Long comments are blog posts, right?
[The following is a comment I made in regard to Spencer Fry’s blog post “Down with Social.”]
I think you’ve made a false (but interesting) divide between what is and isn’t ‘social’.
If you’re arguing that companies don’t need someone tweeting and using facebook exclusively, sure, you may have a point. But the assumption that CRM through email is measurably more valuable than CRM via twitter, facebook, or blog comments doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
If an email response is your definition of ‘measureable’ (even though 1 of your 2 criteria, ‘thorough’ is a qual judgement) then simply counting replies to mentions is the same version of measurable. Twitter is people talking. Facebook is people talking.
If email isn’t people talking, I’ve been using it wrong for 13 years.
The core issue seems to be your definition - you’re argument makes perfect sense if, asLaporte said, social media is exclusively an echo chamber to talk about yourself.
Laporte’s argument was that no one noticed when his tweets weren’t sending, him included. That tells me he was using a conversation tool as a broadcast tool, and probably shouldn’t be calling his use of twitter ‘social’.
”pumping content into the void”? I’d argue that someone who considers a social channel a place to ‘pump content’ isn’t the voice of reason, here.
Anyway, you’re obviously entitled to your opinion, and I may just be misunderstanding your argument. Thanks for sharing.
The Death Of Comments
Blog comments are dying off. This isn’t sad, it’s a natural evolution.
Many of my favourite bloggers, and people, have been reduced to flat out asking people to comment more, in posts, on twitter, and sometimes in conversation. It makes sense, commenting was currency at one point, it was an indicator you’d said something intelligent, conversation starting, insightful or controversial. But I’ve been noticing something of a trend of declining comments, and I think it’s probably a good thing.
Comments are an attempt to corral the conversation, which is generally the worst plan in social media.
The refrain has been coming for a few years now - the brand of the future won’t have a web page, it will have a dozen presences on existing sites, each tailored to the audience that dwells there. I have a feeling this is related to the decline in blog comments - the people who most want to interact with content, use it to start a conversation, or discuss it with the author - they have their own forums.
Blog comments have moved to twitter, or youtube, or facebook, and to our own blogs. They’ve moved to places where we can bring the conversation, and our ideas, to the audiences and friends that we have established individually. When I comment on your blog, I am talking to you, and maybe, if both of us are lucky, the community of people who read your blog on the page where it’s published, rather than in RSS. In realistic terms, other than a means of speaking with the writer, commenting on a blog is putting your words into a corner, and forgetting to tell them time out is over.
When a friend, company or colleague suggest building their own social network, building their own place to host a community and a conversation, I always ask why. I almost never receive a satisfactory answer. Are you going to build a community better than Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn has? Are you going to attract more users than them to yet another service, but this time with such a niche focus that you’re asking them to segment their lives another step further? If your product, your brand, your niche so essential that people will craft another online persona just to interface with it?
If so, we should really go for coffee ;)
And if not, you need to stop trying to own the conversation and the community. You need to start feeling lucky that you get to participate in it, and start figuring out how you’re going to serve it.
Most importantly, you need to stop being disappointed that people are talking about how much they like you in public, rather than waiting until they are inside your living room to do so.
