Is your company thinking of taking advantage of Google+ now that the platform offers "Pages" for businesses to tout their brands? As proponents are quick to point out, Google+ has 40 million users and it comes from a provider offering a wide range of other services. But as detractors note, Google+ Pages presents security concerns and provides an inconvenient administrative framework. Below are a few samples from the raging debate.

While Google+ may have far fewer users than Facebook, which has 800 million, the smaller network may be advantageous to business users, suggests Caleb Garling at Wired magazine. "For now, Plus streams generally contain 'non-frivolous' information. A company's message isn't lost amid a sea of random pictures and cat videos," he writes.

A greater advantage may be that Google+ is integrated into the company's search engine. If someone types a "+" before a business name in a query, they will be brought to the business's Google+ page. Google's wide variety of services, such as Gmail and Android, could be linked to Google+, and this could give Google many different avenues for promoting the social network, Garling writes.  

Garling's positive outlook for Google+ Pages seems to be drowning in a sea of rants and complaints, however. One of the most frequently-cited gripes is that it took Google months to develop the Pages capability, and it still isn't very convenient for marketing teams or social media teams to use. Only one person can post to a Google+ Page account, notes Nicole Ferraro at Internet Evolution.  

"Google has had the advantage of coming to this space late, and following in the direct footsteps of Facebook. Facebook has had years to get a lot wrong and then take the right steps to get it right (some of it). It's curious why Google wouldn't take what works on Facebook (i.e., allowing more than one person to administer a brand account) and use it to its advantage rather than pretending that example isn't there to follow," Ferraro writes.

"A company that takes its time to get something right because it doesn't want to royally screw up is smart (Google has learned this the hard way with multiple products, like Buzz). A company that takes its time to roll out something that has already been proven is...less than smart," adds Ferraro.

One has to assume that Google will update the offering in response to user irritation and outrage--because that is how it operates--but the question is whether users will have the patience to wait it out. Ferraro doesn't think they will. "It is clear that Google+ is really Google's last opportunity to prove to the world that it can do a good job with social," she writes. "By not having the foresight to know that users would want Pages right off the bat, and by not equipping these Pages with the features they needed when they were finally available, Google seems more likely to prove just the opposite."

If you think Ferraro's assessment is harsh, take a look at what Dan Tynan at ITWorld has to say: "[L]ike its disastrous introduction of Gmail apps for the iTunes Store last week, Google has once again dropped a large load of manure onto the web."

In addition to allowing just one individual to post to an account, Google+ Pages doesn't offer vanity addresses (which Facebook does). Worse, anyone can register a page for any business, meaning that it takes very little for someone to hijack your business on the network. Tynan tested this out for himself by creating a page for Walt Disney Co.    

"Welcome to domain squatting 2011," he writes. "It took me about 10 minutes [to create the page], nine minutes of which was spent searching for and downloading the right images...[A]bout 15 hours hence, the Walt Disney Page is still live on G+." 

And if you think Tynan is harsh, you may not want to see what Farhad Manjoo at Slate has to say. In a post titled "Google+ is dead," Manjoo laments that Google had a window of opportunity to compete head-on with Facebook, but the window has closed. "The real test of Google's social network is what people do after they join. As far as anyone can tell, they aren't doing a whole lot," he writes. "Traffic-analysis firms have consistently reported Google+'s traffic to be declining from its early peak."

Manjoo gives Google+ another year or two.

For more:
- see Caleb Garling's post at Wired
- see Nicole Ferraro's post at Internet Evolution
- see Dan Tynan's post at ITWorld
- see Farhad Manjoo's post at Slate

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