As a business owner today you have heard and read that having a blog can be a vital part to getting your message out and creating a community around your brand or company. It is also a great way to share information with others and get feedback from your readership. As blog owners, the way we get our feedback is thru comments. The question comes into play is how do you deal with your comments.

Comment Strategies

A recent article on Contentini.com titled “When Bad Comments Happen to Good Websites: Strategies for Managing Comments Online” talks about the different strategies that you can take to not only promote great discussions on your site, but to also make sure the noise (and spam) stays to a minimum.

Comments can be handled in one of two ways: either pre-publish or post-publish. The difference is whether you let the commenter publish their comment right away or that you moderate the comment first and then publish it. Both strategies work, it just depends on how much work you expect to do and what type of community of comments you would like to build. For example, with pre-publish comment strategies you will need to filter through all the comments for relevance and spam and hand select the comments that work for that post. On the other hand, you could let everything through and then go back and reduce the noise. The later, even though it requires less time, can really fill up a blog post with useless information and even reduce the number of good comments that you could get.

How can WordPress Help?

There are some great commenting plugin systems that WordPress uses to help reduce the noise and spam. The comment systems will capture most spam and spammy looking comments or can have people register, or use social network services such as Twitter and Facebook to comment. Let’s take alot at three popular 3rd Party Commenting systems with plugins for Wordpress.

Zoom View

IntenseDebate

Automatic, the ones behind WordPress, acquired IntenseDebate, making it a real winner with WordPress. IntenseDebate allows for:

• Moderation: Auto-filter comments by keyword, email and IP addresses
• Blacklisting: Auto-delete comments by keyword, email and IP addresses, or ban users from posting
• Spam Filters: Akismet keeps the spam at bay
• Multiple Admins:Multiple Admins illustration Assign additional admins to manage the same blog/website

Commenting can also be done with services like Facebook, Twitter, and OpenID. Commentators can also sign up for an IntenseDebate profile or simply comment without one as a Guest.

Zoom View

Disqus Comments

Disqus Comments lets your readers choose their identity, with Facebook Connect, OpenID, or Twitter Sign-in, when they leave a comment. They also:

• Allow your commenters to easily spread the discussion all across the social web, driving new traffic back to your site in the process. Every time someone leaves a comment, they can easily share the discussion happening on your site to friends and followers.
• Disqus has their own proprietary anti-spam that was built and trained to handle the junk some people try to pass off as comments.

Zoom View

Echo

Echo is the next generation commenting system. It’s the way to share your content, and watch the live reaction. It is a newer player on the commenting block, but is back with features that they other two don’t have. We have not yet used Echo, but it does look promising.

• Echo has Real-time commenting: Watch people react to your content live – without refreshing the page!
• Hyper-Distributed: Visitors share your content with their friends across all their favorite social networks at once – broadening the conversation and driving new traffic.
• Multimedia: Echo items can include safe HTML, photos and video for a richer conversation.
• Strong Moderation: Echo supports countless modes and methods of moderation including ‘Pre Moderation’, ‘Post Moderation’, ‘New User Moderation’, blocking users, blocking IP addresses, bad word filtering, spam detection and more.

Each of these commenting systems have robust spam control to help weed out most of the noise that you would see on a blog. Plus, by having users register with an account, are allowing to use social networks such as Twitter or Facebook (or OpenID), the amount of unecessary and useless comments are weeded out automatically, letting you as the blog owner focus on helping to stimulate the conversation and building your community.

comments | 421(1 comment)http://blog.mosaicteam.com/strategies-for-blog-comment-management-in-wordpressStrategies+for+Blog+Comment+Management+in+Wordpress.2010-07-06+21%3A59%3A45admintags |information sharingpluginswordpress