Consider that when you 'Like' or 'Share' someone, at least on platforms where people take their blogging seriously, you are telling them that they are effective enough for you to go in, if even for a skim, and actually thought their content of value. In turn, by modular inevitability, they will most often like or follow (share) one of your posts.

But here's the gag: Every Like is free advertising for people who (such as on WordPress) appear with other blogs of theirs in a sample blog, right into your email. Or what happens is that the other person goes and looks at your stuff even if it is not automated like this. But the WP style email 'Follower' model is probably the winning stroke for now in that it is direct advertising. I wonder still when social networks start developing into enough modular societies to be able to start closing themselves off to evolve into self-sustaining micro-states. Anyway this is going to magnetize, polarize and pocket the world by means of interest and merit rather than nepotism, or 'who you know.'

I never thought I'd be the one to say this was a good thing, that the web is in some ways actually inherently altruist in structure, being sort of an x-objectivist. But I must say, the power of the reciprocal is brought with an innate and new level of pervasiveness. The Facebook 'Like,' the Google +1, the Stumble Upon...These are all very powerful. In the absolute very beginning of SEO for me (2005) I thought the social array of buttons were rather superfluous.

Get this: they are still the same tools, it's just that people are taking the web more seriously, which is what I've crying for, needs to happen for some time. That said, I would like to share with you what I'm discovering about the 'Like' paradigm to web computing in terms of 'social' network building. It's happening in LinkedIn and Wordpress for me now. Two rules:

1. Whatever you do for someone else, will probably be returned to you.

2. This is actually what is probably a 'web-vortex' Yeah, I just made up that word, and yes, I just make up words. Why? Because before the linguistic PC Nazis hijacked English, people actually put thoughts together with something called logic. Well, the 'Like' across all platforms is actually what I believe to be the structural implosional process of human interest into eventual or sudden pocket groups of which some might even manifest themselves geographically. That said, the Like is what you think might be a nice way to share that you liked something of interest to you and possibly be of objective or social value as well. In reality its a magnet to flatten society just as transactions are flattened in a bank account if both the bank and the consumer-Point of Sale happen in the same instant or thereabouts. Well, in the same way, what's going to happen when you have social media tech that is so powerful that since Google has inventoried every entity on the planet, one Like could mean 15 sales. It will get to the point where everyone with talent fits in, and everyone without self-starting innate drive coupled with talent, real talent, will be on the OUTs.

This is the end of social marketing, and it is also the end of social marketing.