CommunityPlaybook (1)

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Hello fellow Googler,
G+ Communities are a fantastic way to bring
together a group of people who can connect
with each other to exchange ideas, opinions
support and advice about a certain topic
area. Based on the learnings from the launch
and growth of the Google Small Business
Community, this Playbook includes a detailed
outline of all the steps you’ll need to take
to launch a G+ Community, including hiring
a team, moderation processes, content
strategy, analytics, and more. Please feel free
to reach out to lkashuk@google.com with
additional questions.
The GSBC Team
A guide for Googlers who want
to plan, launch, run and grow a
thriving G+ community

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1 Pre-Launch Planning
1.1 Justifying the Investment 06
1.2 Shaping a Strategy 12
1.3 Building a Brand 20
1.4 Hiring a Team 24
2 Community Management
2.1 Dealing with Spam 32
2.2 Offering Support 40
2.3 Service Level Agreement 44
2.4 Moderation Documents 46
2.5 Guest Moderators 50
3 Content Strategy & Style
3.1 Editorial Guiding Principles 54
3.2 The Google Voice 62
3.3 Visual Guidelines 66
3.4 The Content Calendar 72
4 Content Production
4.1 Digital Events 76
4.2 Production Checklist 82
4.3 Other Creative Assets 86
5 Promotion & Acquisition
5.1 Cross Promotion 90
5.2 Influencers 94
5.3 House Ads 96
6 Measurement & Optimization
6.1 What We Measure & Why 98
6.2 Tools, Reports & Process 104
6.3 Setting KPIs 112
6.4 What We Chose 116
7 Working Together
7.1 Internal Communications 120
7.2 Cross-Team Collaboration 124
7.3 Partnerships 128
7.4 Stakeholder Management 132
8 Parting Thoughts 134
Table of Contents

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Don’t do it if:
You have revenue targets: It’s not impossible to sell something via a G+
community, it’s just not the best place for sales messaging. Because of
the focus on meaningful conversation, promotional messages do not
perform well on this platform. Additionally, it is not easy to track sales
coming from a G+ community at this point. More on analytics here.
You are looking for mass awareness: G+ Communities are not built to
be a scalable advertising platform for brands. Unlike Facebook or Twit-
ter, where brands get millions of Fans or Followers, marketing messages
can be broadcast out to those followers, and amplified through their net-
works, a brand-managed G+ community is built to foster conversations
between members. It’s more like a forum or group than a ‘fan page.’
1.1 Pre-launch Planning
Justifying the investment
Best Practice:
The KPIs of a G+ community must be
primarily about quality of interaction
(engagement), not quantity of people
(membership).
Did You Know?
As of June 2014, the biggest G+
communities have around 500k members,
while the biggest G+ page has 9 million
followers. (And the biggest Facebook brand
page has 152 million fans).
Best Practice:
Allow promotional messages only when
you’re offering something free to members
with a low barrier to usage. (For us, $20
toward a Helpout is ok. Spend $100 and
get $50 off AdWords is not).
Did You Know?
43% of customers say “blatantly self-
promotional” content is a major turn-off.

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Don’t do it if:
Pre-launch Planning 1.1 Justifying the Investment
Do it if:
You don’t have people, time and money: Technically, it’s free to create
a G+ Community. But to make one that truly adds value and grows over
time, you’ll need a team of dedicated community managers and moder-
ators at a minimum and an ongoing budget for content creation.
You’re not prepared to provide technical support: Any public forum that
is an official Google channel means that you’ll inevitably get people ask-
ing you how to do that one thing on their Gmail that they used to be able
to do and can’t find the button for now. They will find you, and you can-
not ignore them. Before your launch a G+ community, have a plan (and
the time) to answer or route tech support issues on any Google product.
More on support here.
You have an interested, like-minded audience: G+ Communities are a
fantastic way to bring together a group of people who can connect with
each other to exchange ideas, opinions, support and advice about a cer-
tain topic area. A sign of a healthy G+ Community is when members be-
gin to create high quality content that other members are commenting
on. People appreciate that Google provides the forum—we don’t have to
provide all the activities on it.
You want to learn from your users: This is the perfect platform to build
relationships directly with individuals, and to hear from the people that
use your product or service. While a G+ Community should have an edi-
torial calendar with content created by the brand, the content that is the
most valuable are the interactions between members. Many Googlers
don’t get direct, immediate access to users. Using your community as a
place for qualitative research, quotes and beta testers is a great way to
make us better at our jobs and involve the members directly in creating
a better Google.
Best Practice:
Proactively head off technical support
questions by offering resource roundups,
links to help centers, Q+A’s and video
trainings on frequently asked questions.
Did You Know?
The Google Small Business Community
gets at least 3 technical support questions
per week.
Best Practice:
Make sure your topics are something
people are passionate about. Choose
categories that have legs beyond product
announcements and how to’s so your
members won’t tire of the content and stop
participating.
Did You Know?
Anyone can post and all posts are treated
equally on the feed. Anyone can create an
event. You may have some content areas
in mind, but the democratic nature of the
platform means that the members really
get to control what is being discussed.
Best Practice:
Create a system that allows you to share
the insights from your audience back with
your larger team and cross-functional
teams.
Did You Know?
The nature of interaction on G+
communities is deeper and more
meaningful than other social networks.
People are there to meet and talk and
converse, not just ‘Like.’
Best Practice:
A very well run community also involves
copywriters, designers, video producers
and editors, content marketers, analysts,
and social strategists.
Did You Know?
Depending on whether your community is
public or private and how large it will grow,
expect to invest a minimum of $100k per
quarter on it on an ongoing basis. More on
budgeting and building a team here.

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Pre-launch Planning 1.1 Justifying the Investment
You’re a fierce protector of the Google brand: Unlike most market-
ing materials which get edited, fine-tuned, proofread and approved up a
chain of 10 people, the content that goes up on a G+ Community is alive
and doesn’t have time to be perfected. One careless comment by a mod-
erator 17 comments down a thread can become a screenshot that gets
plastered all over the internet as something that ‘Google’ officially said.
And unfortunately, there are sometimes detractors waiting for a slip up.
Make sure your team and leaders have sharp creative instinct and expe-
rience with what is ‘Googley.’
You want to build brand love: If your mission is authentic, your mem-
bers will truly appreciate the effort. The Google Small Business Com-
munity is a place where businesses can get the help they need to suc-
ceed on the web by connecting with experts and each other. It’s entirely
free and endlessly useful. When we launched, some of our new mem-
bers even wondered what the catch was, and then eventually went on to
evangelize the community to their networks. You’ll create advocates for
Google naturally by simply being there for people.
Best Practice:
PR and legal training, extensive brand
voice practice, and over communication
among the internal team are imperative
to avoid a trip up. More on escalation
and brand voice here.
Did You Know?
Posts by moderators should go up 2-3x
times a day, and comments on member
posts can happen every few minutes.
Best Practice:
Be wary of other teams and senior
stakeholders who may be tempted to
turn your community into a promotional
platform. Set a strong, pure mission
upfront, sell it in, and stick to it.
Did You Know?
It feels good to be loved.
 Timing Tip:
Developing the rationale for the Small
Business G+ community and securing
budget took about 2 months.
Jeff Bond
Yesterday 2:38 PM
+Brian Quimby & +Casey Monroe ... just got
back home and have only one thing to say ...
please give us #moar ;)
thank you, i believe THIS is exactly how you build
#community
p.s. and thank you for the multiple camera tip
brian, that works great!
Shayna Jung
Yesterday 2:38 PM
So happy to be a part of the community!
I am loving all of the productivty posts here
already, what a great encouragement!
Dianne P.
5:23 AM
Thank you, Casey Monroe
I've looked around and I've found some actually
good information.
You have a great community here. I'll stop by
every day to see the updates and hopefully help
others with my own experience.
Ray Snoke
Apr 10, 2014
Fantastic! Thank you for the information. I may
have another question or two in a bit. But thank
you very much. That's quite helpful.
Do it if:

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Insights: Uncover a real, human truth—likely something no one would
say out loud—that you can turn into something that changes behavior.
It probably shouldn’t be about your product. Instead, focus on cultural
context or the consumer’s headspace—their attitudes, experiences or
beliefs.
Mission/Purpose: Given the insights you’ve pinpointed, what can your
project do to improve their lives? Our community was built to help small
businesses succeed on the web. What is yours for?
KPIs/Goals: Now you can look inside and focus on the internal objec-
tives of your new community. What would success look like? Are there
acquisition and engagement goals you want to hit? Defining goals early
on—even if they are edited—is important to getting senior stakeholders
excited about your community. And as you hit them, it gives you ammo
to get more investment in your project. More on establishing KPIs here.
The Brief: Consolidate your strategy into a clear, inspirational one pager.
You can use a template like this.
Content Marketing Strategy: Ideally, your community will grow
beyond just engagement (questions and answers), including a proper
content marketing strategy to ensure that you’re bringing high quality
information, inspiration and interaction to your members. Below are
examples of some of the pieces of an early content strategy for the
Google Small Business Community. The visuals that follow were meant
as a guide to get us going—they evolved quickly as we learned from the
members daily and adjusted.
Shaping a Strategy

