As soon as I saw that Google+ had finally added pages for business I, like many, wanted to create pages for some businesses I work for.
But I’ve seen muddles come up in the past so before I did anything I wanted to know who owned the pages, how they could be transitioned to another owner should someone leave a company (since it seems a personal Google+ account is required to create a page, like Facebook) and how a team could use the page, meaning how do you create admins.
I couldn’t find anything about these questions. Then I came across Robert Scoble’s post, I wish I had never heard of Google+’s brand pages and had some answers, the big one being it hasn’t been thought through yet.
That’s a problem and why I won’t rush to create a page. When it comes to business, it is a basic requirement. More than one person should be able to access the page if only because people go on vacation. If only one person can manage it, does the page shut down for two weeks, three, a month when they take time off?
And if the owner of the page leaves, what happens then? There may be simple answers to these questions. Maybe they aren’t problems at all. But from the searching I did there was no documentation available, just Scoble’s observations that suggest these are issues that have yet to be addressed.
If that is the case, you risk big problems down the road by creating a page today. So as the character Viktor Navorski says in the movie The Terminal, “I wait.”
In the meantime, if you want to read about a fabulous use of a Facebook page, see Lara Wellman’s post, Fantastic Fanpages: Volkswagen Netherlands. (Be sure you watch the video in the post.)
On another note:
I was asked to write something on the subject of Remembrance Day (November 11). This is what I came up with.
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