to make a pretty impressive product launch by inviting press and other influential people for the event. Worthy to note is that Hangouts can be found in search results making it even more publicized. The benefit of +1 has been mentioned before. In the business sense, +1 button is available for customers to click as a support for their brands. Below is how it looks.

When their contacts search for the same thing, they will automatically see which post or web page is recommended by their friends. With this strategy, business can make their posts, advertisements ( +1 is also available in Google Adwords), or brand page more socially related to their customers through the connections of their customers’ contacts. This is how it looks when your contact has +1 the ad.

Not only that, when customers +1 any page, that page will become relevant the next time customers search the same thing but have a higher ranking . This is truly beneficial to any business as their page or post will be kept in the eyes of their customers, and also their friends!

More about Brand Page coming next!

Google+ Launches Pages for Businesses

3 Ways Google+ Pages Make Business Social

Google+ The Business Social Network

Multiple ways to use “Hangouts”

Natchaya T. — Sat, 19 Nov 2011 23:10:19 +0000

First of all, Hangout is a video chat and also a broadcasting channel. Yes, it is pretty much like Skype. Now that Skype is integrated in Facebook, Hangout is even more like that but much cooler (not only me to think so, check Google+ Hangouts is the Best Free Group Video Chat We’ve seen).

So what can you do with Hangout? Here is what Google Plus team explains about this feature.

“Hangouts are the best way for you to say, “I’m online and want to hangout!”

Because it is part of Google+, so you get this ability to act like you will in real life, sitting around showing that you are available for a chat, that is the first thing Hangout does. Even if you do not set a meeting with anyone, you can show people in your circles that you are hanging out by sign in to chat and choose ‘available’ status. This way, people can come and join you then you can catch up or even watch youtube video together. You can also notify anyone you like by sending them an invitation. Also, if you choose to do Hangout with extras, you can actually have a group meeting online and work on your project.

Hangout with extras ?

Hangout with extras let you collaborate work with your group. Although you cannot watch youtube in this, you can have text and video chat at the same time, share screen, edit document with the integration of Google Docs, use SketchUp to draw something or make a diagram, and also make notes which you and your members can come back to after the video conference ends.

Hangouts has a lot of potential and many people in different sectors are already aware of its capability. One great example of utilizing this feature is a set up of a Hangout called “Hangout Academy” which was created by six developers who initially met through Hangout. Hangout Academy is created to provided people to learn new skills by collaboration in a global scale. Its objective is to ”connect people in search of knowledge with experienced professionals and hobbyists willing to share it.” Another example of Hangout’s benefit for education and learning is how students can work together on virtual study groups and professors can provide “office hours” through Hangout. In business sector, Dell is quick on trend by already thinking about using Hangout as a new tool for its customer service. In media, KOMU News has already launch its Hangout ”U_News @ 4″ as a way for better connecting with its viewers as well as getting instant feedbacks and reactions.

Some might wonder how can it work for KOMU News to connect its audience when Hangout can host only up to 10 people? The answer is that there is something called “Hangout On Air”

The idea is that “Hangout On Air” provide live stream so the host can reach wider audience. It can be used as a closer connection with news consumer as in KOMU’s Hangout or as a behind-the scene live broadcast in Black Eyed Peas’s backstage Hangout.

Just a while ago, Hangout On Air was also used by Dalai Lama to celebrate South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s 80th birthday. The online meeting was planned as Dala Lama was not able to visit South Africa since its government failed to respond his visa request.

It seems like there the creative ways to use Hangouts will not stop at this as Google has planned to let this feature available for web developers to use for their websites. Here is another new innovation from Google+ that will definitely change our online social interaction – with the people in the whole world.

KOMU-TV Puts Google+ Hangout Video Chat on the Air (pbs.org)
Do Business People need to Hangout? Google+ certainly thinks so (marketing.yell.com)
How To Use Google+ Hangout For Business (adrsocialmedia.wordpress.com)
5 new challenges for media companies using Google Plus (lostremote.com)
Sarah Hill, KOMU-TV – Google+ Hangout: Norwegians speak on Oslo bombings (nextlevelofnews.com)