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Types: Sketch out a plan for the topics and format of content you want,
and what desired responses you expect.
Service
Responses to questions/
Routing to customer support/
Thanks for participation/ Office
hours/ Help Outs
Gratitude/Relief/Advocacy
Snacks
Infographics/Tips/Stats/
Quotes/Trivia
+1 and share
Discussion
Thought pieces/Studies/
Reactions to current events/
Methods/Points of view/
Theories
Consider and react
Monday
Snack: Quote
from case study
and link
Training
Tuesday
Snack: Tip
(Google yourself)
CM Video
Training: How
to 1
Wednesday
Snack:
Infographic
Discussion: Q/A
Thursday
Snack: Trivia
Training: Share 1
Magic: Indv.
spotlight
Friday
Recap:
Highlights
Discussion:
Thought piece
Ad Hoc
Promo (1x)
Magic: +1s,
shoutouts
Snack: Quote
Service: GCS
Hangout
Snack: Tip
Training: How
to 2
Snack:
Infographic
Learn 10x
Snack: Trivia
Training: Share 2
Snack: Tip
(GABO)
Magic: Biz
spotlight
Promo (1x)
Magic: +1s,
shoutouts
Snack: Quote
from case study
and link
Training
Snack: Tip
(Google yourself)
CM Video
Training: How
to 1
Snack:
Infographic
Discussion: Q/A
Snack: Trivia
Training: Share 1
Magic: Indv.
spotlight
Recap:
Highlights
Discussion:
Thought piece
Promo (1x)
Magic: +1s,
shoutouts
Training
Training/How tos/Education
modules/Project show & tells/
Case studies
Understand/Try
Magic
Google watercooler/Rewards
and recognition/Surprise +
delight
Brand love/Advocacy
Product
Promotions/Links to
campaigns/Product pages
Click and become a member
Cadence: Start to think about balance and flow of your content and devel-
op a skeleton content calendar to get a feel for how it plays out day by day.
Long-term Goal: 50% of the activity coming from members themselves
Pre-launch Planning 1.2 Shaping a Strategy
Description
Content BalanceContent Types
Content Calendar Template
Desired
response
Desired
response
Description
Snacks
50%
Service
Discussion
20%
Magic 5%
Training
20%
Product 5%

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1
Quiet Launch
March 19
Content
Pre-populate content
into 'Be Found'
and 'Advertise and
Measure'
Aquisition
GABO week daily
HOAs
Capture long tail
founding members
via GABO week
initiatives
Operations
First week of active
moderation and
activation of content
calendar
2
Test
April—June
Rub SMB week
special
Promote growth via
internal newsletters
and communities
Invite Googlers
and friends/fam to
'dogfood'
Test content to
determine best
formats, topics
and cadence/Run
experiments and
proactive polling
(first HOA, hashtags,
behaviors)
3
Loud Launch
July
Regular
programming based
on learnings from
test
Need big activators/
Engagement stunt/
AdWords campaign/
G+ suggestions
placement/
Other paid promos
Add work together
section/Hire
additional team
member/Plan for
growth period
4
Grow
August—September
Regular
programming
Begin monthly
newsletter (via SMB
Hub)
Paid aquisition
continues and
extends to other
social channels
Take over G+,
FB, Twitter/Add
LinkedIn/Hire
additional team
member(s)
5
Campaigns
October—December
Regular
programming
Begin monthly
newsletter (via SMB
Hub)
Need holiday
activation/
Engagement stunt/
Paid promo and
campaign ideas
Add 4th Earn
category
Sources: Who will create your content? You probably don’t want
to start from scratch every time. Develop a who’s who of the
voices for your community.
Phases: Communities can be unwieldy compared to many other types
of projects that are fully under your control. You should develop a tenta-
tive plan for launching and growing your community over the course of
the first year, knowing that as it grows organically, the way forward will
becoming more and more clear. Here is a sample of our first stab at 5
phases of the Google Small Business Community.
More on our how our content strategy netted out here.
Who's who - Content Creators
Phases of Growth
Daily
The Pulse
(hired teams/customer support/members)
Weekly
Experts
(unknown Googler/Partners/comarketing/etc.)
Monthly
Thought Leaders
(known Googlers/outside
influencers)
Quarterly
Celebs
Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4

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Best Practice:
Your strategy will shift constantly, but
having some guidance down on paper
helps keep you moving forward. Keep
your eyes open for opportunities and
embrace change.
 Timing Tip:
Developing and getting all stakeholders aligned on
the strategy took about 2 months.
Launch Plan: If you’re starting your community from scratch, a plan to
introduce yourself to the world is key. Communities should start small
and grow fairly slowly in order to retain their relevance and activity.
Because of that, we started with a “quiet launch,” taking advantage
of another team’s initiative that generated some founding members
and content for us. We ran tests and made hundreds of tweaks to our
content strategy over the next two months working up to a “loud launch,”
which would involve a much heavier push for new members. We ended
up formally launching 6 weeks ahead of time to take advantage of a
Small Business related national event. Instead of using paid advertising,
we got a home page promotion on Google.com.

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Naming your community: We used a combination of keyword research
and Google Consumer Surveys to form a recommendation for the name
of our community. Because G+ has some great SEO benefits, it is im-
portant to choose a name that is search friendly and memorable, vs one
that is clever but not straightforward.
The Challenge of Creative Excellence: Our SMB Marketing team aspires
to create work that is beautiful, helpful and fun. Our team of communi-
ty managers and content creators were certainly able to make sure the
content of our posts was practical and relevant to our audience and in-
teresting and entertaining to engage with. That’s what they do. But we
didn’t have the budget for a designer to be at the ready every time we
needed to post something (3x/day).
A Systematic Solution: Before we launched, we worked with a creative
agency to develop our branding: starting with our avatar (the closest
thing you’ll get to a logo). Using Google’s Quantum Spec as a guide, we
came up with a visual representation of what we wanted our community
to be about: businesses interacting with each other.
Building a Brand

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Once that was approved all the way up through our VP, we used it as a
guide to develop a comprehensive set of editable templates that would
function as the visuals for our day to day content. There are over 60
templates in our set to account for those with pictures and icons, those
without, and for variety in copy lengths and colors. Eventually, this same
branding style was rolled out into things like swag giveaways (water bot-
tles, etc.), animated end cards for videos, and other marketing assets
like emails and paid ads.
Best Practice:
Hire a community manager who is fairly
comfortable in basic Photoshop skills so
he/she can use these templates to create
the content each week.
Best Practice:
Try to come up with a system that is
flexible enough for different media and
applications.
 Timing Tip:
Developing and getting approval on the branding
and templates took about 2 months and cost $150k.
Pre-launch Planning 1.3 Building a Brand

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Hire and Agency? Google teams, marketing especially, tend to default to
using agencies to staff projects. In taking a look at the landscape and in-
terviewing Googlers with previous experience in social, we chose to go a
different route because:
Boutique digital creative agencies They do more than social, so they ar-
en't interested in community management/moderation in the long term.
It's something they'll probably do, especially for Google, but not some-
thing they work to hire the best talent for. To them, it’s not a sexy cam-
paign, it’s an ongoing day job. The main thing this type of agency would
be interested in with a G+ community project is the content creation
side of things—and more so when it's higher production content that re-
quires a lot of design or mini-campaigns/contests, videos, etc. With their
own internal approval process, getting daily microcontent from an agen-
cy would take too long, and we’d still have to solve the moderation issue.
They often outsource the bulk of the moderation and manage that rela-
tionship, or they would have to hire moderators for us specifically.
Hiring a Team

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Big, full service digital agency of record They are machines. They
have a department for everything, so they often can manage social
content and moderation. However, the plug and play resources and
have high turnover, which leads to the possibility of different people on
different days. With the nuance of the Google voice, the importance of
a personal connection with moderators, and the intricacies of working
with Google’s internal systems/processes, it’s tough not having a 100%
dedicated team. With these types of agencies, you may also deal with
account people trying to upsell you to use their other services.
Social agencies. They know all the tricks of each social platform to hit
the acquisition and engagement scores that they need to look good.
They often even recycle content ideas across a ton of brands (New
Year's Resolution post framing for a cracker brand, a B2B brand, a
clothing company can look shockingly similar coming out of places like
this). The quality of content from these shops can be formulaic, but their
moderation is solid.
Pre-launch Planning 1.4 Hiring a Team Pre-launch Planning 1.4 Hiring a Team
Hire a team: By personally recruiting 3 stellar team members, each with
their own strengths, we were able to plug directly into a lean but close-
knit team of specialists fully dedicated to our G+ community. We decid-
ed to go the route of having the three red-badged TVCs split moderation
duties in the beginning, knowing that we could scale that up easily later
on by hiring a layer of junior moderators once volume was high enough.

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Roles and Responsibilities:Here is what the model looks like:
Content/Community Managers
Moderators
Team Lead
Google PMM
Google PMM: The Community Lead
• Accountable for overall success
and evolution of the community
• Identify opportunities to improve
and add to long term strategy
• Manage creative process and
approvals of all stakeholders
• Liaison with other Google teams
and own outside partnerships
• Manage budget and hiring
• Partner closely with Team/Ops
Lead on event production
• Concept special initiatives,
activations and campaigns
Content/Community Managers:
• Concept ideas for content
topics, formats and series
• Research and write short
and long form content
• Own content calendar
• Find, repurpose and curate
existing third party content
• Collect data and create monthly
and quarterly reports
• Run experiments analyze
results for those, along with
campaigns and activations
• Daily moderation and/or management
of moderators and guest moderators
• Develop ideas and strategies for
engagement and acquisition
• Help execute events and activations
Team/Ops Lead:
• Responsible for day to day
success of the community
• Supervise Community
Managers and moderators
• Work closely with PMM on
implementation of special
initiatives, activations, campaigns
and event production
• Project manager of all
processes and productions
Moderators:
• Respond to members
• Remove spam
• Listening and assistance with reporting
• Pattern identification and
trend identification
• Sending swag and thank you notes
 Timing Tip:
It took about 1 month to find and hire our first 3
team members and 2 additional weeks to get them
the access they needed via the tvc process.
Pre-launch Planning 1.4 Hiring a Team

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Best Practice:
When you hit 20k members or 20 member
posts/day, be ready to hire 1-2 additional
team members who spend 100% of the
time on moderation and spam removal.
Consider hiring an offshore overnight
moderator to ensure that each morning,
your community has high quality content
and conversations.
Best Practice:
Consider hiring two community managers,
each with different strengths in the
responsibilities listed above.
Best Practice:
Find a community management team
that is passionate about what they do by
recruiting via something like Meetup.com.
Find people who are actively involved and
interested in the community management
industry extra-curricularly.
Pre-launch Planning 1.4 Hiring a Team

32 33
2.1 Community Management
Dealing with Spam
As your community grows, you’ll notice that
you’ll be defining and redefining spam. At first
you might just think of it as electronic junk,
multiple posts or gibberish words written in
Arabic but as the community becomes more
discoverable and active, so do the kind of
spam posts that surface. It’s important to
constantly evaluate what you consider spam
and to inform your community, both with
publicly posted guidelines and individually as
people violate that policy.

