Ok, so I recently gave a presentation on current commenting technologies being used by commercial Web sites. The three I chose were boston.com, chicagotribune.com, and espn.com, all of which use different methods to manage and maintain user interaction on their Web sites.
boston.com manages and maintains the comments users leave on its Web site. After leaving a comment in the box and submitting it, the user is thanked for their feedback, and told that their comment will be reviewed and posted by the boston.com staff. As a result, there is no instant gratification for the user, and boston.com has to have a staff member who reviews and posts the comments deemed publishable.
chicagotribune.com is a stark contrast from the boston.com model. Instead of having a staff member who reviews and posts comments, they have outsourced this duty to Topix, who manages the forums. As a result, the user is taken away from the Tribune’s Web site, and users are allowed to post whatever they want. The user, however, does get instant gratification in seeing their comment posted. As a result though, good comments sometimes need to be weeded out from the bad ones. Check out George Castanza here:
So last but certainly not least is the model that espn.com has adopted. In order to post a comment, users need to create a “Fan Profile“. After providing ESPN with some basic information (apart from the standard email address request), users are allowed to comment on stories, manage a friend list, and message other users. Judging from some articles that have several thousand comments, I think ESPN’s approach is having a lot of success.
It’s a win-win; users get to see their comments posted, and ESPN gets to market all of its products to the user. I’d like to see some of their data though to see what features users are engaged by.
What factors encourage you to leave a comment on an article?
Commenting has to be easy. Signing up and entering a lot of information is often a discouragement. ESPN.com is a special case; it is one of the few sites that has successfully charged users to access certain content. It is the kind of place that users frequent and so enter that information isn’t a big deal.
Often forgotten in the discussion of user commenting is how Flickr has set up its “community guidelines” and allows commenting to be community policed.
As a Medill alum who is newly over on the new media side, I plan to keep a close eye on you guys (and gals) - this is a great project.
Only other thing I’d suggest on commenting - you can ask for more information from potential community members, but you have to have strong enough content that the user is willing to fill it out. ESPN is a strong enough brand, and their fans have a passion that makes it worth their while to give a little info. (And it helps that sports, like politics and weather, is a topic you can get folks to engage in discussion almost immediately.
The payoff is less clear for some users on general news sites - you can hear the wheels turning. “Do I need to comment? Eh, never mind, I’m not going to bother.”
It’s a fine balance - but it’s about the user first - the payoff for the site second.
Good luck with the project.