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I was invited to contribute a few throughts for an article by ZDNet Asia on what businesses can expect from the upcoming Google+ corporate profiles. The article by Ellyne Phneah is available here, and my full response is below. Let me know what you think.

Personally, I think it’s still way too soon to compare Google+ to Facebook. While Google+ has had a solid start so far and has received mostly positive comments all-round from early adopters, it’s still unclear what the final product will look like and whether it will offer users a compelling reason to migrate from their current social networks. For example, Google just included the option to "ignore" and "block" posts or people into their notification settings, and you will see them make more of such fundamental changes as they continue to refine the product in the weeks and months to come.

Similarly for businesses, the options for brands to set up presence on the Google+ platform will only be rolled out at the end of the year; although they are already working with a few brands like Ford to experiment with test accounts.

Facebook on the other hand, has had the advantage of time to build out a solid offering for brands to engage in one-to-one and one-to-many interactions with fans. This offering includes many of the now staple features available to community managers such as social ads, local and hyper-local geo-targeting, customized landing pages, Facebook applications, games, events, Facebook connect and analytics. That’s not to say that these features will not be available on Google+ eventually.

But while we’re speculating, there are already hints of areas in which Google+ might be able to better Facebook.

Firstly, is targeted conversations. Google+ Circles allows you to organize your contacts into buckets according to your real-life social connections. This enables you to filter conversations and share them with only the people you want, as well as manage content posted by people you follow. For businesses this could potentially be a feature that allows brand to have multiple types of conversation through the same platform, e.g. share content for consumers and enterprise customer through the same brand profile just by organizing them into separate circles.

Besides sharing them to circles, Google+ also allows you to have private conversations with another person. This could be a useful feature for branded conversations that need to be taken offline, e.g. customer service queries or conversations that require sharing of private information. Facebook currently only allows page administrators to send private messages to fans, and not from the brand profile.

Secondly, is search. Google currently has a 65% of global search share and it will be interesting to see how they will use this to build out Google+ as well as integrate Google+ data into search results. And while how they will do this is still unknown at this point, it will eventually happen. The key here though is not necessarily just in enabling a search feature within Google+ or pouring Google+ data into search results, but more about weaving Google+ as a social layer across the entire web ecosystem. If Google is successful in developing Google+ as the backbone of its social ecosystem, the opportunities for real-time search and with that, targeted content serving even outside of the social network will be immense.

Thirdly, is analytics. Google’s measurement tools, Google Analytics and DoubleClick, provide users with detailed and actionable data. While Facebook has constantly been upgrading its page analytics feature, Insights, it still lacks meaningful data and doesn’t integrate across multiple channels and campaigns. There are third party companies that offer more intelligent and elaborated reports for Facebook page managers, but the built-in tool is terribly lacking. Integrating Google Analytics and DoubleClick with Google+ will surely prove to be valuable to marketers.

That said, the ultimate statistic that will convince brands to invest time and resource in Google+ is reach especially to relevant and local audiences. According to ComScore, Google+ now has 25 million users since it launched in June. Still, a far cry away from Facebook’s 750 million. Early adopter brands may consider creating a presence on the platform (once the brand profiles are available) as a skunkworks project. And if you do, remember that while it’s an experiment, it’s still a public space for discourse. So the same rules for communications and brand engagement applies. For those that are not quite ready to take the plunge, it will still be important to include Google+ as one of the platforms to monitor and listen to conversations about your brand.