Google Is Integrating Social Features in Google My Business, and Other Google Small Business News

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:07
Hello, business owners entrepreneurs. Welcome to web and beyond cast, I am Raisa D. Smith and I’m the president of W three consulting. And I’m very excited to be back on the wagon with web and beyond cast our podcast for W three consulting. And as some of you may know, I was doing kind of a seasonal thing with the podcast. Now I’m going to be going to a weekly show. And so I’m looking forward to putting out weekly episodes, where I’ll be doing solo shows, I’ll be doing interviews, some roundtables, and otherwise. And so let’s get started. As some of you may know, I am the Google Small Business advisor for productivity. And what that means is, is that I work with the Google Small Business team out of Mountain View, to educate small businesses about the power of productivity using G Suite and the various pieces. Google products and its ecosystem. So each month, I’m going to be bringing to you an episode that is dedicated fully to Google to the Google verse. And that’s this episode, I’m going to be doing a what’s new at Google? monthly edition. And so let’s get started with this. What’s New in Google July 2020. edition, what I will be doing is going through all of the changes that affect you as a small business owner. And I’ll be closing out with a particular concentration on Google My Business this week. And I’m interested in kind of fleshing out where I think Google Small Business is going in the world of small business and Google Maps, and really how it’s going to be contextualized for you as a business as we make our way through both the covid 19 pandemic, but also beyond. So let’s get started with the updates this month for what’s new at Google. So first and foremost, Google has started to update all of their applications to help have dark theme on Android. dark theme is available for Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. You will now also find it in Google Chat on both Android and iOS. So we should be seeing that streaming out for all users across G Suite for all of those applications. For those who are very excited about dark theme in and across all of their applications, there should be a welcome thought. And just for those who may not be aware, dark theme is for low light conditions. Traditionally, where you might be in an environment where you are, you don’t want the bright white background to be shining into your eyes. I’ve actually also found it very useful in very high light situations so that the white lettering or the light colored lettering against the fully dark background is actually a better contrast ratio for me to be able to read that text. Okay, next up is that The ability to manage Google Chat and classic hangouts in the G Suite admin console will soon be coming to one location within the admin console. This is going to be very, very powerful. If it hasn’t already rolled out to you, it should be rolling out to you very, very soon. And it’s going to all G Suite customers. And you as a G Suite administrator can now manage both Google Chat and classic hangouts in the same space. This has been a little bit of a point of contention for some customers, and now they are solving that problem, thankfully. Okay, next up is something in the really cool productivity space. But if you use iPad on if you use Gmail on iOS devices, specifically iPads, you are now able to multitask with Gmail and other iOS applications. What that means is, is that iOS has split view. split view is the ability to be able to bring multiple applets On the screen at any given time, so you can bring up one application and bring up another one side by side and use those. And the newest iteration of Gmail. Google is now bringing that to the interface on iPad. So again, this should have been rolled out and released by now. So this was in early July. So by now you should have it across all of your various iPad devices. And so if you update to the latest version of Gmail, you have the ability to now have say, your Google Calendar, sitting next to your Gmail, and you can write an email saying, hey, by the way, I’ve got this event on Tuesday. How about we meet on Wednesday? Very, very handy. All right, next up is a solution to a problem I have experienced in the past, which is accidentally deleting contacts. And so now in Google Contacts, you will be able to find a trash can. So you’ll see a new folder called Hold trash or a new label called trash, and it will hold your contacts for 30 days before they’re permanently deleted. This is available across web, Android. and iOS on that would include Chrome OS and the other application platforms as well. And so this is really great. It makes it much easier for us to be able to recover contacts when we accidentally delete them, or say, an employee leaves and you know, is disgruntled and deletes all their contacts and and then, you know, leaves the office in a huff. And now you can go back and recover those, those deleted items in the trash can up to 30 days. Okay, the next series of updates in the G Suite world is all related to Google Calendar. And so Google has now given us the ability to set a default meeting length for Google calendar events underneath our domain, right. So in my particular case, you know, I have w three c Inc, calm as our G Suite domain and so calendar WCC Inc calm is our Google calendar page. And any events inside of that domain, I can now say, you know what, I want this to be 45 minutes long, for every default, every meeting as a default to load as 45 minutes in length. And now you can do that, okay, so you can set that default length, of course, and users can change it to the length that they want. But you can set it and say, you know, if you decide that you want your meetings, to default to 15 minutes, to give everybody 10 minutes to kind of get done with a meeting and transition to their next meetings, so they don’t have back