Posts tagged comments
Replies And Threaded Comments Are Now Available On Facebook Pages
Mar 25th
In addition to rolling out Graph Search, Facebook just rolled out replies and threaded comments to select Facebook pages. The qualification is to have a page with a minimum of 10,000 likes. Starting in July, it will be rolled out to all Facebook pages by default. Honestly, this feature was long overdue. This concept isn’t new [...]
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How Online Comments Are Becoming A Big Business
Mar 25th
They almost seem like an afterthought, the comments attached to Internet content. These scribblings may seem like the anonymous musings of the masses, but many corporations are viewing them as a high-powered vehicle to drive lead generation and community building, and funding trends for commenting vendors suggests that this is not afterthought: Comments are a very valuable Web business.
Chances are you’ve used Livefyre and not known it. After all, their clients include some of the biggest media out there. With huge partnerships with Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, and TechCrunch, Livefyre’s business is largely enterprise, and geared towards giving its clients, who boast millions of readers, new outlets to express themselves. Way beyond the typical social login, those options include live chat discussions, comment threads where users can embed YouTube videos, media and pictures, and new second screen experiences geared to drive engagement.
So when Livefyre announced a $15 million funding round last month to ramp up their mobile and moderating features, people took note.
If Livefyre is the new kid on the block flexing its muscles, then the tried and true veteran is Disqus, which has raised more than $10.5 million in VC investment. The six-year-old Y Combinator startup is the other major player in this sector, powering a total of 2.5 million sites, including big names like CNN and — ahem — ReadWrite. Disqus operates on a freemium model, with pro accounts at $99 a month. While it may not be fancy as Livefyre, it’s effective, just like other commenting services like IntenseDebate and Echo, other players in this space.
That’s a lot of choices for publishers, because there’s value in giving customers varied options as to how they interact online.
Let Them Comment
Users crave both more options from comments and more ways to engage with other readers and writers. As a result, publishers are shelling out dollars to increase that back-and-forth interaction. At the end of the day, people commenting on a page means longer active time spent on a site, and the potential of driving up click rates on adjacent ads. It’s also about community building on these comment threads, and leveraging that community for more page views and reader loyalty.
Robyn Peterson, CTO of Mashable, says Livefyre has amped up conversations in three ways. Comment streaming drives up the “organic and lively feel of the conversation, which in turn drove more commenting from other readers. Second, since Mashable is a very social brand, a lot of our reader conversation takes place on Facebook, and Livefyre is able to cull those conversations and mirror them on our article pages, which coalesces the across-the-web comments into a single comment stream.”
Lastly, Peterson says, social functions — like the aforementioned embeddable media — help readers “add more interesting content to a given article.”
Interfaces that fuel user engagement creates maximum return on these comments, says Jordan Kretchmer, Livefyre’s founder and chief executive officer. He sees comments as way beyond a linear and threaded tool.
“Our approach of integrating all conversations about an article or topic into one place makes us unique, regardless of the format those comments are displayed in,” he said. “The centralization of social content is key to getting users to interact more.”
Steve Roy, a Disqus VP for marketing and PR, says his company is not trying to build a better comment mousetrap. Instead, he wants to make it easier for people to participate in discussions and introduce them to communities where they can explore their passions:
Our AudienceSync feature enables users to easily connect their Disqus profile to publisher sites with one or two clicks. It makes it easy to participate in discussions on even more sites while enabling publishers to manage their own registration systems.
Roy explained that these tools are getting people to stay on the site and express themselves, a boon for publishers. “Our data shows more than half of all our page visits include time spent engaged in comment, either reading, sharing or leaving comments. Audiences truly care about this discussion. And as page real estate, it’s unharvested revenue territory,” to the tune of 15 million organic new clicks to publisher content a month.
A new tool called the discovery box recirculates traffic back to the publisher through promoted articles, providing a “new revenue stream each time a reader clicks on an advertiser’s content,” Roy said. “It’s optimizing their comments section much like they already optimize the headlines and articles for search.”
That interaction between commenters and blogs is producing real revenue. “This quarter, we’re making revenue share payments to our publishers who have participated in our pilot native advertising launch,” Roy said.
