Posts tagged Comment
Dear Facebook, My HooHoo Hurts: Facebook no Longer Protects Big Pharma From Public Comment
Aug 16th
Facebook has reportedly removed a unique feature from its site used by pharmaceutical companies to block all user comments from being posted to the Facebook pages owned by the companies. According to a report from the Washington Post, that policy changed yesterday. Some drug companies are shutting down their Pages, the vehicle they use to publish updates out into the news feeds of their fans, rather than allow public commenting on those Pages.
The Post quotes company representatives saying they need to figure out how to effectively monitor their pages before those pages can return. It quotes experts saying the companies likely don’t want to deal with the headache of monitoring all the crazy complaints that could be posted 24 hours a day. I think something different is at issue. I think the companies already know that the web is filled with complaints about their products and they just don’t want those complaints to appear on an officially sanctioned page. Why were they ever allowed to silence comments in the first place?
Sponsor
From Christian Torres’s report in the Post:
“Facebook would not say what specifically prompted its change of heart. Andrew Noyes, manager of public policy communications for Facebook, said in an e-mail, ‘We think these changes will help encourage an authentic dialogue on pages.’
“Facebook will allow companies to continue to block Wall comments on specific prescription product pages, but those are a minority of pharmaceutical company pages. Most of the open pages would be focused on companies themselves or on disease or patient-specific communities, which then have ties to the companies’ prescription products.”
The fact is, though, that there has been a whole lot of public discourse all over the web for years about pharmaceutical drugs. I once consulted a consultant to a consultancy that monitored online reports of adverse drug reactions for a pharmaceutical client, specifically for a diet pill that caused anal leakage. They were spread out across forum sites all around the internet. We used the heck out of Dapper and Yahoo Pipes to scrape, filter and organize what we found. The existing approaches were arduous but widespread. (“Welcome to Big Pharma,” my client’s client said to me ominously when we met, making it clear that any moral distance was in my own mind alone.)
So I don’t believe that Big Pharma wanted to block public comment from its various company Facebook Pages because it didn’t want a public forum for complaints, or because it wanted to be lazy about monitoring social media mentions (what big brand doesn’t do that already?) but because Facebook Pages are an officially sanctioned communication channel. And crazy complainers ought to be kept from clean, well-lit official places if that’s an option.
Gizmodo’s Sam Biddle says about the policy, “It’s silly to provide patients with a tool, and at the same time neuter that tool. They might as well just take the pages down entirely.” I think that misses the raw self-interest, though.
If you can use social media as a broadcast tool, without having to pay the cost of being seen publicly responding (or not) to criticism, what corporation wouldn’t jump at that opportunity?
This is why I love Twitter’s ad product Sponsored Search Terms; it’s the opposite of this old Facebook policy. It says “Dear Brands, we dare you to pay to appear atop a stream of freely posted public comments about you.” It’s awesome; it’s brave. Facebook’s allowing Pharma companies to use its service to broadcast messages but block public comment is the opposite of that.
The only real question is: why did Facebook allow it? At least the policy has changed now. What other strange favors is Facebook doing for the rich and creepy? We’ve asked the company for comment and will update this post with any we receive.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Comment Guidelines
Jul 27th
Spam Comments
Like most blogs, ReadWriteWeb assumes the best about our commenters. We don’t pre-moderate because we don’t want to slow down your ability to contribute to discussions. If we see a comment that we aren’t sure about, we do assume your comment isn’t spam.
That said, when a comment is clearly only made to pimp your blog, your startup, your product or an affiliate offer, we’ll remove it. Spam includes folks who call themselves ‘Free iPad’, ‘Low Cost Mattresses’ and other SEO stunt names.
Sponsor
You won’t receive a warning or an email notification, your spam will simply be removed. If you think we’ve made an error, feel free to let our community manager know.
Personal Information
Our advice is to avoid placing personally identifiable information in the comments. We’re not hall monitors, so if you choose to do so we won’t remove it, but remember that doing so opens you up to spam and worse.
Links
Please don’t simply drop a link in a comment and leave. While your link may direct our readers to insightful discourse that is absolutely relevant to the discussion, without context it’s useless. Please take a few moments to explain why your link is relevant. If you don’t not only will no one click your link, we may assume it’s spam and remove it.
Disagreements
Please do let us know if you disagree with our writers. Likewise, if you see a typo or if we’ve otherwise slipped up in some way we want to hear about it. However, please do this respectfully. It should go without saying that writers have feelings too…
Your Treatise on Subject B
Remember that you are writing a comment and not a blog post. Anything beyond 500 words probably belongs on your own blog. While we won’t remove your long-winded treatise, we probably won’t read it all the way through either.
