Cameron Olthuis over at Link Building Blog has been pondering the importance of positive comments on social media stories. His take is that even good content can be irreparably wounded by a few negative comments appearing first on its comment thread. We know about the classic social media trait of voting for (or voting down) a story before actually reading it, but I was always of the mind that voters made their decisions from the title, subject and short description of a story. I did not consider the possibility that others' comments made much of a difference.
Whether a comment is "good" or not is also a bit subjective. If the story is about something that really gets people's blood up, the definition of "positive" is harder to determine. For example, stories about Fox News reporting falsehoods and gossip frequently make it onto social news sites and the majority of comments are tirades against the network. They rarely say anything, positive or not, about the actual story that's been submitted.
If an initial comment is negative enough, it sometimes ignites a flame war that seems to attract readers to a story. I'm more likely to take a look at the comments when there are a lot of them, and lots of comments usually indicates a disagreement or two. When readers gang up on an early commenter, they tend to vote for the story out of spite, simultaneously voting down their other person's comment. The mental process here appears to be "I disagree with your negative review of this thing, so I'm going to vote it up just because I can."
Cameron talks about the immaturity aspect of some social media contributors, and it is surely immaturity that makes readers decide what they're going to vote for and what they're going to vote down based on the views of other people. His advice is to ask your friends to make a few positive comments on stories you submit or have an interest in. I'd go as far as to say that "baited" comments should probably be even more than positive - they should begin a discussion that other readers will feel compelled to join. I know that I'm more likely to vote for something that I've commented on, instead of just clicking through, looking at the external story and then leaving. I'm also more likely to comment if there's already some interesting discussions taking place.
That said, a story whose first comment is "thus story sucks" is already somewhat disadvantaged. A better comment to see would be, "this story sucks because ____." At least then, despite your story being cursed with a negative thread, readers actually have something to talk about.
By: Jane Copland
Do The Comments Really Matter?
Social Media
The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.
Positive, negative whatever. The initial comments just need to add value.
Even a negative, trolling, flaming or sarcastic comment can add value if it enhances the overall conversation.
Entire communities have been built on the back of such commentary.
Here on SEOmoz, Michael Martinez often has views that are blunt and go against the grain, yet these comments always add a lot more quality to the conversation.
Comments may not matter to transient audiences but for the creators, contributors and passive lurkers that have more than a passing interest in the article, the comments can often add more value than the article itself. If not, we'd all still be reading broadsheet newspapers offline.
I would imagine that all of this has opened up new areas for research... the impact of group theory, celebrity (if only within the community), and recency effects within the blog and social media communities.
Not to mention entire new career opportunities for those with multiple personality disorder ;)
Where it has been established that comments are not just acceptable but important, the quality of the comment will matter (negative or positive).
On a site with little or not interaction that way, it could be seen as sour grapes or friends commenting to boost morale.
On our news site, negative comments don't seem to affect readership as much. On our blog site, it inspires more interaction. I haven't seen what it does to our designer creative sharing site yet.
I suppose to a certain extent comments - positive or negative - will drive traffic to a site. Negative ones may even inspire other blog entries and linking... commentbait
;)
There ya go - all you SEOmozzers have created a new word!
I've found on other blogs (not this one - this is never an issue here!) that if there are zero comments, the comments tend to stay at zero for quite some time. Often, the first person to comment is a staffer or the post's author, or "commentors" who I'm pretty sure are just bait. Other readers are tempted into clicking through to read comments, and then are far more likely to add a comment themselves.
Commentbait, indeed.
I've found that on my own blog. It took something like 100 visitors/day to get past the zero comment barrier. Once one or two people started to comment, getting small batches of comments was quite a bit easier, but there seems to be a critical mass needed to get the ball rolling.
Then again, maybe I'm just especially boring.
Once the swimming blog that I help maintain got to 100 unique visitors a day, we started getting comments. I think the longest comment thread we had was about 25... although there was the one where I had to delete about 20 comments... and no, it wasn't spam. But we won't go there :)
Suffice to say, people will start commenting when there are a) people to talk to and b) already comments. And yeah, I baited posts with comments in the beginning. And it worked!
