Do me a favor. Look at the address bar of your browser. Does it end in “like-button-disclaimer”? If so, scroll to the bottom of this post. (Go ahead, I’ll wait here.) If not, click the title of this post, and then scroll to the bottom of the page that you’re brought to.

What you’re looking for is the Facebook “Like” button. It might not look like much, but it’s a craze that’s sweeping the nation. Here’s what happens when you click it.

First and foremost, if you’re one of the first people to “like” a post, you’ll get your name and a link to your facebook profile right on that page. (After the first few, it’ll just tell you how many people like it.)

Then you’ll get a little entry in the Recent Activity tab on your Wall that says, “[Your name] likes [the name of the post]” with a link to the post you liked. All of your friends will be able to see it.

So far so good, right? It doesn’t seem much different than Digging an article, for example. It’s just like “liking” anything else on Facebook — only you can do it all over the internet.

And there’s the rub. See, while you’re flying around the internet liking things left and right, Facebook is collecting data about the kinds of sites you’re visiting. Now, ostensibly Facebook will use this data for relatively innocuous purposes — like helping advertisers more accurately target your profile. But in certain situations Facebook will be able to make your user data available to others. Not all of your data, mind you — just the stuff you make publicly viewable. That includes your name, your city or town, and whatever else you choose to share with the general public.

But lots of people aren’t comfortable with Facebook sharing their personal information with others, even if it’s already publicly accessible. For those people, I recommend not clicking the Like buttons on this site — or any other site for that matter. If you’d still like to express your appreciation for this blog , then by all means let me know what you think in the comment section at the bottom of each post.

For the Record:

• I am not interested, nor will I ever be interested in collecting the Facebook user data of people who visit this site. I’m more interested in having a conversation than I am in figuring out the average age of people in Toledo who visit this site. Who cares? Let’s talk.
• I believe that making the Web more inherently social is a very good thing. I believe that the easier it is to spread ideas among people, the stronger our ideas become. I believe that things as mundane as conversations among friends are all part of a larger dialogue, and the open publication of this dialogue in its entirety makes ideas more significant.
• If you ever have any questions about the security of your data on this site, please let me know. I’m very happy to discuss any concerns you might have in an open, honest and public fashion. That’s why I wrote this post, after all.
• Click the Like button!

What I’d like to do is pose a hypothesis on Monday, debate Tuesday through Thursday, and then draw a conclusion on Friday. But because I decided to start this blog on a Wednesday (of all days), we’ll have to make this round of scientific inquiry a bit shorter. Them’s the breaks.

Hypothesis: Prolonged Boldness is More Effective

Conclusion: FALSE.

We ran into a bit of conundrum when we introduced the idea of “scaling” boldness. Did we mean prolonging the exposure to bold messages, or increasing the level of boldness? In the former case, we saw how being bold over an extended period of time is actually detrimental to the continued effectiveness of the message — and in at least one case how it can turn your audience against you. This is certainly not true of less-bold messages which, while they may not inspire positive response, certainly do not inspire overly negative response.

Hypothesis: The Bolder the Message, the More Effective.

Conclusion: None.

We can agree that bold messages have the potential to be more effective than less bold messages, but it is unclear whether a bold message is clearly and consistently more effective than a milder one. What’s more, it is difficult to rank the relative boldness of messages — we can identify messages that are clearly bold and those that clearly are not (with a few exceptions, naturally), but as of this moment we are unable to define either A) how to classify the boldness of a message, or B) what traits comprise a bold message. Until we can agree on a standard of measurement, we cannot test our hypothesis.

Recommendation: If You Wish to Be Bold, Do It in Small Doses

There is ample evidence to support the idea that boldness works once. We see it every day — the hard sell at a used car lot, the busty women on TV selling domain names, the headlines on tabloid magazines. They’ll get you once. But anyone who has bought a used car from a pushy salesman once will tell you that they’ll never do it again. Consumers get wise to boldness quickly, so if you’re going to use it, proceed with caution. It can work — I had a positive reaction to the Target ad to the extent that I blogged about it two days ago, and that pushy beggar got me to throw him a buck, after all — but at a certain point boldness just becomes unwelcome noise.

Assignment: Be Bold.

I want you to think up something bold to say about your product, service or company. Get wild. Be outrageous. Provoke someone into action (or stun them into disbelief — that’s almost as good). Then when you think of it, post it in the comments section below. Then read some of the bold messages that others have created and discuss ways they might implement them. But above all, have fun!

