Danny Brown

podcaster - author - creator

blog comments

Social Media Won’t Kill Blog Comments – Bloggers Will

Last week on my blog, I published a post about the difference between writing and blogging.

Because I’d shared my thoughts on what that means earlier this year, I decided to open up the question to the readers and subscribers of the blog.

The result was that the post itself was a mere 60 words (seemingly breaking almost every “blogging rule” out there when it comes to content length).

60 words.

You’d think such a short post would receive crickets, or lack of interaction, right? After all, if there’s no in-depth wisdom on display, why should anyone comment?

58 comments and counting later, I guess that train of thought has been blown out of the water. And these comments aren’t just “great post”, or “well, because a blog’s a blog and not a book”.

No, these are some of the most thoughtful and insightful comments I’ve seen about this topic – all despite a post of only 60 words starting the discussion, all within the context of “blog comments are dead” from a very vocal majority online.

So why?did that post counter much of what we’ve been told about blogging, and blog comments in general?

Why indeed.

The ROI of Showing Up and Caring

To throw that question into better light, a tweet by Craig DesBrisay sums it up perfectly:

Craig’s “surprise” at the comments outshining the post show a lot of what’s “wrong” in blogging today, and why I started this Pure Blogging movement that you’re currently reading.

Recently, a lot of blogs have closed down their comments section, citing “too much spam”, “the conversation is on social now”, “it’s too much work to moderate”, etc.

For me, though, it’s less external issues that have caused these sites to close down comments, and more internal ones – namely, the blogger (or blog owner) stopped showing up and caring.

I used to follow a lot of the blogs that closed their comments section(s) down, and something that became clear as they were getting close to that decision was the blogger was seen less and less in the comments.

Whereas before they’d been very active in helping build community and hold active conversations with commenters, now they were only replying to comments that praised them or their post.

That’s if they even showed up at all.

Instead of a thriving, interactive comment section, there was simply comment after comment without a reply, either from the blogger or other commenters.

In that kind of environment, of course blog comments are going to suffer – after all, how long would you stay talking to someone on the phone, or in-person, if there was no reply coming back?

Not long.

Now, compare that to blogs where the blog author continues to be present and active in the comments, and you’ll see there remains a very robust comments section – and not just between blogger/commenter, but also commenter/commenter.

It’s what happens when you simply show up and care.

Good Things Are Never Easy

I get it. We’re all busy, and we all have finite time in our days. There’s only so much we can allocate to our blogs versus elsewhere, and remain effective on both sides of the coin.

But then isn’t that true for everything in life?

Don’t we make decisions based on what we want and how to get there, as opposed to giving up because the work to get there is a little more than what we want to put in?

  • Yes, conversations are happening on social. But guess what? People are complaining that there are less opportunities for conversations on social now the marketers and brands have taken over.
  • Yes, blog comments need moderation. But guess what? Do the legwork early on (blog comment policy, banning offenders, making the comments a fun place to be, etc.) and you’ll actually get a better community.
  • Yes, community growth needs interaction. But guess what? Interact and build that community, and you have a wonderful “base” to build from when you do have something to sell, or need to get your message out to a wider audience.

It’s easy to blame social media for blogging’s woes. Much like blaming others for our own failings in life, scapegoats are more attractive than self-analysis.

But it’s not as clear-cut as “all the conversations are happening on social media”. They may well be happening a lot – but guess where that traffic will come when they want to see the source of that discussion?

Once that traffic arrives, if they find a comments area that looks as fun and inviting as a McDonald’s restaurant does to a food snob, of course they’ll leave immediately.

If, on the other hand, they see a blog that opens up to others, and – imagine this! – actively converses with them, they’ll stay. Comment. Reply. Subscribe.

Social media won’t “kill” blog comments – bloggers will.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Unless you let it be.

Making the Full Switch to Postmatic ? What You Need to Know

Regular readers and subscribers to this blog will know of the praise I’ve been putting the way of email commenting solution Postmatic in recent months.

Not only does the solution work seamlessly, it does exactly what it says on the tin – encourage blog commenting, comment interaction, and increased engagement. And it does it all in a snazzy email template that looks great on both desktop and mobile.

