Google+ Company pages: Locked to personal profiles
Google has rushed the implementation of Google+ Business Pages without thinking through how pages are too be owned and managed over time.
Right now, it would seems you can’t create a G+ company page without first having a public profile (for the same account). Plus, you can’t have multiple admins for a page, or transfer admin rights either.
This means that you will be creating a page that is tied to your G+ profile. If you change job, the company page goes with you, with no way of moving it over to anyone else.
If you create a “company google account” (non-personal, which many already have for administrating such things as Google Analytics, Feedburner, etc) you will still be forced to create a public profile before a Page.
If you use your Google Apps account (if your company uses that) then you yet again will be forced to create a public profile – perhaps not something you want to do if you already have a G+ profile from your own account. And this still doesn’t get round the problem of not being able to add additional admins.
As they are, Pages are going to create a number of duplicates and “scrap” profiles – something which Google has (so far with G+) tried really hard to avoid.
Clearly very early stages for Company Pages on Google+, get the feeling they’ve pushed this out as early as they possibly could – but I think it’s foolish of them to have overlooked (or down-prioritised) the account architecture side of Pages.
Such a decision can do nothing other than create headaches in the future.
Update 2011-12-21
Google have made a welcome update to Google+ pages. Not only can you have up to 50 administrators for a page, you can also transfer ownership of a page between accounts. Read Write Web has written a quick guide for these new features.
(this post was originally posted to Google+)
