The newest behavior is that Likes are used for when you actually like something.

When you don’t like something, or feel ‘other’ – and want to engage, you comment. Likes are for liking, ignore or comment for everything else.

Simple.

The reason I, and a few others, agree on the inappropriateness of ‘like, is simply because of practical reasons.

First, it is very unclear what is means. Even if we forget about measuring popularity/success for a second, it is annoying to have button that when you click on it, as an end user, you don’t see what that action means.

Then, in a professional world people will be happy to work for their company or they want to appear this way to their colleagues. Therefore, they might feel obliged to Like everything, as ‘not like’ means you are not happy with something the company does or represents. This doesn’t apply to every employee or company, but it is enough if some see it this way. In other words,

“All business is done by people, and all people without exception will like or dislike everything they encounter to some degree. And you claim that “doesn’t work”?”

Yes, because people behave differently depending on the environment they are in.

Why try to deny your employees their humanity?
Why tell them their nature is “inappropriate for business”?
All business is done by people, and all people without exception will like or dislike everything they encounter to some degree. And you claim that “doesn’t work”?

I guess I’m curious to know why some arbitrary sense of “professionalism” is more important to anyone than finding ways for “people to interact in a way that benefits all involved”. Which is the definition of the word “business” by the way.

On the topic of people “liking” a post containing upsetting news, I always assume that the person clicking Like is saying, “I like that you have communicated this, thank you.”

If the ‘liker’ really meant to say “HECK YEAH, I’M GLAD ALL THOSE PEOPLE DIED” then I would expect they would leave a comment so that nobody would misinterpret them.

Besides, the masses may know what Like is, but even they complain about it at times – I’ve seen friends apologising for Liking sad posts but just wanting to indicate their support, and asking why there isn’t a Dislike button.

I do work in a child protection organisation though, so I just know the ear ache I would get if I asked people to Like some of our content. I guess it could be different for other organisations.

Nikos – we can get popularity from user analytics though – page views, average time spent on page, unique visitors (if you are lucky). What is important is whether people think it is worth reading or not.

I think any negative feedback (contructive criticism) about intranet content should go directly to the content owner or in a Comments box.

Even though the ‘like’ as a word doesn’t really work for business purposes, we should try and harness its power which lies in simplicity.

Maybe we should look at the +1 of Google+ either in the same form or as a “I read it” button. And then the article will say “read by 252″, which will indicate popularity. And then have another button saying “Recommend” (or something similar) to indicate quality. In my mind you can either click one or the other, but both count towards the popularity index.

What do you think?

I think that with company info, you might just want to indicate that you think something has merit or is worth knowing about. The trouble with Like is that it is a positive statement – would you want to like an announcement of redundancies? Similarly, ratings appear to indicate how good you think something is, when you might just want to indicate you think people should be aware of it.

Maybe an ‘Interesting’ button instead – you can take that either way!

I’m tempted to suggest that the only way through this is a star-rating on 2-3 elements: topic, importance, relevance. How would that work for you?