Google Starts to Remove Brands from Google+
Early mover brands that went about creating Google+ profiles in the same way as they would via Facebook or Twitter have started seeing their pages disappear or lack functionality. Brands affected by the move include Ford, Mashable, and Sesame Street.
More than a fortnight since Google+ debuted, there was a bit of a game of Russian roulette underway as brands saw the sharing potential and brand-building opportunity of Google+ but were paralyzed by the question of should or shouldn’t create a Google+ profile.
The official line was that real people with real names could create a Google+ account but that Google wasn’t ready to deal with brands yet.
However, some brands went ahead and created Google+ profiles. Within 24 hours of Google+ going live, social news site Mashable had a presence on the new social network, for example.
With brands already present on Google+, it sends a signal out to any online brand with a pulse to get their profile up there.
More than a week ago, Google announced that business pages would be coming to Google+ soon and asked brands to refrain from setting up new accounts.
Brands were then requested to apply to be part of a test program that stopped receiving applications last Friday. According to Google’s Christien Oestlien, it was inundated with applications from charities, businesses, and other organizations.
Some brands have already begun to work around the problem. Mashable quickly amassed a follower base exceeding 108,000. According to reports, the social news site’s founder Peter Cashmore will start posting from the former Mashable account to keep the user base served.
The whole episode, however, should be a lesson to Google about the social space. The operative word here is ‘communication.’ It should have made it clear from day one that Google+ was about people first, not brands, and that plans were afoot if businesses could hold back a little while.
Google has been massively successful with Google+, amassing more than 20m users in less than 16 days, which should make Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter nervous.
Brands will go where the people go. But brands are the enduring story of belief and passion for a product. No doubt, when Google has business profiles up and running, it will be extraordinarily successful.
But between now and then, Google will need to ‘communicate’ what’s happening in a transparent process that rules out any notion of a pecking order.
According to Oestlien, a few brands have been allowed to remain, including Ford, which now has a ‘test account’ logo emblazoned on its page.
Oestlien said: “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+ correctly, 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 business profiles up and running for EVERYONE in the next few months. A tiny handful of business profiles may remain solely to test how businesses interact with consumers.
“In the meantime, we ask you not to create a business profile using regular profiles on Google+. The platform 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,” Oestlien said.