to back 60 minute meetings, you can, you can now do that. And that’s very, very helpful. Next up in Google calendar is a feature that I’m really excited about, because seeing items just jam packed on my calendar and overlaid on top of each other is sometimes aggravating to kind of figure out where and what I’m supposed to be doing at any given time. So Google has now given the ability for events that are shorter than 25 minutes to actually take up less space in the Google Calendar interface. And so they look just like a shrunken version of it, the text is a little bit smaller, and it’s perfect. So, for example, every day I have I, my time that I walk the dog, which is kind of my, you know, start the day I get up, get walk the dog, and then I come back in, into into the office. And that’s kind of like my quote, unquote, commute to the office, you know, in the covid 19 pandemic times. And I just liked the idea of having that little anchor in the beginning and end of my day, but it’s just 15 minutes, you know, it’s just a walk in the morning in the walk in the afternoon, and it would take up a full block of time for either, you know, a, you know, 30 minute time block would be taken, and now it just shrinks it to that little 15 minute increment. And now I can see it taking up the appropriate amount of space. For it in my calendar, so really, really like that this also changes in the printed version of the calendar. So that’s really, really helpful in in talking about printing, Google Calendar now supports full color for printing. And so that means now when you go to print out a calendar, it will print out in the colors that you have set it for different events, including different calendar and event type colors. So you know, you can change the color of any specific event to another color and it shows that little primary calendar color in the little left hand sliver, and then the rest of the event is in the color that you changed it to. So really great. And you can print up to 24 hours of events per day to show you know on any, any calendar print, so it’s nice to be able to print things out when you want to. I have not printed out a Google Calendar. I have to admit in several years, but There was a time when I was printing my calendar every week to do a weekly review. And it was really nice to be able to do that. And quite honestly, now that these full color options are available, it seems like something that I might want to think about doing again. Okay, continuing on in the Google News Update. So now, when a user joins a Google group, they’ll receive an email listing the shared calendars that they can access by being a member of that group usually happens within about an hour of them joining that particular Google group. So it makes it much easier for new members of your organization employees and otherwise, to see the relevant calendars in the groups that they’re joining. And this is really helpful. It gets everybody kind of on the same page to say, Okay, here goes the team you’re in and these are all the calendars that that team has, so that you can quickly and easily give them access to those pieces. And they can go ahead and subscribe to the calendars, add them to their interface, show them or hide them as necessary and go from there. If you have iOS devices within your G Suite account as an admin, as the, you know, as a G Suite administrator, now, you have the ability to use now what’s called the apple business manager. And that allows you to be able to start managing your company owned iOS devices. And that’s just fantastic. Now you have a more seamless way of doing it, they used to have the develop device enrollment program at Apple. And in essence, your G Suite endpoint administration was a little bit more cumbersome. Now we’re able to integrate directly into G Suite and start creating that endpoint management as necessary. This is for a little bit bigger businesses. You know, if you’re running just a couple of iOS devices inside of an under 10 person shop, you’re probably not going to be dealing with this. But if you’re on G Suite enterprise, and you have a couple hundred employees and you’re dealing with iOS devices, This Apple business manager and the endpoint management upgrades are going to really be useful. Next up is a straggler. Back to Google Calendar, Google has updated their event creation on the web interface. So there have been a new number of improvements to the event creation workflow. And what you’ll see now is just a nicer and more detail in terms of black text being the most important things selected, and then smaller or grayed out text for the things that are secondary. And so right at the top now you see the big add Title field for you to give a title to the event. You can then change calendar date and time, and start and end time that is, and then you can see the time zone you can determine whether an event is going to repeat or not. You can add your guests. There’s a big prominent Google meet video conferencing button, one in which I’ve been struggling with lately, because it was automatically adding Google meat links to everything. Bye I solved that by going into the admin console and turning that feature off yet a second time. This time, hopefully it’s stuck. But you can also then add rooms and locations, you can add the description and attachments. You can see which calendar you’re creating the event from and its availability. So is it free or busy? Is it visible to everyone or not and what types of notifications are available for you to get an alert when the note when the event is coming up. They also see the four different chips for event out of office reminder and appointment slots, and just very quickly to jump over to the particular items that you want. So it’s just a it’s a much nicer experience. I feel like it’s a good new update, and it gives you just a nicer flavor for the experience of creating calendar events. So good on Google for doing that. Okay, just a couple of other minor updates to G