I use one fairly innocuous form of comment-bait. I've made some friends in the usability space and local business community, and when things get slow, we comment on each other's blogs. It helps keep us all rolling, and is quite a bit more white-hat than posting on my own blog under an assumed name. People might get suspicious if my first comment was always from "Dr. Steve" :)
Haha, I don't know that I feel bad about adding some comments to the blog I have an interest in. I was always commenting on something that I didn't write... still, the username Jay Copeland might have been silly, hmm?
Yeah, when the first three comments were by "Jay Copeland", "Joan Capland" and "John Kaplan", people probably started to catch on :) I actually found the comment exchange a little easier, in some ways. Leaving a halfway decent comment on a friend or colleague's blog just comes more naturally to me than trying to concoct one for my own. I've also found that it's pretty easy to build a blog community, where, by posting regularly on some smaller blogs, those authors tend to reciprocate (even if they don't know me). For example, there are a handful of grad. students around the world that comment on my usability blog because I'm a regular visitor to their blogs.
I did the same thing to get comments going on my blog. I made a few friends online who also had blogs that weren't attracting much in the way of comments.
Once we started commenting on each other's blogs and most posts had at least a few comments I noticed more people joining in as well.
I agree too about it feeling more natural to comment on a friend's blog. We'll even talk about things sometimes that have very little to do with the post. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not, but I think it comes across as friendly and makes things feel more like a community. I suppose it can run the risk of getting cliquish though.
Vangogh, I recognize your blog from yuris blog, improvetheweb which I link to alot from feedthebot, geesh I have much reading to do. Is Yuri in SEOmoz's tangled web somewhere?
I didn't know you knew Yuri until now of course. Yuri is here somewhere, though I think he's been busy lately and hasn't been by much. Cool that you recognized me from there though. For awhile we were guest posting on each other's blogs. I probably have a half dozen posts or so over there and he has about the same at my blog.
A good example of this is on this search engine land post where the first comment is someone criticizing our premium membership. Unfortunately the person who posted it is confused about which tool is the crawl test (they thought it was the page strength tool), and I don't think they even signed up for a premium membership. I think on high quality blogs and other sites where quality discussion occurs I think it's important to jump in there and defend yourself if something negative is posted. On social media sites, digg in particular, I don't even bother defending any negative comments. Digg users are a bunch of trigger happy pessimists and it really doesn't make a difference if the thread following a submission is positive or negative, because most people take digg commentary with a very fine grain of salt.
Although I dislike both, I can deal with negative comments better when the person's actually taken the time to check out what they're about to crap all over.
I find the search engine land comment amusing because of the a) confusion and b) lack of research.
At least when some takes the time to read what you've written you can take it as constructive criticism even if it's not meant that way. The ones that don't take the time to read are often so off base with their comment that they don't even realize they're agreeing with what you said.
Here's a simple experiment for anyone who does A/B or MVT testing.One group of users is shown 50 comments to the latest post. Another group of users is shown the same blog post but this time with 0 comments. Measure the clickthrough rate for both. Pretty easy to guess the winner right? But what's the actual difference? And why?
Blogging and comments can be seen as a psychological study of audience dynamics. Within any mob (the comments section), there are leaders (the initial constructive comments that guide the direction of the conversation), sergeants (follow-on commentators), rank-and-file (the posts that don't enhance the conversation) and the bystanders (passive lurkers).
Understanding the interaction between these commentators can be very useful. For example, most sites usually have a lot more lurkers than contributors. How do you coax these lurkers out of their shells and turn them into contributors?
The trick is to convert these new contributors into regular contributors, but that's a comment for another blog entry :)
Great post, Jane. :)
I dont know how many people read blog comments, do we really do? Advantage is from SE point of you, you get a lot of content for your small post.
Generally when I search on mattcutts.com I get pages because of the comments. Thats a big advantage.
This story sucks ;)
Personally I don't think comments like that really hurt. If your blog/site/whatever is popular anyway and you've got your regular readers then someone's going to call them out on it. And to paraphrase Shor: all conversation is good.
Aw, is my story crap? Or is Cameron's? Or both?! I'm on the fence as far as the subject's crappiness is concerned. I agree that all discussion is good (as I said, I'll click through to comments if there looks like there might be a good discussion going on), but if every comment says that the content is a joke, then that isn't good at all. Even if you get some short-term attention, the bad press for a brand is only going to hurt.
