WWJD (Jack Daniels) do about Facebook cutting organic reach?

I’m a Nashville resident, and as such I’m kinda partial to Tennessee’s world famous Jack Daniels whiskey. Say what you will about my taste in spirits, but I’ve found another reason to love that black label and their parent company, Brown-Forman.

While many organizations are up in arms over it, they see Facebook’s recent action of cutting Brown-Forman’s organic reach “basically to zero” as a good thing for them!

Watch the video to hear it in the words of Brown-Forman’s director of global media and digital marketing, Jason Loehr (if you’re reading this in an email, click through to watch the video on my site):

I’ve written previously about the folly of relying on rented social media channels like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. to build member engagement. Over the past few weeks, this risk has become painfully obvious.

• The head of Google+ resigned, and there are rumors that the team has been decimated.
• Facebook has cut organic reach on company pages essentially to zero. That means you’re reaching virtually none of the people who have liked your page.
• Twitter recently filed for an IPO, and will now have to find ways to monetize the site. That is likely to happen at the expense of organizations who want to engage their customers and prospects on Twitter.

When you engage in social media, you’re not the customer, you’re the product. Social media isn’t free: You transfer value to social media sites whenever you engage online, which is then monetized by the social media sites. The majority of the value generated by the engagement you create on Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter inures to Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter. It’s that simple.

Brown-Forman figured this out and started concentrating on its owned web properties, where they can capture better data about the people they’re engaging, benefit from deeper levels of engagement, and have more predictability and control over the user experience. I’m obviously biased, but injecting social features, like a white label online community, into Brown-Forman’s web properties would be another way to boost engagement and ROI.

Are we entering the post-social media age of engagement?