Suite. Google Docs has gotten Some mobile improvements. So in essence, now when you click on links, you will get a preview of those. So if you click on it, you’ll get a preview, it’ll kind of show you what the what the item is all about. And what I’ve been seeing, at least on my devices often on is that it is showing you what it wants to know what it does now on web. So when you go to Google Docs on the web, and you click on on a link, so HTTP, colon slash slash your business name. com, if you click on that link, it will then show you that little link preview and it will say, hey, do you want to switch this to the title of the webpage. So if your business name.com really says services in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, it will change the hypertext to that those words as opposed to the HTTP link just sitting naked there on the page. Very, very handy to just make it more readable and still leave it as a link to what you’re trying to get to. So I see that now happening in the Android and iOS experience for Google Docs. And I’m very happy to see that happening. They’re also adding smart compose, so that as you’re writing, if you have the feature enabled, it will then say, Hey, would you like to complete the sentence with X or Y, and all you have to do is either swipe or hit tab on the keyboard, and it will then go ahead and insert the text that’s there in the grayed out format. So you’ll see a little bit of grayed out text, that is the text it’s recommending to you. And now you can start to fill in kind of the blanks of what you’re trying to say before you type it, which is incredibly productive. And last but not least in the G Suite updates for this month, is something that we have been testing out internally, and I’m super excited to see it coming. Google Voice is now now has ring groups. So when you have automatic call routing rules enabled with a ring groups in Google Voice, you can now have multiple people in your organization. Make it receive calls from the same Google Voice number. This really makes for the whole integration within a business seem seamless. So now you have a generally available, it should roll out to all users who have access to Google voice within the organization, you can do simultaneous or random order, call routing. So you can, you know, just call everybody all at once or you can have it choose a specific operator to pick up the phone. You can determine who in the ring group can make outbound calls. And then you can use that ring group number as the caller ID. So doesn’t matter who’s making the outbound call, it all shows the same caller ID to your customer, you can determine what happens if no one answers the call, does it route to a voicemail message does it go to a particular individual, again, what happens and then you can also determine business hours so you can ring that group during particular hours and you can say, Okay, I want this to go to this voicemail message. box when we’re in off hours. So this is really giving us an enterprise level phone system. That is all done in the cloud. And this is just phenomenal because you’re just paying one rate for your G Suite account to have these access privileges to be able to do this kind of stuff. And it’s all just built in to the G Suite interface. So leaves administration easy, and you can just set it up in minutes, and you’ve got yourself a full fledged phone system, you’re still going to need your your either cell phone or local phone system, you know, phone lines for managing this, but you are replacing all of the equipment and management of the systems that are necessary to route calls and so on and so forth, especially as we are now in this remote work phase and having to deal with a distributed workforce. You can now set this up and you don’t need any additional equipment to have a really high class phone system. I’m on to now some non G Suite news. So Google has announced that they have acquired north. Now north is a fairly unique company. They actually started with some very high tech technology they called Mio, which, quoting from their website was a quote, gesture based input device that directly coupled neuromuscular impulses into signals computers could understand and quote, and then they quickly shifted gears to what is now known as smart glasses. So in essence, they are glasses with embedded technologies to bring them into the connected world, the IoT world, in their particular case, they do direct retinal projection, and they also are prescription compatible. And so Google has acquired them, they have not said anything about what’s going to happen with the company. So they have shut down sales of the of the product and they’re probably going down. for some period of time, but what this tells us is that Google has not given up on the Google Glass project. We know that Apple is in the works to bring out an apple glasses type product. Amazon has their own out. Now, Bose has some version of smart glasses that are on the market, mostly attuned to, obviously, audio files, who are who are trying to listen to music. So the smart glasses market is still something that is being determined. And Google is working on that in the background. And it’s very exciting to kind of hear this news of them making this acquisition and seeing what they’re going to be doing with that. Moving right along. Google has announced that they are bringing free retail listings to Google search. So in the past Google Shopping, which is the section of Google that when you type in any product in Google determines that you’re looking to purchase a product. It takes you over to Google Shopping. So if I were to type in Men’s dress shoes into Google right now, it would know that I was looking to purchase men’s dress shoes, and it would take me over to shopping.google.com or google.com, forward slash shopping. And then show me the products that were available either near me or available to purchase through e commerce that was once free. You could put that into your Google Merchant Center, you would then be able to provide a product feed, and voila, Google would syndicate your e commerce site products into the Google search algorithm in Google Shopping. They then started to start to add advertising fees for people to be able to do that. So instead of you being able to just put your feet in there and get it out there for free, they started charging you to be able to do so well, as of the end of June and early part of July. Google has now started to make those listings free for most businesses, so it’s across

