Stop treating me like a Troll, I’m a real person with real opinions!!

Made Essential Reading on 23 June 2011 Felix Hemsley

As we find ourselves immersed in the digital age, we’re becoming increasingly obsessed with insight and analysis of user interaction, visits, page views, downloads, goals, conversions and any other metric you care to name. Focusing on blogs the one very important interaction mechanic and function is the ability to comment.

As a content creator and blog editor I look forward to, and get that warm feeling, when someone comments on a blog post with kind words or an alternative point of view.

If I didn’t want people to comment I’d turn off that functionality. Making it a black and white decision either you can manage comments effectively (a great post on the trials and tribulations of trolls can be found at Econsultancy) in which case you read each and every comment and post anything as long as it adheres to your guidelines or alternatively you can turn it off altogether.

However, I’ve recently noticed that blogs which I regularly read – which are by no means big players – are simply not nurturing those who try to participate in commenting on their blogs and in my experience my comments (which contained nothing but kind words and a potential extension to a piece) often don’t even appear. My delightful colleague @richard_turrell has joked that it’s because my opinions are boring, but the whole reason for allowing comments is so others can share their opinions, as a result of this apparent neglect I have become strangely irritated and widely disillusioned by certain blogs.

There is one blog in particular which I can no longer read as none of my comments have ever been posted, which to me is counter-productive, lazy or just plain bone-idle, which has ultimately lost them a reader and an engaged one at that.

In summary: If you’re keen to write content online and you have a comments section on your blog, then manage it in a structured and timely fashion. If you believe you don’t have the resource or time to handle them, then I suggest you turn commenting off. But whatever you do, please don’t neglect your readers who are trying to have some input, they have invested time reading your content and replying, the least you could do is do the same.