I wish I had never heard of Google+'s brand pages
OK, you all know I'm Google+'s biggest fan, right? For the past five months I've poured almost all my time into my Google+ account, which has paid off with a fun community and a lot of followers. — But yesterday Google+ rolled out brand pages.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google told marketers in July 2011 that brand pages were coming within two weeks; they instead took four months to ship, a delay GigaOM argued was a genuine strategic screwup because brands were left building audiences on Facebook while Google+ stayed invite-only human. By October, product chief Bradley Horowitz was still framing Google+ as a platform play rather than a feature list (his AllThingsD interview).
Now the pages have arrived — and the terms are tighter than marketers expected: as The Sociable notes in syndicated pickup, Google is banning promotions and competitions on Pages outright. The sharpest reaction comes from inside the tent: Robert Scoble, who spent five months pouring his time into Google+ and calling himself its biggest fan, publicly wishes he had never heard of the brand pages.
First-order effects
- Brands that spent the summer waiting can finally open Google+ Pages, but only under rules that forbid the contest-and-promotion mechanics they rely on elsewhere, forcing social media teams to treat Google+ as a broadcast-presence channel rather than a campaign channel.
- Scoble's public reversal puts Google's most visible organic advocate on record against the rollout, handing critics a ready-made quote about the cost of commercializing a community.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's brand toolkit — where promotions and competitions are standard practice — becomes the default destination for the marketing budgets Google just constrained, sharpening the comparison advertisers were already making during the four-month wait.
- Google faces pressure to either relax the promotion ban or compensate with other engagement hooks for brands, since restrictive launch terms risk repeating the perception problem the July delay created.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer social platforms face a sequencing dilemma: the organic users who make a network valuable are often the ones most alienated when brand infrastructure arrives, pushing platforms toward staged commercialization models rather than full opens.
- Terms-of-service as competitive weapon — restricting what brands may do on one network to protect community character while rivals permit it — could become a standing axis of differentiation among social platforms.
The trend: Consumer social networks are discovering that adding a brand layer tests whether the organic community that made them valuable survives the commercialization, with each platform's terms of service becoming part of its competitive identity.