Raymond Sidney-Smith 19:56
a wide variety of their categories. So if you have never used Google Google Merchant Center, I highly recommend that you head over to the Google Merchant Center, just Google Google Merchant Center, and then figure out how to get your e commerce sites product feed. If you don’t have one, have a developer get you one. You might even need to change platforms in order to do that. But it’s a really powerful and great opportunity, especially during during this economic downturn, to be able to have Google taking your products and just feeding them into its algorithm. So very, very powerful. And good on Google for making it free again, next up is Google has a division they call area 120. And it’s where they develop new interesting products and services. Well, one of those experimental projects is keen. And and Google has recently released keen so keen is basically a an area where they’re able to replicate what kind of looks like a little bit of of Pinterest, and a little bit of Instagram in an environment. And so what they say is is that Keane isn’t I’m quoting here from the the Google blog post announcing it, it says that keen isn’t intended to be a place to spend endless hours browsing. Instead, it’s a home for your interest. It’s a place to grow them, share them with loved ones, and find things that will help in making this precious life count and quote, so I haven’t installed came yet but I plan to, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what Keane is all about. So it’s available both on web and as a as an Android app. And I will report back to you in the next couple of months. But if you want to check it out, you can go to stay keen sta y ke n calm and install it on your Android device or sign in through Google through the web, and check it out and see what it’s all about. And it looks like you know, just a card based system for you. Being able to organize and appoint different thoughts into a visual interface. So we’ll see how it all comes together. But you know, with Google, they like to test these things, and then see if they stick. Alright, next up, we are taken to Google Photos. Google is disabling Google Photos backup for folders that are on your system and backed up automatically. So images that are saved onto your device by messaging apps, specifically, those folders will no longer be backed up by Google’s Google Photos cloud based service by default. In essence, you’ll have to go in and you’ll have to turn those folders back on to update now they’re doing this because during this pandemic situation, there’s been an unprecedented amount of bandwidth being used by people. And so they’re just making people aware that you need to turn this on. So if you have WhatsApp or messages through Facebook Messenger, otherwise kik is another one of those apps. They’re in Turning that function off you, you will need to go into it and turn them back on in order to be able to turn on backup and sync for those folders. There are instructions in the article that talks about it. You can find instructions in the show notes from that article moving right along. And back to Google Shopping. Google has launched another project out of area 120. This one this time is called shop loop. And shop loop allows influencers to create product demonstrations, so to speak, think of it as a mobile video, virtual shopping space, kind of like a trade show or an expo where you get people to come and look at your use of products in your environment. Okay, you can think of this akin to home shopping network or QVC and other kinds of, of home shopping channels. other platforms have brought them to bear so Amazon live is currently doing something similar. YouTube has the shoppable ad format already. And so they’re using this in a little bit of a different way. Facebook has something similar with live shopping, where you can, in essence, do a virtual trunk show. And now Instagram, of course, has their own shop destination. So all of these social networking platforms are trying to get in on the ecommerce boom, that’s kind of happening during the pandemic. And shop loop is right there in the fold. They’re trying to really help uncover trends that haven’t yet happened. So they’re trying to kind of bring the new trends to the table, allowing for influencers and creators to talk about what they’re using and how they’re using it and having people experience it. I’m going to install the application myself, and check it out. And I’ll let you know what I learned as we move ourselves along. So it’s currently a progressive web application, meaning that it works on any device, you just have to go to shop loop dot app, and you can then load it into your phone. Next up is that Google ranks its YouTube channels by the number of people who subscribe. And that is the primary vehicle by which many of us see the success of our channels, we see how many people subscribe, and that then usually correlates very closely to how many people few videos on our channel, generally, I just thought it was recent, very interesting that Digital Trends gave us a list of the Top 10 YouTube channels. And I’m just going to list them here so that you can get an understanding of them and then really take away some important points about what happens on YouTube and why. So starting from the the number 10. And going up to the number one slots, number 10 was actually WWE, the wrestling network. They’re at 63 million users then Next one