Jim Bruene writes:
Facebook changed the rules for brand pages ... the Internet giant only allowed 30 days to make the change. Obviously, the company still doesn't know (or more likely care) how long it takes to revise marketing materials in the real world. While the timeline change doesn't materially impact the tactics we looked at, it does illustrate a downside of developing on the Facebook platform:
- Facebook sets all the rules and you must adapt to them
- Facebook evolves faster than most brand marketing strategies, so it takes a commitment to keep up with the changes (this can be outsourced of course)
- Facebook is so popular, and has so many ways to grow revenues, it's not likely to listen business customers' feedback (yet)
While I do have some sympathy for someone whose corporate cultures is so clogged with red tape that it takes more than a month to get a simple task done, it seems somehow petulant and ungrateful for a marketer who has been given a gift of a free profile on a social media site that gives him access to half a billion customers and prospects to bellyache about the inconvenience of having to make adjustments.
The ominous "yet" seems to imply that there will come a day when the advertisers control the online channel, much in the way they have had control of traditional channels for decades, and with much the same consequence. Let's hope that never happens.