As usual I go to my Feedly reader and find a bunch of articles titles something like "10 reasons your small business MUST be on Google+ today" - and I can barely keep from retching. Really, I have long been tempted to write a long form blog post to counteract the outright false information cranked out by that fanboy culture "10 reasons your small business should NEVER use Google+". I won't do that of course, or if I do I won't publish it on Google+ where any criticism of Google is treated as a personality defect, but with more than 60,000 followers there, and a business community of about the same size, I feel i have some "street cred" on the issue.
My latest frustration is small by Google+ standards. I have been asked to help build a community for "team building" professionals there. That is a good topic, and while some effort should be required, it shouldn't be that hard. My associate had already build a circle of about 160 team building brands and professionals - itself not a trivial effort but in inviting people to this circle I found what I more or less already knew - that people on Google+ are flooded with community invitations -few probably even saw then.
The solution, I thought was to send a "notification" post to them, and I decided to create a circle of the "Top 100" community building brands and professionals to share along with the community invitation. Conveniently, this is the exact number that Google supposedly allows you to send a notification message too - for a circle that is 100 people or less, a little checkbox will appear that allows you to seed this notification.
You guessed it, for all this effort that little checkbox never appeared for this particular project, and no one seems to know why - or even the exact number of people you are allowed to send a notification to - apparently it shifts and changes based on some mysterious "algorithm".
I'm sorry Google, but for small business, that just doesn't cut it. I have been jacking around with this simple little task for like three days now, which is absolutely ridiculous. Big corporations my be able to afford your service - but I am not sure the rest of us can. It is practically a full time job just to manage a Google+ account, and the ROI is absolutely terrible.
