I’ve been warning for some time about the futility of applying traditional marketing approaches to the new world of the empowered customer (who’s happily ignoring traditional marketing approaches and doing his/her own research to find out about firms).

For some time now in its monetization strategy, Facebook has been looking for ways to work advertising messaging into user’s news feeds–which, of course, advertisers are eagerly paying for. Facebook has used the term “organic social marketing” but it looks a lot like “traditional interruption marketing.” A couple of weeks ago, in a Friday night blog post, Facebook announced that starting in January 2015 it was cutting back on allowing such messages–prompting Forrester Research’s Neil Elliot to declare the death of Facebook’s organic reach.

I was advising two years ago that Facebook reconsider an earlier version of its monetization strategy, with recommendations on how to adjust their strategy to the realities of new marketing. My recommendations still stand! And I’m happy to make them available again, here.