Google seems to have finally got a worthwhile product in Social. Google+ has certainly caught fancy of the early adopters. Given the hype around it businesses are rushing in to create profile pages and test the platform. Google made announcements about launching the business service shortly and in fact invited people to register their business pages.
Today I came across an update from Christian Oestlien that surprised me a bit. Here is what he said:
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Here is a quick update on Google+ and businesses:
A few weeks ago we mentioned we would be doing a test of business profiles and asked people interested to apply. Believe it or not we actually had tens of thousands of businesses, charities, and other organizations apply to take part from all over the world. Many of you have reached out to me personally through Google+, e-mail, chat, and even other Googlers. Thank you. Your response has been humbling.
With so many qualified candidates expressing intense interest in business profiles, we’ve been thinking hard about how to handle this process. Your enthusiasm obligates us to do more to get businesses involved in Google+ in the right way, and we have to do it faster. As a result, we have refocused a few priorities and we expect to have an initial version of businesses profiles up and running for EVERYONE in the next few months. There may be a tiny handful business profiles that will remain in the meantime solely for the purpose of testing how businesses interact with consumers.
In the meantime, we ask you not to create a business profile using regular profiles on Google+. The platform at the moment is not built for the business use case, and we want to help you build long-term relationships with your customers. Doing it right is worth the wait. We will continue to disable business profiles using regular profiles. We recommend you find a real person who is willing to represent your organization on Google+ using a real profile as him-or-herself.
All of us on the Google+ effort are delighted by your engagement with this project – thank you all for taking the time to apply and offer such incredibly useful feedback. Keep it coming!
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See the lines marked in Red. The second last paragraph stating that we’ll disable the business profiles using regular profiles bothered me. So the Google Business product is not yet ready, you invited people to send in their business profiles on Plus and now you want to disable those pages without providing them a proper migration. So all the efforts put in by people creating various business pages will go down the tubes. Interestingly they will allow tiny handful business profiles to continue (of course these are the big advertisers giving pots of cash to Google). It will be interesting to see whether they diable various pages created by Ford.
This to me looks like punishing early adopter who created business profiles and informed Google that they’re interested in getting a business profile. Makes me wonder how Google is going to police millions of profiles and disable them. In my opinion they should create the business product first and then provide a feature to migrate content. I’m sure they will be doing that with the tiny handful business profiles that will be allowed to continue.
