Alex Steer

260 words | ~1 min

Altimeter's paper on The 8 Success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing makes for an interesting read.

Here are Altimeter's eight criteria:

And here's their heuristic analysis of how different categories are performing.

Retail and consumer goods are doing best; regulated industries and luxury hotels are doing worst.

But hang on. If you had to rank these industries by the extent to which they needed to be good at meeting the eight criteria above, wouldn't you generate something like this?

The paper seems to assume that brands in all these industries are playing the same game in respect of social media: that retailers are in the Premier League and luxury hotels are in the Vauxhall conference. But that assumes that social media is an equally useful and viable channel for them all, and that these objectives are equally necessary and desirable.

I had a great conversation last night, talking about the Starbucks digital strategy, in which the thought came up: maybe it's time for everyone to stop writing opinion pieces on social media marketing. Maybe it's just time to concentrate on start doing it, doing it well, and adapting it to specific business models. You know, like we do with TV and newspapers.

Reading this paper makes me think we had a point.