The Power Of The Like: Exploring Digital Marketing, Online Innovation, & The Future of Social Media
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Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius podcast. My guest today is Martin Reeves. He's a managing director and senior partner, chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, BCG meaning Boston Consulting Group. He's the author of Like, The Button That Changed the World. So we're going to talk about his work with the BCG think tank and his new book. So welcome. Thanks for coming, Martin. Thanks a lot, Reg. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, if you would, just tell me a bit about your background, how you got to work with BCG and then what led to the creation of this book. Sure. So, um,

I used to be a biologist and I guess I'm a generalist. I'm interested in all sorts of things. And so I settled in the consulting profession because you see a great variety of problems. And for many years now, I've been running the research part of BCG. And so I write my research and basically on the ideas that business will need in the future, the upcoming sort of ideas and challenges. And

This particular book is a little different. It's a book about the micro history of the like button. And it's not really a traditional business book. It's more of a narrative. And the reason I wrote it is I accidentally bumped into one of the people that might have invented the like button. And that triggered a three-year detective story to figure out who invented the like button. And so that's how I arrived at the book. Okay.

Okay. Yeah. What's some of the background to the like button? Who was the creator of it? What was the thinking at the time? Well, so my co-author is a guy called Bob Goodson. He's a Silicon Valley CEO and a former actually a medieval literature scholar at Oxford. And

And, um, he's a bit of an avid hoarder. I'm sure he wouldn't mind me saying that. And, um, so he keeps all of his, you know, receipts and tickets and papers and so on over the years. And he was moving. So I, I, we were talking about this over coffee, didn't know each other very well. And, um, and, uh, he, I said, well, you must be stumbling across all sorts of interesting stuff then Bob. And he said, yeah. And he pulled out some, a notebook and in it was a sketch of the like button and the, uh,

The date on the sketch was obviously several years before Facebook introduced it. And I said, Bob, are you telling me you invented the like button? And he said, no, of course not. Well, maybe. And that was the start of the conversation. So we dug into this and, you know, we don't know who invented the like button because, of course, it's a gesture that has been used with many meetings over hundreds of thousands of years. And, you know,

We have many progenitors. You know, we have the TiVo control. If you remember your TiVo control, it had a little like button icon on it. That was like a physical icon. We had early voting sites. I'm not sure if you remember the site Hot or Not, where you voted whether a... Oh, yeah, I don't know. Right, you remember that one. Well, that was sort of an early voting. And you had the sketch that like...

Bob made for Yelp. He was one of the first employees of Yelp. And their problem was that they needed to attract restaurant reviews and they couldn't afford to pay for them. And so they needed to recognize and reward the people that are in the reviews. So that's why they came up with the like button. In terms of there's a whole cluster of people that were facing similar challenges at the same time. And we

We identify 10 or 15 sites in the book that invented some aspect of the like button. And the really interesting thing about talking to all of these inventors of the progenitors of the like button is they were actually not aware that they were doing anything special when they designed the like button because they were dealing with just that day's tactical challenge. So for Bob, it happened to be, how do I encourage more restaurant reviews? For the founder of Hot or Not, it happened to be, how do I aggregate visually in some sort of voting mechanism?

And then, of course, it later emerged that the like button was the whole key to the monetization mechanism of social media. But that came much later, almost like an unintended benefit.

Well, how could they not know who created it? I mean, I thought it would have been created with Inside Facebook and the other first one that... No, absolutely not. In fact, Facebook opposed the introduction of the like button for several years. I mean, it was already, we can document that it was already up and running with others. And then actually, Mr. Zuckerberg actually opposed the introduction of a

of a like button for about two years, although the team there continued to work on it and they employed it and it caught on and it turned out to be a great monetization mechanism. Because, of course, the bigger problem that turned out to be solvable using this button is the old advertising equation. And people have always said about advertising that...

you know, only half of my advertising makes any difference. I just don't know which half. And this gave you the feedback signals and said, I like that advertisement. I like, I like that product. I like that company. And he did so very cheaply and in real time. And that was a revolution in the advertising industry. Well, again, so how did this first come on your radar? Well, there's a conversation with Bob and then, um, so I had a half hour get to know your meeting with Bob, my coauthor, one of the progenitors of the like button. And, uh,

And we actually spent a whole day. I spent a whole day digging into, well, who invented this thing then? And I'd done a lot of work in innovations, so I was quite familiar with the ideas of an academic called Brian Arthur, who has written a book about just how serendipitous innovation is. We often tell hero stories about a

a farsighted individual that in an act of genius created something new in an afternoon or something. But it almost never happens that way. It's always, the process is always social. In other words, many people involved. Often you're trying to do something else. It's a serendipitous benefit of trying to do something else. Often there are many forgotten Einsteins, many people that contributed that are not remembered. The monetizer, the people we attribute the invention to is often not the person. And so...