34 35
Google Small Business Community
Henry Akanno
Work Together – 10:40 AM
watching Italy Vs. Costa Rica world cup games!
Best Practice:
In general, anyone who only does this once
gets a pass. But multiple offenders are
quickly banned from the community.
We’ve landed on 4 spam categories that might help you get
started defining yours:
1. Spam: Electronic junk. No more explanation needed.
2. Irrelevant: This can be a judgment call. Often, posts like this are dis-
cussed by the core community management moderation team. While
it’s not a spam post, it doesn’t offer any value to the community. He isn’t
asking a question or communicating with other members.
Community Management 2.1 Dealing with Spam
Best Practice:
Have a group chat up during the day for
quick gut-checks with the moderation team
regarding spam. As you notice patterns,
document them so you don’t have to have
similar time-draining conversations over
and over again.
What We Do
The Google Small Business Community is designed to help busi-
ness people make the most of the web. It’s a place for business
owners to connect with Googlers, industry experts, and their
peers. Our moderators will be in the community to offer guidance
and answer questions from 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM Pacific Time on
weekdays (except for major US holidays).
What We Ask From You
Be helpful. This is all about bringing people with varied expertise
and experiences together to help each other out. Do your best to
support your fellow contributors to the community with positive,
relevant posts and comments.
Be respectful. Other people in the community will have differ-
ent perspectives, beliefs, and points of view. That’s okay. Please
be polite and compassionate. If you have a disagreement, work it
out professionally (and in private).
Be specific. When you have a question, idea, or response, the
more context and information you can provide, the better.
Be constructive. This is your community as much as it is ours,
and we know you have a lot to offer. We need your feedback to
make sure that the community is the best it can be.
Be family-friendly. Anyone with a Google account is able to see
the community, so make sure you’re not posting anything you
wouldn’t want your grandmother to see.
Be open. We encourage you to give advice, offer help, and share
your experiences doing business, especially when it comes to
the web.
Guidelines for the Community
Don’t promote. This isn’t the place to post marketing material for
your business. To maintain meaningful conversations about suc-
ceeding on the web, we do not accept promotional offers, sales
pitches via blog posts, or links to a general homepage (with the
exception of introducing yourself or asking for feedback on a
web site).
Don’t post classified ads. This isn’t the place to job search. We
want to remain focused on creating and fostering an environ-
ment for business people to share their advice and experience.
Don't post links without context. We encourage you to share
links with our community as long as they're business-related. We
ask that you include a short writeup in your post that tells mem-
bers something you learned from the article you're sharing. Links
without summaries will be removed by our moderation team.
Don't worry if your link gets removed. We evaluate the content of
each link shared to make sure it's up to our quality standards. Our
moderators act as editors to make sure that the community feed
always has a well-curated set of useful articles, with the best
of the best included in our daily #BizLinks roundup. If your link
comes down, please try again another time, with a different link.
Don’t be mean. Abuse, insults, profanity, personal attacks, bul-
lying or hateful comments (including but not limited to com-
ments about race, gender, sexual expression or identity) will be
removed.
Don’t post personal information. Members of the community
may share information with you that isn’t intended to be shared
with the public. Because the Google Small Business Communi-
ty is a public community, we ask that you be careful about what
information you share. Please don’t post personal information
about other users, like phone numbers, email addresses or cus-
tomer ID numbers.
Repeatedly breaking any of these rules will result in your being
banned from the community.
Here's a look at our community guidelines.
KEIN TRUC NMB
Work Together – Jun 1, 2014
http://094983487762724872.blogspot.com/
094983487762724872
094983487762724872.blogspot.com
+1  Add a comment...
+1 

36 37
3. Self-Promotional: This is also a tricky topic. When our communi-
ty first launched, we allowed many self-promotional posts because our
standards for member created content was very low, and we wanted to
allow people to introduce themselves. Over time we saw fans take ad-
vantage of the fact that unlike a G+ brand page, they too could post their
own content. This allowed us to evaluate on a case by case basis if the
fan was just being self-promotional for their own sake or to genuinely
contribute. Oftentimes we would have one off conversations with fans
explaining our policy. We’d invite them to return following the policy by
asking a question or commenting.
4. Link Dumping: Because we’re a business community, a lot of our
members want to share business related links. This is great when
they’re encouraging discussion, but you don’t want your community to
become just an endless string of links with no discussion.
Best Practice:
Positive encouragement and suggestions
go a long way when private messaging
someone who inadvertently posted spam.
We’ve seen members come back and
contribute in meaningful ways.
Best Practice:
We eventually settled on a policy where
we allow links as long as they’re business-
related, they include a summary in the
post text (to add friction), and the articles
themselves are high quality. We tell the
community that we think of ourselves as
editors of the community’s content, rather
than just moderators.
Did You Know?
It’s better to start strict while
moderating and loosen up as you’ve
gained respect and control than it is
to start relaxed and tighten up.
Security and Investigations
Be Found Online – May 21, 2014
Check out the DMOC Entertainment website like us on
facebook.com/DmocEnt or dmoc-ent.com/
Dmoc Entertainment
facebook.com/DmocEnt
Steve Burk
MiscBiz – May 12, 2014
Thanks for letting me join this community. I am one
of the partners of a small repair shop looking for our
chance to go bigger. Come check us out. Any feedback is
appreciated. www.PeerlessInkc.com
+1
+2


Allen Borza
MiscBiz – Jun 18, 2014
How to speed up your business website
Speed up and organize your website
greengroup.com/blog/web/speed
+1 
Not Allowed Allowed

38 39
When you remove a post, you should to send some kind of message
to the person whose post was removed, to let them know why you
removed it. Google+ has three ways of doing this, but we recommend
doing it via a comment on the removed post. Here’s the list of options,
and why we made the selection we did:
Escalation Flowchart
Hangouts.
You can send a Hangouts message, but
a lot of users don’t sign in to Hangouts
or don’t notice the message, and miss
it. In addition, it gives strangers in your
community the ability to ping you BACK on
Hangouts, which you usually don’t want.
Finally, there’s a spam quota—if you send
too many Hangouts in a short time, your
ability to start new Hangouts is temporarily
removed.
Privately shared posts.
Like Hangouts, this also has a spam
quota—notify too many people too quickly,
and your posts get removed. We also
noticed a low response rate here.
Comment on the removed post.
For this method (and only this method)
of messaging, Community Moderators
are immune to the spam quota, which
is reason alone to use it. It also has the
highest rate of acknowledgement by the
user being moderated. Two things to
bear in mind, though: First, posts should
be removed quickly—removed posts in
Google+ communities don’t disappear until
you refresh the community, but comments
appear automatically. So if someone is
on the community when you remove the
post, the post will appear to remain up, but
your moderation comment will be visible.
Second, anyone who visits the profile of
the person whose post was removed will
be able to see the comment. So while your
posts won’t be obvious to other people in
the community, they still won’t be strictly
private—so be careful what you say!
Best Practice:
Keep a document with a pre-written list
of responses you can use to address the
different types of posts that need removing.
 Timing Tip:
Expect to spend 2-3 days writing and revising
your guidelines and spam policy. You should also
expect to re-evaluate them both at least once a
month—more often during the early stages.
Is the post within the guidelines?
Remove the post
No
No
No
No
No
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Does the post ask a question or
otherwise request follow up?
Engage. Welcome the user and
encourage them to feel at home.
Is it a question that can only be
answered by a Googler?
Is it a question that is appropriate
for us to answer? (Not related to
competing products, etc.)
Is it a sensitive question? (for example,
online privacy in Google Drive)
Escalate. Let the rest of the team know
what’s going on, and loop in PR/Legal
to get official language for a response.
Encourage Advisor response. Loop
in the #AskAnAdvisor hashtag and
surface to the Advisors as needed.
Contribute and call backup. Provide
some info to answer the question
yourself, but also loop in the Advisors
for more detailed info.
Offer Support. Redirect them to
support resources, offer simple
answers where possible.

40 41
Offering Support
The Google Small Business Community is not
meant to be a community to get tech support
on Google products. That said, any time you
open a channel through which people can
talk to a Googler, you will get tech support
requests. Because we’re a marketing channel,
we have a specific focus on making sure our
community members walk away happy, which
means that handling tech support requests
can be a touchy subject.

42 43
Reactive:
Answer the easy ones. Our first tool is to answer the question.
If it’s an answer you know or can find easily, go for it.
If it’s a complicated question, route away. If you can’t answer the
question yourself (or even if you can), you should provide them with
a support resource to get more information—usually the Help Center,
or official support forum. You can find that list here.
Always route somewhere specific. When you route, it’s always
better to route someone to a page that directly addresses their ques-
tion rather than a help center or forum homepage. Even if you’re just
linking someone to the “tech support” category on the forums, that’s
better than routing to the forums in general.
Follow up. When you route someone, check back in on them
afterwards (by PM if necessary) to make sure their issue has been
resolved. This goes a long way to have members that feel personally
connected to Google.
Proactive:
Post about support resources. Because posts on G+ aren’t preserved
very well, be sensitive to questions that are coming up a lot, and proac-
tively post to let people know where the answers can be found.
Close any replies with posts directing people to support resources.
When you answer a question, whether you get a final answer or not,
always include a link to the support resources they would need to
answer further questions.
Post more heavily about non-product related things. We want to make
sure we set the tone that we talk more about advice and strategy than
directly about Google products.
Keep a list of contacts. You should maintain a list of internal contacts
at Google for every Google product you expect to get support questions
about—as well as in the PR and Legal departments—in case you need to
double-check your messaging.
Partner with support teams. We have monthly meetings with the
SMB Services team (AdWords support) to fill them in on what kinds of
questions our members are asking and to share content back and forth
between our community and their support forums. Our relationship with
this team has been highly beneficial on both sides.
Community Management 2.2 Offering Support
Best Practice:
Answering questions is good, but having
your user base answer them for you
is better. Once you get to know your
community, you can +tag in another user
who knows the answer. If you’ve covered
something previously, be sure and call back
to your earlier content with a link!

