Day 28 – Blog Commenting Strategy

This challenge asks us to answer the question “Do you think it’s important to take a more strategic view of commenting and to have a plan for how you want to incorporate commenting into your overall online behavior?”

And my answer is not really. Unless that strategy is as follows: Be authentic. Comment because you have something to say. Focusing on any other motives can’t help but compromise authenticity. Doesn’t mean you can’t be aware and even embrace the auxiliary impact that commenting might have on your brand or on traffic back to your blog or whathaveyou. But again, I’m not willing to construct my notions of commenting around anything other than contributing to conversations in meaningful ways. Whatever else follows from that is icing.

Day 29 – Commenting guide for students

This challenge is geared towards the educators who make up the majority of the challenge participants. So rather than fumble around aimlessly, I’ll refer any students to my response to the day 28 challenge: <guide>Be authentic.</guide>

Day 30 – How Can You Use What You’ve Learned about Commenting to Change Your Teaching Practices?

Again, not much to say here. I’ve learned, if nothing else, that people prefer a variety of commenting styles, just as people have different learning style preferences. We have to provide the means to learn and participate in a variety of media to let everyone engage in the ways that work best for their learning needs.

Day 31 – My five take-aways

OK, here we are, leaving the challenge with more of a whimper than a roar.

1. Be authentic. I knew this already, but believe it now more than ever.
2. Video commenting is awesome. If you haven’t tried it, but have a webcam, give it a go in the comments on this post. I promise a video response to any video newcomers.
3. 31 straight days of blogging is about 27 too many for me. I couldn’t do it. And I couldn’t write anything else in the meantime.
4. The edu-tech community is awesome. I love all of the engaged people who’ve come and commented on this blog via the challenge, all of whom have outstanding blogs in their own right. A true pleasure.
5. I (and this blog) have a great community. I’ve been blown away by the quality and quantity of conversations on this blog since I’ve started writing again. It’s totally motivating. Thank you for that.

Looking back, the challenge was rewarding in a number of ways, even though my motivation really flagged in the final two weeks. It really got me thinking about how I engage conversations both here and elsewhere. I walk away from it feeling pretty good about where I am and confident that there is still more to learn. Thanks to the challenge organizers for making it happen and thanks to my regular readers for enduring this past month. I now return you to your regular library blog.

Personal branding is a new concept to me. If Twitter was fully functional, I’d point you in the direction of an update from just a few days ago. I commented that when I was previously talking about marketing librarians, I might have more properly been talking about personal branding. For a good intro to the concept of personal branding, check out Tom Peters on the topic.

Recognizing that commenting builds your personal brand is one thing. Being able to assess what your comments say about your brand is another. I’m going to assume that my comments sound a lot like my blog posts. That is, the sound of one guy talkin’. I hope that, in addition, they say that I’ve actually taken the time to read and digest what you’ve written. I hope they say that I’m opinionated (and, most of the time, thoughtful). I hope they say that I’m engaged and that I give a damn. Beyond that, you probably have a better idea of what my comments say than I do.

How can I improve my commenting behavior with an eye toward building my personal brand?

One tweak that I’m going to make to my commenting behavior comes from this post, where the author realizes the benefits of using a consistent, singularly identifiable name in his commenting. I’ve usually commented as “Greg” and although I think most people whose blogs I’m commenting on know who I am, that doesn’t help other people who might be reading those comments. So expect to see me comment in full-name format from here on in.

Any other suggestions? What’s working or not working for you? Are you even thinking about your personal brand? Methinks you ought to consider it.

The conversation surrounding my implementation of video commenting was well-balanced between enthusiasm for the expressiveness of the medium and hesitation due to the barriers of both producing and consuming content in that medium. I come down strongly on the side of offering as many different ways to comment as possible. Yes, it might take longer to consume the comment, but you’re worth it. I haven’t given enough energy to examining audio commenting tools, although I suppose you could use Seesmic without a camera to that end. We’ll save that exploration for another challenge.

But yesterday, I finally regrouped, changed gears and sought out the Indonesian blogosphere. I quickly found a post with some visuals that spoke to something I could comment on, namely the Ofcom report on social networking. Of course, I had to find a translation tool. Not much out there for Indonesian-English translation, but I found a trial of a tool called Kotaku, which translates the first 300 words of any web page. Close enough. You can find the post, along with my comment and its translation here.

