cre8d design

As an experiment, I’ve switched my commenting over to Facebook’s commenting system (for a little while at least). Apologies to those of you (cough Bene Diction, Chris Heaslip) who don’t have a Facebook account.  

Like Facebook or loathe it (I can’t decide), the social networking giant has had a huge impact on blog comments, primarily:

A decrease in the number of blog comments

I regularly hear from bloggers who are concerned about the low number of comments they get on their blog, compared to a while ago. They note that more conversation is happening on Facebook but would prefer it to happen “out in the open” on their blog and on their site.

I think there’s a few reasons for the shift:

Facebook is so much easier to comment on than most blogs

How much simpler can a comment box be than this?

By making that the most common commenting experience people are now having online, anything else looks rather a lot of work and requires learning a new way of adding a comment. Compare the Facebook experience to WordPress (top image) or Blogger (bottom image):

Granted, creating an account and logging in reduces the comment form complexity in WordPress, but if you’re like many of us, you’re already logged into Facebook for purposes other than to comment.

Facebook has mastered the art of easy commenting.

Facebook is more personal

In Facebook, you’re commenting on a friend or page’s status update or photo etc. You know the types of people who are reading it and will also be commenting. You recognize their photos – which pretty much everyone has, unlike Gravatars used on many blogs. You can see their real* names. In many cases, you closely know the person you’re commenting with as well.

On blogs, unless you’re a regular commenter, or reader of the blog’s comments, you’re not so likely to know the other people commenting and you can get into debates with people who you’ll have no idea as to who their identity is.  This can be a good or a bad thing – but by and large, requiring commenters to use their real* name and photo attached to their thoughts reduces the likelihood of the nasty and unwanted comment varieties.

(Probably not as important, but different to most blogs, if you make a mistake you can edit or delete your comment on Facebook.)

A preference for clicking “like”

Facebook’s “like” button has replaced a certain type of comment and reduced other kinds of comment. Instead of spending a few moments to write a thank you note, or insight into why one appreciated a post, clicking “like” is much faster and much easier. For some sites, “likes” reduce the clutter of endless repetitive comments, but for others, the richness of a full thank you note is lost.

An overexposure to soliciting for comments

Now that every site (not just blogs) are wanting your comments, your feedback, your interaction, it can get a bit overwhelming and tiresome to comment on everything you read. When blogs began, their commenting functionality really opened up communication channels and was revolutionary. Not anymore.

So what can bloggers do to get more people commenting?  Here’s some ideas.  

Reassess your commenters’ experience 

Think hard about the commenting system you’re using (WordPress’ default, Disqus, Intense Debate, Facebook comments etc) and whether it provides an easy user experience in the way you have it set up.  Keep an eye on new features but check that you’re not complicating things for commenters.

No one wants to be first

Being the first commenter on a blog post seems to take more courage, more effort.  Perhaps try getting a few friends to comment on your blogs with an insightful comment to help get things going.  Also, the first few comments can really set the tone of the discussion – it can start off on the wrong foot very easily.  You set the tone for your blog content, consider the type of conversations you want to encourage and discourage in your comments.  Do you want constructive discussions, allow petty ones, fierce debate etc?

No one likes their comments ignored

I love it when I see responses from the author to comments on their blog, and it makes me want to comment there again.  This is even more so the case when I have spent a lot of time writing a comment.  It’s disheartening to feel ignored.   What’s more, the bigger the blog, the more meaningful the blog owner’s direct responses to you can be.  When was the last time you responded to the majority of comments on your blog for a day or a week?

PRESS RELEASE January 1, 2011

Ever wished you could keep all your Facebook status updates as a real diary? Now you can. Launched on January 1, 2011, Like This Book is a real book version of your Facebook wall.

Founder Rachel Cunliffe came up with the idea after the birth of her first child two years ago.

“I used to keep a diary but now I write a status update.

“Even if I have fool-proof back-ups of my status updates on my computer or online, that doesn’t leave me a user-friendly way to reminisce over my life or leave something for my kids to flip through one day. Life on the internet is geared for right now and often not for the distant future.”

Rachel knew she wasn’t the only person feeling this way and started working on a semi-automated service which creates a physical diary rich with photos, comments and memories.

And that service is quick and easy to use. All you need to do is use Facebook’s download button, securely send your files and then preview and purchase your book.

Like This Book launched January 1, 2011 at http://www.likethisbook.com/ and http://www.facebook.com/likethisbook

Books are priced from $14.95US, tax and shipping additional.

Rachel Cunliffe is a blog and community site designer at http://www.cre8d-design.com/

Nels Wadycki has written an excellent little post with links I’ve been absorbing — ironically I found it through a trackback to my post on John Mayer quitting Twitter for blogging.

Nels writes that some are quitting twitter for blogging due to its longevity: research shows tweets really have a lifespan of just an hour, whereas blog posts may have comments and discussions on them for days, weeks, months or even longer. They’re certainly more searchable than old tweets and old Facebook status updates.