number nine is five minute crafts at 67 point 4 million users. I didn’t even know five minute crafts existed before seeing this top 10 channels chart. We then have sports the sports YouTube channel at 75 million set India I’m not even sure what that is. But I’m guessing it’s a a channel focused on things happening in the country of India 77 point 5 million subscribers. The gaming channel on YouTube is 85 point 6 million cocoa melon Nursery Rhymes at 88 point 6 million directed at children PewDiePie the unfortunate and notorious, probably racist youtuber he’s got 100 5 million subscribers which is both amazing and unsettling at the same time. Then there’s the music channel on YouTube at 100 12 million subscribers youtube movies has 117 million and T series 146 million subscribers. And so when we look at this just from a general overview of the number of subscribers and the ones that have the most. So for example, the T series, most people don’t know, but they’re popular Indian music channel. So at 100, and you know, 46 million subscribers, they’ve had 100 16 billion views over the course of its time. We know that people are coming to YouTube for entertainment, they’re coming to be entertained first, and then they’re coming to solve problems next. That’s why parents come to YouTube to play Coco melon nursery rhymes. So we could take some very universal principles, when it comes to us as business owners publishing content on YouTube is to first figure out what is going to be useful and entertaining to people on YouTube, and then produce that kind of work. Okay, it’s really important For us to be able to understand that people are coming for usefulness and entertainment. And can we be both of those when we’re producing video for YouTube, so YouTube in working to really comply as well as get ahead of regulatory affairs in other countries, as well as other states in the United States. They are responding to the California consumer Privacy Act by putting in some more controls for kids content. So if you are producing content, and it’s not for children, make sure that you do not check that box that says this is children’s content. That’s a way to get yourself banned on YouTube. But on the other side of it, if you do check that box, just understand that you may see different options turn on and off when you go ahead and turn kids content on that is this content is for children. So just be mindful of that as you’re moving forward. There’s a video in the show notes I highly recommend Watching it if you do have children, as your primary viewers,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:03
a couple of recent wins by Google, Forbes has put out an article. And they’re just noting the fact that Google has recently won. A partnership with box box is akin to Dropbox. And Google Drive and other cloud storage services and file sharing. And box is now moving to Google Cloud. So this is really phenomenal. This is this is bringing yet another major service and a major company to the Google Cloud environment. If you don’t know Google Cloud is what is actually the umbrella business that contains G Suite, and many other cloud hosting services. And so if you’re doing anything in the Big Data space, Google Cloud handles that it’s akin to Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. And recently, Google One a contract with Deutsche Bank. They most recently got a public sector contract with the United Kingdom. They got Major League Baseball MLB to join their services in this past March. And so they’ve been making some really good inroads in bringing more of these cloud vendors and other businesses, organizations and governments on to the Google Cloud Platform. And I’m just excited to see box joining them. For me, it’s actually about when they’re all on the Google Cloud system, like Evernote is Evernote runs on top of Google Cloud, while they’re separate islands. They’re using a lot of the same technologies in the background, which makes their integration in my perspective, hopefully easier. So hopefully Evernote and say box and other tools that are sitting in Google Cloud can now integrate more easily because they’re using the same background infrastructure. So they announced this at Cloud Next, which is Google’s enterprise conference that they Hold every year, this year, they did it virtually. And so they actually extended it over the course of nine weeks. And in one of their announcements, they announced that they were actually capable of using technology to encrypt data while in use. So what that really means is that a new level of confidential computing is going to come

Raymond Sidney-Smith 31:22
to pass. They’re calling it confidential computing. What this means is that if you’re using G Suite, you will now be able to, presumably in the near future, encrypt your transmitting of data. So as you are sending data back and forth between you and a customer, you’re actually capable of having that encrypted in transit. And that’s just really remarkable. It’s writing to the database in an encrypted format, which just increases the level of security by far meaning that even if the data was was captured or you know, in somehow intervened in a It would be intervening with encrypted data. And so it would just be a blob to the hackers. This is a really, really cool new development. And I know that it sounds a little bit geeky on the front end. But from a from a business perspective, having your data both encrypted at rest and in transit is a powerful, competitive advantage. Because people who do not have this happening means that their data in some way, shape or form is not as secure when it is being utilized. And Google is bringing that for those people who are on Google Cloud. So I’m very excited to see it. I’m looking forward to seeing more data come out about how it’s going to be utilized and when it’s going to be implemented in G Suite and other products across the Google ecosystem. One more story before kind of what I wanted to dive in on today, which