How is your Comment Quality Quotient?
April 26, 2008 | By Lorelle VanFossen | Filed Under Blog Relationships, Blogging, Comments, Editorial
At a conference, I heard someone trying to explain the Comment Quality Quotient theory to a small group during a break. It went something like this:
You got your good comments. You got your bad comments. You got your comment spam. Somewhere in the middle, you got your time waster comments. Which do you want more of? Which do you want less? Which do you want gone?
The better the comments on your blog, the better your blog, right? So you need to improve your Comment Quality Quotient.
While everyone agreed that comment spam and “bad” comments were unwanted, a number of the group agreed they wanted the time waster comments gone as well. They all wanted good, clear, quality comments that contributed to their content. The problem was determining how to improve their Comment Quality Quotient.
How do you improve the quality of your blog comments? The ratio of valuable comments from the time wasters and boring commenters?
I asked them that question. Here are some of their responses:
- Quality Content Dictates Quality Comments: The better the quality of writing, the better the integrity of the content in general, the more improved the Comment Quality Quotient.
- Leave Room for the Readers to Comment: If you say everything, there’s nothing left to be said. Leave room for the readers to add their own perspectives and say.
- Consistent Content Creates Consistent Comment Quality: By building a strong fan-base with consistent content subject matter, the blogger sets a tone and controls the topic for discussion, eliminating the off-topic comments. The blogger also relies upon that fan-base to set the comment tone.
- You Get What You Give: The quality of comments are set by the tone of how the blogger responds to comments, on their blog and others.
- Quality Means Editing Your Comments: To control your comment quality, you must edit your comments when people break the “rules” by removing signatures, cleaning up misspellings, and deleting useless and inappropriate comments and comment spam, so what is left sets the standard.
How is your Comment Quality Quotient? Do you, too, wish it was better? Do you think about how you comment on other blogs as setting the tone for the comments to follow you? Do you consider how your comments can change the life of the blogger or another reader? Do you even think about how each comment you leave on blog is a mini-resume of your blog? How can you improve your comment quality, on your blog and off?
About the author: The author of Lorelle on WordPress, as well as several other blogs, Lorelle VanFossen has been blogging in one fashion or another for over 14 years, covering travel, nature and travel photography, web design, web theory and development, blogging, and WordPress extensively as web technologies developed. Lorelle is also the author of the fast-selling book, Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging, available in the new Blog Herald Bookstore.
Comments
One Response to “How is your Comment Quality Quotient?”
Leave a Reply
Sponsors
News
Ghost Bloggers Growing in Popularity?July 18, 2008 | By Andrew G.R. | 2 Comments
Toronto’s Globe and Mail is asking the question that’s on everybody’s mind (sarcasm): Does rapper Kanye West have a “ghost blogger?”
While the concept of ghost writing is hardly new (celebs have been relying on professional writers to create content that is officially credited to them forever), it looks like ghost blogging is blipping onto [...]
PodPress Update in 10 Days
July 18, 2008 | By Thord Daniel Hedengren | 1 Comment
PodPress is probably the most used podcasting plugin for WordPress, and the one we’ve been using here at The Blog Herald. However, there have been issues with it since WordPress 2.5, and it doesn’t work with recently released 2.6. Among others that are frustrated are David Peralty, who’s written about the issue.
Luckily, the PodPress developer [...]
Twitter Outage Used to do Upgrades, New Design Being Tested
July 18, 2008 | By Thord Daniel Hedengren | Leave a Comment
Twitter experienced an unplanned outage, and is down and out for maintenance. They are using this outage to upgrade the affected database, according to a blog post. The service is still down, but hopefully we’ll be getting our microblogging cravings satisfied soon.
Speaking of Twitter, they have apparently tested a new design on select users. SheGeeks [...]
Unannounced Blogging Hiatus
July 17, 2008 | By Andrew G.R. | Leave a Comment
I’m back after a three-week bout of NoBloggingitis (be careful, it might be contagious). I never intended not to blog. Simply put, life just got in the way. The big event in my life was selling my place and moving into a new one. While I expected it to be stressful, [...]
Female Bloggers Want Out of Playboy Poll
July 17, 2008 | By Thord Daniel Hedengren | 3 Comments
Veronica Belmont and Sarah Austin wants out of the sexiest female bloggers poll on Playboy, according to a story on TechCrunch, but Playboy says no. It would, of course disrupt the poll. While I have no love for these kind of polls, and the Playboy one is no exception, I do think that if you’ve [...]
Pownce App Updates
July 17, 2008 | By Thord Daniel Hedengren | 1 Comment
Microblogging service Pownce have updated their Pownce Desktop app to 2.0, which means you’ll get embedded media, notification alerts, friend management, and more. Pownce Desktop 2.0 is in alpha, and free to download.
The Pownce developers have also made an iPhone and iPod touch version available from the iTunes App store. Free, of course.
Patrons
Sponsored Links
Recent listings from Blogger Jobs
Business Bloggers WantedWe got this from Business Man World: We are looking for bloggers to write about business on a bloggers community. It is not necessary to have previ [...]
A Trio of Blogging Opportunities
This batch is courtesy of our sister site, Performancing.com: Retro Gaming bloggers needed! — “We need bloggers who are passionate abou [...]
Today.com is Hiring Bloggers Daily
Today.com is hiring bloggers daily!! Join the fastest growing blog network in the world If you like to write and would like to make money part time, [...]
Blogging Jobs at MechaWorks
We got this through email from MechaWorks: MechaWorks is a new blogging start-up and we’re offering several new blogging positions. So, if you [...]
Weekly Bloggers for Hire 45
Want your profile here? Read this earlier post for more info. Remember: please follow the instructions there. One-liners will be ignored and have be [...]
More at Blogger Jobs
Contributors
- Andrew G. Rosen
- Andy Merrett
- Anne Helmond
- Arvind Satyanarayan
- Chris Garrett
- Darnell Clayton
- David Krug
- David Peralty
- J. Angelo Racoma
- Jason Kaneshiro
- Jonathan Bailey
- Lorelle VanFossen
- Matt Craven
- Thord Hedengren
- Valeria Maltoni
Our Blog Metrics
Recommended
When you moderate nearly all comments with Spam Karma because of the way you have it set up, in the email notification you only have 2 options.
Spam
Approve
If you hit the first option on the poor quality comments, after a while you never see them any more (from the same person)
Quality comments generally encourage other quality comments so much, that any legitimate commenter either constructively joins the conversation, or keeps their mouth shut.
The hard choice is the very short comments which seem on topic… almost… often from first time commenters on a number of posts.
Most of those hit the spam button as well when I see that they came from a dofollow search engine.
The hard part is writing something interesting enough in the first place to gain a few comments, and having enough readers to ensure there is some conversation on every post.