So enamoured have I been with the difference Postmatic has made not just to this blog, but to my overall blogging enjoyment too, I’ve decided to make the full switch over to a Postmatic-powered blog (at least as far as email and commenting is concerned).

Given I currently run a weekly newsletter with MailPoet, this is going to mean some changes. Here’s what they are, and what they mean for you.

If You’re a Current Newsletter Subscriber

If you’re an active subscriber to my weekly newsletter, you don’t need to do anything – you’ve already been moved over. However, this is only if you’re an active subscriber – so, you opened or clicked one of my newsletter emails.

If you didn’t do any of that, an email invite went out yesterday to advise of the change, and how to subscribe to the new format.

* Note – due to a glitch between MailPoet and Postmatic, several of you may have received multiple invites. My sincere apologies, and the Postmatic team is looking into what happened.

If you wish to continue receiving my posts, but now as soon as they’re published as opposed to a weekly digest, you’ll just need to reply with “agree” in your email and Postmatic will do the rest. If you don’t wish to change over, simply ignore the email and job done, subscription over. 🙂

The last newsletter will go out this coming Sunday, June 21, with an update on the new set-up.

If You’re a Current RSS Subscriber

Lucky you – you don’t have to do squat! 😉

Because Postmatic is an email-based delivery and commenting solution, my move won’t affect your RSS subscription. You can continue to get the posts you like via your chosen feed reader, or Feedly, since these are handled by my RSS provider, Feedio.

Of course, if you did want to get email delivery instead of RSS curation, then the next section is for you.

If You’re Not Yet Subscribed via Email

Because I’m moving from MailPoet to Postmatic, this means my email list details need to change. So, from this post on, anyone that uses the email subscription box at the end of each post will be added to my Postmatic email service.

This means any new posts I publish will be emailed straight to your Inbox, and then that’s when the fun really begins.

Because Postmatic not only delivers my posts to you by email, but also allows commenting by email, you never need to leave your Inbox again (at least for this blog).

Here’s what’ll happen:

  • I create a post and hit Publish
  • Postmatic delivers to your email
  • You read the post, and if you want to comment, you hit Reply
  • You write a comment as you would an email, and hit Send
  • The comment appears on my post in the comments section
  • Any replies to your comment, or new comments by others, will come back to your Inbox
  • You choose whether to reply (by repeating the third and fourth bullet points)
  • You continue to take part in the comments as long as you want.

The real beauty of Postmatic is that you, the reader/subscriber/commenter, are fully in control of what comes into your Inbox.

  • If you simply want to read a post, you get that post by email, read it, then delete it. You won’t see any comment emails unless you leave a comment yourself.
  • If the comments are getting too busy, Postmatic will pause notifications (when there are more than 6 comments on a single post within an hour). You choose if you wish to continue receiving notifications.
  • If you simply want to stop comment notifications, you just send an email with the word “Unsubscribe”, and you drop out of that conversation.

Don’t worry, Postmatic reiterates these points with an introduction email when you sign up to my blog via email.?It’s a very elegant way of ensuring your Inbox doesn’t get clogged with multiple emails from the same blog post.

So there you have it. As of this post, all future posts will be delivered by Postmatic. There are also some cool features coming down the line to make your experience an even better one, so stay tuned.

Thank you for being with me this far, and I look forward to seeing you in the comments in posts to come!

Why I’ll Only Use Postmatic for WordPress Blog Comments

It takes a lot for me to be completely won over by a new product out of the gate, never mind make me a staunch supporter of it from that very same gate.

Usually, I’ll find a bunch of things I don’t like, and use that as an excuse to look for another solution, or one that does the stuff the one I’m looking at doesn’t.

Now and again, though, the actions of the developers or creators of a product make you forget what’s missing, and instead make you focus on the very cool stuff that’s included in the current version.

That’s exactly what happened with the Postmatic WordPress plugin that enables blog comments by email. And now, I really can’t see myself using any other option.

If At First You Don’t Succeed…

When Jason Lemieux, the co-founder of Postmatic, first reached out to me about his product (I think it was on Twitter), I’ll be honest, I didn’t really have the time or inclination to check out another plug-in.

For one, I was tired of content and commenting. Not so much content and commenting itself, but the myriad of commenting systems I’d already tried out and had left for various reasons.

