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Preparing to move homes a few years ago, Silicon Valley veteran Bob Goodson stumbled across a sketch he made in 2005 of a prototype for a like button when he was an early employee at Yelp. He showed it to a new friend, Martin Reeves, who happened to be the head of the research arm at Boston Consulting Group, Inc., and together they set off on a three-year deep dive into the origins and mechanics of a piece of technology that most of us have clicked countless times but likely treated as trivial.
They found it held surprising importance, offering a different model from the conventional approach to innovation that society prizes; helping to fuel modern online marketing while delivering satisfying dopamine hits to our psyche; accentuating the political polarization that is deeply dividing Western nations; and presenting an intriguing side-story of how thumbs up became a common expression of approval.
Mr. Goodson never thought he was creating a societal icon. He was just dealing with that week’s mundane challenge, which was to encourage more unpaid reviews of restaurants and merchants that the site accumulated. People were already sending messages offering positive feedback to reviewers – a free form of compensation for their toil – and that seemed to encourage even more reviews. Adding a “send a compliment” feature to the site would likely increase engagement.
As he researched, he found Amazon had recently developed a way to show appreciation of customer reviews by clicking on a blue hyperlinked phrase: “Like this review.” A site called Delicious was sharing customer nods to favourite web sites; clicking a thumbs-up icon next to a user-contributed URL added it to your own bookmarks. Other sites were playing with features of similar ilk, although interestingly Facebook was not among the pioneers and indeed, when the like button started to become a trend, its chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg held off, only capitulating in 2009.
We tend to view innovation as singular, one person coming up with an idea that nobody else has imagined. But this is different: “A perfect case study of the dispersed, disorderly, serendipitous, unguided process from which high-impact innovations usually emerge – despite how such stories are often made to sound in the retelling,” Messrs. Reeves and Goodson write in Like: The Button That Changed the World.
When techies gather around the campfire, the authors note, most tales of innovation have their heroes experiencing brilliant epiphanies, going for the glory of making their visions real and knowing that their names will go down in history. Here a bunch of people in different operations were grappling with the same possibilities to solve short-term issues with similar solutions.
James Hong, in his efforts to have people rate photos submitted to the HOTorNOT site, was probably the first to get into evoking emotion-laden responses from users but he is slow to take credit. “If we hadn’t invented it, you know, someone else would have – I mean, like, a lot of smart people out there would do the same thing, right?” he told the authors.
One thing that intrigued the authors at the outset was that a button for registering approval could have taken many different forms. It could be hands clapping, a smile or a gold star. It turns out the gestural symbol chosen is a deep-seated meme in human culture.
Ridley Scott’s Gladiator had recently captivated the public with Joaquin Phoenix as Emperor Commodus extending his right hand to issue a verdict of thumbs-up (or thumbs-down) to decide a fighter’s fate. That would take the idea back to ancient times except the authors’ research suggests it didn’t actually occur that way in the Coliseum.
The remote controller for recently launched TiVo included buttons with little hands to press to add a program to the queue, with a thumbs up symbol displayed. The Fonz, played by Henry Winkler on the Happy Days sitcom, was known for his double thumbs up signal. Critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, to avoid copyright infringement when they took their show from public broadcasting to network distribution, stopped giving yes or no verdicts on new films and opted for thumbs up or thumbs down. It was in the Zeitgeist.
In time, the Like button became critical for determining the interests and inclinations of people on social media, leading to ads and other content – notably political messages, some of it disinformation – being sent their way.
“Nobody at the outset foresaw what, in retrospect, is its most significant result, the aggregation of data about likes to revolutionize the field of marketing and advertising. The initial focus was way down at the granular level of making one person’s reaction visible to another individual,” they write. “Innovation unfolds like this all the time. People don’t see the ultimate prize at the outset.”
They argue any innovation is embedded in and must succeed in the context of a social system. It’s a messy process, not purposeful, linear and disciplined as many big, long-established companies want to believe. They note one of the reasons that it took decades for electric motors to replace steam systems in factories was that the factories themselves needed to be redesigned to take advantage of the new method.
That means we should be careful not to blame the inventors of the like button for the harms we see in social media today. “One thing we should learn from the like button and other warts and all histories of innovation is to embrace an unruly process, not pretend it is otherwise,” they write.
Cannonballs
- Even before the like button there was the floppy disc icon, indicating we could save information to a disc. With floppy discs a thing of the past, the icon still remains, even in an era where we sync to the cloud, download files from web, export copies to local storage and take advantage of auto-save functionality. But a study by The Nielsen Norman group suggests it should be retained: It’s familiar even to those who have never used a floppy disc and usability may suffer if the recognized symbol for saving is removed.
- Recruiting specialist John Sullivan says at an opportune time you should offer a sincere, personalized thank you to job candidates. They are investing time and effort in your company and deserve thanks (but not generic messages, which won’t have any impact). As well as being the right thing to do, it can pay off in an improved employer brand image and higher offer acceptances.
- Atomic Habits author James Clear notes we all enjoy convenience and comfort but also yearn for challenge and to be stretched. That means a good day requires small moments of discomfort.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.