Paul Carr writes of another reason to continue to blog rather than tweet: depth.

“Throughout my earlier archives, I was able to find lengthy, sometimes surprisingly personal, posts – recounting the highs and lows of starting companies, making and losing friends, leaving London, beginning to travel around America and Europe… and countless other published episodes that backed up, and enhanced the contents of my private notebooks. But then, as I clicked forward through the archives to more recent years, something odd happened. At a certain point, the number of posts in each monthly archive dropped off a cliff, particularly where details of my personal life were concerned.

The reason, of course, was that I’d started to use Twitter for that kind of personal stuff. Unperturbed, I moved my research attentions away from my blog archives and over to my Twitter archives – and that’s when I started to panic: for all the dozens of updates I wrote each month, there was absolutely no substance to any of them.

140 characters simply doesn’t give enough depth or breadth to commit events, memories or feelings to the permanent record.

…blogs may have been twee or self-absorbed or clumsily written or emo or just plain boring – isn’t that the joy of a diary? – but they at least required the writer to take the time to process the events of their life, and the attendant emotions they generated – before putting finger to keyboard. The result, in many cases, was a detailed archive of events and memories that they can look back on now and say “that was how I was then”.

And then along came micro-blogging – and, with a finite amount of time and effort available, the blog generation turned into the Twitter (or Facebook) generation. A million blogs withered and died as their authors stopped taking the time to process their thoughts and switched instead to simply copying and pasting them into the world, 140 meaningless characters at a time. The result: a whole lot of sound and mundanity, signifying nothing.

To argue for a mass switch back from Tweeting to [blogging] in the interests of the permanent record is as ridiculous as campaigning for everyone to abandon instant messaging and return to letter-writing. The fact is people are busy (or lazy, depending on your view of humanity) and for the vast majority, immediacy will always trump posterity.

…by constantly micro-broadcasting everything, we’ve ended up macro-remembering almost nothing.”

Leo Laporte also wrote to his return to focus on blogging – on ownership and engagement:

“I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place.

I should have been posting it here [on my blog] all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs. Well no more. I’m sorry for having neglected you Leoville.”

It wasn’t easy for me to put together my lifestream – especially pulling out old Facebook status updates and while I love Twitter and Facebook, I’m getting enjoyment out of blogging more regularly again. There was something immensely satisfying writing about the birth of my second son nine days ago on my personal site. It was a different feeling to the immediacy of tweeting his birth announcement and getting back a flood of comments and tweets on Twitter and Facebook:

“Yeah!!!! Just gave birth an hour ago to a gorgeous baby boy Austin no drugs or complications or stitches feeling on top of the world”

I’m not going to close down my Twitter or Facebook accounts in the near future, but I am thinking long term about where my written memories are stored. Are you?

We recently watched the documentary “We live in Public“. It’s disturbing, prophetic, confronting and thought-provoking. While it’s an extreme version of the lives almost all of us live, the elements many of us play with each day inch closer to “living in public”.

The ubiquitousness of social networking, recording devices and ease of worldwide distribution in merely a few years has changed what each generation understands as being public versus private.

I’m all for engaging with social media and I love using Facebook and Twitter, reading blogs, video conferencing and using my iphone. But at the same time, I found myself reflecting on some of the comments made in the documentary – made years before the advent of these things:

• How people find their self-worth based in the number of comments, or reads, or likes or numbers of “friends”.
• How people are crying out to be heard and to get their 15 minutes of fame every day.
• How we think we’re getting community online but we often feel more alone.
• How we trade privacy for connections with people.
• How we forget how public things are when we’re immersed in a culture with no privacy.

When I found myself in the emergency room of hospital ten days ago, I sent txt messages to close friends and family – but didn’t tweet about it. I wanted to know that the people I love deeply knew first. Years ago, news would take quite a while to circulate in a circle of friends and acquaintances but now it can be done in an instant – globally.

I’ve seen numerous times people forget this on Facebook or Twitter and stress about making sure someone knew before they were told by someone else – rather than directly. From the outside, it may seem silly that someone should “forget” that anyone can read it, but once immersed in social media it is hard to remember what private means.

Another result of watching the documentary: I recently did a cull of people on Facebook – names I didn’t recognise, or people I had never exchanged communication with on there. There were surprisingly lots of them and it actually felt good to do a spring-clean.

I also was reflecting on my sister’s comments about how she always left a comment if she looked through a set of someone’s photos on Facebook – she felt a bit stalkerish without doing so. That’s quite a nice thing to do and it really doesn’t take time – let someone know you’ve noticed, you’re interested, you’re there. We read so many blog posts and then skip on to the next interesting thing without stopping to engage – because it’s not required. We’ve swap ease of access for probably less engagement. Yes we don’t have to sit through boring slideshows of other people’s trips and can pick and choose what we want to see, but we’ve lost all those real conversations, the context around the photos – the laughing together, the eating, the swapping of stories. They can be gained online, but it’s more work than we’re used to.

PS, I’m fine!