Hey, that’s nice. It’s all good, you agree, 100% approval. You wish you had it, said it, thought it or thought of it first. You can’t argue with that.
As in the new book “Like: The Button That Changed the World” by Martin Reeves and Bob Goodson, it’s so good you feel like telling the world.
You can’t help yourself.
You post something on social media, some random thought or small story, an event, kudos to an employee, whatever, and you’re irrresistibly compelled to check back on your Page 10 minutes later. Those little thumbs-ups are a serotonin boost, a confirmation, an acknowledgment, and the more you get the happier and more confident you feel. Contrary to popular belief, though, those thumbs-up icons didn’t originate on Facebook.
No, the “thumbs-up” goes back farther, with gladiators, with Fonzi, with TiVo and icons on TiVo’s remote control. A few years before the explosion that is Facebook, there was Yelp, which Goodson had joined when its founder, a Ukrainian contemporary of Peter Theil and Elon Musk, was first dreaming of that company. In 2005 – and he still has the dated scrap of paper to prove it – Goodson sketched out a thumbs-up icon for Yelp that would start a revolution in user-participation, data-gathering and social connection.
Later, Facebook began using the mighty little icon, and the rest is history.
So why do you care about a one-click approval that is used, the authors say, more than 160 billion times a day around the planet?
The “like” button was not created in a vacuum; it was made with bumps and lumps and research along the path, and its making wasn’t straight-line. Its popularity wasn’t instantaneous, either. It took years for anyone to recognize the thumbs-up’s usefulness. Even so, it was a known gesture for almost everyone, and nobody had to be taught to use it.
And yet, there are “consequences” to the “like” button, the extent of which we may not know for years.
It’s interesting how miffed you get when nobody likes your posts. When they do, you rack up that count and swell with an odd sense of pride – and why? It’s not a tangible item, but read “Like” and, though the psychology of it is lacking a bit, you’ll see why that button’s a near-necessary (and possibly lucrative) part of doing business.
It was a long and curious trail from idea to innovation to universal, and the authors hold a reader’s attention while sharing the journey. What happened is a kind of history that includes subtle hints and cautions for workplaces that can use the emoji to benefit, and not just technologically. The authors address the quirks of creativity, the need to give it time, and the notion that nothing should be permanently scrapped. That’s good news for tinkerers at work and for the bosses who rely on them.
If this book were a website, you know what you’d do. Find “Like.” It’s a nice read.
Terri Schlichenmeyer’s reviews of business books are read in publications throughout the U.S. and Canada.