Blogging Sueblimely

When I read about ways to reward those who comment on blogs I always enthusiastically try them out. I see comments as the life blood of a blog, providing a distribution system for so many other aspects of blogging. Their are plenty of blog posts around about the benefits of leaving comments but what of the benefits we gain by receiving them?

Benefits of receiving comments:

Communication Needs

• Comments are a concrete way of showing that your blog has readers, particularly interested in your blog, rather than just passing trade. The passing trade do comment too but you can distinguish these from your regulars. A hello and thank you to my regulars.
• Satisfaction - Stating the obvious - no one wants to run a blog that is not read by others, for whatever reason we blog. - stats may indicate visitors and readers but figures do not provide the same sort of personal satisfaction.
• Motivation - to keep writing posts and to keep going with the blog itself - many blogs are abandoned (probably too early) because of receiving few or no comments.
• Egos are stroked - a natural human need to one extent or another (not because bloggers in general need ego strokes more than anyone else)
• Social advantages/Social Networking - we get to know others, we develop contacts outside of the blog itself, we can develop friendships, contacts can lead to more contacts and more friends who also come to comment on our blogs - the Blog Loop.
• Networking - again to develop contacts but done for business, professional or money making reasons rather to satisfy strictly personal needs.
• Networking + Social Networking - those who start blogging for the above reasons often find it is the social aspects that motivate them to keep on going.

The Blog Loop and how it goes wrong

This post is not just an off the top of my head type now - it has really got me thinking and I even created an image. Do some of your blog posts develop along these lines?

Feedback

• This includes the pat on the back type comments that help with the motivational and ego stroking needs mentioned above. We know deep down that some of these type are not sincere but how many of us ignore this and choose to appreciate them anyway? This does not include the "nice post", "well done", "I am not adding saying anything else because I just want you to visit my blog" type. These are just a drag and for delete or the spam folder. I notice some of these have snuck into some of my older posts - they will be ex-comments soon.
• Learning which of our posts are popular with our readers. It does not necessarily mean posts that draw the most comments but also those which elicit the more valuable comments - what is valuable depends of course on your own particular blog and your own blogging needs. Being aware of which posts fit these criteria is an enormous help in showing us how to improve and meet the needs of our readers. By aware I mean not just knowing which posts they are but thinking about why they are popular and how to reproduce the success again. Looking at our unpopular posts can be similarly helpful.

Research and learning

• Finding other blogs in our own niche areas can advance our learning of the particular subject we cover. Blogs tend to beget contact from similar blogs. Following your comments and the comments left on their author’s blog can be a source of valuable knowledge.
• Even if you blog on a particular topic by following comments you can find wonderful blogs to interest and entertain you; to satisfy leisure and personal learning needs.
• Comments that give us information, add to the topic, or add things we may have missed are a valuable learning tool (the latter is only of positive use for perfectionist types who do not beat themselves up about missing something.). And to prove that I am not a perfectionist I am going to end here and ask you to add any other positive things you can think of - (Ok the truth - I don’t particularly like missing things but I ran out of steam and ideas and I even like getting comments that tell me what I have missed, as well as ego stroking ones.)

Benefits of Leaving Comments

Simple - just take account of the benefits you gain from receiving comments and bestow these on others - not only will you feel good about yourself you will receive backlinks, kudos, recognition for your own blog, more visitors, readers, increased page rank and all the other stuff you can read one of the many blog posts already written on the subject.

I started this post only intending to tell you some news relating commenting tools but not wanting to lose your attention I will write about these next. I have a real talent for (problem with!) getting completely sidetracked.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Entrecard has just joined forces with SezWho. “SezWhat?” you may be saying - I will explain what it is later in the post but firstly want to talk about Entrecard itself and why this partnership may be very useful to bloggers.

Entrecard has been a great way of bringing visitors to blogs and creating a means for members to get known but it has fallen short in producing significantly extra comments and expanding individual blog’s reader communities. Entrecard has always had higher aims, with goals of bringing not only traffic but also audiences, readership and community participation. I agree with Graeme, the mastermind behind Entrecard, when he says that “Commenting is the second most important thing for you to do after writing quality posts. It was due to his aim to use “The same credits that power our culture responsible for millions of blogger-to-blogger visits each week … to help power a culture that comments on posts as well” that has resulted in the partnership with SezWho.

