Monday, August 10, 2009
Tools for Your Blog: Managing Comments Pt. 1
Comments and conversations are the building blocks of social media. They happen on any site you logon. They happen on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. They used to happen as IRC, forums, MySpace comments, and blog comments. It's the way people interact, share stories, have flame wars, introduce themselves, meet new people -- and generate ideas. Conversations also build community, reputations, brands, and spread awareness of whatever that you're doing or promoting.
Comments are an integral part of any blog no matter where the conversation happens. Most of the conversation on this blog happens on Facebook and Twitter. No matter where your conversation ends up happening, the starting point is always your blog.
If you're thinking of starting off in building a community around your blog, here are 8 Steps to Growing Your Blog Community one Person at a Time by Ben Yoskovitz. It's an old post written even before MyBlogLog was bought by Yahoo. But the principles still hold true and you can apply them for Facebook, or Google. Fast forward to the Twitter age -- we still need conversations despite having them in 140 characters or less at a time. So how do we plug into the stream of conscious with all these sites and all these conversations happening at the same time? What if we don't have time to manage an influx of spam comments? Simple: get a comment management tool.
I was going to write just one post on this but there's a lot of topics to explore. Next up is, which blog comment management tool you should be using. Stay tuned.
Photo: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid
