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Google+ Opens To Businesses With 'Pages'
karthikmns writes with news that Google is rolling out Google+ Pages, integrating businesses and brands into its social network. When Google+ launched, it asked businesses not to create user pages, which upset many companies who had grown accustomed to interacting with customers on Facebook. Today's update closes the gap between the two social networks in this regard, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how annoying you find social marketing.
"If you’ve established a personal Google+ profile before, then the features offered through a Page will be familiar. You can place people into Circles, which lets you share content with specific sets of users. You can launch video hangouts, which lets you have face-to-face conversations with your followers. And the Pages work through the site’s mobile app. ... But Google has made some key tweaks. The first is that a Page cannot add someone to a circle until that user has already added the page to one of their circles. In other words, a Page can’t start sending you messages until you’ve elected to add them to one of your circles. Another key change: the content on a Page defaults to public (as opposed to ‘My Circles’ for personal profiles) and Pages can’t share with extended circles."
Did you reall mean to find "Bob Smith, Corp" or "Bobsmith Co." or "Smith LLP"
I worry how this will play out.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Shouldn't Google+ worry more about getting people communicating with each other before they start throwing businesses on to the platform? Where is the API?
My company home page
What is this inane gibberish, how is it news for nerds? Does anyone care about the groups system on the BBS I wrote in the '90s? Thought not!
I deleted my FB account a year or two ago, but
many companies who had grown accustomed to interacting with customers on Facebook
I never saw much "interaction" unless you mean spamming with marketing messages, or simply ignoring them. Is/was there any other form of FB interaction?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
... Google needs to finish refining the product and then re-produce (since they did it before) the media campaign they carried out to drive excitement and interest in Google+. So many people came, got in, found few friends in the system, and left their G+ accounts stagnant --- or came, and didn't even get in --- that they really need a massive campaign to drive interest again. And since most people that use social networking already know about G+, they should approach it as such; they should be saying "come pop in again, and get your friends in for real this time" or something of the sort.
Like most of the people I know with G+ accounts, I appreciate it and its merits beyond facebook, but the long transition from the level of contact I have via FB to any level close to that in G+ looks like it is so far out that I hardly ever check G+ at all. Not only that, I see absolutely no trend of migration. I came to G+, got a few friends, invited some that came, and since then there has been NOTHING.
Come on Google! For your sake, and also for those of us who recognize your product quality, make yourself visible! (Its not like you don't have massive advertising, for free, within your reach, lol).
So now, all of my cats can have their own page! I love it. I'll do one for Fluffy, and one for Buffy, and one for Muffy, and one for Satan (he's incontinent). Rockin!
This signature has Super Cow Powers
It looks, at least, like Google has abandon the "Real Name" policy. Looking at the Google+ Privacy Policy and Google TOS pages today, I could not find any mention of a real name requirement. Unless I missed something (possible), it looks like Google did the Right Thing after considerable pressure from the community at large:
Anyone know any different? Is it actually permissible to have a pseudonym-based account on Google now?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
That's a stupid idea. Many people don't want others what they have searched for.
Actually, they've gone one better. You want to see Pepsi's page on google? type in "+Pepsi" on Google's search page or in the Google search bar of your browser. There it is.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
. . . with a way to organize 'fans'. This will probably tie into Google Analytics.
That just brings me usual search results, with pepsi.com at top.
Go to google.com, type +pepsi
Get it yet?
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
fantastic - love the linked stuff in the stream, especially the bloodied polar bears captions "you want a coke mother fucker".
But of course, even though that looked like a stream on pepsi's page, it was really just search results. Too bad that I can't really see which one was the real pepsi google+ page (glad to see their policy on real names is working fine).
In short - Google+ is a total failure, which is a pity. They need to stop trying to be like facebook and start being like a communications hub where we can share all the google products (and our own) in a central location. *Then* they might get some use out of it. Keeping it like a mini blog is just not working.
Go to google.com, type +pepsi
Get it yet?
Yes, Google has destroyed an important feature of their search engine (using +term to mean that term absolutely has to appear on the page to count as a result) just to keep from businesses from asking for human-readable URLs in Google+.
using Google, you're doing it wrong.
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=%2Bpepsi
Or by business they mean people who do not use google to host their services?
apps users have been allowed for a week or so now.
stephen
Yep, still doesn't work. Judging from the comment under me, I'm not the only one either.
search results, with pepsi.com at top for that too
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Baiting Apple for the lawsuit's free publicity. Pretty transparent ploy.
I see Google now wants me to google ' +Brand Or Business That I Want To Videochat With '
So that is why they disabled the + search operator, now requiring two double quotes surrounding the word you insist on actually appearing in every search result.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
But if you use an Apps account belonging to someone else (like my Uni account), remember the domain admin can see *everything* you put on G+.
