Google Places to Google+ Local - help!

[JeanieWalker]

I do not want a personal Google account tied to me for the company I work for - this is the crux of my problem - any advice?

I setup a great Google Places page a year ago - it included lots of stuff, was a great page, but boy have things changed radically.

I guess now it's Google+ Local, but in order for me to do this, looks like I need to sign up for a personal google+ account (do not want to do this). I've searched on Google help everywhere to try to figure this out. I used to have a Google+ account for myself but dropped it pretty quickly, much as I have my personal FB for privacy reasons.

Once I get past this hurdle, it seems there are prompters to get my old content moved over to the new + Local.

Any advice on how to set this up for my company without forcing a tie to me personally would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jeanie,
I empathize with the desire for privacy. I will put a question out there to the Local SEO community to see if there is some way around this (I've not heard of one). In the meantime, is there someone else within your company who would be willing to be the public face of the business if this is not something you feel you can do yourself?

I will return to this thread.

Miriam

[JeanieWalker]

Thanks for response, Miriam

Google's approach seems very invasive (just to setup a business acct) - too many liabilities from a company perspective (eg, employee leaves, goes to competitor, says or does something off brand).

I have my own voice that represents me as a human, and not as an entity of a company (flaws and all), and if I'm working on behalf of a company, I want a wholly separate history and identity, such as 'Marketing Dept" or perhaps "Jeanie at Dinerware" - I'm actually facing similar dilemmas with other accounts, such as Twitter.

To me, it's one thing to be a marketer and lead discussions, or be helpful to a company audience - and in fact, try to build that audience. But I don't want to be so deeply associated with this one job or even or several clients that there is no line at all between my personal brand and reputation, and that of the company I am managing accounts for.

Something bigger just seems wrong, wrong, wrong when individual opinions and activities expressed online are bound so tightly to companies -- and vice versa - I'm hoping there are simple ways around this - looking forward to any tips So far, the only answer seems to be to create a totally fictional "person" - which doesn't make sense either...

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Jeanie,

As I suspected, I could not find any ideas of a workaround to having a personal account in order to set up the Google+ Business Page. I want to link to a Mike Blumenthal article here, just to make sure that you understand all of the steps involved in the transition from Google Places to Google+ Local:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/06/08/google-for-business-places-forums-wrapup/

This, in particular, describes the issue at hand, I believe:

1- Be sure that you upgrade your Google account to a Google+ personal account. Life will be much easier if it has the same email as your dashboard account as it will make the coming merge go more smoothly. If your Google+ Business page is created under a different account than your Places listing, then add the email for the Places Dashboard as an additional manager of the G+Business Page. The Places email must be associated with an individual and that individual must have a G+ account. This will make it easier for Google to match the Google+Local page that was created to the Google+ Business page.

Note if the email is a business email and can not be associated with an individual you will need to wait for the implementation of Google’s manual merging process.

I recommend reading the whole article. Mike does a good job of explaining what is happening and why you have to have certain accounts to swim with the tide on this. Granted, you must have that personal account to manage the Google+ Business Page, but the outward facing signals of the page can be about the business, rather than about you. All the same, I agree that the way Google has gone about this is confusing in the extreme and I'm sure thousands of business owners are saying,"huh?"

Hope the above resource helps, Jeanie.