is that Google recently announced nine tips it within their remote work policy, and I encourage everyone To start the process of creating a remote work policy for your business, we are going to be in this either virtual working environment working from home remote working experience for quite some time as we have this protracted both shutdown and recovery period because of the covid 19 pandemic, and really, because of the lack of leadership being shown in managing this crisis for small businesses, so Google came out and they announced these nine particular items. Now they focused on four real fundamental areas. And I’m just going to cover these nine items thereafter. And you can go check out the Inc article that I have linked in the show notes, but they really focus on four areas, and in this order, well being, performance, connectedness, and productivity. And so as you can imagine, the productivity part really speaks to me, but for well being, performance, connectedness and productivity. And these are the recommendations just in highlight, and I’m quoting here from the article number one, make team meetings a priority. Number two, show personal interest. Number three, be present. Okay? Don’t go drifting off when you’re in meetings with people. Number four check in, it’s really important to have things like virtual coffee breaks, and other kinds of mechanisms to be able to check with people, either on a daily basis or otherwise, about their work days about their weekend plans, and so on. so forth.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 34:31
Number five, recognize your teammates, really show them appreciation and give them reputational enhancements, you know, give them accolades, and so on and so forth to make them know that they’re doing the right things. Number six, invite colleagues, participation, invite people to join you in work that you’re doing. Number seven, set team norms. These are this is a new working environment. So you really have to set some cultural standards Some culture in place for people to be able to know what they should be doing. Number eight, use the right medium. Not everything’s right for email, not everything’s right for a phone call, and everything’s right for a video meeting, determine what’s going to be the right medium for being able to have interactions. And number nine, make well being a priority. They should have probably made that number one. But being made it number nine, we just don’t make well being a priority. We are in the midst of a pandemic, and they want to make sure that people are taking care of themselves, you should be worried about taking care of your employees as well. So go ahead and do that. Make sure that they’re setting time limits on their work day, make sure that they’re taking care of their health, making sure they’re they’re setting up an office space that is ergonomic and safe for them to be working in. These are all really important features. And it’s good for Google to be highlighting this and making this available to everyone else. In closing out today’s episode what I wanted to do was to talk about Google My Business and Search Engine Land recently put out an article called How nine major Google My Business updates in 2020, can help you rebound. And what they did was they went over the nine major updates. And what I wanted to do was to just sort of contextualize how I see Google My Business really changing in the near term, both in the face of COVID-19, but also really, in how Google really sees Google My Business are kind of making a play across different areas. And I’m interested to talk that through with you. So first and foremost, they have updated their system to allow for you to have a temporarily closed status. As I said, we’re kind of having different shutdowns, different reopenings happening across different regions of the country and the world. And so Google now has an option to select yourself as temporarily closed so that people know that you’re not open right now. So they can trust themselves to go to Google Maps and to find out the status of what your business is in, I highly recommend that you install the Google My Business app so that you’re able to make those changes within the application on your mobile phone on the fly. Google has also taken your chain restrictions off of posts. So once upon a time, if you don’t know, there’s a feature called posts with Google, and you’re able to post onto your Google My Business listing well chains, that is businesses that have more than 10 locations, where once restricted from being able to post to the posts with Google, now they are lifting that restriction. So you’re now able to post across multiple locations if you have more than 10 locations. Google has also added a new COVID-19 post type. So if you go to that post with Google section, click on posts you’ll see the various chips across the top you’ll see offers and what’s new and so on so forth events. One of those options is going to be COVID-19 update. So if you need to push a COVID-19 update out to your your followers, you can go ahead and do that. There are also some new Google My Business attributes and displays. quoting here from the Search Engine Land article. They say Google added new attributes for businesses to add curbside pickup, and no contact delivery, which have been essential for restaurants and retailers. And they go on to say that not only are these attributes above the fold that is in the Google search engine results page, but Google notes their existence with a checkmark or x that makes the attribute even more visible. If these attributes are available to you. It’s critical that you use them and make sure they are accurate,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:36