Livefyre, Disqus, Inline Comments, Google+ Comments. All with their strengths, all with various reasons to go with one over the other, and all with the same problem – they don’t play well with each other when it comes to leaving a comment.

You want to leave a Livefyre comment, you need to create a Livefyre account or sign-in with social log-ins (unless the blogger allows guest commenting). Same with Disqus.

You want to leave an Inline Comment, the reader needs to be aware Inline Comments are actually available. Since comment bubbles only appear after a comment is left (unless you want intrusive comment boxes after every single sentence), Inline Comments are invariably missed by readers.

You want to leave a Google+ comment, you need a Google+ account. Not only that, but the notification system is poor, since you don’t know people have commented on your content unless you’re tagged in that comment. You can imagine some of the stuff that could appear on your blog with that in mind.

So, four comment systems, four reasons to sigh. So, yeah, when Jason reached out, I initially wasn’t interested.

But, fair play to him, he didn’t give up, and reached back out at a time when I was ready to look at commenting options again, especially given how I want to turn this blog into a very personal destination, where conversations are the driver of the content as much as being the other way round.

And I’m glad he did, because Postmatic has made commenting fun again, and reminded me of what it used to be like when blogs were the hub of conversation, versus the multiple social channels that blogs fight for attention with.

Why Postmatic Should Be on the Radar of Every WordPress Blogger

So, you should be getting the gist that I’m a fan of Postmatic, even in its early form (the product is just coming out of beta). Given that there are alternatives to the commenting solutions mentioned earlier, why the big love for Postmatic in particular?

Simple – it’s made by WordPress lovers for WordPress lovers. Specifically, WordPress blog comment lovers (although it does a good job with email delivery too).

Postmatic WordPress Blog Comments by Email

Because my whole mantra with this blog has always been about the conversation, and for everyone to have the same voice when it comes to commenting and sharing ideas, Postmatic’s main goal strikes a chord with me.

Engaging in meaningful, timely conversation online is out of reach for too many people, especially in the blogosphere. We have created blogs for so many organizations that publish thought-provoking and essential content, but it often goes overlooked and under-discussed. Last spring we started thinking about how to change that. And so it is that we made Postmatic.

Jason Lemieux

Based on what I’ve seen on my own blog since initially installing Postmatic, and from comments of others I’ve recommended Postmatic to, the team behind the plug-in are well on their way to meeting that goal, and more.

As I mentioned in my initial post back in February, it takes a little getting used to, to not only reply to a blog post by email, but to leave a comment, and continue leaving comments, by email too.

Ever since blog commenting became more open source, we’ve needed to jump back to a post to leave a comment, and then sign up for notifications if we wanted to know if anyone replied to us. That kind of behaviour is ingrained in us.

So, flipping the mindset to commenting via email takes a little leap of faith – but the benefit to us, as bloggers and commenters, is worth it.

Especially with the new features from the recently public version.

More Than Just Comments by Email

While Postmatic’s methodology is sending a blog post out by email, then inviting people to leave a comment by simply hitting “Reply” to that email, it feels like it’s more than that simple premise.

Probably because it is more than that, intentionally or otherwise. When chatting with Jason about some ideas regarding future additions to the plug-in, I mentioned that I see Postmatic more as an engagement optimizer than a simple comment plug-in.

Because that’s exactly what Postmatic does – it not only encourages more comments and engagement by removing the technology barrier to leaving comments, it optimizes how that looks and feels for both commenter and blogger.

Since my initial look at Postmatic in February, the team behind it have added a whole slew of features to ensure a seamless and, more importantly, user-friendly experience for reader and blogger alike.

Seamless Integration with Any WordPress Blog

As long as you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, and you use native comments (or even wpDisquz, which supports Postmatic integration), you can get Postmatic set up in minutes.

Because Postmatic uses email to reply to, and receive, new comments, your existing native WordPress comment styling isn’t touched. All that changes is you have a little box below the comments to sign up for Postmatic comment replies, and you’re good to go.

If you currently use another solution (like Livefyre, or Disqus), and you decide to switch back to that from Postmatic, your comments are there ready to import back into that platform. Try that the other way round, without getting some weird leftover Livefyre or Disqus styling in return.

