Google Groups – How to Set Up Groups for Your Teams
Originally from here: http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/training/preseason/googlegroups.php
Also on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuhJ4mdrsrU
Hi 30 day challengers Caro here and welcome to another one of my videos.
Today’s topic is going to be on how to set up a Google group for yourself and your teammates. Now you can use Google groups for many different reasons in this context this is what we’re recommend you use it for. I’ve already done a video on Skype and setting up Skype, and I’ve mentioned there that it’s just a wonderful wonderful tool or vehicle to communicate with your team. So too with Google groups. It’s like you can invite the members so you can invite your team members and I’ll take you all through that. And you invite them and you use that as basically your central hub to send out any correspondence, so it could be when the next meeting’s on, it could involve questions, it’s really just a very effective and efficient way to communicate with particular people that you’re desiring to.
Anyway all that said, follow me and I’ll show you how it’s all done. It’s very very simple, I promise.
Okay, so here we are at the Google page and all I did was type in Google groups and I get this here [groups.google.com]. Now I’m going to sign in, and for the purposes of this video, I’m actually going to use the 30 day challenge gmail address, because we don’t actually have a Google group set up in that, so I’ll show you how it’s done. So I’ve signed in, now, just to backtrack, I really do recommend that you get yourself a gmail account. If you don’t have one already, you can certainly post on the forum asking for gmail invitations. But generally what you do is you first of all set up your gmail account.
So I’m signing in there. It thinks I’m Ed. I can be Ed. For nickname, I’m going to call it Ted Legend. Now I have a feeling that a photo of me might come up that’s not ed, but please don’t get too panicky about that. So that’s what I’m going to be called here, my nickname.
Okay, so I want to create a group.
Name of the group is 30DCTest. So it’s as simple as that. And [in the description], “This is a group for demonstration purposes only :-)” Now here are the various options that you have. Now, I recommend that you do restricted. For this purpose you want it to keep private, so it’s going to be restricted and create my group. That hard. Wait, no it’s a bit trickier because it’s got one of these, that sometimes aren’t always clear. Okay, so, it took me two goes, trying to work out what those letters were to get in.
So what you can do is then you can add members. So, all you do is you add their email addresses. So I might type in, you know, one of my own addresses. You list people one under the other, and then it’s “Hi there, Caro here, I’d love me to join my group :-)”, so you provide whatever you want [ for the invitation message ]. So invite members that way.
So that’s the group there, that’s what it’s called, group email, and invitation to one member. So [click] visit our group. And this is where you can set it up. Now you see here group owner Ed Dale, there. Now you can invite members here, discussions, a discussion topic here, and you simply do new post.
And I could do subject “This is a test email for demonstration purposes”, [ with a message of ] “Hi Caro, welcome to your group. Cheers, Caro :-)” Yes I’m completely and utterly crazy here, and then you just send her that.
Now it’s important to know that when you send out a message the best way to respond is to come back into the hub of the Google group so I just post that message. And then I click here, and then it tells me that from Ed, that there’s a test email here and so I can go read them, so you build up your list here so discussions here, you can load up files, there’s pages you can create, you can invite more members, so really just enjoy yourself, have a look around this group. It’s that simple.
And really one of the main messages again is to use it, and it’s just such an excellent communication tool, so I really do recommend that you go about setting it up, I also recommend, something I’ve been taught, is everybody uses gmail email addresses, it’s not absolutely mandatory because we have people in some of our 30 day challenge behind the scenes groups that have not used gmail, it’s just very easy and preferable. If you don’t have a gmail address at this stage, by all means just post on the forum, maybe we start a thread for that, and it’s very easy to send invites out to people. It’s not a biggie. I think actually for a lot of people it’s also called Google mail, so it’s either gmail or Google mail. So that’s pretty much it.
So I’ll flash through to the final slide. Very simple Google groups, go to it, set it up with your team, just so you know, I am also going to be creating a video on teams, how to go about setting it up, the importance and everything like that. What you know for now is that Skype is a great tool to speak to your team and so are Google groups.
So that’s it for me, I hope you’re having a great day with whatever part of the world that you’re in right now. Take care, bye!
