Last November, I had the privilege of being selected for Connect Live 2019. Obviously I was posting some pictures of that fabulous experience on my social media accounts - as one is supposed to do ? - and that must have drawn the attention of @Sabrina_DE, who is a former colleague of mine. She had been a local guide for quite some time already, and so she reached out to me while I was still in San Jose. We agreed to get together some time to exchange our experiences with the local guides program.
Some local guides getting together… hang on, isn’t there a name for that? Yes, of course, that’s called a Meetup! So I formalized it and submitted the proposal for the Ultimate Tips & Tricks meetup (modesty never was one of my strengths), so other local guides could also join. In the end we were a company of four, which was of course the perfect group to fill the average restaurant table. Instead of staying out in the cold, we darted into a nice Turkish restaurant to grab some dinner at one of those aforementioned average tables. [Yes, yes, I will write that review soon; can I just finish this recap post first? There’s really no need to keep showing those notfications]
Turned out the evening was a mixture of meetup and Google fanclub night, as all four of us were quite avid and happy users of a multitude of Google products, not only with regards to software (G Suite!!!, Lens!!!, and even - believe it or not - Maps!!!) but also hardware: we discovered that all 4 of us were #teampixel (as you can see in the picture, which obviously only shows 3 phones as it’s tricky to get the phone you are taking the picture with into that very image) - whereupon we decided to nickname ourselves The Pixies.
As a matter of fact that picture was the only picture taken all evening - sorry foodies, we just started eating when the food was served (with the additional advantage that the food was actually still warm when consuming it - a pleasure the relatives of some local guides can only dream of ?) - as it was really a knowledge sharing occasion. Quite a bit of tips & tricks were exchanged, which I’m not going to all spell out here & now, but most of which are simply accessible to everyone who wants to hear them, by listening to the LetsGuide Podcast (make sure to check out episode 10).
Because @Sabrina_DE was in fact the reason why the meetup had gotten organised in the first place, I still had a little surprise for her. At the last day of the Connect Live event in November, all 200 local guides who had been invited received (on top of loads of other small and not so small surprises) a box with some nice Local Guides branded gadgets. In the box were also 2 Google Maps Pegmans, one for the local guide herself/himself and another one as a gift to support a fellow local guide. So I figured @Sabrina_DE was the perfect candidate for my spare Pegman. I hope we will soon see it pop up in posts and pictures from her hand - and perhaps even in a Connect Live 2020 submission video?
[One tip I can share here & now is the main tip for the question I get asked the most: “What do you need to do to get selected for Connect Live?”. The answer is simple, the task itself is not so simple: consistently add high quality contributions to both Google Maps and Connect.]