Real Value?
Comments are seeing a serious build up of online niches and sub-communities, to the point where some sites like Gawker have even toyed with the idea of charging readers to comment.
A year later, it seems they’ve given up on this pay-to-play approach, but Gawker has since introduced a new level of comment curation. Users who reply to an existing comment are more likely to get their opinions seen higher on the page than an earlier user who added a reaction directly to the original post. Gawker is attempting to highlight the most-trafficked and replied-to material, doing away with the chronological commenting stream, all in an effort to keep readers on site.
It’s difficult to imagine a scenario where charging a fee to comment becomes plausible or scalable. It’s not something that we believe in culturally since speech tends to be viewed as both free as in freedom and free as in beer.
But publishers are investing in comment systems in an effort to generate more indirect revenue. People are commenting more than ever, driving huge consumption and engagement that publishers would lose if they didn’t recognize the value of comments. A value that’s at least the equal of the material they’re commenting upon.
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
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SEO Positive Comments on Increase in Clicks and Impressions in Google … – PR Web (press release)
Jan 31st
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SEO Positive Comments on Increase in Clicks and Impressions in Google …
PR Web (press release) Inevitably, some retailers were annoyed when the service moved to a commercial model in the U.S. in October, however it has been reported that research from Marin Software, a leading provider of online advertising management solutions, has shown that … |
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SEO Consult® Reacts to Matt Cutts’ Comments Regarding Press Releases – PR.com (press release)
Jan 12th
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SEO Consult® Reacts to Matt Cutts' Comments Regarding Press Releases
PR.com (press release) Cheshire, United Kingdom, January 12, 2013 –(PR.com)– Leading UK search optimisation agency, SEO Consult®, has reacted to comments made by Matt Cutts in a Google help forum regarding online press releases. Responding to a comment from a user … |
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SEO Consult® Reacts to Matt Cutts’ Comments Regarding Press Releases – SYS-CON Media (press release) (blog)
Jan 12th
 SYS-CON Media (press release) (blog) |
SEO Consult® Reacts to Matt Cutts' Comments Regarding Press Releases
SYS-CON Media (press release) (blog) Cheshire, United Kingdom, January 12, 2013 –(PR.com)– Leading UK search optimisation agency, SEO Consult®, has reacted to comments made by Matt Cutts in a Google help forum regarding online press releases. Responding to a comment from a user … |
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Everything You Need to Learn About Blog Comments and SEO – Business 2 Community (blog)
Dec 12th
 Business 2 Community (blog) |
Everything You Need to Learn About Blog Comments and SEO
Business 2 Community (blog) A few years ago, the comment fields on blogs often resembled a land mine field of spam. For every genuine comment, there were at least 3 more hawking diet pills or gambling web sites. It is an effective SEO tactic to leave comments on the blogs of … |
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Facebook Tinkers With Comments To Get Users To Talk To Each Other
Nov 14th
Despite all the refinements Facebook has forced on its change-phobic user base over the years, the social network’s commenting system hasn’t gotten a lot of updates. That’s finally changing as the company tests rated comments – promoted with Likes – and nested replies with a small test batch of users. (Facebook is also toying with a new notification “ding” to boost engagement – we can almost hear the backlash now).
Commenting Is A Shouting Match
The tweaks, engineered to boost enagagement, should be a boon for Facebook’s one billion plus users as well as the brands that try to reach them.
For brands in particular, Facebook comments are a total mess. Say you’ve got a few thousand followers. You post something that riles them up and you’ve got a deluge of comments rolling in. Suddenly it’s a conversation, right? Not exactly. There may be 200 comments on your latest post, but each one is the equivalent of a someone walking up and stapling their thoughts onto a telephone pole.
Tenacious engagers might cruise back around or even wade into the comment pool and tag users by name to reply, but it’s mostly just a tangle of people shouting over each other in chronological order. Popular comments might attract a lot of likes, but they don’t move up or down the totem pole or get called out in any way.
Likes Get A Bigger Role
As the screenshot shows, the new commenting system adds a one-layer-deep level of replies. Users can respond to a comment on the original post, but (thankfully) won’t be able to reply to a reply. This basic improvement should help clear up the confusion about who is talking to whom in an ongoing Facebook comment thread. Better yet, comments that garner a bunch of likes will rise to the top, highlighting more interesting or on-point comments.