Trolls, Free Speech and Hate
We understand that this is the Internet and you expect to be given free reign but this particular slice of the web is not your personal property. Any comment that we deem destructive will be removed. This includes but is not limited to libel, defamation, hate speech, excessively sexual content, excessive profanity and harassment. Passion is good. Anger is OK. Harassment is a no-no.
If you disagree with a removal you are welcome to let our community manager know.
Please give us a hand by flagging spam or destructive comments when you see them.
These guidelines aren’t comprehensive, because they don’t need to be. We don’t struggle with a burden of inane vitriol that you see elsewhere on the web. If need be in the future we’ll update these guidelines as necessary.
Candle photo by Christa Uymatiao
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Google Places Makes its Move, Pushes Other Reviews Into the Background (Updated With Google’s Comment)
Jul 21st
Updated with comment from Google below. This was probably something you could see coming: Google Places, the search giant’s relatively new play in local search and reviews, today announced that it has revamped Place pages and removed excerpts from reviews on 3rd party services.
For now, sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, JudysBook or Europe’s Qype will be linked-to at the bottom of a list of Google Places reviews. (Sometimes they appear at the top.) This seems to me like the kind of thing that could be discussed in an examination of potentially monopolistic business practices. Independent review sites have had to know, though, that the company that delivered them up in search results for so long would be tempted to just create its own content and keep review searchers on Google’s own sites. Google Places is a very compelling service for users, too.
Sponsor
Maybe it’ll be ok; maybe a lot of people will click through and visit other local review sites, still. I know I sometimes start at Google Places to check open and closing times for restaurants and then go to Yelp for more reviews. For how long will Yelp have more reviews though, if all paths through Google lead first and foremost to more Google?
Google says that in the long run, it hopes to make writing and posting reviews even faster and easier (it’s quite easy already, the Google Places iPhone app for example is a model of usability), it hopes to take those Google Places reviews and display them all over the rest of Google sites and services where they might be useful and it hopes to serve up more personalized content – like reviews of places written by people you know. Perhaps people in your “inner Circles?”
There are a lot of different ways to look at this change, including from the perspective of small businesspeople and the tech consultants that serve them.
“Jeez – Can’t these guys knock it off with the changes already?” asked Search Engine Consultant Dev Basu today in comments on a hotly discussed post by Google Maps and Search consultant Mike Blumenthal. “I spent the better half of last year educating clients in hotel and hospitality verticals to not put all their eggs in Google reviews. Instead, we decided to run Yelp, Tripadvisor, and Hotels.com programs to incent reviews.”
Blumenthal argued, though, that Google still links to other review sites and presumably will still surface them in search. Thus he argues that the best practice for local businesses remain the same: to cultivate reviews on 3 independent sites in addition to Google Places.
We’ll see how things look in the future. Google Places is a great service, but competition between multiple innovators is ultimately better.
Update: A Google spokesperson emailed to provide the following feedback (sometimes they are very nice, I swear) “the headline, second paragraph and overall suggestion about why we made today’s changes is inaccurate.
“This line from our LatLong blog post is most instructive:
“Based on careful thought about the future direction of Place pages, and feedback we’ve heard over the past few months, review snippets from other web sources have now been removed from Place pages.
“If you could please update your post to reflect this sentiment, that’d be much appreciated.”
If you can explain to me the substantive difference between that and what I did say, please let me know in comments below and include your mailing adress. I will send you a big cookie. So goes it, sometimes.
So, readers, apparently Google would like you to know that they did not put excerpts from their own reviews on Places pages, remove excerpts from other sites’ reviews and leave only one line of links to 3rd party sites because they wanted visitors to remain on Google sites instead of going elsewhere. Regardless of the intention, I suspect you’ll agree with me what the most likely consequences are.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
What is the Best Way to Move Apps to the Cloud? Comment and Earn Chance to Win a MacBook Air
Mar 7th
We have a new contest this month. The winner will win a MacBook Air. Our question this month is about moving apps from an on-premise environment to the cloud.
To participate, add your comment to our contest post:
How do you move applications to the cloud?
Sponsor
We’ll review the comments and pick a winner at the end of the month.
Criteria
Our criteria for choosing the winners is as follows:
- Depth of understanding
- Factual examples to back up assertions
- How the conversation develops
- Accuracy
- Strength of argument
- Concise writing
- Originality
The winners will be announced on the first of April. A Disqus account is required to participate. Please take a few moments to read the full list of rules before joining in the conversation.
We look forward to the conversation!
