Why Blog Comments Matter

Aug 10th, 2009 | By Rex Gradeless | Category: Blogging, Featured, Lead Article, Social Media, Web 2.0

blogcomments A blog without comments is not a blog. No, really. See for yourself.

The comments and trackback features of blogs allow the readers of your blog to participate in the discussion and contribute value.

These features of your blog are what make your blog “social”. Disabling comments, or not allowing comments to be viewable, falls under the old media model where a reporter, or website, would tell viewers, or readers, what happened without allowing direct feedback.

Instead of the old media model, social media encourages dialogue in reporting and/or blog posts. Dialogue in today’s media is now expected. For example, many media sources share news stories on blogs and expect audience feedback.

Moreover, these media outlets sometimes even allow the audience to provide the content. For example, the stories on this page iReport.com, are user-generated content. “CNN has vetted only the stories marked “On CNN” and uses those stories in CNN’s news coverage.” Or Foxnews.com uAsk/ uReport found here.

The same philosophy applies for your legal blog. Comments should be allowed in order for the readers of your blog to participate. I’m not saying don’t have a reasonable comments and trackback policy. But showing some sort of openness to dialogue and the thoughts of others will not tarnish your image but make it stronger. Honest discussion will make you more authoritative in your field while being a one-sided filter of the comments to your blog usually makes you seem disingenuous.

A policy of being a verbal bully to those who make comments on your blog may make you popular in some circles but it will not increase your authority. If users can participate freely, they are more likely to come back to your blog because they will feel like a part of your community (or tribe).

Do you have a comments policy? Do you have any compelling reasons for disallowing public comments? Please comment below. Without comments, none of us have blogs.

This post should be called “Why Conversations Matter”: This post should actually be called “Why Conversations Matter” because the comments feature to your blog should encourage honest conversations about the topics you write about. In order to facilitate conversations on this blog, we have recently installed Echo. Echo is a way to share your content, and watch the live reaction. Embed it on your site – replacing your old commenting system – and you get:

Real-time – Watch people react to your content live – without refreshing the page!
Social Gestures – Echo captures the Social Gestures relating to your content including comments, likes, star ratings and more!
Stream – Echo simplifies the presentation of conversation to just two levels. This simpler, cleaner style helps people keep track of contributions and engage in parallel conversations.
Hyper-Distributed – Visitors share your content with their friends across all their favorite social networks at once – broadening the conversation and driving new traffic.
Aggregated – Echo captures conversations related to your content from across the web and places them on your page.
People – Echo allows people to connect to your site using their profile from the worlds most popular social networks. Users can even bind multiple social media accounts together.
Multimedia – Echo items can include safe HTML, photos, and video for a richer conversation.
Multiplied Engagement – Echo increases engagement by providing more ways for users to get involved and express their opinion.

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Just added ‘Subscribe to Comments’ | Carl Chapman Sr August 13th, 2009 10:09 am :
[...] the idea here is for a free flow of great information, what better way to do that than to encourage commenting? Hope y’all will make use of the new [...]