44 45
Serivce Level Agreement
Hours of operation: We make it clear to our community that we will be
online and answering questions during normal working hours (Pacific
Time). We clean up spam and bad posts outside those hours, but we
don’t engage directly. Having our hours posted helps set expectations.
Procedure/time frame for responding: At our launch, our goal was to
answer all questions within three hours. As long as it’s within actual
working hours, we’ve had no trouble keeping to that schedule, even as
our community grows to 25k or more.
Follow ups: We keep a spreadsheet that tracks “open loops—” that is,
any conversation where we know a user is waiting on us for an answer.
Once we’ve responded and the matter is settled, we hide the row so we
still have a record, but we know it isn’t pressing.

46 47
Date Moderator Link to post Reason for removal
1 6/16/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/1234 Spam
3 6/15/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/2044 Link
4 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/a034 Self-promo
5 6/13/2014 Berrak plus.google.com/232455 Spam/Non-English
Moderation Documents
This document tracks every post we find ourselves needing to
remove. For each post, we note:
1. The date
2. The moderator who removed it
3. The name of the poster: This allows us to search by name
to see if we have any repeat offenders.
4. A link to the post: This lets us check the actual post to
verify how bad it was, and to read the comment that was
used to reply to the post.
5. The reason for the removal: This lets us look for trends in
different types of spam.
6. Whether or not the person was banned
Removed Posts
Removed/Flagged Posts from Community 

48 49
Form Responses 
Canned Responses Flagged for Follow-Up
This doc is where we pre-write our responses to removed posts. We up-
date it frequently as we change our Guidelines and we see different
types of spam, but the common thread is that each response polite-
ly informs the user that the post was removed, explains why, links to the
Community Guidelines, and invites them to try again.
This document includes a link to every “open loop” thread—everything
we need to make sure that no question ever slips through the cracks. In
the document we track the following things:
Each row is hidden once we resolve the issue, so we retain a record—but
our goal is to keep this spreadsheet clean.
• Name of the poster
• Date of the original post
• Link to the post
• General question topic
• Our next step
Community Management 2.4 Moderation Documents
Best Practice:
If you see the kind of behavior on the
community that you want, engage with it.
Always acknowledge positive behavior and
radiate positivity. It’s contagious.
Self Promotion
Maxim nonsequid erias voluptatur rero doloratat.
Voluptatem estem aut paribus cipsandi iusant venim inciist
oreprovitio officiis endemolectur re mode.
Link Dump
Maxim nonsequid erias voluptatur rero doloratat.
oreprovitio officiis endemolectur re mod estibeatem fugia
sinture ma et voluptis aut eictate ssimodit ulpa quas pos
exceribe..
Blogspm
Maxim onsequid erias voluptatur rero doloratat.
oreprovitio officiis endemolectur re mod estibeatem fugia
sinture ma et voluptis aut eictate ssimodit ulpa quas pos
exceribe..
9 ABCO 4/30/2014 plus.google.com/128912 AdSense not working!
12 Mihai GRBlog 5/11/2014 plus.google.com/1394 Denied for AdSense
14 Ashish G 5/21/2014 plus.google.com/94939 AdSense Help
17 Tuck Sing Leee 5/27/2014 plus.google.com/2423 Auto-posting blogs from social media
Removed/Flagged Posts from Community 

50 51
Guest Moderators
Our community has a group of dedicated third
party volunteers, who we call Advisors. The
purpose of the Advisor program is to make sure
that every question gets answered. Setting up
a volunteer moderator program is great if your
internal team doesn’t have the bandwidth to
engage with every active member at scale. And
sometimes, as Googlers, we get questions that
we can’t answer.
Some examples of risky topics include:
Competing Products. In many cases, it makes sense for a Google cus-
tomer to also take advantage of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Yelp, or any
number of other products that compete with Google. We never want to
give our customers bad advice or a limited picture, but advising people
on what competing products to use and how can be legally dangerous.
Our Advisors can freely give advice on all business tools across the web.
SEO. The precise workings of Google’s search engine are a closely
guarded secret, and even if you’re only casually brushing the topic, offer-
ing information “directly from Google” can always be risky. Instead, we
link them to Google’s SEO handbook and then let others do the talking.
In cases like these, we depend on our Advisors to make sure that
we have a way to get these questions answered, without having to
answer them ourselves.

52 53
Working with third party moderators
Community Access. We don’t recommend providing third parties with
moderator access to your community, as any moderator can make de-
cisions (like removing posts) that you don’t necessarily want to leave in
the hands of a volunteer. Unfortunately, “moderator” and “owner” are the
only levels of access, meaning that you can’t easily make your vetted
third party guests stand out. For this purpose we recommend using a
doc (like this one) to identify your volunteers and make them stand out.
Communication. Always make sure you can reach your volunteers via
email. You may be tempted to reach out to them exclusively on Google+,
but many people don’t check their G+ notifications the way they check
their email.
The Pitch. In many cases, you won’t have to sell people on an opportu-
nity like this—recognition from Google goes a long way. That said, it’s
important to make the benefit statement clear: What you’re offering is
an opportunity to connect directly with potential customers, in order to
build your brand and identity as an expert. We get their expertise, they
get access to our user base and the validation that comes from a Goo-
gle seal of approval. What they don’t get, is...
...Self-promotion. Make sure that your volunteers know that they’re not
there to promote themselves at the expense of the community. It’s im-
portant that they don’t use your community to advertise—but it’s also im-
portant that they feel rewarded for their contributions, so be sure to use
your own influence to promote them where it makes sense.
Check-ins. We encourage you to have regular check-ins with your volun-
teers to make sure they’re happy and excited to contribute. As long as
they’re helping, it makes everyone look good.
Vetting. Make sure that you carefully vet any volunteers before you give
them the stamp of approval. The vast majority of the people in our Ad-
visors group have already been vetted as Ambassadors for the Google
Partners Community, so we know they have training both in how to use
our products and in what they can and can’t say. If you don’t have anoth-
er group to rely on, you’ll have to do that training yourself. Be careful!
Surfacing Issues to Your Guest Moderators. We use two different tech-
niques to let our guest mods know when an issue comes up that needs
their attention. First, we created a hashtag (#AskAnAdvisor) to flag ques-
tions that need their attention—our Advisors regularly check that tag
for new posts. For times when we have exceptionally high volume (like
Small Business Week), we also created a simple doc that lists links to rel-
evant questions, identifies the topic, and then has a field where Advisors
can “claim” the question, so they don’t wind up duplicating a lot of work
by answering the same question multiple times. This isn’t necessary
during normal volume, but it’s good to have ready for special events.
Community Management 2.5 Guest Moderators

54 55
Plan ahead. When planning the rough outline of content topics for the
community each quarter, the first thing we check is the calendar for big
holidays that would be relevant to our members, such as Mother’s Day,
Memorial Day, Small Business Week, Earth Day, etc. We have at least a
daily piece of content for these holidays, if not bigger activations such
as interviews or business spotlights we can do in the community.
Be flexible and timely. In addition to planning ahead for holidays, your
content calendar should also leave room for last minute, unplanned
additions or postponements. This can be the launch of another Google
product (or community), a policy change in your moderation guidelines
that requires an explanation post, or replacing a piece of content you
had scheduled. Additionally, we keep a content repository to refer to
when we need to plug in a piece of content - such as statistics to use
for trivia questions, quotes to inspire conversation, and links to business
related we can repurpose for branded content.
Steal and share with pride. To capture the interest of your fans and be
seen as a thought leader, find ways to produce your own unique content,
rather than repost what you can find (even if it’s really awesome.) That
said, borrow from other relevant Google content like Think with Google,
Life @ Google, etc to see what you can repurpose for your community.
Establish points of contact on teams that you share content with regu-
larly, and be ready to share back! Create a Content Resource doc
so content creators have a starting point that’s not a blank page.
3.1 Content Strategy & Style
Editorial Guiding Principles
Berrak Sarikaya MODERATOR
MiscBiz Jun 20, 2014
How to Share Your Best #BizLinks
Our goal is to make sure that our community mem-
bers are getting the help they need to succeed on the
web. That can happen through useful content, like
the links you share with us every day. But the best
connections really happen through conversations. Re-
cently, we tested a new way to handle submissions for
business-related links to try to encourage interaction
around fewer, better resourceds. We've been tracking
this experiment closely, and have decided that there
is an easier way for you to share the articles that you
have found helpful with others. With this in mind, we're
making a change.