Now on to SezWho itself:

SezWho is a commenting/comment rating tool, which calls itself a profiling service and engagement platform. It creates a ‘profile’ for your commenters; hovering over their profile image or “check me out” link brings up a box which shows you the latest comments they have made and their SezWho ratings. It allows you to rate posts and the the comments and follow comments via RSS. If you are not registered or logged in when rating then the rating will be processed as anonymous but this has much less impact on member reputation scores. You do not have to have your own site to register with SezWho.

The Profile that pops up for Colin Campbell’s comments.

Its use is aimed at giving highly rated members “web-wide recognition for their insights and expertise”, “thought leadership”, and an increase in traffic. The theory is that the number and quality of comments on your blog will grow.

The Entrecard connection is that credits are awarded to members who comment on SezWho enabled sites. The amount of credits given is based on how highly the comment is rated by those who vote on it - ranging from 1 to 10 Entrecard credits. The idea is that quality comments gain the most, quick meaningless comments left merely for backlinks and spam comments will luck out.

will give SezWho users who receive ratings of 4 stars or more with credits to advertise on its network of blogs. This is an interesting approach, as it connects reputation with a direct reward.

How to integrate SezWho with your site (currently supported platforms are WordPress versions up to 2.6 (2.6 is beta still), Movable Type, Blogger, Drupal and phpBB):

• Create an account with SezWho
• Wordpress - download and intall the SezWho plugin by upload to your plugin folder, activate it. Then enter the blog id sent to you with your registration confirmation email in the SezWho plugin’s setup.
• Blogger - add the provided code to a HTML/Javascript page element.

You can view your own profile on your SezWho page:

Colin must lead thoughts to better places than I do

As I have only just installed the plugin I do not have any ratings, I do have ‘Star Power’ of 2.5 as this “community ranking” is not purely based on ratings?

Advantages

• If this new system takes off and more Entrecarders do comment, rather than merely dropping on you, your blogs bounce rate will improve.
• SezWho does not host any site content. All published and user-supplied content remains on - and is controlled by - the original site. It does not make off with your comments like some similar programs do.
• Backlinks are created for yourself and commenters.
• If you are an extraordinary commenter, a thought leader among bloggers, then your reputation will spread far and wide. If you are average then it may not make any difference to you, although I am sure the word will get round if particular blogs have generous comment ratings. I am open to that word :-). In my case I am sure I will not want to favor one regular commenter over another so will rate them all well, just because I am pleased to see them here. If you are new then I should imagine that I will vary my ratings although I love my comments so much that no doubt I will be generous - it will most likely depend on the mood I am in and if you are using a name that includes such words as casino. (my jury is still out with regards to the keyword luv plugin but I will save that for another post)

Disadvantages

• Receiving low ratings could lead you to have less confidence in your writing, even though it may be that your particular commenters do not want to use the system.
• It could be looked upon as bribing people to comment *
• If you write quality posts you are going to get plenty of comments anyway (I do not believe this always to be the case as it depends on your type of blog and readership)
• Adding to your workload by commenting on blogs just for your ratings is yet another way to divert you from writing and concentrating on your own readers.

Reading:

• On Entrecard’s blog Announcing the Partnership of Entrecard and SezWho
• Entrecard fan Joe Tech’s Top 10 reasons why the Entrecard - SezWho partnership is Important for Bloggers gives a positive review. The 70+ comments on the post show agreement with this view.
• * Entrecard + SezWho = Meh on Monkey Fables and Tales which talks less favorably about SezWho and not wanting to “bribe” people to comment. The 50+ comments on the post show agreement with this view.
• SezWho in operation on a phpBB forum on the SezWho Support Forum

To give you an opportunity to try out SezWho on this site I am will pose some questions.

• Based on this post or on your usage of SezWho are you in favor or against?
• Do you think this partnership is a positive or negative step for Entrecard.
• Are the multitude of peripheral blogging activities available to us now having a general effect of

• reducing blog posting frequency and quality or:
• taking us away from commenting on blogs? Is blog conversation moving to social media sites instead?

Popularity: 8% [?]