(New! Google has fast-tracked this fix….and it is now available!!)
I wanted to put up a quick post to express my disappointment that Google has not made even the most basic administrative feature for the real world available in its launch of Google+ Pages. This is a continuation of its previous omission from allowing multiple owners for Google Place pages. It’s simply out of touch with reality. Google needs to go out and talk with people who are managing pages who are not just single person companies and discuss what their practical problems are. Until then, we’ll stumble around and come up with pseudo-users and all that bullshit we are forced to do.
The frustration has been brewing on the help forums:
Seriously Google. You promote Google Places as a business tool, but then give access to it like it’s a personal tool.
It’s time to allow the verified owner the ability to add an admin to a Google Place. The original person that claims a place initially is verified as the owner may not necessarily be the appropriate person to maintain a listing. CEO’s tend to delegate tasks.
I do not understand why Google would not have this feature. For us like others have stated you can’t pass it back to the business or if a person within the company is fired or leaves then they don’t have access to change over to another administrator.
LinkedIn started out with multiple admins too loosely defined – all you needed was the same email top level domain and you could tweak pages. Then they gave the option to define a finite list (thank good ness) to prevent confusion and possible vandalism. This worked much better. Now it’s straightforward to define 4-5 people who can tweak your pages. The only downside to that is that you must have the user in your LinkedIn network before you can add them as an admin – a requirement I don’t really understand. They should just allow admins to be made from any follower of the company like facebook does.
LinkedIn Multi Admin Setup for a Company Page
Facebook multi-admin couldn’t be simpler, and probably stems from their experience
with groups. You simple list the fans of the group and click “Make Admin” as many times as you’d like.
Google’s omission is inexplicable to me.
Postscript: One of my friends at Google sent me the following link. https://plus.google.com/102648148748642147788/posts/8a64q4at5xs … which gives hope that this won’t be long in coming. It also gives me confidence to go ahead and help out my clients with Page Creation.
Postscript #2: Multiple administrators for brand pages coming in Q1 2012 … Sigh….This was from Tae E. Kim‘s presentation from CrushIQ.
Postscript #3: According to Kristoffer Sorensen at Google, this is on fast track for December 2011.
Postscript #4: Available now!
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I sit here all disappointed too. It’s so basic, yet Google misses the point.
I don’t know who infuriates me more… Google, for pulling this brain-dead move or every single person who has rushed to FIRST! to create their organization’s page without thinking of the implications.
Google may take months to allow multiple admins. In the meantime, folks will go on vacation or better yet…maybe they’ll quit on a moment’s notice and congratulations, your brand’s Google+ presence is now tied up with your ex-employee’s @gmail.com account. Hope they left on good terms. If not, the next few updates on your official public page could get interesting.
Thanks for the post Scott. You are absolutely right google are not thinking about this practically. I have just created a page for TenerifeMagazine.com and wanted to add the editor to the admin of the page and now find out I can’t! :(
This should have been there in the top 5 features!! How do I role this out with my clients now???
I also can’t see how visitors that come to my Google+ listing and can leave a comment on the wall, all they can do is reply to an existing thread…or do I need to change a setting?
Agreed 100%. I am astounded at how poorly they have rolled this thing out.
It’s crazy!! I know one social media company who is setting up a + account for each client and managing them that way.. me, I am waiting a bit.
It does say on the manage pages section:
“Shown below is the list of Google+ pages you have either created or have been given access to. You can view the page, edit it, or change its settings.” so I wonder if it is coming in the next update…
Agreed, totally ridiculous.
Facebook Pages win.
I’m disappointed too! Can anyone tell me if I can change the admin? I had to sign up with a “pseudo-user” and now want to operate it from a different account. Possible? Or should I start from scratch?
Heard from one of my Google friends that ownership changes are on the way.
Yep just ran up against this problem too. Well, if they roll it out quick they can be forgiven, but I just hope in the meantime, as Scott mentions, they don’t do anything nasty to people who set them up under pseudo-users. Reasonableness and compromise is a two way street after all!
Hope this happens soon… Keep us updated Scott. Thanks for the post – barely anyone is talking about this right now
This article and the comments are shortsighted. It’s not done yet. Google sucks at keeping it’s message to the public clear and what they should have is a giant badge somewhere that says it’s still “beta” basically, but they got scared with the moves of FB and others and excited too and rushed things.
When it’s all finished, it’ll be perfect. It’s got the makings of something much more powerful than FB and the others.
When Google was young, Larry Page was famous for saying that he was in no rush to get it out because he knew it would just get better every day. If you waited until tomorrow, he knew you’d see a better Google than if you rush over today. I think that they should go back to that attitude. Google Plus itself feels rushed. I sympathize with the Googlers being forced to push it out too soon. The Google Buzz team went through the same thing, bypassing their external testing protocol and “labs” approach.
