Online Commenting And Community — Where Are We Going?

A couple of weeks ago, it was my one year anniversary with ERE Media and I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about online comments and online communities in general. When I accepted the role of Community Director, I didn’t expect the job to be easy. I expected it to be a challenge. The biggest thing that I didn’t anticipate though was how much my assumptions about online communities would shift over the course of a year. I also didn’t anticipate that it would still feel like progress has been, well, less than ideal.

I’m not a newbie to online communities. I mentioned at the Social Recruiting Summit last year that I have been involved with them since dial-in BBS’s were popular. When the web started to explode, I used IRC chat to discuss anything and everything. I created my own websites too and I bought my first domain name 12 years ago. I also had a fairly active account on LiveJournal (received 12k+ comments on my posts there and managed a big political community there). After that it was on to blogging, twitter and starting a blog/social network (mostly all in my professional realm).

The more I got into professional communities in the last year, the more I’ve doubted everything I thought. I know a major part of that is simply focusing in on the subject matter as a full time job rather than as a side job. Still, I am consistently humbled by how little actionable data I can use when making decisions or thinking of new ways of approaching a situation. Here is a sort of brain dump of what I’ve figured out and what I’m still struggling with.

Online Commenting

Let’s take the low hanging fruit here: online comments are going downhill quick. And that’s not an affront to people who comment here or on ERE Media sites (I would definitely rate the conversations here and there as much above average most of the time). If you go to most media sites though, the comments you find are often complete garbage.

Part of it is anonymity. It’s why we require people to use their real names on ERE.net. And I can’t lie that I’ve been watching how Techcrunch is handling using Facebook as their primary commenting platform. If I can be blazersguy1981 instead of Lance Haun, I don’t have to think that much about my comments. And indeed, when we’ve found people using aliases on ERE commenting on content there, we typically ask them whether they want to change their name and close their account (along with deleting all of the comments). Fascinatingly enough, most people ask for us to close their account.

I often wonder if there is another thing driving it though. Most comments have typically been disagreements with the post or adding something new but there was certainly a fair share of comments saying how they agreed with it or found it interesting. What we often see is people use Facebook or Twitter sharing as a way of saying that a post is interesting or that they agree with it. And when I’ve tracked my own behavior, I’ve noticed the same thing (sharing what I like or find interesting while commenting on things I disagreed with or had something to add). Comments used to be a real currency as far as how posts resonated with readers but now I focus a lot on how things are shared too.

Online Communities

Of course, one of the things I’ve also thought about is how communities continue to evolve. I think about the rapid expansion of online communities and I see much of it going to the top players in social networking: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. So it seems like a necessity that if you run a brand, you should also be in those places (even if you have your own space).

As you can imagine, LinkedIn is by far the most successful at reaching our target demographic of recruiters. We have over 16,000 members in our group and pains have been taken to reduce the amount of spam and mindless promotions that typically overrun groups of this size. Our Twitter and Facebook accounts have less people but are still relatively popular.

The balance I’m always struggling with is how much time do we want to invest in something we have very little control over and something we do? Our LinkedIn group had some added functionality put into place that really helped moderation but that wasn’t done on any time schedule I could control. And if LinkedIn ever abandoned the concept or wanted to shut it down at some point, we’d have very little to say about that.

And while we do have our own community, there is a commitment there too. For one, building is tough and it is sort of like rolling out of the car lot in a brand new car. Very quickly, the stuff behind the scenes ages. I’m sure all of our friends who develop SaaS based tools can understand. You’re not only investing in the time it takes to develop the initial project but the time it takes to maintain and upgrade functionality in the future. Not only that, but you run against the grain of new people who are flocking to Facebook and little else.

Where Are We Going?

While anyone who has been around knows that things are on the constant move, I think there are some specific things that are happening:

• Anonymous is getting shoved out of the mainstream - There will always be places where the anonymous can roam around the internet but I have a feeling most of it will disappear from the mainstream content sites. Those that continue to allow comments will either find ways of verifying the poster or ensure that what an anonymous poster is posting adds to the conversation. At sites that want to continue using anonymous comments, they are going to shove them more out of the way or they will discontinue them entirely.
• Large social networks are reflecting real-life - The big plus about networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter is that, in all reality, they are millions of individual communities segmented in an ultra-personalized way. The people I follow on Facebook are different than anyone else. Features that continue to help users reflect that will prosper while others are likely short-lived.
• Smaller communities will have to sharpen their focus – Smaller communities play a vital role in this ecosystem but the focus has to be sharp and easy. With the many alternatives out there, smaller community operators have to be thinking about where they can continue to make a positive impact. Painful adjustments are going to be necessary but worthwhile.
• People are fickle, deal with it - If you saw the utter collapse of MySpace (really a blink of an eye), you should know that people are fickle. They are sensitive to a whole host of issues and if there are better alternatives out there, they’ll jump. Just look at the explosion Quora got at its launch. All of the Q&A sites are terrible and somebody upped the quality and people flocked to it. If spam and usability infest Quora, will it lose its mojo? Of course.

Where do you think online comments and community are going?