Does Like Or +1 Express What You Want To Say?

Posted: April 1st, 2011 | Author: Olga Safonova | Filed under: facebook, marketing, persuasion, social media, UX | Tags: +1, attitude, audience, community, facebook, Google, like, plus one, publishing, rating, sharing, social media, Social network, social networks, Social Search, ux | No Comments »

Recent Google’s move on Social Search – announcing of +1 button – is being discussed all over the internet. Naturally, people speculate on how it will evolve and how it is compared with already established Facebook like.

According to Google, the new “+1 is a digital shorthand for “this is pretty cool.” .
But what actually is “cool”? Since you don’t necessarily want to share only “good” and ”positive” things with your social circle, “cool” can mean almost anything – from fun, cute, exciting, awesome, inspiring – to sad, shocking and even gross. Of course, when sharing you can always add a short comment of yours, describing your feelings about the shared material in a bit more depth. This also will give a personal touch to whatever you share – and that’s exactly why some tweets get more retweets than others. It’s all about the message framing.

However, It feels like there is still a need for a bit more diversified interface element – just check how many groups and pages on Facebook that want a “dislike button”. Furthermore, there are extensions for Firefox and Chrome that allow you to add “dislike” button to Facebook!

What I wanted to share with you today – is how Danish newspaper Berlingske took the element of attitude expression by the audience for the articles one step further – they’ve implemented “reactions”. You can still ‘like’, tweet or share the articles on all possible social media sites – but you also can express your attitude by choosing one of the five reactions available. The reactions are “jeg jubler” (I’m cheering), “Jeg smiler” (I’m smiling), “Jeg keder mig” (I’m bored), “Jeg er ked af det” (I’m upset) and “Jeg raser” (I’m in rage).

You can of course dispute over the choice of the reactions, it’s number and it’s formulations, as well as its applicability in the contexts other than newspapers articles. But anyway – how cool is that? Thumbs up, Berlingske! I like it and +1 it :)