'Like' and the Power of Simplicity

By Dan Lagani

Tuesday, May 4, 2010 Anyone who’s ever done a bit of self-reflection knows there is some truth to the adage that, left unchecked, your strengths become your weaknesses. A couple of unrelated news items recently - Facebook's "Open Graph" announcement and the addition of four new alternative baseball statistics in the NY Times - has me thinking that the inverse is true, too.

Like a lot of folks, I suffer from what former Apple executive Linda Stone termed Continuous Partial Attention; sort of a digitally-induced ADD that debunks multitasking as doing a lot of things simultaneously, but none in-depth. For diamond-cutters and neurosurgeons this would be a major liability, but in media and marketing, I think a certain lack of focus is actually a positive - especially if it puts you in the same distracted mindset as your consumers.

Scanning the headlines last week, I did pay attention to the Facebook announcement that it intends to distribute its "Like" button across the web. The news set off a flurry of articles hailing it as everything from the end of Google to a major privacy threat destined to bring congressional scrutiny. Where it actually falls on that spectrum is still to be seen. But one thing that's immediately clear is the simplicity of allowing Facebook's 400 Million users to "Like anything, anywhere" is brilliant and it's bound to transform word-of-mouth marketing and data collection on the web once again.

Twitter - with its 140 character limit - is another great example of how simple ideas can spread like wildfire. Racking up 100 million users in less than four years is quite a testament to this fact. Ironically, the rest of the Twitter experience is far from simple and I'd argue a major reason this transformational platform is seeing slower growth. Would providing easy, on-site help for new users to understand when to use a #hashtag, an @reply or the true value of a "list" increase Twitter's user-base or more importantly the number of active users, which seems to be less than 30% of the total? I'd bet that the answer is yes.

Which brings me to the NY Times and its recent addition of four new, alternative baseball statistics being published in the paper and online (www.bbref.com/nytimes). The stats are so-called "Sabermetrics" which attempt to more fully indentify and predict the impact and overall value of a player to his team. Here is an edited description of one new stat called "Batting Runs":

"Batting runs are...an attempt to measure all of a batter's positives and negatives: hits, walks, hit-by-pitch and outs. The ultimate run-scoring-value of each of these events has been researched - for example a double is typically worth 0.85 runs. We then add up the value of each batter's events and create adjustments for the hitting environment by era and by park, so a performance in Coors Field in 2000, a hitter's park, can be compared to one in Dodger Stadium in 1968...."

Now I love baseball, I like statistics and I've even read Money Ball by Michael Lewis chronicling the rise of sabermetrics - but the description of just that one statistic alone made me think that I’m not only going to be the last generation that reads papers – but also the last that follows baseball, too.

An overreaction on my part to one geeky paragraph, perhaps, but also a very important reminder that in this era when even your best customers are only paying partial attention, simplicity, with apologies to Mastercard, is priceless.

Dan Lagani is the president of RD Media, where oversees publication of Reader's Digest magazine and other brands within the company.

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