(empo-tuulwey) Social Strategy Part 3 - Like

Go to Part 2, Part 4

While the ultimate goal of a social media strategy should be an increase in revenue, there are various subsidiary goals that contribute to this overall goal. One of those goals is the establishment of an identifiable presence - either via your name, your brand, or your name for someone else (hear that, Rita Moreno of Arte)?

Because social media is (supposed to be) social, it is preferable that social media practitioners engage in a dialogue with their customers. While I'll speak more on that later, I'll note right now that it's hard to create a truly meaningful and deep dialogue on the philosophical merits of a particular toothpaste or word processing application.

But there's an easier way to promote interaction. This interaction method, pioneered by FriendFeed, was adopted by Facebook (several months before Facebook acquired FriendFeed itself) - the like. Back in February 2009, Adam Ostrow wrote:

Facebook seems to get more similar to FriendFeed every day. The latest, the addition of an “I like this” link on News Feed items, is one of the more significant challenges to the lifestreaming service yet, as it essentially duplicates a major component of what makes FriendFeed tick – a simple, one-click display of indicating your liking of a specific item in a stream of activities and a view of all of the other people that have also liked it.

From Facebook, the feature spread all over the place, sometimes under different names (Google calls its similar feature "+1").

In addition to being simple, the like feature is a powerful one to demonstrate (or fake) devotion to your persona or brand or whatever. If I can con a few hundred people into liking this post on Google+ or Facebook or Twitter (via number of retweets) or wherever, then I'll have a pretty powerful set of statistics that will attract attention.

And when likes are combined with a friend list, they become even more powerful. It's one thing to know that a hundred people like a particular dishwashing detergent, but it's another thing altogether to know that my friend Peter, my friend Susie, and 98 other people like that detergent. Peter's and Susie's recommendations are more powerful than the recommendations of hundreds of people that I don't know.

In social media sales, as in all other sales, the goal is to be liked.