Today, we’re supposed to highlight a favorite comment, but I don’t want to do that, for the very same reason I didn’t want to pick a favorite commenter: I don’t want to discourage anyone who’s inclined or even tempted to leave a comment here. And I don’t want to tell you what makes a good comment (which is tomorrow’s challenge), lest it shape the way you leave comments.

Almost any comment left on this blog is a good comment in my book. I’m not about to start making qualitative judgments based on some set of arbitrary criteria that I conjure for the purpose of this challenge. I just appreciate that you take the time to say whatever’s on your mind. I try to respond in kind.

I’m not sure it matters. I don’t have any meaningful recommendations to make and feel a bit disingenuous making a recommendation for the purpose of completing a challenge. So I’m gonna leave this alone for the moment and assume that the right moment to make a meaningful suggestion will present itself. I’ll hope that’s still in keeping with the spirit of the challenge.

To ensure that I didn’t end up in library land, I started with Chris Brogan’s Rockstars, which led me to socialTNT. From there, I found Shoestring Branding, from whose blogroll I found my final destination, Escape from Cubicle Nation. I chose to comment on a post called Help Me, Help You, where the author discusses recognizing opportunities to get help from others and seizing them.

And so take that, Comment Challenge! Until we meet again…

There have been challenges. The Twitter question generated so many comments so quickly that I was overwhelmed before I even began. I ended up leaving a generic thanks for commenting comment, which is embarrassingly lame. Yet I can’t muster up the strength to tackle personal responses to 30 comments, most of which are variations on a theme (albeit interesting and notable variations). Can I declare comment bankruptcy?

The day 18 challenge involves further analysis of commenting patterns on your blog. Because I’ve lost my entire comment history from the Movable Type days, I have a pretty limited set of posts from which to draw data.

* Which of your posts have generated the most comments?

Well, the one where I went fishing for comments on Twitter received 30 comments.

The launch of video commenting drew 21 comments.

My Thoughts on Managing My Social Network post garnered 18 comments.

The big winner though is my Stepping Into Marketing post, which generated 38 comments.

* Which has generated the best conversation? (The last question is about quantity; this one is about quality.)

I think the marketing post clearly had the most mojo and generated the best conversation between commenters. One of the commenters took the conversation over to his blog, where I continued the discussion with him at considerable length. The video commenting also introduced some nice back and forth between commenters, which I enjoyed immensely.

As an aside, if you haven’t tried out the Seesmic video commenting plugin on this blog and have the technology to do so, please do give it a go. So much fun.

* Are there any patterns to the commenting on your own blog? Do certain types of posts generate more comments than others?

I think the posts where I ask/ponder the types of questions that people are already asking themselves and each other draw the best comments. How do we manage our social networks? Why do I use Twitter so fervently?

But really, it’s just plain hard to predict what people will talk about, as Walt Crawford observed during the first comment audit. For example, only two people commented on my comments on librarian rock-stardom, but Walt picked it up for the latest Cites and Insights. Never know who will respond to something you’ve written. But you gotta put it out there and see what sticks.

* If you do see a pattern or commonality between posts that generate good comments, what can you do to increase those qualities in other posts?

I don’t believe that the primary purpose of this blog is to generate comments, so I’m not sure that I want to bring that mentality to every post I write. Sometimes I just want to share.

I’m started by exploring blogs and podcasts of other registrants to Podcamp Ohio, for which I recently registered. (My first podcamp. So excited!)

One of the registrants is co-founder of Social Media Club Louisville, which I had no idea existed. So comment 1 is on the SMC Louisville blog. I also tried to comment here at another Louisvillian podcamper’s blog, but something is broken in the commenting, so I sent the author an email instead. I’m counting it.

I wanted to comment on this blog, but the author explicitly said “the best way to interact with me for now is on Twitter.” I commented anyway.

I then switched gears and commented on a submission for this week’s Uncontrolled Vocabulary. And finally, I commented on a post related to an attempted one-off revival of the Carnival of the Infosciences.

This took much, much longer than five minutes. It took hours. I’m not cut out for speed commenting. It doesn’t suit me in any fashion. Now I know.