Moderation via Email

Run any blog with comments activated, and you’re going to come up against comment spam. It’s the bane of every comment system, even with the various filtering, moderation and blocking features around to combat it.

Postmatic makes it really easy to moderate via email, even when on the go. As a moderator, you can use “Approve”, “Trash” or “Spam” as a reply to a comment notification and Postmatic takes care of the rest.

Again, a bonus if you don’t have time to jump into your WordPress dashboard (or third party comment system admin area) to quickly moderate spammy or abusive comments.

Responsive HTML Email for Posts, Comments and Invitations

While the free version of Postmatic offers a perfectly functional email notification system, it’s when you jump up to the premium version that the design really kicks up a notch.

Standard Postmatic
Premium Postmatic

Using the Postmatic Premium template, you can add your own header, end of email widgets (for promotional banners, email sign-up, or anything else you’d normally put in a WordPress widget), and footer template.

This lets you have a branded email and comment reply notification that is immediately recognizable as yours – and it’s all responsive, so will look good on any display.

Email Notification Throttling

When I wrote about Postmatic in February, the post ended up getting over 200 comments. 100 of these came within the first couple of hours of the post going live.

Now, while this is great for engagement, you can imagine what that must look like for someone’s Inbox, especially if you leave the conversation for the day, then come back to your email in the morning only to see your email clogged with comment notifications.

Enter Postmatic’s notification throttling, one of the new features that a lot of early users of Postmatic – probably commenters more than bloggers – have been asking for, and a great addition to make the user experience even more enjoyable.

If a post gets more than six comments in an hour, Postmatic will pause notifications and instead send out an email that advises the post discussion is taking off. The post commenter/subscriber then gets an option to leave it on pause and resubscribe to the conversation at a later time, or rejoin there and then.

It’s a slick implementation that puts full control into the commenter’s hands – if you rejoin, you know what you might be getting yourself into. If you no longer want notifications, you won’t get them.

Past Commenter Invitation and Email Provider List Migration

I mentioned earlier that I see Postmatic as more of an engagement optimizer than a commenting solution, and their “past commenter invitation” option is part of that.

When you switch Postmatic on, you have the option of sending an email out to people who have commented on your blog before, but may have dropped off the radar.

You can send a personalized invite out to those folks, advising of your switch to Postmatic and inviting them back to the conversation, with the promise of never contacting them again if they don’t reply (click to expand).

Postmatic invite

It’s a great way to reach out to members of your community that may have slipped out of sight. This also lends itself to migrating your existing email list subscribers, if you also want to use Postmatic to deliver your content.

Instead of sending a blast email out to everyone, Postmatic determines those that have taken an active action in a certain timescale on your existing list – click, open, forward, etc, – and only sends an invite out to those people.

It’s another way of showing respect to subscribers, and keeping spam out of the inboxes of email users.

So, Postmatic is Perfect, Then?

These are just some of the new features that Postmatic is offering, now they’ve moved out of beta. There’s also:

  • Guaranteed email delivery and seamless Jetpack, Mailchimp, and MailPoet list integration
  • Almost instantaneous comments (within 6 seconds of sending the email)
  • Social sharing within email using multiple supported sharing options
  • Better privacy for all users
  • URL support when commenting on a blog natively, so your username/name links back to your own blog/site
  • Full control over commenters and comment history, and more

I’ve also been fortunate to have a look at what Jason and the team have coming down the line in the next few weeks and months when it comes to even deeper integration between comments, blogger and readers, and they’re pretty damn exciting.

With all that being said, Postmatic isn’t perfect – yet. Some of the core things I’d really like to see are:

  • Email and comment analytics. Currently there’s no way to know how many people opened your email, forwarded, replied to comment, etc. While that’s not too important from a commenting angle, it’s an important requirement for email lists. The team have mentioned this is in the pipeline – it’ll make a big difference.
  • Video embeds inline. If you have a video embed in a post, the Postmatic email template doesn’t pick it up. Instead, there’s a message that says, “This format is not supported by your email client”. While it’s not super important, it does mean you need to click through to the post to view, which dilutes the “reply by email” benefits a little. In fairness, most rich media content creators and subscribers prefer RSS for this, so it’s less of an issue than it could be.
  • Weekly digests. Currently, I run a weekly newsletter versus instant updates, as do many other bloggers I know. Postmatic doesn’t support this format – however, this is something else that the team are working on, and hopefully it’ll be here soon as an option.

