Facebook Inc (FB): Our State Dept. Spent $ on These? Why?

Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is known for its famous “like” button. The “like” has become even more ubiquitous on the Internet than Facebook itself, with hundreds of other websites (like this one) allowing for “likes” with comments about news stories.

And in some ways a Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) “like” could be considered digital currency like Bitcoin, as it seems that many advertisers and marketers like to track the number of “likes” that a brand or certain page gets in order to determine effectiveness of ad campaigns and to follow up with those “likes” to get  data commonalities that will help drive the next targeted marketing campaign. And with better marketing  can mean better sales and more revenue – so “Likes” ca be a currency. But how much is a “Like” worth?

And how many “likes” does it take to make $630,000? Well we are not sure, but apparently our own U.S. State Department  set a goal to find that out, and so far no one seems to know the reason why. An internal inspector general’s report basically ripped into department officials for spending what amounted to more than $600,000 over two years trying to collect as many “Likes” as possible for the various department Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) pages. Why the need to create such popularity artificially is so far, anyone’s guess. And apparently, since the inspector general didn’t quite understand either what the purpose was, he wrote a scathing report about the practice as a waste of taxpayer money on a program with no known mission.

At least, if there was a mission, the IG seemed to say in the report that State did not do the right things in order to make collecting Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) “likes” a productive and effective mission. Of course, we’ll give you the excerpt that refers to this, but we cannot help but wonder – what would ultimately be the mission to be achieved by the State Department in collecting “likes” on its own department pages? Could this have been seen as a recruiting tool?

In the report about the collection of Facebook Inc (NADAQ:FB) Likes, the inspector general wrote, “Many in the bureau criticize the advertising campaigns as ‘buying fans’ who may have once clicked on an ad or ‘liked’ a photo but have no real interest in the topic and have never engaged further.”

What do you think about the State Department collecting Facebook “Likes” and spending more than $600,000 of your money to do it? Do you consider a “like” a form of currency, and how valuable do you think they are? Would a Facebook investor like billionaire fund manager Jim Simons (see his full equity portfolio) consider the value of a “like”? Give us your thoughts in the comments section below.

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