Brand pages available in Google+

We’ve heard this was on the way for a while and now it’s here. Your company, your organization, your brand can have a presence on Google+. MPR already has several pages up and running although they’re all pretty blank for the moment. Eventually, though, they’ll be filled with articles, links, forums, hoo-has, thingies, whatsits, doohickeys, and dealies. Hooray social media! What I’m looking for is how the experience will be different from Facebook brand pages, which feature handy URLs (facebook.com/pepsi) and which are being used instead of, say, pepsi.com in a lot of marketing. As with all things Google+, if it can differentiate from Facebook and improve on Facebook, there could be something here. If it’s just a less populated Facebook that sucks more, well, that bodes ill.

ZDNet thinks that Google’s search power might be the differentiator:

Also, it occurs to me as I think about getting a Tech Report page up there that this is one more social media outlet for social media teams in every organization to maintain.