To Comment or Not to Comment

In the past, the Visual People blog has deliberately not turned on comments. We love hearing from our customers and potential customers, but we’ve utilized other avenues for having those conversations.

We, like many of our small business clients, have found some reasons why not having comments works better for us.

Moderating and responding to blog comments takes time. Most of our small business owner clients are crunched for time as it is. We encourage them to take what time they have available to create more blog content.

We recommend the use of blogs as tools to increase traffic to the business’s website. Blogs are amazing ways to attract people to your website, as they incorporate lots of on-topic expertise and keywords that get indexed by Google and other search engines.

Many of our clients want to have more of an article archive than a true give-and-take blog. It can be a hassle to deal with commenters who question your expertise – it’s hard to respond appropriately and come away looking professional. So they would rather not worry about how to deal with negative comments on their own blogs.

We’d like to encourage people to expand on — or contradict — our thoughts in their own blogs, where they can write and share more than in a small comment area.

We also agree with what marketing expert blogger Seth Godin wrote in 2006, “I think comments are terrific, and they are the key attraction for some blogs and some bloggers. Not for me, though. First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way too much of my time to even think about them, never mind curate them. And finally, and most important for you, it permanently changes the way I write. Instead of writing for everyone, I find myself writing in anticipation of the commenters.”

But, we’ve recently decided to turn comments on in our blog as an experiment. Why? We’ve been blogging daily and aim to continue doing so, and we’ve received a few requests for an option to comment. It seems worthwhile to give it a shot, and see if the purpose of comments – increasing dialogue with friends, fans, online media experts, potential customers – will prove interesting and beneficial.

So, give it a shot – let us know what you think about our blog and our decision to allow comments. We do appreciate your thoughts.

What's your advice?

After thinking about it for quite some time, I’ve come to the conclusion of definitely YES. It allows for interaction, which is the very essence of social media. And, even if a comment is negative or contrarian, it allows you demonstrate grace and humility, which are very attractive business qualities.

Chris Nordyke is the best example of this. Here’s his actual response to a bad review

— Bill Zipp Apr 2, 08:48 AM

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