For brands in the landrush to establish their page before squatters cause confusion in the network, it’s a non-trivial decision of WHO to assign as the Google Profile to own the Page since you only can have ONE person. So, you’ll have a bunch of people rushing to set up a Google Profile just to get their page, or guessing, or having their marketing consultant do it for them. And there will be duplicate profiles, and psuedo-profiles, and blah blah blah… a tangled mess. We’ve seen this before. Perhaps Google will set up solutions fast and prevent the problem (e.g. ownership transfers, mutliple admins) but based on how they handled the Google Apps/Google Plus situation, I’m not counting on it. When they finally pushed out Google Plus for Apps, they offered no migration tools. It was just a huge waste of their users’ time. In some cases users were stuck with configuration situations they could not get out of, and they have to start everything from scratch – possibly losing years of history, Google Reviews, etc.
sharing admin rights is a must or if there could have been moderator at least.
This is not good. I’ve just set up a page for my business so that I can understand the process – amongst other things my biz offers social media training and also social media account setup.
Not being able to add Admins is a major oversight – the pages should never have been released without this functionality. In addition to the comments above I can see major problems if we set up a page for a client – how do we hand it over to them?
Another thing (I may have missed something) is that I can’t see an easy way to get back to the page when I’m over using my personal profile. This is going to confuse many of the small biz owners we work with – these things need to be obvious not hidden away so that only geeks can find things. So far can’t see anything that would persuade me to off this in addition to Facebook Pages (as much as they can annoy me from time to time).
Maybe its a local thing cause I can add admins to a G+ page over here in Germany. (Even if the company is US based)
Would you be so kind as to send screen shots to me (scott@buzzmaven.com)
I’ve been seeing Googlers talking about ownership transfer functionality. I think that this is on the way. I’ve been setting up pages for my clients also (giving caveat that it may be a few weeks before I could transfer ownership.) See the link in my postscript above for discussion from Google+ team lead.
Google should have thought of agencies that would need to handle clients accounts. Setting up multiple profiles that have you instead of the owner and you cannot give the owner of the site access without Mickey Mousing the whole thing is just wrong, when the point was to have one profile per person that was verified as being that real person. Same problem owing multiple businesses and ending up with a profile for each one, but they are all you. Wow reading this back sounds as crazy as it really is :-|
I really think this comes down to rushing the product out before it was ready. Just like Google Buzz, they bypassed their normal external testing protocol (Google Labs) for all of this.
I definitely agree. I manage multiple pages and its very hectic. I would also suggest some utility to be able to connect wordpress automatic posting to Google plus… unless there is one already somebody advice.
I’m also discovering that “building pages for clients” is locking me into regular maintenance if I have to use my personal Google+ account for it. I’m a freelancer, really, so I have no problem with it. It’s the clients who have issue. I’ve set up several Facebook Pages and I always keep myself as an Admin, but I almost immediately add the client as an admin – sometimes before the page is even finished. Months isn’t that big of a deal. I can create the pages now, maintain them for a short period, but they really need to get on this soon – especially with the announcement they had about it. You can’t compete with Facebook with less features and expect people to move over… Multiple Admins is a huge oversight.
I have had clients lose 5+ years of Google Analytics because one person of admin role who connected their Google account to analytics was fired, got confused, and deleted their analytics. Google would not help recover it. A fiasco, guaranteed. I’d like to see Google offer “account ownership” and “staff admin grants” to all of their business-oriented services. They do this pretty well now with Google Adwords (MCC and sub-MCC functions) … but we need it for Google Analytics, Places, and now G+
where is the -1 on Google +! That would be a good feature!
Multiple Admins scheduled for Q1 2012 according to Tae E. Kim of Google’s Strategic Partnerships. That’s right. Likely Feb/March.
I wonder if there is any function to add BUZZ (Twitter, etc.) to G+ pages like we can do it on regular user profiles. As long as the pages don’t bring all features of a user profile they are worthless and fake accounts will win.
I just found out about this limit today. I was talking with my Internet marketing consultant about having access to the nearbythis.com google plus page and I said, “I’m not sure how, but certainly there must be a way to do this”. I’m extremely disappointed to find out that there is not. Hope they fix this and soon.
Shocking really.
As of now it is possible to have multiple admins for Google+ Business Pages! You can invite other people to be a page manager. They will have less permissions than the page owner. Read more about Owners and managers on Google+ pages.
Thank you for the update. Looks like Googlers working over holiday!
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