Great input from my good friends in the marketing world about yesterday’s hypothesis. We all agree that bold messages at least have the potential to have tremendous impact on an audience — though their rate of success is questionable. But even given that bold messages are usually more impactful, does that mean that bold messaging is a viable long-term strategy? And does any of this answer the scalability question (in other words, the bolder the better)?

Diminishing Returns?

We’re all familiar with the Law of Diminishing Returns. Does the relative boldness of a message abide by this rule? Let’s say we were to rate all messages on a boldness scale from 1 to 10, 10 being the boldest. Let’s also say we had two groups of ordinary people, Group A and Group B. And let’s say we exposed Group A to a message rated at a 9 on the boldness scale at regular intervals over a period of three weeks, and did the same to Group B with a message rated only a 5. At the end of those three weeks, which group will have remembered the message most clearly? Which will have responded most positively? Which will have displayed a greater level of brand recognition? And if Group B remembers the message more clearly, or responds more postively, or displays greater brand recognition, will that have been true throughout the duration of the experiment? In such a scenario, at what point will the 9-bold message become less effective than the 5-bold message?

Short-Term Tradeoff?

Of course, it could also be argued that bold messages are not meant to be sustainable. Target’s Life ads only ran (in primetime, anyway) once a week for the six-week duration of that series, for example. Boldness by its very nature loses its edge when encountered in the same fashion a second time. For example:

When I first moved to Boston from quiet, suburban central Massachusetts, one of my first experiences was being confronted by a man who bet me a dollar he could do ten one-handed pushups. What surprised me was not the nature of the offer; it was the fact that this man had the gall to walk up to me on a busy sidewalk in broad daylight and introduce himself with the line, “Hey! Betcha a dollar I can do ten push ups with one hand. Gotta deal?” That, friends, is boldness without peer.

Two weeks later, the same guy sauntered up to me on the same sidewalk with the same line. “You got me last week,” I said. We had a laugh, and I went on my way. Then three days later: same guy, same sidewalk, same line. The fourth time I was with a friend. “No,” I said to the man as we strolled past the familiar spot on the sidewalk. “Stop bothering me.” My friend whispered to me when we were out of earshot, “I’ve just started ignoring him. I hardly notice him there anymore.”

I won’t deny that the one-handed-pushup beggar’s schtick worked: he successfully solicited a dollar from me. But the very reason it worked the first time — its boldness — became its downfall the second time. So the argument goes like this:

Argument: Bold is only bold once. After that, it’s just loud.

Do you agree or disagree? Think of a bold message that you’ve heard repeatedly over time and talk about its effect on you presently. State your findings in the comments section below.

David Meerman Scott released an ebook not too long ago to illustrate how writing with conflict is more persuasive. Of course, you can’t tell a story without conflict — not one worth reading, anyway — so we can assume without reading the book that he’s got a point. Question is, how scalable is this theory? If writing with conflict is more persuasive, is writing with much more conflict much more effective?

Evidence to Support:

I enjoyed watching the television series Life on the Discovery Channel. Me and my family all curled up on the couch, stayed up way past our bedtimes and watched young ibexes (I think that’s the plural) outrun red foxes. (Or foxen. Whatever.)

But what I loved more were the brief sponsorship ads that Target ran before the show launched into commercial breaks. They were ten seconds long, and they were more memorable than any of the other standard ads that ran during that two-hour stretch. Did you catch them? No? Well here, I’ll recite them in their entirety:

“Life is presented by Target.”

How utterly brilliant is that? Life is presented by Target. LIFE! You are alive — this whole planet survives because of Target. You just witnessed how amazing is the miracle of life, and what makes it all possible? The fine people at the giant nationwide box store with the big red target on the front.

Bold makes an impression. There is conflict inherent in boldness, because despite what you see on television, boldness is not the norm. To be extraordinary (in the original sense of the word) is to be controversial. Life is presented by Target? you ask. That’s absurd!

Exactly. But it solicited a reaction. The Target promos don’t say anything different than any other consumer brand promo. They all want you to believe that the things that make your life worth living are available courtesy of whatever store they’re promoting. Target just said it in five words.

Evidence to Refute:

This is where I need your help. Can you think of an instance where bold failed? If so, leave it in the comments section below.