56 57
About this community
Welcome to the Google Small Business Community—a
place where businesses can get the help they need to
succeed on the web by connecting with experts and each
other. In addition to regular Hangouts and Q+As with
Googlers, trusted Advisors and industry leaders, you'll also
see:
#BizBits - Stats, tips, quotes and trivia for a little
learning every day
#BizBytes - Case studies, infographics, thought pieces, and
articles to discuss
#Bizdom - Topic-specific training sessions led by web
specialists
#BizLinks - Roundups of your favorite resources every
Monday/Wednesday/Friday
#FeedbackFridays -Your chance to have the community
weigh in on ideas
#AskanAdvisor -If you have a question you want an online
pro to answer
Invite people Share this community
Serialize everything. We’ve established specific formats of content we
post on certain days of the week, so that our members expect it and can
follow along to the programs they enjoy most. Brand these series with
memorable hashtags to encourage repeat visits and interaction.
Contnent Strategy & Style 3.1 Editorial Guiding Principles
Be consistent. In addition to branded series that occur on a regular
schedule, have a consistent posting format, always including a headline,
hashtag and CTA. Member spotlights should always be called spotlights,
rather than sometimes being snapshots. Same thing goes for recaps,
roundups and resources. Using similar language helps train members
on how to use the community and offers familiarity.
Sort by categories. In addition to hashtags, utilize the G+ Community
Categories. We decided that we would have 4 broad categories when we
launched the community: Be Found Online, Advertise & Measure, Work
Together, and MiscBiz (for anything that didn’t fall into the first three cat-
egories). As the community grew, we added a weekly recap to our con-
tent on Fridays, which led to the creation of the Week in Review catego-
ry, which serves as an Archive of the best content.
Welcome
MiscBiz
Be Found Online
Work Together
Advertise & Measure
Week in Review
Events
 Search community
6
1
1
1

58 59
Let the members lead the way: Your members are your greatest inspira-
tion, you should constantly be on the lookout for content ideas coming
straight from their words. Your community should be a creative outlet
for them to voice feedback, discussion topics and content series. For ex-
ample, Google Small Business Community members posting questions
about hiring for their business was the inspiration behind our Hiring for
Your Business Hangout.
Another example is a member who created an introduction video to re-
ply to follow up questions asked by our moderators about his business.
This led us to launch a series of SMB created videos.
Always have a next step: Each piece of content should include a CTA to
encourage engagement, such as a question tied in to your post, RSVPing
and submitting questions for an event, or downloading a one-sheeter
that we’ve created. When appropriate, we also include links to addition-
al resources, as well as calling out any related content that’s been post-
ed in the community.
Berrak Sarikaya MODERATOR
MiscBiz Jun 20, 2014
#BizBits Share your productivity tips with us
The key to productivity is creating a routine and
minimizing distractions. In addition to starting
your day right with a morning ritual, increase your
producitvity by setting limits on meetings, using
technology and apps to streamline your business, and
creating old-fashioned to-do lists.
Want to know how other members being their
mornings? Check out this post on with their
commesnts on morning rituals: http://goo.gl/mbQOsJ
Michael Stringfield
MiscBiz – Jun 18, 2014
Thank you Casey Monroe for asking me for some
thoughts. This is the video that I came up with. I have
a ton of thoughts but I didn't want to drag on and on.
Thank you again!
+1 

60 61
Optimize Frequency and Cadence:
• We’ve found that posting content 2-3 times per business day is the
best for exposure and engagement. This will also allow your members
to go back and comment on posts they may have missed.
• This will take trial & error as you get familiar with your members.
We’ve found that posting between 8:30 and 10 AM PDT to kick off the
day works best for our members. We disperse the rest of the posts
throughout the day, usually at 3 hour intervals.
• You’ll usually receive a surge of activity after regular work hours, when
businesses get online at the end of the day.
• Pin & repin posts that are getting a lot of engagement to highlight
them and continue the conversation.
Let people talk about themselves. While 80% of our content is about
doing business online, we break it up with calls for people to share about
more personal things. For example, we ask our members about the
books they’re reading, their morning routines, what gives them inspira-
tion, etc. We try to have one of these a week to encourage more engage-
ment and our members interacting with each other.

62 63
Expanding on the already established Google
Brand Voice and the User to User Guide, we
developed a few best practices for the voice
of the Google Small Business Community that
applies to both the content we create and how
the moderators interact with our members.
No exclamation points, emoticons or internet slang of any kind.
It’s easy to get carried away with these in social platforms, and it ends up
sounding insincere when overused. We stick to straightforward punctua-
tion, allowing our humor to come through within the words themselves.
Be conversational. Use contractions.
Google is friendly. No need to be stuffy or overly formal.
The Google Voice
Before:
Give us your best guess! Try not
to Google it ;) LOL.
After:
Take a guess.
Try not to Google it.
Before:
We aim to provide you with
information and knowledge so
you can take advantage of op-
portunities to succeed in online
marketing.
After:
We hope you’ll learn a lot
about using the web to better
your business.

64 65
Steer clear of corporate jargon and acronyms. While we may be drown-
ing in this at the office, we can’t let them escape into the real world. It
makes people feel excluded and insecure. If we absolutely have to use
certain terms, we try to define it within the context of the conversation.
Always be positive. Try to avoid talking about hot button issues
our team can’t solve, like “is Google spying on me?” Instead, we stay
proactive and bring attention to the value we can provide. But when
uncomfortable or sensitive issues arise, do not ignore them. Answer
humbly and positively, thanking members for their feedback. Here’s an
example of a positivity-led response to one of our few and far between
negative posters:
Be specific when suggesting resources. If a member has a very
specific product question, do a little bit of research to try to find the
answer. Barring that, find the appropriate forum that can help them or
ask an expert to respond, instead of directing them to the a Help Center
home page or leaving them hanging.
Contnent Strategy & Style 3.2 The Google Voice
Example
Community Question Our Answer
Nikolas Bogioglou
Mar 20, 2014
I have a question. How can you convince/help
us about google/google+ and SMB's when you
have barely 4 posts and 100 followers? I am
far from sure that you are the right person to
even moderate this community. I have deep
knowledge/belief on the semantic web and how
google+ can kill many birds with one stone for
SMB's BUT you seem to never believed this until
you were hired as a community manager. If you
need any help, no need to post in a community.
Just PM me and I will do it unconditionally and
ofc free of charge - This applies to everyone.
Casey Monroe
Mar 20, 2014 +3
We're glad you're doing your homework,
+Nikolaos Bogioglou. Lauren, Berrak and I are
always learning more about online tools. This
is a great chance for us to explain our role as
moderators.
Our deepest expertise and passion lies in
managing communites. Our job here is to
facilitate conversation, make sure questions
get answered, and connect people to help
each other. We also act as our members'
ambassadors. As we get to know our members
and what they are interested in learned, we'll
work to bring the most useful information and
experts we can to address those topics.
I'm glad you have advice to share freely with this
group, and I hope you decide to share it here on
our community so we can all benefit.
Security and Investigations
Be Found Online – May 21, 2014
Hi,
do you know how I can secure my sheet in docs with a
password?
+8 
Berrak Sarikaya May 23, 2014
Hi +Marek Dorsz, +Roxanna Daniel is correct.
Your documents and spreadsheets in Google
Drive are not accessible by anyone until you give
them access. You can get more info on sharing
documents in Google Drive here: https://support.
google.com/drive/answer/2494886
Lee Pettijohn
Advertise & Measure – May 16, 2014
Greetings, Thanks for the invite.
I received the invitation in an email from Google Analytics
that had a snapshot of one of my accounts. I'm hoping that
someone in here knows how to create this kind of report for
all the websites I watch. Any help is appreciated. Thanks.
+8 
Casey Monroe May 16, 2014
Hi +Lee Pettijohn—unfortunately, those particular
reports are created specially for the email updates,
and can't be edited. I've relayed the suggestion
back to the Google Analytics team, though.
In the meantime, as +Alexey Chesnok says, you
can customize your reports in a number of differ-
ent ways. More information can be found here:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/11
51300
We do appreciate you joining us here in the
community, though, and we're happy to offer help
where we can. What sort of business do you do?
Before:
Identify your target market to find
prospective customers..
After:
Find your ideal customers and be
clear about why they should pick
you over your competition.
Weave in go-to phrases: For the Small Business Community, we say
“Make the most of the web,” “make the web work for your business,”
and “get the help you need to succeed on the web.” This reinforces our
mission and the value we strive to provide.

66 67
All creative assets that are posted in your
community should be consistent with your
visual branding, which can require repurposing
of content used from other sources. At a
glance, all of the posts in your community
created by your team should look uniform.
Visual Guidelines

68 69
#BizBits
Pis mossectibus num ipsunt optas rem
eum quossincit anditiis et ex esciaepudi
optaspis nit officiasit laborep elitibus,
veri ius quia velest officidel moluptatus.
Xeratia natibusae coritatum aspidelibus
rere porae. Et ut eicit, voluptiniam sim
sendit everaeprepe laboribus dolorei
ciatque eseque velia pratestiberi
   http://goo.gl 
Left-aligned. All of our copy in our creative assets is left-aligned
according to our Google SMB Marketing brand book.
Shortened links. We shorten all of our links using the goo.gl tool,
both for analytics purposes and for a clean look.
For more formal uses such as a HPP, we use a g.co link that can be created by filing this bug
Contnent Strategy & Style 3.3 Visual Guidelines
Use hashtags in titles. Even when they aren’t clickable, hashtags in our
images help reinforce the branding of our series and encourage people
to participate.
Always include a branded graphic element. Every post we
have in the community is accompanied by either a branded
share graphic or a video.

70 71
Photos. Every photo that’s posted in your community should include
your branding, so your creative templates should include one for photos.
Never use stock images when posting in a Google community. In
addition to high-resolution images our creative agency provided for us,
we also make use of the GCreative Library to find photos relevant to our
content when applicable. When spotlighting a small business or featur-
ing an interview, always plug in the photo to your branded template.
Use appropriate icons. Our creative agency provided us with a library of
icons in the photoshop files for our snacks. When talking about Google
Maps, we have the maps pin icon. When discussing search, we use the
magnifying glass, and so on. If there’s no appropriate icon, we leave it out.
Contnent Strategy & Style 3.3 Visual Guidelines
#BizSpotlight
Bazaar
Curiosities & Oddities

72 73
Find a format that makes sense for you and your team: Your content
calendar should include all of the relevant information necessary for
every member of your team to post in the absence of the content man-
ager. We created a trix that’s broken down by week.
Weekly vs. monthly views. In addition to our weekly content calendar
that includes all of the relevant content, we also have a snapshot view of
our monthly themes, including larger activations such as HOAs.
The Content Calendar
Date Day Time Content
Type
Poster Category Content Image? Final
Post
Monday Tuesday
1
Bizdom re:
content capture
Wednesday
2
Thursday
3
Bizdom Jodi
Text Q&A
Friday
4
Saturday
5
7 8
Bizdom re: SEO
9 10
Bizdom Advisors
Q&A SEO
11 12
14 15
Bizdom 1 refer
back to Helpouts
GYBO video
16 17
Bizdom Helpouts
Text Q&A Brian
Quimby
18 19
21 22
Bizdom re: YT
23 24
Bizdom YT
HOA Ryan Park
(influencer)
25 26
28 29
Bizdom re: PR
30
April Content — Larger Activations

