Living like a LODDER

I recently went on a vacation with a few close friends of mine to northern Sri Lanka. My friends are avid kite surfers, and I have long since wanted to try this new fad, but residing in artic Sweden limits my options for most any water-sport quite drastically. For this reason, and with the added opportunity to spend some good time with excellent company, I packed my bags and left for Sri Lanka.

Before we go deeper into the social media nature of this post, there is a few things that needs to be said about kite surfing first. The sport combines elements from wakeboarding, surfing, paragliding and acrobatics to form a very addictive extreme-pastime. Once you have mastered the arts of controlling the kite, and you are able to surf back and forth, the next thing is to start practicing on your tricks. A kite is not a transport vessel, nor is there any credit given to the fastest kite surfer. Rather than that onlookers will gasp at the one who jumps the highest, or pulls of the most daring stunts. Kite-looping seems to be the main focal point. 

Adding to this, the untouched part of the Sri Lankan nature, the jungles, and its people, makes for a lot of very good and beautiful photo opportunities. Needless to say; we took a ton of pictures during our trip, most of which ended up on our shared DropBox folder (amassing some 3 GB in total), but some of them also found their way out on the social scene.

Now, after the mandatory heavy retouching, obligatory #nofilter, as well as comrade-tagging, the photo was posted on Instragram and/or Facebook, instantly followed by offline haggling, bartering, and finally complying.

As you all surely already know, a post’s popularity on any social network is determined in part by how many “likes” it gets. If a post gets a high number of likes, it will reach a larger scale of the entire network, and the poster will become more influential. This is core, old news.

Consequently, nights in our hut, in the remote wildernesses of Sri Lanka, consisted of getting the rest of the group to like your photo, while at the same time making sure no other photo got more likes than your own. This is a tricky business, especially in a closed group of friends, and immediately triggers back-stabbing, connivance, and deception. Often a person fishing for likes would formulate set rules for how the other would get liked back; effectively making the other person “Like on Demand” or LOD, for short.

Quickly the word LOD, and the affiliated person the “LODDER”, became regular practice for the trip. “Don’t be such a damn LODDER Erik. Just like what you truly like!” was a standard façade statement, often utilized by con-artist Jesper, covering the heavy LODDING taking place behind the scenes. 

LOD carried on all through the Sri Lanka trip, and got more and more intense by each passing day. LODs could be traded for small favors; borrowing sunblock, fetching the next rounds, even throwing the occasional game of Settlers of Catan - just to name a few examples. Paying for LODDING was not far away. Obviously you didn't want to be caught as a LODDER, LOD was synonym with swindling, not something you wanted to be public with. This also carried over the Sweden as we got home; we would send PMs on Facebook, encouraging the other to comment or like certain pictures to raise it to the top of the feed, again with a re-comment or re-like not far away.

This whole social experiment does not come without some reflections. I know there must be professional LODDERs out there, I just cannot see any social media campaign run today that does not employ some fact catalysts to get posts flying, even though no one would ever admit to doing so. What our Sri Lankan LODDER Experiment also have shown us is that as soon as you know the post has traded likes - a LOD post - you lose all respect for it. And the higher the percentage of known LOD the less likely I am to actually fall for it. If I knew that the status update of a company with 1000 likes got 500 of those like directly from LOD, all my respect and trust for that company would go out the window.

The question here is naturally; is LOD and the employed LODDER already an Internet norm, and if so is this to be expected as the next evolution of online marketing? Word of mouth marketing has long since proven itself as a powerful tool; social media likes is a marginalized, but still influential version of that. Would you trust companies, political campaigns, or think tanks that had a LODDER on its staff? 

In the words of Jesper: “Don’t be such a damn LODDER. Just like what you truly like!”