How Blog Comments Can Be Good For Business
Blogging evangelists like me have no problem in telling business owners that comments on blogs can provide valuable information from the market. But there are risks.
It’s important that business owners who are establishing a blog understand that, while most blogs provide for readers to leave comments, there is no rule that says they have to.
Businesses with blogs are not bound to be open to receiving comments. But the owners of those businesses do owe it to themselves to do some serious thinking about blog comments and where comments fit in their business’s online communication strategy.
In my non-lawyer, layman’s terms, the basic arguments about the advantages and disadvantages of comments go something like this:
- comments are good because they enable genuine, transparent, non-mediated communication between the business and its marketplace
- comments are risky because a reader can leave libellous or other inappropriate comments and expose the company to legal or public relations problems
While most blogs these days seem to have commenting functionality, in the past the feature was not so widespread. The greater “commentability” of blogs these days could be, as Darren pointed out last year in his excellent post Using Comments On Your Blog, because most blogging platforms these days have the commenting feature integrated.
But even though your blogging platform will most likely have commenting functionality, you do not have to have it switched on. If you do have it functioning, but are concerned about comment spam or comments which are otherwise inappropriate for your blog, you can - in any reputable blogging platform I’ve used or heard about - enable a moderation function, either for items identified as spam or for all comments. That is, you can adjust the settings so that comments which are clearly spam will be quarantined or deleted, with a further option of other comments being withheld from publication until you have checked them and either cleared or deleted them.
This capacity to control comments should be reassuring for anyone worried about the downside risks of blog comments - for example the risk of litigation against their company.
Of course, there is more to blogging risk management than that, but when I started this post I was actually wanting to make a point about how much I like having comments switched on, both for blogs I write and blogs I read.
Because my assessment for my own business is that the advantages outweigh the downside risk.
My business, whether in coaching or consulting, or in promoting business blogging, is fundamentally about ideas. It’s very good for me - essential really - to have my ideas challenged. Having “comments on” provides scope for that - as well as for people to publicly agree with me! :) So in providing the opportunity for people to hold me publicly accountable for my observations and opinions, comments can actually help me in business.
That’s why I’m always pleased to find a comment from a colleague, friend, client or potential client, whether they agree with me or not. The presence of that comment demonstrates to me and others that the “conversation of the blogosphere” is something I’m in, not just something I’m speaking or writing about.
I also value the opportunity to comment on other people’s blog posts and I get frustrated when I can’t.
In fact, what prompted this post today was an experience of reading an emailed newsletter and finding myself disagreeing with one of the articles, where I had some relevant experience. But because it’s a newsletter and not a blog with a commenting facility, that means I have to email or phone the author and go through the dance of disagreeing, without wanting to be needlessly provocative or risk having an argument about the matter.
If however I express opinions in a blog, as I am doing now, and I have “comments on”, I am effectively saying to my readers - if you want to disagree, or put another point of view, I’m cool with that so go right ahead. You don’t need to phone me, you don’t need to try and figure out if I’m in a good or bad mood, you can just go ahead and agree, disagree, or put an alternative point of view.
Maybe not every business is going to warm to that idea, but for those who have a belief that they are different, want to communicate that difference to the marketplace, and want to hear back from the marketplace, I would suggest that leaving comments on is a good move.
And by all means have a statement on the blog, or where people leave the comment, outlining your “acceptable use” policy for comments.
The other problem some people have – “Why don’t people leave comments?” – is a subject for another post.
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