If you put ‘Is marriage out of fashion’ into Google, the statistics often quoted and the balance of comment suggests the commonly held view is that it is, indeed, ‘out of fashion’.

So, if, as the figures often state, the act of marriage is at its lowest since the 1800s it therefore follows that ‘the act of engagement‘ is also at its lowest.

If, as a society, we are resisting the process of committing to each other where does that leave the wider activity of engagement with, and commitment to, the world around us? My personal belief is that we have become even more non-committal.

This inherent fickleness is what gives me the biggest problem with the term ‘engagement’ and the way it is being used in the context of web content management and the broader ‘customer relationship’ environment. When I think of ‘engagement’ with regard to websites in particular, that wonderful phrase ‘herding cats’ springs to mind.

Regardless of the growth of social media, I still believe that the vast majority of online activity within the greater mass of websites  is goal directed behaviour. When you are focused on a goal, the overtone of ‘engagement’ is that it will take more time and commitment than I am prepared to give. I want the information that satisfies my goal as quickly and easily as possible – if you put any sort of barrier in the way or make me feel I’m being ‘sold to’ or ‘manipulated’ in any way – I’m out of there.

Now, I’ve been kicking around the web virtually since its inception and I know there are countless ways in which I could ‘personalise’ my online activities and experiences that, if I analysed it from a time management perspective, would actually make my life easier – so why don’t I? More than often it’s just one step too far in making a commitment to a process, application, site, or organisation. The thing is, I don’t think I’m alone in continuing to do things the hard way online and I don’t think I’m ever going to be persuaded to change. Sorry – I simply don’t want to get ‘engaged’ – thank you…

Sadly, my kids really like ‘Take Me Out‘ a UK TV programme where a hapless bloke is judged worthy of a date by a jury of women – ‘Paddy’s flirty thirty’. It’s the contemporary version of a long running favourite from my youth, Blind Date – only a lot more brutal and, in keeping with societal evolution, makes ‘men’ the main figures of fun. Its saving grace, other than it being similar to fantasies I’ve had in the past, is it sometimes challenges superficiality and pre-conceptions. This was something Blind Date did by hiding participants behind a screen so that they were judged on their personalities as opposed to their looks. Take Me Out often takes the opposite approach by sometimes revealing almost all of the male participants, especially if they have well honed six packs and prominent lunch boxes, it then takes delight in exposing these young adonises as shallow, chauvinistic mother’s boys – so that what started out as a full bank of approval lights from the ‘flirty thirty’, dwindles to just a handful who are clearly more interested in style over substance in their dating partners – “No Likey, No Lighty” is the show’s catchphrase.

Which brings me to the main subject of this post – ‘The Like Button’. I haven’t paid too much attention to social media over the last 4 months or so as it seemed pretty obvious it wasn’t going to go away and, quite frankly, I had better things to do. However, some recent experiments with Facebook advertising have dragged me kicking and screaming back into the arena and had me reigniting an FB profile that had laid pretty much dormant since 2007. On the surface, not much seems to have changed but then I went through the process of adding back in my interests and activities – which previously were just a text list – and realised that they were linking automatically to Facebook fan pages.

Now I know Facebook had been using these text based preferences way back in 2007 to serve up relevant advertising and it is this, at its core, that gives the organisation its market value and presents the only viable threat right now to Google’s Adwords dominance. However, I notice now that ‘The Like Button’ has gone into overdrive and is spreading across the web like a viral rash. It’s one of the those mechanisms that gives us the ‘Paradox of Choice’ described so well by Barry Shwartz in his book and TED lecture and also leads to his conclusions that ‘More is Less’. The speed with which it is spreading dilutes its impact and I’m already getting worn out making choices about whether I like something or not. You see, in the same way that Take Me Out and Blind Date challenge superficiality by not judging someone purely on what they look like and encourage those participating to ask questions that look deeper before deciding, I will avoid making instant judgements about things. I know that if I spread my ‘liking’ too widely, I’m going to get bombarded with wall posts and advertising and even if I do express a ‘like’ you can be sure I’m going to be asking a lot more questions before I make any further commitment.

The whole ‘Like’ concept also reminds me of the first psychometric test I did around 20 years ago when being interviewed for a job. Much to my surprise, I got the job and in my first meeting with the HR people, they gave some feedback on that test, that I’ve never forgotten. In their analysis of my answers, I had scored higher than average in Social Acceptability. Scoring high sounds good, but in this instance the questions were designed to test whether I would tell people what they wanted to hear and this was deemed ‘Social Acceptability’. In this instance I was young, keen, sharp-suited and had applied for a job in marketing, so having a higher level of ‘Social Acceptability’ was regarded as an attribute for the role. The terms ‘marketing’ and ‘social acceptability’ appear inextricably linked, so how much weight can you put into someone expressing a ‘like’ – has it been done through peer pressure, a desire to look cool, an affinity with the brand or a definitive expression of further interest? Does the motivation behind the ‘like’ really matter?

Well… faced with the cold hard facts of my trial Facebook campaign versus my Adwords campaign I think it does. Run over the same time period, at the same cost…

Facebook – click-through rate – an excellent 30% – product sold = 0

Google Adwords – click-through rate – a paltry 4% – product sold = 5

If  my ultimate metric is ‘cash in hand’ then Google wins. Should I give Facebook Advertising the thumbs up or thumbs down?  How would you vote on this?