Facebook's overnight introduction of Love, Angry, Sad and other 'Reactions' has no doubt led to adland rubbing its thumbs with glee at the possibilities. But is there a hidden danger here?
With the introduction of Reactions on Facebook, you'll already be love-ing, sad-ing and angry-ing posts (and probably trying to work out better verbs), and from a user perspective, this is on balance a long-awaited addition of nuance to the platform.
As advertising folk, I'd also bet that planners everywhere are mashing the Love button into dust at the idea of being able to target those who Loved a page, or being able to add new layers of segmentation and sentiment to performance measurement. Who's most likely to Love a brand? Which generation is the angriest? Which brand has the saddest fans? The answer to all these questions and more are coming to an infographic near you, soon.
The problem with Facebook though, by definition of its sheer scale, is that it has to be lowest-common denominator. It is - it has to be - reductionist in nature. It cannot deal in specifics, it can only deal in generalities, and ends up reducing us all to a handful of extremely large buckets made of big data.
As with all improvements and innovations, there is usually a danger attached to the opportunity. Given the massive amounts of money that brands now (most often correctly) invest in the platform, and given the enormous reliance that marketers place on the shiny data that comes with it, there is a danger to see this as a great leap forward, rather than what it really is, a young giant still taking baby steps.
Even the principal scientific adviser to Facebook says so - talking to Wired he explicitly says that he specified no less than twenty reactions that he thought would cover a wide human spectrum. Engineering, meanwhile, determined that no more than six could be allowed, the lowest common denominator possible.
This is a long-awaited addition to Facebook's feature-set, and is going to make my day a lot more fun both personally and professionally, but we must remain careful of placing too much trust in the platform, simply because it acts on such a large scale. The danger is that brands and planners revert to Facebook data as the single source of behavioural insight when it comes to brand interaction - given how reductionist the reaction set is, this will only lead to more generic, homogenous work.
There is a German word, schlimbesserung, which roughly translates as "an improvement that makes things worse". The platform and the opportunity has undeniably gotten better - don't let the work suffer as a result.
By Alex Kirk
Group planning director at MediaCom Sydney.