74 75
Approval cycle. In the beginning, as we became familiar with our com-
munity, we were on a weekly approval cycle for our content. The content
manager created an outline of the content in a separate word doc to be
reviewed and approved by the copywriter (if working with one), Team/Ops
Lead and final approval by Google PMM. The peer review and approval
process helps to ensure that all of the content is aligned with the Brand
Voice. All of the content for a week should be reviewed and approved by
Thursday afternoon of the prior week. As you get more comfortable, this
should be bumped up to having content approved 2 weeks in advance.
Contnent Strategy & Style 3.4 The Content Calendar
 Timing Tip:
Give your Team Lead and Google PMM a full
24 hours to review and give feedback for edits
on the content. The actual content research
and creation, including editing, formatting and
creation of assets take 8-10 hours per week.
Monday Post 1: Trivia 
Monday:
Post 1: Trivia
Options:
First choice, since we will be discussing marketing spending
during the FICA: 66% of small businesses are maintaining
or increasing spend on digital marketing. (AT&T Small
Business Technology Poll 2013)
67% of businesses are using their website to market to
customers. (AT&T Small Business Technology Poll 2013)
Adding videos to landing pages can increase conversions by
nearly 90%. (SocialTimes)
Karina Elise
2:43 PM Jun 11
This copy really isn't adding anything
to the table. Everyone already has
some kind of morning ritual, so why
tell them to have one?
Maybe there's an interesting thing
about a well-known business leader's
morning routine.., does Bill Gates go
for a swim at sunrise or something
like that? And then have the CTA be
the snack.
Reply • Resolve

76 77
The RSVP functionality built into G+ is great
for making sure members participate with
your highest-quality interactive content.
E-mail and G+ notifications allow you to
communicate with attendees without needing
them to proactively check your community.
4.1 Content Production
Digital Events

78 79
1 Text Q+A
A Text Q+A is the least expensive type of event to produce, because
your expert can be located anywhere. It’s lot like a Reddit AMA (Ask
me Anything). In our case, we invite a subject matter expert, choose
a topic and then let members asked whatever they want. When our
community was first created, this was a good way to ease our team
and the community into the nature of real time questions and answers.
Here is an example of one of our first Text Q+As with Jodi Wing from
Ready State about creative content creation.
Pros: Less pressure/more time to answer questions thoughtfully.
Cons: Some members will be confused about where the Q+A is
happening, looking for a video or chat room functionality. Over-commu-
nication is key to explain and link to the thread and time frame where
the conversation is happening.
2 Pre-Recorded Video
A pre-recorded video can be an interview, panel or tutorial. Sometimes
we produce these from scratch ourselves. Other times, we repurpose
videos from teams with relevant topics—like this interview about how
to improve your website. Instead of just posting the video to the wall,
scheduling an event around it will help build momentum and conversa-
tion around it. Here is an example of a pre-recorded video Hangout that
we created around Holiday Search Trends with a Googler.
Pros: This is the most polished, high-quality type of event you can have,
because you have the most time to prepare and edit.
Cons: No live interaction means that engagement for videos can be low,
even with an event. We combat this by combining pre-recorded videos
with a live text Q&A follow up to make it a more well-rounded event.
Best Practice:
Have the speaker repeat the question
with every answer written. That way,
fans reading the Q&A in line in the thread
can follow along if they’ve missed the
beginning.
Did You Know?
Planning videos or Hangouts on Air with
external Subject Matter Experts are the
most difficult and costly—you have to
make sure that you have a substantial
budget to fly the subject matter experts
to a central filming location, provide
transportation to the studio (usually
either MTV or NYC as both have HOA
capabilities and the Google sets), and put
them up (if it can’t happen in one full day.)
Best Practice:
Those unfamiliar with G+ can get
confused easily, thinking any event is
a live streaming video. Be sure to over
communicate and be very explicitly,
saying things like “this is a pre-recorded
interview with a text Q+A follow up” in
your event descriptions and posts.
Best Practice:
Aim for a topic that can be easily explained
without visuals.
Best Practice:
During the hour that the Q&A is live, create
either a group chat or a hangout with the
participant and your main moderator (as
MC) to discuss the flow of questions and
answers. Have your expert talk through
their thoughts about answers that aren’t
pre-planned on the group chat before they
write them out. It helps them consolidate
their thoughts and allows you to make
sure they aren’t incorrectly addressing any
sensitive topics.
Content Production 4.1 Digital Events
We host 3 types of events, each has pros and cons to consider
before choosing which one(s) to move forward with.

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3 Hangouts on Air
Hangouts on Air are live, syndicated videos recorded and published
to the community in real time. To follow the Hangouts Bizdom train-
ing strategy, all of our community’s Hangouts on Air followed a Q&A
format to answer their questions. We brought in a YouTube creator
Ryan Park for our first HOA to discuss how to create quick & effective
YouTube videos seen here.
Pros: The community is eager to be involved. If you work with an
influencer, they’ll most likely bring their following into the community
to participate before, during and after the Hangout airs.
Cons: This is a live syndicated broadcast, just like TV but with less
lag time, so anything can happen! Clearly you don’t have any time to
edit the video before it is published.
Best Practice:
The day of, you’ll need at least two (if
not three) team members available and
ready to make this successful. One will be
conducting the interview on the Hangout,
one will be vetting the questions to the
interviewer being filmed and one will be
looking for questions in the community in
real time behind the scenes.
Best Practice:
Especially if you have multiple Subject
Matter Experts involved (for a panel),
practice the entire flow of the HOA at least
once before you’re live.
Best Practice:
Fans like to be called out by name for
their questions during Hangouts on Air. It
allows them to feel like they’re a part of the
conversation.
Content Production 4.1 Digital Events

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Production Checklist for Events
Source topics: Your members will be vocal about what they want to
learn about. Have your moderators help you keep a running list of topics
for events.
Find your talent: You’ll need someone with patience, charisma, tact,
expertise and, as a bonus, a large social following that they can bring to
the table. We use Googlers, our Advisors, and outside influencers—in-
cluding co-marketing partners. We screen every person via video chat to
make sure they will be a good fit.
Book studio time: Create relationships with the studio managers- as
they oversee the studio time and production process for all videos.
In MTV, David Kruschke runs the Hangout studio. In NYC it’s Heather
Duthie. Once you’ve formally filed a ticket via go/guts and emailed David
and/or Heather to coordinate when you can film, send calendar invites
to all teammates involved including the studio manager(s) to block off
recording time. Also be sure to block out time for the follow up Q&A
during the day that the content is published (if applicable).
Create content in advance: Your expert can provide ideas about what
angle on the topic they are comfortable with, and your content creator
can help find a hook and catchy title for the event. Even though events
like interview and Q&As are live, you should write a script so that every-
one involved is comfortable with the general content. You can start by
providing your speaker with a first draft of questions for them to answer,
and then shape it into a script from there.

84 85
Promote the event: The goal is to promote the event at least a week in
advance and follow up 2 times in separate posts to the community. We
work closely with the G+ Your Business page which has 1M fans and
a very similar message to ours. When our events are specific to other
verticals (like HR), we’ll also have our Point of Contacts from those teams
promote via their social channels. (I.E. Life@Google with the HR event, or
Enterprise when talking about Google Apps.)
Prepare your speaker(s): Whether you’re working with a Googler or out-
side expert, outline how your event will work, what to expect, where to be,
what time commitments are needed, and who their point person will be.
Never assume they’re familiar with being on camera or live chatting in a
community. Allow for more time to answer questions if you are interview-
ing someone outside of Google.
Say thanks: Once all is done, send a gthanks or a note to external partners
(we created branded stationary and swag) thanking them for their time.
Collect questions from members in advance: When you initially tell
your community that you’ll be having a Q&A and ask them for questions,
they’ll eagerly volunteer their inquiries, but not all on one thread. We
usually direct fans to reply in the comment of the announcement thread,
but when collecting the questions, we scrub all of the threads (the event
page, the original post(s) and even other comment threads to make sure
that we’ve captured all of the questions asked.)
Event specific assets: Ideally you’ll have already worked with your
creative agency to design opening, end and name overlay cards (as seen
in our Hangout with GoDaddy here) to be used by the studio manager
to brand it unique to your community. Have your studio manager upload
the Hangout directly to your YouTube channel on a private setting, and
approve it/provide edits via that outlet. It will save time for your modera-
tion team in uploading videos down the road.
Create the event: When you first created your community, it had to live
under a G+ profile page. We’ve learned when creating events, it makes
more sense to create the event under THAT page and invite the commu-
nity, over creating the event exclusively in the community. Remember to
create a circle for all RSVPed attendees leading up to the event, so if an
emergency happens and last minute you have to cancel the event, you’ll
have a list of all fans who have RSVPed to re-invite.
Content Production 4.2 Production Checklist for Events
Best Practice:
Before launching your first event, create a
ritual unique to your community. We created
a standard “initiation” question that we ask
every member (internally and externally)
interviewed in the community. It creates
a sense of familiarity regardless of the
topic being discussed and puts both the
interviewer and interviewee at ease. Develop
a regular cadence for publishing your events.
We have Q&A bizdoms every Thursday.

