I’ve been out of town, and so while Bob has been working, and our long-tail marketing efforts have continued doing their thing, I missed something a few days ago. Now, let’s tweak the Influency equation a bit. And let’s talk about why.
Last week, our old friend Adam Popescu wrote a story about … comments. It might seem like an unimportant subject, but in the Influency game very little is insignificant.
Popescu wrote about a subject that’s been on my mind for quite a while: what’s the right way to manage comments on your blog or website?
It’s a complicated subject; while you might not be all that interested in comments on the Internet, many, MANY people are, and comments are the lifeblood of search engine optimization. And with optimization being one of the tenets of Influency, we pay close attention to the subject.
What Adam Popescu talks about in that article is that comments have become a big business all unto themselves. The three largest players, Livefyre, IntenseDebate, and Disqus, manage untold billions of comments on web sites large and small, making it easier for people to leave comments and track related topics, while simultaneously cutting down on SPAM—if you’re lucky.
And until now, despite the many benefits of using these systems, we’ve stayed away, for one reason: when your content lives on their web site, you lessen your Influency.
This isn’t OK. It’s bad form from a marketing perspective and dangerous; what happens if someone you’re doing business with goes away?
If this post and Livefyre’s stated positions are correct, using Livefyre to manage comments eliminates those issues. Livefyre comments on your content are still stored in your Content Management System, and “they pass through all your SEO credit”. OK, cool; we’ve just turned on Livefyre here (as you know, we test everything we do or recommend on our own site so you’re covered later), and will report back on the issue, soon.
But assuming our optimization concerns are assuaged, there’s still the question of whether you want someone else to manage your comments.
In a way, this is a story about coopetition. If, in a social world, there’s no reason to fear your competitors, wouldn’t it stand to reason that it’s OK to let others benefit from your content?
Let’s start with the idea that comments at your web site are ‘your’ content. You didn’t create them, and depending on the way you moderate them may not have any idea what’s in them, either. But Google sees comments as content, both because the words in them send out signals, and because when you use a content management system each comment at your web site gets its own web page and permanent address.
So the issues, assuming Livefyre is telling the truth, that all your comments remain your comments with addresses at your web site instead of at livefyre.com and the content itself remaining hosted solely on your domain so as not to pull optimization away from you because of LiveFyre’s size, come down to comment facilitation and SPAM management.
Does using a system like Livefyre boost the number of comments you receive? That’s one of the things we’re looking to find out, and one of the few—maybe the only—question we’ll be able to answer conclusively. What about the SPAM question?
People have different definitions of SPAM, so right off the top that makes this an interesting question. I completely disagree with the way C|Net saw it a few years back, think Digg raised interesting but troubling questions in this story, and of course have big issues with Gizmodo. And SPAM is a serious subject.
But if you manage your comments intelligently, SPAM can be reduced, and so can its impact. We’re going to see just what the ramifications of using Livefyre turn out to be, and get back to you.
In the meantime, let’s get started boosting your Influency.
Here’s the first test of LiveFyre. I’m leaving a comment, logged in as me
Now, here’s test #2: I’m trying to posting a comment guest, with no log-in required, but … that doesn’t seem to work!
theanswerguy Hi there and welcome to Livefyre! I’m Meghan, Director of Community here at Livefyre. To post as a guest you will need to use an email address that is not associated with a Livefyre account, you will be logged in with your Livefyre account if you use an email that is already linked to a LF account.
I’m also seeing two comment widgets on this article. Our Support team can help you out with fixing this, just send them an email support[at]livefyre[dot]com. If you have any questions feel free to give me a shout.
Hi Meghan. Thanks for both answering my question and being proactive about the double-widget problem. Relative to THAT, I did send a support request, and your Dhara Mistry is working on it.
I tried to comment from an incognito Google Chrome browser window, and while Livefyre does seem to let comments through without connecting to a social media account or being specifically logged in here (umm …. or actually, to Livefyre, I guess), the process is for sure not an anonymous/guest kind of scenario.
Of course, as the web site owner, assuming you share correspondent/registrant information with me, I like that, right? But calling it “guest” is really not fair, says me.
meghankrane: Hi Meghan. Thanks for both answering my question and being proactive about the double-widget problem. Relative to THAT, I did send a support request, and your Dhara Mistry is working on it.
I tried to comment from an incognito Google Chrome browser window, and while Livefyre does seem to let comments through without connecting to a social media account or being specifically logged in here (umm …. or actually, to Livefyre, I guess), the process is for sure not an anonymous/guest kind of scenario.
Of course, as the web site owner, assuming you share correspondent/registrant information with me, I like that, right? But calling it “guest” is really not fair, says me.
Oh, and I also see a couple of other problems with the way Livefyre is supposed to work:
I responded to you with everything above this paragraph, and while the site registered, logged, and approved the comment, it never showed up here. That might have been because I deleted the @’s, but I would think that the altered behavior would be to post the comment but not in-line as a response to you. Not what happened; it simply never appeared here even though it was in the back end/admin !
Second problem … that comment never showed up, as I said, and that raises questions about whether Livefyre is live-updating as it is supposed to. Or, since I know “it does”, why is it not, HERE?
OK… when it does show up the live-update thing DID work, so strike that last question!
meghankrane So Meghan … several hours have passed and I see that there is one less comment showing up down here than in the comment count at the top of this article. Presumabley that’s the comment that never showed up, counted intenally by WordPRess but completely invisible to Livefyre.
Any ideas?
meghankrane theanswerguy ouh-oh .. now there’s a disparity of TWO …
Hey,there, Jeff! I followed you through from the comment you left on my blog post about LiveFyre. To LF’s credit, they have EXEMPLARY customer service. If only every business had this degree of service….
The assistance was the best aspect of LF to me. There was *always* a disparity between the number of comments shown in the counter and the number of comments there actually were. We never could get my old comments restored while LF was installed. It took a LF tech specialist a full week and lots of trial and error to get my former comments displayed back on my blog once I decided to uninstall LF. I didn’t get spam when LF was installed, but I got a lot less comments, too. My readers felt like there were too many hoops to jump through either to post or to follow to another commenter’s blog. I felt the same frustrations, and after a couple of weeks, dealing with spam was worth restoring the harmony to my blog conversations.
Hi, Kym.
I have to agree with you; the customer service at Livefyre is AMAZING, and the woman from Livefyre who commented here is just the tip of that iceberg.
I’m happy to report that we got everything restored relatively easily, including new comments, without needing much help from Livefyre, so thank goodness their software now works better than when you tried using it. Then again, I AM The Answer Guy, right? 😉
I’ll be writing the follow-up to this piece tomorrow; but as you can see, sadly, Livefyre is now gone from here.
Postscript, folks: it took less than 12 hours, but: Livefyre is now gone from here, and this post is a test of whether our original posting system is restored completely and properly.
-JY
(and yes, it is)