We started to dig into that. And as we dug into it, we bumped into other interesting questions, which sort of spun out from the main question. So, of course, the next question was, well, how does innovation really work then? And the next question was, right, but this could have been a smiley icon. It could have been a gold star. Why the thumb? And then that naturally led on to some things about human language, gestural language, brain science. You know, why do we like to like? And is being liked the same thing as liking and liking?

What do we know about the brain science of that? And then that bumped into this sort of phenomenon of business disruption, which is, well, how did that blow up the advertising industry? Because this, you know, if you want to rewind history, this could have been an absolutely fantastic technical idea, but there's no reason why they should have started an entire industry, the social media industry, or have disrupted the advertising and marketing industry. And it started or just augmented. Now you're able to like them, dislike them, you know, wherever it's YouTube or wherever, you know? Well, exactly. Exactly.

So I think it would be an exaggeration to say, of course, the entire invention of social media hinges on the like button. But on the other hand, it did play an incredibly crucial role because like a lot of tech businesses, it actually started without...

a clear monetization mechanism. And that could have gone all sorts of ways, right? It could have been that the monetization model turned out to be charging users of these free social and email services. But it turned out that the killer proposition was actually

selling to advertisers that the advertising would be more effective and more informed with the use of digital marketing and the like button. And the like button played an absolutely crucial role there because if you remember not so long ago, actually, 20 years ago before the digital revolution, if you remember how advertisers got feedback, essentially they either didn't get feedback or

or they get feedback periodically every six months or something from an expensive survey, or they got a signal from a set-top box on a TV that didn't say that anyone liked anything. It simply said that the TV was on, or that particular channel was on. So this was really a revolution, but it was not a planned revolution. It was a...

serendipitous outcome of people trying to do something else. But I'd say a fairly pivotal role in the disruption of marketing and advertising and the rise of the social media industry. Well, I mean, it gives social proof. If you see something that has, you know, 10,000 likes and, you know, if you can't see the dislikes or anything, it just...

It monetizes itself on the back end. Like, I mean, were they considering charging people to like something in the beginning? No, I don't think. I think like a lot of businesses, you start with a good functional idea. You've got a cool, you know, you've got a site like Hot or Not or whatever, and it takes off. And then, you know, you have to make money. You have to find the scaling and the monetization mechanism. And the like button was crucial to that. The like button turned out to have some value.

some really clever properties, but they were not really designed. They were bumped in. So one clever property is that the word like is actually very ambiguous, right? Because it means homophily, which is this word the scientists use for, I am like you, I'm similar to you, but also preference. I like your content or I like you. So that's very interesting because that gives you the possibility of not only liking content or a product, but also affiliating with somebody. So

That's where we get the realization of the social graph. And then another very interesting function of the like button is

It's probably the lowest effort, lowest friction form of content, because if you're running a social media business, the last thing you want is your feeds full with, you know, extremely impoverished responses. You know, people just tweeted thanks or okay. It's not going to make a very interesting feed. But if you can compress all of that into a like, it sort of cleans up the low impact content.

low-impact content. It's a sort of voting mechanism. You know, do you like this? Do you not like this? It creates the social graph and the content graph. What content do you like? Who do you like? It's instantaneous. It's cost-free. And the other clever thing is maybe some technology veterans in your audience will remember a book that was very popular among designers at the time called Don't Make Me Think. And the idea was that innovation should not look special and complicated. It should...

It should look low friction. It should piggyback on ideas that already exist because those are the ideas that scale cost-free. And of course, we all knew because it's a cultural icon in the US and in other parts of the world, we all know what the like button meant. We didn't need a manual to figure out how to use the like button.

