The “Like” bribe

Yesterday, I was one of the recipients of an amusing mass email from the long-time tech pundit Guy Kawasaki. He sent it out to promote a new book he’s written as well as to promote the Facebook fan page for that book. Under the subject line “Free copy of Guy’s first book,” it went as follows:

A long time ago (1987 exactly), I published my first book, The Macintosh Way. I wrote it because I was bursting with idealistic and pure notions about how a company can change the world, and I wanted to spread the gospel …

I recently re-acquired the rights for this book, and I’m making it freely available from the fan page of my upcoming book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. To download The Macintosh Way:

1. Go to the fan page.

2. “Like” the page.

3. Click on The Macintosh Way book cover to download the PDF.

Yes, that’s right. The pure-hearted, Apple-cheeked idealism of youth has given way to the crass cynicism of using virtual swag as a bribe to get you to click a Like button. Marketing corrupts, and Facebook marketing corrupts absolutely.

guybribe.jpg

Here, by the way, is how Kawasaki describes his new tome: “The book explains when and why enchantment is necessary and then the pillars of enchantment: likability, trustworthiness, and a great cause.” That’s “likability” in the purely transactional sense, I assume.

Back in elementary school, there was this distinctly unlikable kid who, if you agreed to act like his friend for a day, would let you swim in his family’s swimming pool. Little did we know that he was a cultural pioneer.

11 thoughts on “The “Like” bribe”

  1. Seth Finkelstein

    I don’t know if it’s better or worse if he’s aware of the Dungeons-and-Dragons type connotations there.

    ” Enchantment

    Enchantment spells affect the minds of others, influencing or controlling their behavior.

    All enchantments are mind-affecting spells. Two types of enchantment spells grant you influence over a subject creature.”

  5. umesh.bawa19

    Mr. Nicholas…

    Firstly, i was get stunned from bulky couple postings from you after gap of atleast 20 odd days. secondly, as compare to your old writing pieces, these two pieces went to last full stop quite early, as we left short of fascination and has to jumped to comment box quite early… This is not fair from you….

    well… Going by ‘envhantment’ and macintosh touch to the soft corner of your heart, i guess, you need revidion here. you’d be surprised to know that your wavelength to define wochkard hidden behind these erratic bribary stuff is errant and subtle, in this case your self justification to this subject is quite ordinarily ‘brief’ and get killed after living 5 minutes of peculiar life…..

    this is not a sort of verdict, as i am soaping to germs, take it lightly a statement from veterrinary doctor, who didn’t even know about cardiology…..But he both were named doctors…

    But you somewhere needs revision and also caucsatic way of classifying acts, is bruisely worthless….. Avoid it…

  6. Tom Foremski

    What’s stunning is that Guy Kawasaki is a sophisticated marketing guru, yet he believes that bribing people to click a “like” button is effective marketering. He doesn’t even harvest an email address.

    There can’t be much value in his ancient book if that’s all the value he can harvest in return…

  7. Bullworthy.wordpress.com

    The “bribe” marketing phenomenon is definitely taking hold, even among the most sophisticated of Internet marketing communities. I’ve even created a series of Facebook “reveal” pages for a few of my clients as a test run. Basically, when you land on their business pages, you’re greeted with a picture that invites you to “like” the page for access to some resources (similar to the PDF download Guy offers). Once they click “like”, the page “reveals” a new landing page with the resources, but only if they click “like”.

    Although I’ve introduced reveal marketing to my clients as a worthwhile endeavor, the truth is, I haven’t tried it with my business page. Effective online marketing lives and dies by the relationship that is built with the audience; reveal marketing could just turn out to be another sly attempt at gathering followers for the sake of popularity, not to deliver a core message or develop any sort of sustainable business network.

    -Tom Copeland

  8. Darlene Santos

    Tacky.. Yes. But you’d be amazed at the data that can be harvested from a “Like” button. It’s not about the “Like”, but what the “Like” provides you as a marketer.

    Can an e-mail address do that?

  11. admin

    He had to put both “Like” and “Do not like” buttons to avoid corruption accusations and achieve the same if not better marketing effect.

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