Likability

Twitter allows famous people to make fools of themselves. Marc Andreessen can somehow tangle up his words to imply British colonialism in India was a good thing. (That Tweet was since been deleted.) Another venture capitalist type, Paul Graham, wrote a blog in defense of income inequality. (That post has since been revised to remove most of the offensive bits.) Kanye West says Bill Cosby is innocent in a Twitter post that is still up there, with more than 47,000 retweets and 57,000 likes.

Open networks that lack gatekeepers invite transgression. That is, logically enough, the price of having an open network. Then there is redemption: If somebody writes something dumb, there will be somebody smarter to issue a brilliant takedown on another open network, like Holly Wood’s Medium takedown of Paul Graham, or Mark Zuckerberg’s rebuttal of Andreessen on Facebook. Certainly, things can go too far. Hate speech gets too much play on Twitter and the platform has stumbled in lame efforts to stop it. The odd thing about this kind of modernity is that social channels have made the cycle of stupid-remark-to-redemption incredibly fast. Removing a bad patch of history is just a delete key away. It wasn’t always thus.

Think back to Paul Reubens (Pee Wee Herman) getting arrested for exposing himself in a Florida movie theater. That was in 1991. His career is just getting back on track now with a new Pee Wee movie. His mug shot is still up online, so that unfortunate bit of history has not been erased. But Twitter wasn’t as powerful then, and Reubens was silent after his arrest. His only hope for redemption might have been to go on Oprah. Now, transgressors who wish to redeem themselves have a DIY solution: Retract their post, erase it, revise their thoughts online, or like Kanye, let their stupid remarks stand.

If you are likable it is assumed that you won’t do or say anything offensive. Likability is the very soul of caution, hence pretty often boring. We all engage in the occasional schadenfreude, enjoying the latest celebrity misstep. But to consistently walk in the confines of likability is to be enslaved by niceness. Aren’t we all supposed to be likable? Isn’t it something aim toward?

Let’s turn that question a few degrees. To be transparent and honest, you can’t always be likable. To be transparent means making hard choices and talking about them. To be honest means saying things that people don’t always want to hear. If anybody reading this is a parent, you know just what I mean. There are times you have to be more of a parent to your kids than a friend. They won’t like you for that.

Let’s turn this another few degrees. When brands show up online, they like to be liked. That usually takes away from their being transparent. Can you imagine Volkswagen telling the truth about its manipulations and remaining likable? Truth and likability are a difficult combination, but when you get them to go together you generate something powerful and lasting: Trust. Every brand, even every parent, wanted to be trusted. The only way to do that is to tell the truth about yourself, cultivate transparency, and be real about who you choose to present to the world. You can be relatable and not likable, strange as it sounds.

You can apply this formula to several recent controversies and come out ahead. Product Hunt, a beloved portal for discovering new things, was recently exposed as being not entirely transparent about how new products get on its front page. It was possible to game the system and get featured. The people behind Product Hunt have made the (good) decision to become more transparent about what they do.

Facebook feeds and Twitter feeds are the window we hold up to the world, personally, and also when we represent brands. If they aren’t telling the truth about who we are, they can’t be transparent. They are likable but sanitized. Likability isn’t everything and certainly, honesty can sometimes make you look bad. As Jean-Luc Godard said, commercials are just thirty seconds long because if they went longer they would have to tell the truth about the product.