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Yeah, it's pretty obvious, right? Yeah. Obviously in retrospect, but, you know, talking to the people that were working on this at the time, they were trying to solve the daily tactical challenges and they bumped into this bigger sort of, you know, industry upturning, this more momentous use of the like button, which is now almost like a standard, right? You try and find a website that doesn't have something like a like button. It's hard. It's not just... Emoji is now too, to dimension your feelings, but yeah.

Well, that was... So, interestingly, the version of the like button that my co-author drew was a single thumbs up symbol. The one that Yelp adopted was not that, but a multifunctional like button where you could find something funny, cool, etc. And...

So the world sort of standardized on the like button for a while, but then recently we've actually seen the proliferation of the multifunctional like button. So if you go on sites like LinkedIn nowadays, you'll see not just one possibility, a thumbs up, but you'll see a possibility of many emotional responses. Is there any part of the like button or process that's patented that people have to pay a royalty on? No, actually. You would have think that...

people would have raced to do that and then maybe it was struck down because it was already in use? Well, I think it was for a couple of reasons. So we are used to thinking about inventions as the property of one inventor or one company and being restricted by patent. Often invention is social. It involves many existing ideas. And then we detail a number of technologies in the book. For

where you copy some letters or you say where the bus is or whatever in a little picture to distinguish yourself from an algorithm. Yeah, that was invented at this multiply at the same time by different parties. Going back to the famous story about the heroic invention of the miner's safety lamp by Sir Humphrey Davy that prevented sort of catastrophic mine explosions in the Industrial Revolution. Turns out that wasn't just Humphrey Davy, there were at least two other contenders. And I think it's partly a problem that number one,

multiple people were facing the same problem at the same time. And that problem was, how do you get feedback on these new web tools? And at the time, remember, it was dial-up internet without triggering a page refresh. So you had to do it in the browser. You had to do it in JavaScript. And that was a problem that

every company at the time was facing. So not surprising people came up with solutions. Second reason is the particular culture of Silicon Valley. So when we talked to the progenitors about how did you hear about this? How do you communicate? They pointed out things like Squid Labs and other meetups where people just shared across companies. There was a real sort of sharing community across

across Silicon Valley. And then the other thing was the like button for all of the progenitors we talked to, you know, it was not a big thing. It was a solution to a daily tactical challenge and later converged on this sort of big proposition that we may reasonably say is obvious in retrospect, but was not at all obvious at the time. Which is why, going back to the origin of the book, when I said to Bob, you know, so are you telling me you invented the like button? He said,

No, of course not. Well, maybe. He didn't know because that day that he did the light button sketch was not a particularly special day. It was just, you know, the tactical challenge of the day. And the next day there was another one. So I think it tells us something about the nature of invention. Yeah, there's co-invention. I know that happens with a lot of things. I've heard about that.

Is that what you think this phenomenon is? Yes, absolutely. So certainly in the case of the like button that we look at in great detail, I mean, there's the books entirely about the evolution, the invention and the consequences of the like button. It's absolutely clearly...

a social, a parallel activity. But actually, we look at a whole bunch of other inventions and it was true of those too. And interestingly, just after we completed the book, there was a paper in Nature that actually showed that I think it was something like 70% of scientific papers actually

actually are about something that wasn't anticipated, a result that wasn't anticipated in the initial grant proposal that funded the paper. So it turns out that science and invention is highly social, highly serendipitous, often without foresight. You're trying to do one thing and something else happened, often with delay. At the time, it didn't seem like a big thing, but later became a big thing. The phenomenon of forgotten Einsteins, I think, is very, very common. A lot of the early progenitors are not recognized

We happen to associate a name with something. We call it Humphrey Davis Safety Lab. But in fact, you know, there are many people that were involved in the process. And I think the importance of all of that is if you fully accepted that that is how innovation as a role works, you'd probably organize your innovation process a little differently because it's not the, you know, not the planned solitary detainment.

deductive foreseeable activity that it's sometimes portrayed to be. Okay. So what, you know, now that it's in use and it's pervasive, how has it affected your guys' use of it? Or is there a follow-on study of it? Are there nuances to it now that are making it more effective? Like, I guess all these companies are collecting internal data on what the likes are, what they aren't. I don't know. Is there any interesting data, like a user behavior surrounding it?