it’s likely that these these attributes will be permanent, especially as curbside pickup becomes more popular among large chains. So and quote. So this is really, really powerful that they are actually adding these other new attributes and making them so prominent in the feed for search results. Okay, Google has also made their local service ads expanded, so You’re able to actually add more features within the local service ads. So for example, you can have video appointments, you can have video estimates you can accept on site jobs or urgent jobs, you can determine what the health and safety functions or features are of a particular business. So really great for those businesses that have to go into a home and do work at homes. These local services, ads or local service ads really helped to add these attributes so that customers feel safe about how people are going to be working on in their homes and other environments. They have additionally, for healthcare businesses, provided functions for telehealth and COVID-19 information links. So if you’re in that space, you now can add that function. You can add that information to your Google My Business listing so that you don’t get inundated with requests. Google has also added for businesses the ability to have support links and donation links, meaning that in your listing, you can say hey, I Need you to buy gift cards from my restaurant or cafe, and you can now have a gift card function on that page. You can also have donation links to lead people to a donation space to donate to say a crowdfunding platform page or otherwise, while you’re shut down, you can identify also secondary hours for people. So if you’re a grocery store, and you want to have SR hours listed separately from the normal operating hours, you can go ahead and do that. Now, inside of your Google My Business listing, I imagined that this is going to stick around Search Engine Land also agrees that this is going to be normal for the rest of time. They also added some safety features into Google Maps. So across the top of your screen now you’ll see some chips, some little buttons and those buttons will say takeout and delivery and so on so forth, three to quickly get to things, but there are also some features that are there for public transit. So it will say something like public train For services may be impacted due to COVID-19. And you can go ahead and see that based on where you’re going and how you’re getting there. So it’s just useful to be able to see these kinds of things and alerting you that there are changes as they’re happening. And so, as we can see, there have been a lot of changes that Google My Business has been making to the interface to make it useful for Google Maps users, people who are searching Google universal search when they go to google.com. But also when they’re searching on their mobile devices, for locations and for places that they may be wanting to shop from. What this really means to me, though, is that Google has made a number of different changes to the platform that make me think that Google wants more and more people to use GMB as a social space.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 41:50
And I’ll give you a couple of examples. One is that Google has recently in Google Maps given a much nicer experience It was available before, but this is a much nicer experience, say that someone is coming over for dinner. And they say, Hey, I’m leaving for dinner, and they send me a link. Well, they can, they can share within the Google Maps application, a real time link that shows them on the map moving toward my home. And Google has also now given businesses on the GMB side, the Google My Business side, the ability to post and have followers to those posts on their Google My Business listings. So what they’re doing is they’re giving a little bit of social on the personal side, inside the Google Maps side, they’re giving more social posting capabilities on the business side. And they’re starting to test to see how people feel about using Google My Business and Google Maps more generally, as a place for people to be able to interact in these pro social ways. What I’m doing Thinking is that Google is going to make this a tighter integration across the board with GMB, Google My Business being more of a social platform akin to Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. And they’re just going to slowly but surely get into the background. They don’t want to make anything splashy, they don’t want to Google Plus, that’s gonna, you know, you know, say, Oh, this is Google’s next, try it social. You can see that Google has done this with Google Photos and the ability to message and share photographs in the background. They’re adding social media features into their products in these very light touch ways. And I think that Google, my business is now the next product to get some of these light touch useful social features. They’re going to try and make Google My Business more and more social. And I’m looking forward to seeing how that all works out in the long run. So that’s it. That is my first what’s new Google, this being the July 2020 edition for the reboot of the web and beyond cast podcasts. And I’m really glad and happy that you all have found me here. Before we end this cast. If you have a comment or a question, feel free to visit the podcast episode page at web and beyond cast.com. And you can send me a direct message right there, click on contact on the website. And you can ask us a question, you can suggest a topic that you’d like me to cover here on web and beyond cast and a future episode, and so forth. Also, if you’re able to help us out, if you can leave a rating or review on Apple podcasts or Stitcher or whatever app you use that allows us to leave a rating and review. That’d be really fantastic. That helps us bring new small business listeners to the fold to grow the web and beyond cast community. And so thank you, thank you for listening. Thank you for rating and reviewing. And with that, thanks for listening to web and beyond cast where small business comes to learn about marketing and managing on the web and beyond. I’m your host Raisa Smith. Until next time, here’s to your small business success on the web and beyond.