Dilbert RSS feed
Weird. Works for me and I have nothing to do with Google+
I think it's fairly obvious that Facebook's enormous success is at least in part because so many businesses have gotten on board. Even little mom and pop stores have "like us on Facebook" stickers everywhere. Which in turn makes people, even old people and such that aren't usually so tech-savvy, want to check out this Facebook thing. Which makes more businesses want to sign up, and we have a nice feedback loop going.
Yes, people need to be on + for its success, but Google has just taken too long to get the ball rolling. There was a brief surge of interest when all sorts of people were trying it out, but then everyone but tech people simply went back to Facebook where they can play games and get malware and be marketed at.
They didn't destroy it. All you have to do is put the term in quotes.
Not just that, but they did it by silently ignoring the + for quite a while... to the point that it took me ages to figure out why it wasn't working anymore. (Of course, the only reason I needed to use it so much in the first place was because Google's spelling correction feature has gone malevolent and started mangling searches for specialist things into the more common search it thinks you wanted. Sigh.)
So I've created a "page" for my business. It seems my own G+ account is linked to this "page" so only I can admin the page... I'm sure this will be fixed, but surely its kind of obvious?
Also obvious, but is it possible to create a "page" via a Google-Apps account? 'cos that would make sense really.
But I can see no obvious way to do these things, and whilst I'm sure it will be solved in time, it's annoying because as a business, I feel compelled to secure my "page" right now.
Linus Torvalds - 4:24 PM - Public So the google pages thing might actually work as a reasonable place to do kernel release announcements. I always felt like I wouldn't want to do them on my personal page, but having a G+ page dedicated to Linux makes the announcements actually make sense. So if you are following me because you expected to see kernel announcements, and you haven't figured out already that I'm very spotty with that, you might want to unfollow me, and follow the Linux page instead. Of course, I might be spotty there too. It's not like I'm the most organized person in the world. But at least there is one release announcement there now.
And the actual announcement:
Linus Torvalds - 3:53 PM - Public By popular demand... Linus Torvalds shared a Google+ page with you. Linux - you know you want it
Apparently, their naming policy is still very much geared toward individual users. Upon trying to create a page for my non-profit, we were first required to update our profile, and then warned that our name was not consistent with their naming policy, so I had to update it. After doing so, it allowed me to create a page, but the profile has a warning saying that it has been disabled because our name was flagged as being inconsistent with their policy. I understand that this is in an alpha stage, but the process needs to be significantly simpler, without imposing unnecessary restrictions on names and such.
It's funny to see people abuse mod points seemingly pointlessly.
using Google, you're doing it wrong.
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=%2Bpepsi
Hate to break it to you but this is absolutely not the same and not better. If you type www.facebook.com/business you land on the business page straight away, and the first thing you see is whatever content business placed there.
If one follows your method, you land on a Google search page where the page you look for is one of many links. Yes, it is the top link but you are still on google, you still see the listing of other random crap (or related crap if you're [un]lucky). It takes an extra click to get to the goods, and all the extra links are potential distractions that in some cases will take you away from the business you were looking for originally. plus.google.com/business would be a much cleaner solution.
+Raider of the lost BBS
Either way - doing it myself in Google, or using your link - gets me a standard search page of results, with pepsi.com at the top. There's no reference to Google+ on the front page.
And if you legitimately could say "you're doing it wrong" ... that kind of proves how useless it is, doesn't it? The point is it's supposed to be easy to get there. The methods I'm seeing described here are anything but easy.
When I use the link I gave, or if I type +pepsi into google, it does exactly what it is supposed to do, and takes me directly to the Pepsi Google+ page.
But then, I seem to be aware of how to use the internet. :P
I don't have the same experience as you. If one follows my method, you land directly on the Pepsi Google+ page. No extra clicks, a lot less typing, and so much easier than typing out a complete url address.
Not for me, straight to the Pepsi Google+ page.
I'm glad they finally got around to adding this. Business support will be a big help with getting people to make the shift from Facebook to Google+.
Need any dad jokes?
Awwwwww, how cute, the AC is offended.
The use of a :P as a sign that I'm just giving a friendly ribbing is lost on this one.
They didn't destroy it. All you have to do is put the term in quotes.
Since this was never required before, and there isn't any documentation that says this is required (in fact, the only documentation for the "+" is for the Google+ Direct Connect), I don't see why I shouldn't expect it to work the way it always did.
I dunno what you're talking about. I learned about putting terms in quotes several years ago from Google's own help pages. Putting terms in quotes has been supported as long as using +terms were. If they've been light on that information lately that is a problem, but it's not some new feature. I've never used +terms before, it has always been quotes.