In the grand scheme of things – with perhaps the exception of the analytics – these are minor quibbles in what is otherwise an awesome plug-in and experience.

And, to be fair, Postmatic isn’t positioning itself as a replacement for the Mailchimps and the Awebers of the world – yet. Instead, they want to make the process of blog post to email to reader to comment-by-email to ongoing engagement as smooth as possible.

In that regard, they’ve succeeded in spades.

The Proof is in the Engagement Pudding

While Postmatic doesn’t offer analytics for comments, etc., at the moment, there are other options out there that you can install, if you want to track the change pre-Postmatic and post-implementation.

One of these is Graphical Admin Report, that shows you behind the scenes statistics about growth of your blog, including comments. Using this, I ran a comparison of my own blog’s comment count for the six months between November 1 last year, and April 28.

The first three months – November, December and January – are all pre-Postmatic. The last three months – February, March and April – cover the period since I switched Postmatic on.

Despite the plug-in doing a weird right-to-left comparison, you can see for yourself how effective Postmatic has been at increasing comments and, by association, engagement on my blog.

Even the lowest of the comment count for Postmatic (for this month) is still more than the highest comment month in the previous quarter (November).

This rise in engagement seems to be happening elsewhere, too, once Postmatic is installed. A couple of bloggers I introduced to Postmatic, Jens-Petter Berget and The Jack B, have seen an increase in comment numbers since installing, and are good examples of the way Postmatic can increase engagement when introduced properly.

Because it is a mindset change, as well as a change in behaviour, and as humans we’re often not good at that – a good introduction by the blogger helps ease readers into the change.

Wrap your head around it though, and email commenting makes so much sense.

We already do it, anyway – if we use Livefyre, Disqus, Jetpack or native comments, we get an email notification telling us of a new comment or reply. And we still have to jump through another hoop to comment. Postmatic removes that hoop and leaves you to spend that time more effectively.

As the title of my post says, when it comes to WordPress blog comments, it’s the only solution I’ll use on my blog moving forward.

For a blogger that cares about engagement and true interaction with his readers, that’s the highest possible endorsement I can give.

You can check out Postmatic, and get a free two week trial of the Premium option, here.

Why I Don’t Want You to Come Back to My Blog Post After You Comment

One of the things that continues to intrigue me when it comes to content is how we interact with each other after reading a post.

I’ve shared various thoughts on how I see digital conversations evolving, and how we need to close the loop more on making the experience the best it can be for everyone involved – blogger, reader, subscriber or occasional visitor.

Due to a change in how readers consume content and how they discuss it afterward (and, more specifically, where they discuss it), many bloggers have decided to switch off blog comments altogether.

For me, this is a lost opportunity for these bloggers, as the often rich exchanges of thoughts and ideas help take a blog post to a much higher level than it was originally.

Especially when the likes of Postmatic make it incredibly easy for everyone to comment, and comment intelligently (as in, the natural way comments should be handled).

Postmatic

Commenting as An Everyday Action

Think about your daily activities – what’s (probably) the one thing you do the most, regardless of setting (personal or professional)?

It’s probably composing and/or replying to emails, right? Because email is the one thing that remains the same, regardless of technology advances and solutions – you get a message and you reply. Simple.

So why isn’t blog commenting as simple? Why do we need to have multiple solutions all offering (useful, but still fractured) features? Why do we need to provide passwords, sign in options, social actions and more?

[clickToTweet tweet=”Why do we need so many different blog comment options? Actually, we don’t. #content” quote=”While choice is great, the truth is we don’t need so many different blog comment solutions.”]

The truth is, we don’t. While Livefyre’s SocialSync option is pretty cool, and Disqus’s tagging and recirculation community feature is nice, they’re still disparate commenting options.

If I prefer Livefyre, I don’t want to have to create a Disqus account (and vice versa).

This disparate approach to commenting is one of the reasons a lot of bloggers are using when it comes to justifying switching comments off. Instead of commenting on blogs, social channels are preferred as it’s where people spend their time anyway.

Which ties us back to email as a commenting option, because people are already there and using it in pretty much everything they do.