86 87
Other Creative Assets
Events aren’t the only content that fall outside
of our templatized, daily posts. Consider that
you’ll need to plan in advance for a handful of
other high-production creative assets, like:

88 89
Welcome/Anthem video: It’s powerful to launch with an introductory
video as it allows for easy sharing and the moderation team can refer to
it when explaining the community to fans who inquire. Something with
animated graphics instead of live action can be fairly cost effective to
produce with the right creative partner.
Case Studies/Spotlights: While you might not have the budget to
create one off videos initially, ask for incremental budgets to spotlight
businesses that have an interesting story to tell. This spotlight example
showcases LSTN during Small Business Week. You can also do a more
budget-friendly approach by sending members a list of questions and
some tips for filming and submitted their own videos.
Custom infographics: Occasionally, we’ll want to go a bit deeper on a
topic than a quick tip or stat. With some research into statistics and the
help of a designer, we’ve created infographics (in the form of embedded
presentations), like this one on family owned businesses. These are
extra time and budget from our creative agency, since we do not have a
designer on retainer.
Best Practice:
Form relationships with the SMBs you
are spotlighting by reaching out to them
directly. Then, ask them to engage
via their G+ profiles directly on the
thread as you spotlight them and their
business. It makes the content more
compelling, and community members
will respond favorably to both the
spotlight and the SMB who engages.
 Timing Tip:
Anticipate any custom creative production will take
at least 2X the amount of time you’ll need for it to be
live. This is due to internal approvals and delays in
working with your creatives (as fast as they may be).
Content Production 4.3 Other Creative Assets

90 91
5.1 Promotion & Aquisition
Cross Promotion on Internal Platforms
You’re blessed to be in the Google ecosystem
with so many options for free/cheap
promotion right at your fingertips, if you know
where to look. We started out our search
understanding what other teams had content
that was relevant to us, and from there
explored the following:

92 93
Social Channels: We chronicled every social channel we could find
here, where they posted content and/or had a mission that was some-
where related to the community. This also helped us meet more peo-
ple who manage social channels at Google.
Emails: We were able to partner with the Customer Marketing team
for Adwords and send an email to all Adwords customers during
Small Business Week and the Analytics team. Since they were sent,
we’ve been able to partner with the contacts made on content for the
community. The Google Analytics team sent a promo spotlight for
their May email list, which was sent to a list of 250,000, and received
an open rate of .2%
Embedded Promos: We’ve been working closely with the webmas-
ter team to get our community on the footer of various B2B sites. We
also got the Blogger team, based in Australia, to include a promotion
for our community in their dashboard. There are many more opportu-
nities for in-product and in-site links that we are pursuing. Our team
has a dedicated embedded promo person that helps us identify those
opportunities.
Home Page Promo: To kick off Small Business Week, we were able to
get approval (go/hpp) on a Home Page Promo (deck here) celebrat-
ing the week, working closely with the Small Business Administration.
The Home Page Promo sent fans on Google.com directly to the Com-
munity to experience specially created content for the week, includ-
ing quotes from the SBW events and daily photo & video spotlights of
SMBs in the community.
Promotion & Acquisition 5.1 Cross Promotion on Internal Platforms

94 95
Influencers
In addition to your advisors in the
community, it’s important to think about how
to attract influencers: individuals with a high
social clout and can directly affect marketing
or purchase decisions. They range from YT
content creators like iJustine to Oprah, but
because they have many followers in their
respective social communities, it’s important
not to shy away from their potential in
helping you grow the community. Read more
about partnerships here.

96 97
House Ads
You may get to a point where you want to
pay for a campaign to acquire members.
House ads—search and display—are your
most cost effective option.
The Steps
1. Fill out the brief for a Search Campaign here one quarter before
you want to run the campaign.
2. After the brief is complete, you need to fill out a media request
to run the campaign.
3. Reach out to the Community Engineering team to figure out if
they are able to place a remarketing tag in the code to track con-
versions. If they are able to, you are good to go. If they are not
able to, your bids will be limited to a cap of $0.50.
4. Some important notes
• Budget $300k cash a quarter for
Display Advertising campaigns
• Search Ads, if you send over $10k per
month you'll need to allocate some cash.
• Reach out to Media Lab Office hours for any questions!
5. Determine the POC for who manages the account. We have our
internal online marketing team who will help with the campaign.

98 99
6.1 Measurement & Optimization
What We Measure & Why
Measuring results on Google+ Communities
at this stage in its development is a challenge.
Because there isn’t a dedicated Analytics
solution built into the platform, many—
or most—measurements need to be done
manually. Despite this, manual measurement
can produce a lot of valuable data if it’s stored
and interpreted correctly.

100 101
Post Type. Each post we manually sort into a category based on the different kinds of content
we get, so we can encourage certain types of posts (like Discussion) and discourage other
types (like Support Requests). The post categories we use are:
1. Sharing. “Hi! I just joined the community
and I make widgets!” or “Hey I just read this
article and I thought you guys would like it.”
2. Discussion. “Let’s talk about widgets.
Do you guys use widgets? What kinds of
widgets do you like to use?”
3. Advice Requests. “No one is buying my
widgets, so I’m thinking of investing in a
widget-based AdWords campaign. Does
anyone have any suggestions for widget-
based keywords?”
4. Tech Support. “I can’t log in to my
widget-based AdWords account. Can you
reset my password for me?
5. Mod Posts. “Today in the Google
Small Business Community we’re doing a
spotlight on people who make widgets!”
Note that “spam” is included in our reports,
but we track it in the “Removed Posts”
document listed in the “Moderation” section.
Post Date. Spreadsheets allow you to use
this data to extrapolate day over day trends,
but also weekly and monthly.
+1s, Comments and Shares. These are the
best tools we use to measure engagement.
Some types of engagement are more
valuable than others (for example, generally
a comment or share is more representative
of interest than a +1), but all of the data
is valuable. Sometimes different posts
are geared towards different kinds of
engagement, and because we track them
separately, we can gather more details. We
measure these 24 hours after the original
post date, since most posts have seen
as much engagement as they’re going to
get by then. This isn’t an ideal solution,
since there is sometimes continuing
engagement on older posts—but it’s the
best compromise we could find.
Post Link. This lets us do follow up. It’s
also sometimes a valuable tool when we
want to find a particular post—it gives
us the ability to search using fields that
Google+ doesn’t support. For instance, I
can find all the posts from moderators that
went up on May 18th—something that I
couldn’t do on the Community itself without
a lot of scrolling.
Name of Poster. This lets us cross
reference, find power-users, determine
who is posting the most often, and easily
distinguish between mod posts and user
posts. It also makes it easy to track whose
post you left off at if you get interrupted
while you’re filling in the numbers.
Our Analytics spreadsheet measures the following data:
Measurement & Optimization 6.1 What We Measure & Why
We pull all this data manually, but an automated dashboard is in prog-
ress to save us the time. Reach out to cmonroe@google.com for more
information on analytics.
Best Practice:
Chronicle everything internally. There is no
such thing as too much documentation. It’s
important to have data on hand, to not only
track successes but to deduce insights and
predict trends.
Did You Know?
It’s better to have too much data than not
enough. Overcommit to tracking early, and
then scale back later.
 Timing Tip: Pulling this data takes
half an hour to an hour per day.
Post Type Date Category
1 Sharing 4/1/2014 Tech Support
SMB Community Analytics 
Sharing
120
90
60
30
0
Tech
Support
Advice
Request
SpamDiscussion
User Posts By Type: Prev. Month

102 103
A peek at our automated analytics dashboard
Measurement & Optimization 6.1 What We Measure & Why
Community Dashboard Community DashboardEdit Edit
Posts Per Day Gender Breakdowns of Active Users
Commends by Hour of Day
Community Members
Posts by Hour of Day Approved/Rejected Posts per day
+1's by Hour of Day
Cumulative Post Stats
Select
Post Type Date Filter
2014-05-15 2014-07-09

104 105
Tools, Report & Process
Reporting is a complicated process, and it
depends a great deal on the goals and needs
of the people you’re reporting to. That said,
there are some general principles you can
follow to make sure that you’re putting your
best foot forward.

106 107
Measurement & Optimization 6.1 Tools, Report & Process
Tips For Making Awesome ReportsWhat We Report On
Growth. We report on the overall
growth of the community, most
importantly. We also report on the
total number of +1s, Comments
and Shares since the community
opened—but that’s mostly a vanity
stat.
Engagement. We track the number
of Comments, +1s and Shares
for each post on the community,
and we break them down into two
categories—engagement on user
posts, and engagement on our
own content. We graph these out
over time, to make sure that they’re
continually increasing, and match
them up with the number of posts
per day.
Post Types. Remember how we
mentioned earlier that we break
down posts by type? We chart these
in pie graphs to make sure that the
ratios are where we want them—lots
of Discussion and Advice Requests,
not too much Tech Support.
Qualitative Feedback. It’s important
to report on more than just metrics.
Include key user quotes, stories, and
other qualitative information.
Next Steps. Always close with your
plan for what to do next.
Include an executive summary. This is good advice for everything, even
just a long email—but you should always include with a few, quick key
points to explain what you have to say. Make sure that even if they only
read the summary, they’ll get the idea.
Make your report tell a story. It’s important to align your information be-
hind a single central theme. If you can make all the information in your
report tell the same story, the people reading will be more likely to re-
member what’s going on.
Brand your report where possible. Having branded graphics in your re-
port makes sure that everyone remembers what you’re reporting on.
Don’t be afraid to brag. Many people can be reluctant to “toot their own
horn” in a report. But you have to—you’re the only one who really knows
what you’ve accomplished, and if you want other people to know, you
have to tell them.
GBC Report 
GBC Report
All systems are go for loud launch.
Key Takeaways:
The formula is working. The metrics suggest that our
current approach is working well, and is leading to a steady
overall increase in users, engagement with our content, and
quality of user contributions.
Our first HOA with Ryan Park was a big success. We had
a lot of activity from both our network and from Ryan's. The
video itself got nearly 1130 views, users have been posting
about it for days, and Ryan has volunteered to become an
Advisor in our community.
Internal cross-promo is leading to more organic growth.
Our internal cross promotion efforts have been very