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Research Examines What Motivates People to Comment Online
Dec 1st
A study by professors at the Warsaw University of Technology has demonstrated something not surprising to those of us who’ve spent anytime on the Internet. That is, people who comment online are often motivated by emotions, and negative emotions at that. Furthermore, the longer online discussions last, the more likely they are to turn increasingly negative, and in doing so, these negative discussion dissolve into a back-and-forth sustained by fewer and fewer commenters.
Sponsor
The research focused on the publicly-open discussion forums on the BBC website, specifically tracking those items posted on the Religion and Ethics and World News message boards between the website’s launch in 2005 to when the site was crawled in 2009 for a total of almost 100,000 threads and over 250,000 posts written by 18,000 users. This means that the average activity was about 137 posts per forum member, making it a community of “loyal users.”
The study examined users activity specifically to try to gauge the influence of “emotional content” on users’ behavior. Using sentiment analysis, the researchers looked at content, separating “objective” and “subjective”, and then examined users’ responses – whether they were objective or subjective, and in the case of the latter, positive or negative. The figure at the right shows the users’ global activity (a) in relation to their emotional expression (e).
According to the researchers, “negative emotions are a motivation that incline forum participants to express their opinion (as well as emotion) writing a post. The active users are those characterized with negative emotions and they seem to be the key agents that sustain discussion in the thread. Finally, we have shown that negative emotions accelerate user’s local activity in the thread” something that doesn’t mean they participate the same way on a global level.
Researchers do admit that this dataset has a strong bias towards negative emotional content. It is, after all, only a study on those posting on a BBC news forum. The rest of the world’s Internet commenters are much more rational, positive, right?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Should Your Blog Allow Every Comment with a Link?
Nov 3rd
A few months ago I decided to turn my blog into a do-follow blog to see if it helps increase activity, but honestly I can’t really say how much it’s helped or not. Sure, I’ve gotten some spam comments, but I always remove them. Just because it’s a do-follow blog doesn’t mean I have to approve every comment or allow every link. However, I have a moral question for all you bloggers. Would you approve ANY comment with a link you feel is just wrong or illegal on your blog? Before you answer, let me provide some back story.
Last week I was going through comments yet to be moderated on my blog (I know I need to be better at that) when I came across a comment that was really good, but the link in the user name (which wasn’t spammy btw) scared the crap out of me. I won’t mention or even link to it here. Let’s just say it was among the extremely perverted illegal type. At first I removed the link, comment luv from it and I almost approved it. Then I trashed it completely. I couldn’t with good conscious approve a comment from someone promoting such a vile site. It really made me re-question my position on continuing my blog as a do-follow. But then again, if it were a no-follow would I still get the same comments?
No matter if your site permits followed links or not, allowing usernames to put a link on your site, you’re the one hosting that link. I’m not talking about removing a competitor’s link when they comment or disallowing the little blue pill links, but your own personal and even professional ethics. Would you allow a comment with a link to a site that:
- Promoted a particular political party?
- Came from a site with bad service?
- Sold illegal drugs/services?
- Personally attacked another person?
- Contained illegal images (child porn, etc.)?
How ethical should we be as bloggers when it comes to allowing links in comments on our blogs? Would you consider allowing the comment to be posted even if it were legit?
On the off chance you get a link from a site you feel should be looked at by the proper authorities; here is a list of some resources where they can be reported.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
Should Your Blog Allow Every Comment with a Link?
View full post on Search Engine Journal
WordPress Focuses on Conversations with New Comment Panel
Sep 7th
Posted by admin in Uncategorized
No comments
The blog provider has also announced two new third-party apps for WordPress.com blogs to make them more social and shareable. Feedfabrik now allows WordPress.com users to turn their blogs into books, both in PDF and physical formats (and there’s currently a 10% discount offer). Empire Avenue, the free “Social Stock Market” game, has also announced WordPress integration, allowing WordPress bloggers to incorporate their blogging influence into their share price.
Sponsor
The new apps can make WordPress blogs more shareable, but the updated Comments panel adds better social dynamics at a more basic level. Comments are the lifeblood of engagement on a blog, and the new tools will help WordPress authors keep better track of their most engaged readers. Last month, WordPress enabled automated sharing of posts to Facebook pages, which is another way to increase engagement, but as we’ve found at ReadWriteWeb, automated posting doesn’t produce great results. Better comment management could help blog authors keep up conversations with a more authentic voice.
WordPress has reported major growth recently. It currently powers nearly 15% of the world’s websites and sustains a thriving community of self-employed developers.
Have you used WordPress? Are you a WordPress developer? Tell us about it in the comments.
Discuss
View full post on ReadWriteWeb