Absolutely. So, I mean, the other sort of characteristic we see in the like button is, you know, there's convergence and divergence. The process of invention and reinvention and adaptation is never done. So we had, you know, we had progenitors of the like button. We had the like button. We had the multifunctional like button. We had the disruption of the advertising industry. We had the front-end code, the browser code. It didn't trigger the page refresh. But then

Of course, we had the massive data associated with the backend code, which is the intelligence of social media companies. We had new metrics of value and engagement, use the like button, but also other metrics. And more recently, we've had the rise of the influencer industry, which is essentially the world of TikTok, where teenage influencers,

lip-syncing or dance stars attracts the sponsorship of company for the likes that they can attract in their own sort of mini-media companies. Essentially, anyone can be a media company nowadays. And where does it go next? That's the final chapter. We speculate about what happens next and...

We actually, you know, in line with our philosophy that innovation is a very serendipitous process, it's very hard to predict, we present some alternative views as a future. And one of them, which some of the actual inventors of the like button sort of supported was the idea that, you know, as AI hits the scene, you know,

what are some of the most valuable and underutilized data sets on Earth? It's all of that data about, you know, what do humans like? There's a tremendous amount of intelligence there to be gleaned. But there are some alternative views too. Of course, every benefit usually comes with a side effect, which is also not anticipated. So in another future, we...

we begin to restrict the use of these social media tools and these liking mechanisms because it's been proven that they negatively impact the mental health, especially of teenage girls. And some countries have taken action on that. Australia has banned the use of social media by children below a certain age.

In another scenario, we're in a virtual world where we don't need to signal with a symbol, with a thumbs-up symbol, that we like something. Maybe there could be automatic detection of involuntary facial muscle movements and an automatic expression of those movements in a high-fidelity virtual world. So I think it's still evolving. Essentially, what we're talking about here generically is

is the feedback loop in the digital world. You know, whatever we do digitally is 10 times more useful if we get instantaneous and rich feedback and

The question is, how will we receive that feedback in the future? And those are the scenarios we explore in the final chapter. Well, all right. And the girls, you know, affecting them negatively. I mean, it's for everybody. I've just heard anecdotally from my kids or other people, oh, only three people liked my post and they're sad. Or so-and-so didn't like my post. And I'm like, oh my God, seriously. But people are really affected by it and they feel bad, you know. And especially negative comments or dislikes can really like...

I've said somebody, it seems. Absolutely. And so we, the jury is still out on exactly how these negative side effects work. And there are, there are various side effects associated with social media. There are, you know, there are privacy issues. There is, you know, we had the case of Cambridge Analytica and the, the

manipulation of democratic mechanisms and we have teenage mental health issues, we have online addiction issues, we have misinformation issues, manipulation issues. And, you know, we're still trying to figure out the science of all of that. But it's pretty clear that the benefits that we have had from social media come with a cost. And it raises the interesting question,

about how you could regulate for such a thing if you couldn't even predict the benefits at the time of invention, let alone the negative side effects. And so we have a chapter actually on what does this tell us about how you can regulate technology? And...

I think the answer is that, you know, regulatory mechanisms need to be adaptive. There's always a stage where you have this thing called regulatory lag, where you're still learning about the negative side effects of something. The science isn't firm. The regulators themselves are not educated. You may have to do something if the side effects are great. But it should probably be provisional because you will learn more and probably change your mind. So, you know, I think regulation becomes an adaptive affair, not a one-and-done affair. The reason why we have...

I think such an enormous impact of this tiny thing, both positive and negative, coming back to that aspect of your question, though, is that it actually taps into some absolutely central aspects of our brain science. So in your brain, there's something called the nucleus accumbens, which essentially is the reward center where your brain gives itself a dopamine reward for sociality, sex, cocaine,

and internet likes. It's all the same center. And of course, there's a dopamine high, but there's also a dopamine low, which is all of the negative sentiment associated with our teenage daughters not having their posts liked enough or not being as relatively popular as their friends. This is a

a very formative age for kids. And there are consequences because this mechanism in the brain is absolutely central to one of the key features of mankind, which is our sociality. Essentially, this reward center rewards pleasurable and evolutionarily useful activities. So you might ask, well, is this exactly the same thing as optimality?

offline liking, real-world liking. Yeah, it's exactly the same brain chemistry, but the difference is that in real life, I could only meet, you know, maybe...

