After warning people about it for weeks, Google began enforcing its ban on all Google business profiles this morning, to much consternation from, well, businesses. Yes Google did warn people at the launch of Google+ that any non-human pages would be killed and that people shouldn’t be surprised that the pages were killed…
But of course, like when anything is axed on the Internet, people were up in arms. Let’s see what Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan has said：
‘Some of the biggest company/brand accounts on Google+ have now — finally, some might say — been removed.
Google has been removing business/brand accounts for more than a week now, but some users were unhappy with the random nature of the process. Some accounts were zapped early on while others seemed to get special treatment, or at least were ignored, and continued to increase their following.
It’s been a rocky few weeks for companies and brands wanting to have a presence on Google+. Within a week of Plus’ launch, Google announced that business pages would be coming soon, but days later had to ask brands to stop making new accounts. Google eventually invited businesses to apply to be part of a test program and accepted applications through last Friday.
Frankly, the entire thing is a mess. Google Profiles allowed for non-human use long before Google+ existed. Search Engine Land, for example, had a profile with Google Buzz (and still does) before this change happened.
Those profiles all now need to be axed, because Google either didn’t think clearly about the obvious need for businesses to be on Google+ or didn’t devote the resources to make it happen? Crazy.’
Google Social Head Vic Gondutra’s solution was to choose a figurehead from the organization to represent the brand and deal with the interim months between now and when the Google+ Business pages launch that way. Gundotra told me that in hindsight the treatment of brands in this way was “probably a mistake.”
Of course the whole thing is exceptionally ill thought out. Using the Pete Cashmore switchover as an example, Gundotra says that Cashmore recognized that he made a “mistake,” and that’s why he changed the Mashable profile to Pete Cashmore; But, wait Cashmore already had a Google+ profile with 40K followers when he was allowed to switch the Mashable account (and its over 100K followers) to his personal one. So now Pete Cashmore has two (!) personal accounts. I don’t know about you but that doesn’t sound at all like “complying with the rules” to me.
When asked if he would take Google up on its solution Danny Sullivan said, “Honestly at this point it’s not that important to me, to have someone go in there and pretend to be our business off of their personal account.” Indeed, as this kind of pullback and “oh here’s a workaround wink wink” strategy creates mistrust between platform and users. “Putting the business genie back in the bottle is just going to generate a lot of ill will,” Sullivan expained.
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