Which is great news if you have a self-hosted WordPress blog.

Read, Reply, Rinse and Repeat

It seems obvious when you think about it – you (usually) get a blog post update via email, you get notifications of new tweets, Facebook statuses, G+ interactions, etc., via email, and you get notifications of a new comment on a blog post via email.

Taking that to its natural next step, Postmatic enables readers and commenters to reply to a blog post and/or comment via email, too. Instead of having to be at point of origin (the blog post itself), the Postmatic experience is pretty seamless:

  • You receive the latest blog post via email from your favourite blogger(s)
  • You read the post in your email inbox, and want to leave a comment
  • Instead of flipping through to the blog, you hit your email’s Reply button
  • You type your comment and hit Send.

And that’s it – job done. Once you hit send, the email is converted into a comment and appears on the post. If it’s in reply to an existing comment, it appears after that (threaded, if the blogger has that option set up).

Postmatic reply

Further comments and replies will come to your Inbox, and you simply continue to use your email to continue the conversation.

It’s so simple, you wonder why it hasn’t been done before (well, unless it has, but I haven’t seen it, and the Postmatic implementation is super easy).

What I’d Like to See Added

I’ve just started using Postmatic, and I can see how popular it could become. Email is such a natural function for us, and we’re not limited by platform – desktop or mobile email is just as easy to use as each other.

Because of this, organic conversations can now be second nature too – we’re not having to jump over to multiple blog posts, nor do we have to worry if the blogger has their site optimized for the mobile experience.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Email is second nature to everyone, regardless of tech know-how. Blog comments should be too.” quote=”Email is second nature to everyone, regardless of tech know-how. Blog comments should be too.”]

These two points alone should see Postmatic find a pretty big userbase, and make blog commenting “popular” again. It’s also pretty good when it comes to features and support.

Postmatic features

While the existing?setup and features are easy and uncomplicated, some features that would make great additions would be welcome in future updates:

  • Currently, it’s for self-hosted WordPress only, and native WordPress comments. If Jason Lemieux, the Postmatic developer, can offer support for other platforms, either as a shortcode or line of script, it could really make Postmatic one of the default systems for commenting. (Note: Jason has kindly worked behind-the-scenes to make Postmatic work with wpDiscuz, which I currently use for comments).
  • The newsletter option that Postmatic offers, while excellent, doesn’t support custom deliveries (like the weekly newsletter I deliver, for example). Support for this is coming, so I look forward to seeing how it’s implemented.
  • Social sharing from the email would be useful. Given Postmatic’s goal is to make commenting easy, by letting you reply from your own email, sharing of posts could be affected if traffic to comment on an actual blog post is reduced. Including sharing options would definitely help here.

All things considered, though, I’m really impressed and excited by the possibilities of Postmatic. Making it feel as second nature as writing an email could really see the resurgence of comments at source.

And for many bloggers, that alone puts Postmatic in a great position to be an essential content tool.

To see how Postmatic works, simply reply to the comment I’ve left below the post, or leave your own comment and see how the reply is handled.

Introducing Hybrid Commenting (Or Why You Need to Keep Experimenting On Your Blog)

For the last four and a half years, I’ve primarily used the Livefyre Comments system for conversations after each post.

It’s no surprise my usage of Livefyre lasted so long – after all, I’ve written numerous times about how their service is second-to-none, and how their social integration is bringing content creators one step closer to closing the loop on the fragmentation of social conversations.

However, as much as I love Livefyre, I’ve decided to change the way we interact with each other here. This isn’t to say Livefyre has any issues – far from it.

But, as I’ve written before, we need to be aware of changing trends and preferences when it comes to how people consume our content, and this comes down to the comments as well as the content itself.

Hence the decision to go with hybrid comments here, using a mix of Google+ Comments and Inline Comments. Here’s why, and how you can use it for your preferred interactions.

The Medium Is?the Owner of the Message

A slight riff on Canadian media legend Marshall McLuhan’s famous “the media is the message” quote, the conversations around a blog post are no longer the sole domain of the blog post itself.

Instead of comments happening after the post, and after the post alone, now conversations and discussions are happening everywhere, from Twitter to LinkedIn Groups, from forums to Facebook, and – increasingly – on Google+.

