Blog Comments: Should Your Blog Shut Down Comments?

Do you like to get comments on your blog?

Have you ever wondered if you should allow comments or shut them down?

To learn about why blog comments are valuable to your business, I interview Mark Schaefer and Tim McDonald for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Mark Schaefer, who is a college educator and author of four books. His blog is called Grow and his latest book is Social Media Explained. Tim McDonald is the director of community at the Huffington Post, founder of My Community Manager and a member of the No Kid Hungry Social Council.

Mark and Tim share what comments mean to their blogs, and some of the challenges they face with moderation.

You'll discover the upside of blog comments, how you can use them to improve your business and moderation tactics for different-sized blogs.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
Listen Now
You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, or Stitcher.

Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Blog Comments
A long time ago, Seth Godin shocked the industry when he decided to shut down comments on his blog. He didn't really care for comments—for him it was more about generating daily content.

More recently, Brian Clark and his team at Copyblogger decided to shut down their blog comments. As a result of this, there has been a lot of interesting dialogue in this space.

The upside of blog comments

Mark explains how there are a lot of different business reasons behind blogs, and it's up to each individual business to make the decision whether to have comments on their blog.

He says that there are probably some very good economic reasons why Copyblogger decided to remove comments, but Mark thinks that blog comments are the economic engine.

The community that Mark has built on his blog has led to many different business benefits for him and his community. You can get to know people in the comment area, which can lead to collaborations, customers and suppliers.

Mark feels that a lot of influence takes place in the blog communities, where you can develop strong relationships compared to the ones you make on Twitter or Facebook.

You'll hear other great benefits that come from comments on your blog, and why Mark sees them as a gift every day.

The Huffington Post has a little bit of a different viewpoint, just because of their sheer size. They face a bigger challenge because of the number of comments they get every day. It's hard for them to actually interact and engage with every single commenter.

Tim explains at this point, it's a matter of them looking at some of the prolific commenters on their site and working with them. They've found that some commenters don't want to write for them, they are happy just commenting.

Listen to the show to find out the cost of engagement, and why you can engage yourself broke.

Some of the challenges the Huffington Post faces with blog comments

Tim says that the biggest issue for them is to figure out how to allow people to share and express their thoughts on content, while appreciating that the standard for commenting is different from their editorial standards.

They have to find ways to moderate this effectively with the different languages, countries and time zones.

You can't replace a human when it comes comment moderation. You need to find a balance between using technology, combined with what people can do.

You'll hear how the Huffington Post deals with heated dialogue and negative comments on their blogs.

When it comes to dealing with spam, last year they made all commenters authenticate ...