Remember when it was all about the comments you got on a blog or talkback thread? Somewhere along the way, that stopped mattering [as much].

Likes, hearts, +1, thumbs up. Shares. We look to accumulate those en masse, and if people throw a word or two our way, then hey, that’s a nice little bonus.

Feedback has gone away from the personal, and impersonal is more and more acceptable. Which seems ironic, considering social media (a) has “social” right in its name and (b) everyone from individuals to international brands are using it to supposedly connect with others.

Maybe it’s because it’s easier to fit quantity of likes and hearts into a spreadsheet at the end of the month than it is to quantify and bar graph the actual thoughts within comments.

Or maybe it’s simply because the last decade has seen a tsunami of bloggers deluge us with content. At the start of the new millennium, we had a more compact number of personal and corporate bloggers compared to the current climate. During those days, we could spend more time commenting and starting paragraphs of conversations with the fewer blogs we followed. Now, we follow hundreds of blogs, RSS feeds, and Twitter accounts, leaving less time to read and more time to skim and +1ike posts.

Social media commenting has adapted the equivalent of the Jeep wave.

Rather than stopping and catching up, you keep driving and if you see another Jeep owner, you give a head-nod or a two-finger wave of acknowledgement. Don’t have time to stop and write a paragraph about why you agree with the author? Like or heart their blog post. Maybe you go the extra mile and click the Retweet button.

We’ve had to shift our goals and expectations to weight these one-click-approval methods accordingly and not put all of our success eggs into the commenting basket.

You don’t have to Like or +1 this new trend of “commenting,” but you do have to account for it when judging the success or failure of your social endeavors.

Bruce is the Director of Client Services at Roll Mobile.

He is a lover of good music, bad puns and ugly sweater vests. Want to learn more about adding mobile components to complement your existing marketing strategies? Or have a BLOG@ROLL topic you’d like us to explore?

Contact bruce@whyroll.com or on Twitter via @RollMobile.