I think it's an interesting subject. I think Cameron's point is that the early comments can easily direct the comments that come after it and also the votes. Why take a chance that the first few comments will be of the 'this sucks' variety. If you can get that first comment to be more intelligent and perhaps more in your favor then you'll probably get more positive votes, more positive comments about your post, and a more intelligent conversation about your post.
the classic social media trait of voting for (or voting down) a story before actually reading it
wow, isn't this often the case. One must ask how much effort it is really worth trying to bait Diggers or Myspacers. One popular tactic is to spend your valuable time creating highly controversial, funny, even negative stories aimed at these users. Negative comments will flow your way no matter what you do, and nothing attracts readers like controversy.
Controversy and negativity are key pillars of Fox News massive success :)
I think you are right that comments do affect readership, and your suggestions are good ones, I especially like the "this story sucks because..." comment because that is so true and it could easily be used to ones advantage. Imagine if the first comment of someting you see was...
"That story sucks because open source software is a fad and you all know it."
I would read that story just out of WTF value.
A clever person could use this sort of thing like mad. Thanks for pointing that out. I am but a wee little boy in blogging and social stuff, so I am basically treating all of your guys articles on blogging the way Republicans use the earth. I am taking everything I can get, I am strip-mining your wonderful minds to use to my advantage (add Dr Evil laugh here).
Commentbait (both as in baiting the comments and the comments being the bait...)
Since we've all exhausted linkbait ad nauseum, perhaps comment-bait is the way to go.
Commentbait!
Brilliant!
The only prob is now we will hear about it constantly, and users will then start having "comment blindness" and then noone will leave comments anymore, then web 2 will fall over and go over a cliff, catching on fire as it is rolling down the side of a hill like a car in Dukes of Hazzard (the one where Daisy was a Brunette). And then the internet will cease to exist and this will all happen on a thursday sometime in May, preferably after SMX because someone offered me a beer there and it would totally suck if i didn't get it due to commentbaiting.
Re: going over the cliff -> here's hoping!
Kidding... although I wouldn't mind seeing some Web 2.0 sites crash and burn.
I'm amazed how many comments seem to be based off of one word in the title, and so the whole article ends up getting attacked by people who didn't even read it. Worse yet, they back that comment up with completely irrelevant trivia:
Pete, you're not the only one amzed. Some of those comments make it so obvious the post wasn't read and you have to wonder why someone is even voting on it.
Those comments can be a great source of entertainment though.
On Reddit:
Comments matter big time. The more comment-worthy the story is, the more likely it is to rise high and stay there. Stories on that particular site flow largely on the strength of the headline, and then on the depth and quality comments that follow... which can be rich and substantial discussions (lamer comments tend to be buried quite quickly, and not rewarded... like they sometimes are on Digg)
Many of the stories that have done very well on that site recently are submissions and/or headlines that solicit comments and reader interpretations, i.e. "What is Barack Obama thinking here? (pic)"
That's what I love about reddit: not only are the stories usually more intersting overall, but the comments are (in general) reasonably intelligent and worth reading...even the snarky ones have some meaning related to the story.
While I like reddit loads better than Digg, I almost never read the comments on reddit, but I almost always read the comments on Digg. I think it's because Digg's design is more conducive to user participation, wheras reddit's comment system is very light, plain, and a bit hard to read.
I guess my concern is getting enough practice that's not going to add up to a bunch of "bury it" or "story sucks" to my online "resume". That's my concern.
Seeing as we don't really know how Digg, Reddit etc value your profile based on your submissions, this is indeed a real concern. We know that becoming a successful Digger involves having submitting a lot of content and having it become popular often; we don't know how being buried hurts a user.
Unless, of course, you're Jane. In which case Digg hates you and will bury anything you touch...and then ban your account for the umpteenth time. ;)
Twice. It was banned twice and so I just created a new one with a totally different username. Suck it, Rose :-D
Was that...wait...was that a Golden Girls referrence?! Holy shit, Copland, I never knew you had in ya.
Thank you for being a friend...