108 109
Tracking Links to Your Community
Link Shorteners: Link shortening isn’t just an easy way to cram a com-
plicated link into a short number of characters—it also provides you with
an alternate method of collecting analytics data. We recommend using
goo.gl. While bit.ly, awe.sm and other link shorteners have a lot of tools
available, as long as Google has an internal solution available, it only
makes sense for us to use it publicly.
We use link shortening whenever we need to link to a service internal-
ly with a long or ugly URL—the most common case being Google Docs
links, which tend to naturally be very long and full of ID and authentica-
tion codes. We don’t use link shorteners when the page we’re linking to
has an obvious, easy-to-remember URL—like
http://www.google.com/mybusiness/.
Create all the links yourself. If you’re working with an external partner to
send links to your community, make sure they use a specific shortened
link that you give them. Most teams will want warning, and to have the
link well in advance.
Goo.gl, like bit.ly, will allow you (or anyone else) to check the number of
clicks on a shortened link by adding a + sign to the end of the link. With
this in mind, you can track your analytics by assigning each campaign
an individual tracking link. Here’s how we do it:

110 111
Make a link tracking doc. Keep a spreadsheet of which shortened link
you’re using for which purpose. For each link, we track the team that’s
using it to send traffic, the date the campaign took place, and the actu-
al link—with the “+” appended to the end of the URL, so a quick click will
take you directly to the analytics for that link.
Use a new link every time. Often you’ll work with the same teams sever-
al times on a campaign—for instance, if your community is mentioned in
an email newsletter, this may happen more than once. If you do this, try
and generate a new tracking link every time. That way, you can track the
performance of the link and see if it changes.
Start Date Xpromo Campaign Analytics link data End date
(shortlink if applicable) (if applicable)
1 3/24/2014 GYBO Week content goo.gl/h2397
2 3/21/2014 Analytics mo. email promo goo.gl/ads98
3 3/31/2014 Official G+ Post goo.gl/082498
4 3/31/2014 Official Google Twitter goo.gl/9237
5 3/31/2014 Google.com/services footer goo.gl/0i2309
6 5/1/2014 Blogger promo spot goo.gl/973497
7 5/1/2014 Analytics monthly email goo.gl/o384
8 3/24/2014 GYBO Week content goo.gl/h2397
9 3/21/2014 Analytics mo. email promo goo.gl/ads98
10 3/31/2014 Official G+ Post goo.gl/082498
11 3/31/2014 Official Google Twitter goo.gl/9237
12 3/31/2014 Google.com/services footer goo.gl/0i2309
13 5/1/2014 Blogger promo spot goo.gl/973497
14 5/1/2014 Analytics monthly email goo.gl/o384
Xpromo Tracking 

112 113
Setting KPIs
Community Management is notoriously hard
to measure. It’s difficult to strike a balance
between quantitative measurement and
qualitative understanding. If you’re careful,
though, you can create measurable KPIs that
actually help you meet constructive goals.

114 115
How to Choose a Good KPI
Make sure you’re measuring something meaningful...to both your
team and to the people you’re reporting to. Ultimately, this is how
your success is going to be judged, so choose carefully.
Make sure you’re measuring things you have control over. Measur-
ing based on growth is valuable, but remember that a number of oth-
er factors (like how many people are willing to cross-promote you)
will have an effect on you.
Don’t focus exclusively on metrics. Metrics tell an important part
of the story, but not the ONLY part. Make sure you cover the rest of
the story too.
Measurement & Optimization 6.3 Setting KPIs
 Timing Tip: Make sure you budget plenty
of time to setting KPIs and benchmarks
in the early phases—you’re going to want
to dedicate at least a week or more.

116 117
What We Chose
We’re following a two part strategy with our
KPI goals—we’re separately tracking both
growth and engagement.
Growth
100,000 members in the first year. This goal was set before we began,
but we’re confident we can hit it. In addition to measuring our raw num-
bers, we also tracked the %growth rate we would need to hit in order to
meet our goal, and compared our growth to that number.
Did You Know?
Circlecount.com easily lets you track
historical growth for any Google+
community, as well as a lot of other
Google+ measurement tools.

118 119
Engagement.
We broke our engagement goals out into
multiple sub-categories.
Continual upward trending. Our research on other Google+ communi-
ties indicates that as communities get more posts per day, they tend to
see reduced engagement on each individual post, since user attention
gets spread out over a bunch of different posts. With that in mind, it was
important to make sure that even as our volume increased, our engage-
ment numbers continued to trend upward as well.
Average engagement per post. We took the average engagement num-
bers (+1’s, comments, and shares) on the current largest business-relat-
ed community in the world, and aimed to beat them by 150%
Measurement & Optimization 6.3 Setting KPIs

120 121
7.1 Working Together
Internal Communications
Standing Meetings: Our team uses morning “scrums” in the form of
GVCs at the start of the day. No longer than 30 minutes, these provide a
time for every person to list what their goals are for the day and to flag
any concerns. During this meeting, the Team Ops/Lead briefs the team
as to happenings outside of the day to day team responsibilities that
are coming down the pipeline. It allows for a remote team to feel unit-
ed in decision making. Weekly, we have status meetings with the PMM
lead where they let us know bigger picture of any requests from exter-
nal teams or content changes. We use this time to review content for
the coming weeks and discuss larger activations. In addition, our Team
Ops/Lead has standing weekly 1:1s with both community managers.
This as an open time to look at any internal or external problems, and
brainstorm how to best solve them.
Establishing Trust: If your team is located geographically across the US,
it’s important to establish a trusting foundation. The more your team
feels safe and able to communication any reservations or problems
within the community at an early stage, the more successful you’ll be
to avoid any crisis down the road. This will also make them feel happier
and more fulfilled, leading to a better community.
Best Practice:
A weeklong kickoff in person with the full
team to get to know each other is highly
encouraged—including nights out!
Best Practice:
Let the team work together to iron out the
processes and practices that work best for
them.

122 123
Days off/Coverage: It’s important to follow the moderation calendar and
plan days off closely with your team. Give them enough warnings to an-
ticipate your absence and plan their work schedules. Not only should
your moderation shifts be covered, but delegate your most immediate
tasks to specific teammates when out. At the Team Ops/Lead level, if
you’re working with external businesses for event production, be sure to
let them know of your absence as well.
Unified Team: Your success is your team’s success- there is no distinc-
tion between the two. This creates a safe place for the team to commu-
nicate especially when facing obstacles. It’s imperative to be seen as
one, as “Google” to our users. Because of this, to work like a team, you
must think like a team. This means that we had to create an environ-
ment to allow for questions, comments and observations to constantly
flow from one moderator to another, effortlessly. The goal is to have var-
ied responses to fans, but with one collective strategy in mind and slight
voice differences unique to each moderator. Constant communication
between moderators allows us to make sure we know of the context re-
garding specific members (i.e. maybe they were already banned before),
or sensitive topics to avoid (like issues that related to recent news or
sensitive current events).
Working Together 7.1 Internal Communications

124 125
Cross-team Collaboration
The success of the community is contingent
on the relationships you cultivate as a
collective unit with all Googlers: this includes
leads of other social platforms from products
(like Adwords), to marketing (Enterprise) to
customer service (Maps & Places). The more
time you can invest, the more successful
you’ll be in creating compelling content that
hasn't already been discussed, moderating
effectively using the most up to date
information, and growing your fan base via
cross promotion of other pages.

126 127
POCs: We identified one point of contact for each team/product/social
platform and let them know that we'd be reaching out to them in the fu-
ture should we have questions. We then asked if they're the best people
to return to with future questions. Compiling a go to document like this
one made difficult questions a breeze.
Studio: As mentioned in the events sections, David (MTV) and Heather
(NYC) are the team Ops/leads right hands for all video components. It's
important that they understand the larger mission of the community and
are on your side. This is because you will face tight content production
turnarounds and seemingly unrealistic requests. Last minute video tweaks
and/or launches are impossible without their assistance. They hold a
great deal of creative power.
Best Practice:
Aim to tap into the data from teams who
might have related content of interest to
your community. For us, its newsletters
from Think With Google, YouTube "creators"
and even sales bulletins tracking what
areas are frustrating for SMBs.
DYK:
There are 612+ social channels (including
FB, TW and G+) with 350 Million followers
owned and operated worldwide by and/or
for Google. Think of all of the inspiration for
content and potential for free promotion
that those channels hold.
Working Together 7.2 Cross-team Collaboration

128 129
Partnerships
It’s not what you know, but who you know. We’ve relied heavily on our
own social and professional networks to leverage and identify influenc-
ers and subject matter experts to speak about topics that we’re not fa-
miliar with, to validate our credibility, to increase exposure and to grow
our community. The understanding is that we don’t pay the guests in
the community to participate but in some circumstances we will pay for
transportation for them to a Google office and/or set for production. It's
understood that this is mutually beneficial, for this is free publicity for
the partners company and/or business. We ask them in return to pro-
mote the event via their personal and professional marketing channels.
(Which includes but is not limited to social platforms, mass external &
internal company wide email blasts.)
Beyond who you know, who knows you? When identifying potential in-
fluencers to host, you want to choose people who have expertise that is
specific to the niche topic that you might be covering, and who have a
sizable social footprint. This means that it's better to choose a speaker
who has a larger Twitter following and writes for a handful of blogs be-
cause if they have a good experience, they'll blog about it on all of their
social sites. This content will only increase the positive sentiment about
your community and your community's mission.
Best Practice:
As your community grows, you want to be
sure to target larger and larger influencers,
as a way to give your growing and active
members inspiration and strengthen your
credibility.
DYK:
Google was rated 2014's most
valuable brand. This means that many
influencers will happily work with you
and your community simply because
you're an extension of Google, a brand
that they most likely have a positive
affinity for. Vet through influencers
blogs and note those who rave about
you as that's an easy way in.

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Paid partnerships: Unlike guest moderators and speakers for events,
some of your partners will be paid. If you use a creative agency for your
branding or video production, expect to bring them in as a very close
member of your team. Nelson Cash has done a lot of work for G+ com-
munities, and might be a good option for you. Brand Studio also has a
list of approved agencies that are available and in the vendor system.
Visit go/agencyteam to learn more.
 Timing Tip:
It’s never too early to begin conversations
that can lead to partnerships and identify who
are the decision makers in the organizations/
businesses you partner with.
Working Together 7.3 Partnerships

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