While I wasn’t a fan of Google+ originally for thoughtful discussion, that changed around 12 months or so ago, as I cleared out a lot of the people I had been following, and made it a more eclectic collection of people, thoughts and interests.

Now, as much as I love comments on a blog post being on the blog so people can see everything in one place, I’m also seeing fascinating discussions around posts on Google+ – moreso than on Livefyre, where many comments would be from long-time community members.

Nothing wrong with this, but it did mean I was missing out on a lot of stimulating and challenging conversations on Google+.

Couple that with the fact that I’m seeing more traffic and interest from Google+ than before, it makes sense to switch out Livefyre for Google+ Comments, which is what you’ll see from now on at the bottom of each post.

But, like the post title says, I’m experimenting with hybrid commenting, so I’m not just limiting interactions to Google+ (given that many folks still don’t use Google+ regularly, if at all).

The Medium Approach to Comments

Ever since content platform Medium was launched in 2012, I’ve been a huge fan of much of their approach to content presentation and consumption.

For example, the design of this blog is very much an homage to the large feature image at the top of every post. The single column content approach here is also inspired by how Medium presents content, focusing the reader on the content and not distracting anyone with noisy sidebars.

But it’s Medium’s approach to comments that I probably love the most, and am implementing as the second part of the hybrid offering here.

Instead of leaving all the comments to the end of the post, Medium instead offers Notes which can be posted immediately alongside a paragraph or sentence. The beauty of this is the comment is instantly contextual, and about a very specific part of the post, as opposed to the more general comments that can appear in end-of-post comment boxes.

Given that my goal in 2015 is to make this blog an even more personal-led content channel, versus a marketing or social media-led blog, using this approach makes much more sense.

To that end, I’ve installed the Inline Comments plugin by Kevin Weber. This allows you to post a comment simply by using your name and email, and it’ll appear alongside the exact prose you’re leaving the comment about. An example can be seen below (click to expand).

Blog Comments and the Future of Social Conversations

As you can see, there’s a little comment bubble with the number “12” to the right of the main content. Click that, and the conversation happening around that specific paragraph is there.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Context is the connector between content and great comments. Make sure you’re fostering contextual discussions.” quote=”Context is the connector between content and great comments. Make sure you’re fostering contextual discussions.”]

It’s a clean, elegant way to interact. Most importantly, it’s contextual which, for me, is what great content and discussions are all about.

So How Do You Choose Which to Use?

Which system you prefer to use – Google+ or Inline Comments – is entirely down to your own preference. If you’re a regular Google+ user, then the G+ Comments at the end of the post would probably make more sense.

If you’re more about native WordPress comments, and keeping things simple (without the need to have a Google+ account), then obviously the Inline Comments would make more sense.

Both will give you instant notification when I, or another commenter, replies. On Google+, you’ll get an email to your Gmail account, and with Inline Comments, you’ll receive an email from me notifying you of any new replies to your comment. You can also subscribe to all comments, if you wish – just choose that option at the bottom of the Inline Comments area.

There are some things to keep in mind while I experiment with this set-up.

  • Inline Comments and my theme have a slight conflict at the moment, which means you’ll be taken to the top of the post when you leave a comment, as opposed to staying where you are on the page, and the comment loading through Ajax scripting.
  • Inline Comments aren’t mobile at the moment, so if you’re reading this post on your phone, you won’t see the Inline Comment bubble.

Hopefully, these are just minor quibbles that don’t impact your experience here if you want to try Inline Comments. Kevin, the developer, has advised he’s implementing a major uphaul of the plugin soon, so issues like these can be addressed.

In the meantime, if you want to leave an Inline Comment, and you’re reading on a desktop browser, you’ll see the comment bubble fade in as you scroll down the page. Simply click that where you want to leave a comment (I’ll leave some examples for you to see).

I’m looking forward to seeing how this goes, and please, do share your thoughts on this hybrid approach (either in Google+ at the end of the post, or through an Inline Comment).

After all, you’re just as big a part of this blog’s ongoing growth and experimentation as I am – so don’t be shy in letting me know what you think!

Note: Due to a current glitch between my theme and Inline Comments, I’ve reverted to native WordPress comments using wpDiscuz for now. Once the glitch is resolved, I’ll switch hybrid comments back on – thanks!