Posted by New micro-sharing platforms are everywhere. Be it Twitter, your status on Facebook or even FriendFeed, there are many (more places) to drop little notes, thoughts or insights. Couple that with a Blog and/or Podcast and your ability to publish your message is simple, easy and free (if you have the time). But, how are you handling the comments?
Have you noticed that people connected to you on Facebook can now comment on your status updates? It’s not that new of a functionality, but it should give you pause to realize just how much your content is constantly and consistently being scrutinized. As one of the ways to manage all of this micro-content, you can even set yourself up so that when you tweet on Twitter that content becomes your status on Facebook. If you thought that might make your life more manageable, think again. With people adding comments on your Blog, on Twitter, on FriendFeed and on your Facebook status, being available to curate and manage all of the comments on top of the content you are creating is time consuming.
Getting lots of comments is a good thing. It means people are interested in the content you are creating. Having said that, the more places and chances that people have to comment, the tougher it is organize from a personal stand-point, but more importantly, the tougher it is to archive the information in some kind of manageable format.
The whole idea behind commenting was to create a story – one that has the thoughts of the content creator and those of the community and audience in the same space. How is one supposed to keep the flow and logic going when the comments can appear in any one-three locations?
How do you manage your comments and keep the flow of the content going?
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Great post Mitch. This is an issue I’ve been trying to figure out myself. I refuse to have my Twitter account synched with my Facebook status as I find it overkill for my Facebook network.
I signed up to FriendFeed a long time ago, but have yet to really get into it for the same reason you mention. There are simply too many networks to update, especially when you have a career that demands a lot of time, so I choose to give top priority to select networks and study the others until I see it fit to jump in further.
Looking forward to reading the replies to this post for some useful tips.
Part of the fun right now is that many people take delight in the fact that conversations and comments are fragmented. It fits well with the idea that not all commentators are knowledgeable enough about a particular subject.
I don’t doubt that there will come a service that will take advantage of this growing need to automate and consolidate the various commenting systems (e.g. Disqus).
With the exception of obvious spam, I tend to let all comments live on the blog.
The thing about the freedom of speech is that you in order for you to enjoy your opinion, you have to respect the other guy’s opinion too – even if it is unpopular speech. So you have to make allowances for people who are going to disagree with you or call you on certain points.
Where you draw the line on the vehemency of those negative comments is up to you. Some people can take vitriol being spewed at them on their blog. Others, don’t.
Personally, I’m a big fan of “play the ball, not the man” but it seems it’s not a widely-held view out in the blogosphere, so I’ll leave the negative comments out there on my blog. And anyway, I’ve got Editor’s perogative so I’ll always have the last word.
Part of the solution that I use is to at least try to get all of those comments, status updates, etc. coming at me through two routes – either to my email account or as an RSS feed. That at least ensures that I’m listening, which the first step.
Beyond that, I try to spend a little time on each site each day where there might be a conversation going (my blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) responding to those comments. This does not lend itself to a really coherent conversation, but I tend to think that’s the nature of these communities we’re a part of that overlap, but only a little. The conversation is distributed, so it’s different than a conversation that occurs in one place.
yeah, I just keep it simple. Only use Twitter… and do it from time to time.
It’s much easier to manage comments on the blog itself than deal with all these micro-blogging tools…
Most would think that Twitter is an alternative to real blogging…
To be honest I see twitter as a redundant service… or at least something that is more like a communication medium like a mobile phone…
Yeah, I can now say I see Twitter like sms 🙂