10 people caught rich in one day if i wanted to online i can i can have a massively higher frequency with a massively lower friction so i can sort of essentially overwhelm my my neural circuits which is why you get these these side effects well i mean you can meet people online that have literally your exact name if it's not too unusual you know yeah and you can you can sit there for an evening and do it to hundreds of you have a martin reeves like meetup or club you know be weird

Absolutely. So what's any new technologies that, I don't know, will augment this, will take it off its course, will replace it? What do you see now that it's been around for a bunch of years? What's new or what's changing about it?

Right. Well, I think we have the narrow question of what happens to the like button. You know, we just commented on some of that. Maybe in the virtual world, it's displayed as it is in humanity. I can tell whether you like me or not, or whether you trust me or not from your involuntary facial muscle movements. Maybe that's the virtual world scenario. There's the reuse of this data. You know, there's training data for AI. There is...

But also there are new communication problems. I mean, what is the like button in the example of more broadly? It's an example of the co-evolution of communication, technology, and language. Because if you look back at the history of communication, every time we had a breakthrough in communication, we used to have to innovate in the technology of communication. We also used to necessarily...

have to invent things linguistically. So for example, when the printing press was invented and we could read things that were not read aloud by people, English grammar, unlike Latin grammar, was so degenerate that we couldn't tell whether something was a question or not because we didn't hear the rising tone. So we invented the punctuation of the question mark.

You know, in the Roman amphitheater, when we had so many people in the stadium that were voting on the fate of the gladiators, you know, you couldn't shout your, you know, kill him or save him desire in the Colosseum. So you had the thumbs up symbol as a sort of visual voting mechanism. And the like button put some sentiment back into this digital technology to expand the reach of communication further. You know, we needed the like button. Now, what are the linguistic innovations that we need in the future as technology progresses? Well,

I think authenticity will be a key one because if we're dealing with avatars or...

you know, people that could be people or bots, we can't tell. We need a way of judging authenticity. Is it a human? And is it the human I think it is? And so that becomes a major downside of the expanded communication potential of the new technologies and therefore something we're going to have to innovate around. You might call them trust technologies. Who do I trust that I'm talking to? Yeah, I wonder if consuming a piece of content instead of just one like, you know, you'll have many reactions to it.

that come through some other mechanism so that you can, you know, kind of pick apart the content and not just see when someone left, but, oh, they like this. They don't like that. They like this. They didn't like that. You know, that kind of thing.

And to some extent, we already do. We have the multifunctional like button. We have also the advertisers, the digital advertising agencies use all sorts of new ratios, you know, for instance, engagement value, engagement frequency, homophily. They have all sorts of metrics to measure more subtle qualities that are sort of, if you like, subsets of the like button. And if in the virtual world we were able to read

And there are some actually already some technologies that can do this, although they're not in widespread use. When we can read involuntary facial muscle movements and read 50 motions or 100 emotions, maybe we can get very rich about that feedback mechanism. Now, of

Of course, that offers great potential, but you can imagine that that also sows the seeds of a new set of challenges. And this is very much how technology proceeds. We solve one problem, we recreate another problem, and then another innovation solves that problem, and so on ad infinitum. Okay. Well, very good. Where can people that want to find out more about the story, more about the studies, more about all the nuances of it, where can they learn more about this concept? Yeah, so my...

The book called Like, The Button That Changed the World is coming out on April the 29th for Harvard Business Press. You can already pre-order it on Amazon. We have a Harvard Business Review article about the, you know, an aspect of our conversation today was about how does innovation really work. So there's a whole article on that coming up, roughly similar timing in Harvard Business Review. And we'll be talking about how to make a better business.

touring the world, speaking about all of these different things. And I'm very much looking forward to that. Okay. Well, very good, Martin. Thank you so much for coming in. I really appreciate it. And we'll direct listeners to go to Amazon and pre-order if they can for April 29th for your book coming out. Excellent. Thank you very much. If you like this podcast, please click the link in the description to subscribe and review us on iTunes.

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