Comments, anyone?

by iridiumInteractive
October 18, 2010
in Crowd Sourcing, Interactive Marketing, Others, Social Media, Social Media Marketing
1

We’ve been here for a while, posting ideas on the blog and our thoughts about various happenings in the industry and trends that are set to shape how we use the internet. One thing that we notice everytime we post on the iridium blog is the lack of comments. And hey, this is no impassioned plea for you to click on the comments tab and start typing but more of an analysis of a phenomenon we’re trying to understand. What could be the reason for the lack of comments? If we noticed this on our blog alone, we’d find a quiet place to vent our frustrations and not bother writing about it, but this seems to be a phenomenon afflicting blogs across the board. Twitter retweets, check. Facebook shares, check. Likes, check. Comments,..er..what?

Over the course of the past few weeks, we’ve been monitoring several blogs, Indian as well as from across the globe, to understand the commenting trends and almost everywhere we have come across this phenomenon. It seems that now, with the advent of so many social media platforms, there are a hundred different avenues through which blogs are commented on and discussed, including the blog. A simple tweet on twitter like ‘Read interesting post about wordpress 3.0 by *** and totally disagree’ can trigger a conversation on twitter rather than on the blog. If the blogger would like to be part of this conversation, it becomes her job to track where her story is being shared and discussed and get there as fast as possible with her reasons and opinions to continue the conversation. For instance, this blogpost may be retweeted by 10 different people on twitter, each marking the tweet with his/her thought [which takes the place of the comment] along with the url. In this scenario, it might simply be a better solution to add to the comments box a continuously updating list of mentions on the social web thus allowing you to connect with those who have thoughts about your ideas on their platform rather than bringing them to your blog and expecting them to drop a comment. So if the lack of comments is really getting you down, hang in there! Someone, somewhere is tweeting about you. You just need to find them and engage!