The recent launch of Facebook ‘Reactions’ has brought to light an interesting question – are our emotions being commodised? Or is this just another superficial attempt to gain sentiment data from Facebook interactions.

This recent article suggests that “reactions have no emotional intelligence” and proposes that Facebook is, “ a role-play session where you perform friendly duties in a virtual world filled with superfluous interactions”. I tend to agree.

However, I am not so sure that the emotional reactions are artificial – after all, the difference emotional intelligence makes is that instead of emotive reactions, with EQ we can harness emotional responses. So whilst the reactions may be real physical responses to an event, in this case a friends post, it is our real-life responses that comprise the data valued by marketers.

I suggest that any attempt by marketers to use ‘reactions’ for marketing purposes should be treated with great caution, as I rather suspect that they do not provide a true representation of a likely market response. A response will be a reaction, modified by one’s own values, beliefs and life goals. It is subject to strong cultural influence as to expectations of others.

Whilst ‘reactions’ might be bought and sold; our ‘responses’ still remain a bit more elusive.

Author: Gail La Grouw. Insight Mastery Program Director, and Strategic Performance Consultant for Coded Vision Ltd.