I finished reading Inbound Marketing, an incredible book by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah over at Hubspot, a few weeks ago and it, along with The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott, advocates for new bloggers to begin reading relevant industry blogs and comment on posts to begin to engage in the conversation. I couldn’t agree more – that’s what I did a while back when I began writing for aWiderNet. Only problem is that I feel like the value of the comments on every blog I read are diminishing because there are now tons of people posting for exposure. Google corrected the link love issue by recognizing links posted as a comment on blogs and removing all authority they might generate to the resulting clickthrough page, but people still seem to try. Why is that?
I decided to venture into the lion’s den of spammy comments… LinkedIn answers! I did a little experiment to see whether or not questions were being answered thoughtfully or just as fast as possible so that certain people could get exposure. I call these people “hawks” because they simply hover over certain categories waiting for someone to ask a question. Then they dive in as fast as possible to answer, hoping they have something relevant to say, posting as much contact info as they can fit in hope that someone calls them.
Curiously, Inbound Marketing laid the groundwork for the hawk playbook. In it, Halligan and Shah describe a method to pick relevant categories and subscribe to their RSS feeds so that you can see new questions arrive in Google Reader, for instance. I thought this was brilliant and immediately subscribed to several categories, but I did so in hopes that there would be some insight I could offer. Not so for the hawks. While this method is great for aggregating opportunities to engage in thoughtful conversation, it also aggregates methods for spam-like behavior.
Phase two of my experiment consisted of posing a question of my own to see what would happen. Trying to stay relevant, I asked, “Why are LinkedIn answer responses sorted with the most recent at the bottom?“ You can head over there to see the “conversation” that took place. What I was driving at was the following: why do we give credit to the hawks? They post first, their post stays at the top, so they get the best “position” within the responses. Is that ok with everyone?
I was immediately (and I mean within 1 minute) greeted with three responses. The second and third were hawks. #2, as you can see, posted an entire email signature after saying only “Why not? The early bird gets the worm & the 2nd mouse gets the cheese …. “ Perfect evidence of my point. Thank you. The third is a guy who just hangs out on LinkedIn all day… literally. Some of his answers are good, but mostly they are just dribble so that you remember his tag line, “the WIREMAN” for some personal brand recognition. Heck, it worked – I remembered it (and now you will, too).
Once I got the hawks out of the way there were some incredibly thoughtful comments – again, you can read the entire thread here – but the overwhelming theme was that the answer responses were facilitating a conversation. Really? Most people argued that reading the responses chronologically allows you to respond to, not only the question asker, but all other responders. I disagree. The responses are not threaded, which makes it extremely difficult to keep track of who is responding to whom. Incidentally a friend of mine who contracts for LinkedIn mentioned that there is no plan to implement threading within the Answers feature. Too bad.
So what about blog comments? Same problem! We value first responders incredibly highly. Who has solved for that? Answer: Digg.com. Community policing at its best. Digg allows you digg and bury stories AND the comments on those stories. Finally, a site that actually treats good, relevant comments with the respect they deserve.
So here’s my request. Wordpress, Blogger, Typad, etc. Please implement a comment rating system by default! Or at least bundle your software with comment rating plug-ins!
What do you think? Are comments currently operating at their optimum value to the reader? Can we band together to devise a system to police spammy behavior?
Tags: blog, comments, google reader, hubspot, inbound marketing, linkedin, rss, Social Media
Well, at least a minute has passed, so I hope I can respond without seeming like a “hawk”…
Great post, and I think you’re highlighting the tip of the iceberg of what the developments we need to see over the next 5 years *must* be. If the “conversation” is also going to be able to be parsed, understood, and prioritized by the search engines, we need a very effective way of doing the following
- ranking quality of writing and insights in any/every post and comment (likely based on actually human response – perhaps monitoring read times, automatically or Digg like mechanisms to encourage human involvement)
- cross-site maintenance of “reputation” of individuals so there is a negative effect to high volume, no insight posting
- topic-specific affinity for these rankings of content and people (so a guru of “marketing” is not automatically a guru of “wine”)
It will be an interesting decade – the search engines and social sites have a long way to go but the journey will be worth it.
Thanks for the comment, Steven. I like your idea of cross-site reputation tracking, something that, perhaps, facebook connect could keep track of. The overall goal is to cut through the noise and get to the real information from real experts. Good thoughts.