Dan Schwabel's 5 Free Tools For Reputation Management introduced me to a new listening tool, backtype. It solves the problem of monitoring blog comments where people specifically mention you. People can make comments about you on other blogs and if you only track links from blog posts, you won't see it. BackType lets you find, follow and share comments from across the web. I gave it whirl and it turned up some interesting results.
You can also track other bloggers and see where they commented -- I might do this only to study how the masters do it. An old trick is to observe people who do social media really well and learn from observation. It's interesting to observe Chris Brogan's commenting activity.
Update: Based on a comment to this post, I'm adding some context to comment trackers.
These services let you track conversations that are important to your organization and issue. They also allow content creators to aggregate their online activity and expertise from across the social Web into one centralized, portable profile.
Questions To Ask Before You Dive In:
- What do you need track?
- How will you respond to negative
- comments?
- Will you respond to all comments?
- How to prioritize?
- Which tool is right for you?
Why Commenting and Comment Tracking Is Important
- Commenting is the life blood of blogging and key to building a community
- They’re a way to get more minds into the story.
- They’re a way to annotate someone’s thoughts such that the ideas can take on another dimension.
- They're a way to establish authority in your content niche
Click to see larger image
This diagram, credited to the “New York Times via Ed Philp,” (original source)
illustrates the flow of comments on a blog. If you are reading many
blogs and entering in many conversations, how to track where you've
left comments? That's what this group of tools will help you do.
The Art of Commenting on Blogs
- What did they say well?
- What did they miss?
- Answer questions
- What are other people saying
- How does it apply to you
- Look forward
- Look backward
- Ask what if?
Comment Tracking Tools
(I found out about many of these tools from Brian Solis, Conversation Prism)
SezWho - a social platform that gives the community of readers the ability to not only comment on the post, but also rank the quality and insight of other commenters as well as the post in general. When commenting or voting, the service asks for your email address and then tracks your individual comments and your ranking history to provide interested visitors with an amalgamated representation of your views and aptitude.
Disqus - a comment and discussion plugin for websites, blogs, or applications. Pronounced "Discuss", the plugin makes commenting more interactive by creating a community of discussion across the web. It is a free service with no inline advertisements. Users create a profile and are able to track their comments across the web while creating their very own comment blog.
coComment - a Swiss based comment service attempting to create conversations based on web comments. The service notifies users when new comments are left, and allows the user to post new comments to his/her blog.
co.comments - tracks your comments, and it notifies me automatically by sending the comment to your Google Reader account.
IntenseDebate - attempts to enhance and encourage commenting on your existing blog by adding features like comment threading, reply-by-email, and importing/exporting of comments.
Tangler - Enables the embedding of portable, global conversations across the web, similar to the way YouTube videos are displayed in blogs and Web sites. One widget, one conversation with multiple access points.
General Resource
How To Become An Authority in Your Content Niche by Dosh Dosh
How to Comment Like King or Queen by Coolcat Teacher Blog
Strategic Blog Commenting A Screencast by Amy Gahran
Strategic Blog Commenting: Blog Post by Amy Gahran
Commenting by Alan Levine
Power of Comments by Chris Brogan
How To Add To Blogging Conversations by Darren Rowse
Nasty Blog Comments: Human Nature on Blogs from BlogHerald
Specific About Tools
How To Effectively Track Your Comments on Other People's Blogs with Co.Comment by Sue Waters
Why Disqus is Winning the Web Comment Battle by Louis Gray
Cocomment: Annual Week of Comment Blogging by Alan Levine
Very interesting. I'm going to have to try this out tomorrow.
The biggest dilemma I run into is making a comment on a blog post and then not checking back in to receive any follow up comments that may have been made, either in response or just in further discussion with my comment. This way I could at least keep track of what comments I am making where so that I don't miss an opportunity to connect in discussion with someone.
Thanks for sharing!
Posted by: Ashley Messick | October 01, 2008 at 11:05 PM
@Ashley: Thanks for the comment. We're working on some features that will solve your problem.
@Beth: Thanks for the post.
Posted by: CG | October 01, 2008 at 11:53 PM
There are other tools that can do specifically that - but I like how this lets you zero in on who is talkin about you
There are other tools with more features, but not as easy to use.
CoComment
Co.Comments
Discuss
Posted by: Beth Kanter | October 02, 2008 at 04:26 AM
Beth - I just wanted to thank you for this post...absolute essentials of reputation management.
Posted by: Lateef | October 02, 2008 at 09:43 PM
I really like BackType ... thanks for sharing the info.
Beth ... i would really love to have a conversation with you some day about how you 'listen' on a day to day basis. :)
--
http://twitter.com/franswaa
Posted by: frank | October 05, 2008 at 07:52 PM
Hi Beth. Been reading you for a while but this is my first comment here. This is a great post: I have signed up to Backtype. (And subscribed to Chris Brogan's comments, potentially a brilliant way of discovering more great blogs on our topic - good one!)
Not sure if you're aware of me and my blog. Found you via Jeremy Gould. I have just posted a round up of listening tools at http://tinyurl.com/5d3k4m which might be of interest. Would love to pick your brains about any I have missed, and your experience of getting clients in public sector to start tuning into the online conversations.
Comment tracking is a pretty advanced kind of listening. Is it something you've been doing corporately (say: tracking comments which mention a particular organisation or issue) or just personally (named individuals, personal branding)? If the former, I would imagine it's a hard one to sell in and explain...?
Posted by: Neil Williams | November 05, 2008 at 12:21 AM