Of course, many sites already provide some kind of yea-or-nay feedback system that encourages quality content to rise to the top, user-generated or otherwise. Google introduced the +1 to its social search results. The painstakingly tuned commenting systems on sites like Gawker mercifully let readers downvote stupid comments into oblivion. Buzzfeed’s social curation offers a veritable viral buffet, with buttons encouraging users to LOL or OMG (WTF).
Facebook’s Like button has been many things to many users since the company first introduced it in 2009. Now, Likes look poised to evolve into a less dynamic version of Reddit’s upvotes, the social ranking machine that makes the latter site go ’round – and keeps its users coming back for more. Facebook is no doubt hoping its new system will do the same.
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Seo In guk, Reply 1997, comments about the Scandal between Jeong Eun ji – Yahoo! Philippines News
Sep 17th
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Seo In guk, Reply 1997, comments about the Scandal between Jeong Eun ji
Yahoo! Philippines News During the interview, Seo In guk said About the Scandal between Jeong Eun ji. He said, she and I talked and played in dialect just like in the drama, even when we are off the camera. I understand the importance of chemistry between man and woman, so I … |
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DoJ Whacks “Self-Serving” Apple in Response to E-Book Settlement Comments
Jul 24th
Despite criticism of its actions from high-profile political figures, the Department of Justice is standing firm on its settlement with three publishers in the DoJ’s lawsuit against Apple and five publishers accusing them of conspiring against common enemy Amazon.
Under the terms of the settlement, the settling publishers are required to end their agency agreements with Apple seven days after the settlement’s final approval. The publishers can then sign new contracts but are forbidden for two years from using clauses that limit retailers’ rights to discount.
Apple and publishers Macmillan and Penguin have not agreed to the settlement and are continuing to fight the suit in court. But Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster settled with the US in April.
Under the Tunney Act, the DoJ solicited public comments for the settlement, and it got them: “868 comments from individuals, publishers, booksellers, and even from Apple, a key conspirator in the underlying price-fixing scheme.”
That was the characterization of the public comments highlighted in the DoJ’s response to these comments released Monday. In that response, the DoJ took on many of the comments criticizing its efforts to prevent the alleged antitrust actions of Apple and the five publishers – and blasted Apple’s comments in particular as “self-serving and contrary to the public interest.”
Of the comments, only 70 favored the DoJ’s terms of settlement, while the rest argued against the terms, insisting (with variations on the theme) that the DoJ was enforcing one particular business model over another and was out-of-bounds to force settling publishers to end their “agency pricing” agreements with Apple.
What’s Up With “Agency Pricing”?
Agency pricing lets a publisher set the prices of an e-book, with the retailer getting a cut of the price as a commission. This differs from the wholesale model, where a book’s price is suggested, and retailers can discount books to their heart’s content. The wholesale model is what Amazon used.
According to the DoJ’s suit, the publishers entered into agency agreements with Apple – countering Amazon’s existing way of doing things. In response, Amazon blocked Macmillan’s books from being sold on its site, in a move that echoed the Cable TV wars seen in today’s headlines. Amazon eventually backed down, and the agency model became the norm across all e-commerce retailers. The other major publisher in the US, Random House, switched to agency pricing in 2011.
Many of the public comments about the settlement derided the DOJ as attacking the agency model, but that’s not actually the basis of the DoJ’s action. It has no problems with agency pricing, just the way that Apple and the five publishers named in the suit did it: they allegedly colluded to raise the prices on e-books with the express purpose of breaking Amazon’s deep discounting.
The DoJ takes great pains to insist repeatedly that agency pricing is not the problem – nor is discounting.
Conspiracy Theory
“Nothing in the proposed Final Judgment would force Apple or B&N to exercise discounting authority — they are free to carry out their own businesses exactly as before. What they may not do is continue to rely on a conspiracy to restrain their competitors,” the response read.
The response also slaps away any arguments by Apple that the settlement will reduce competition in the market.
“In fact, what the evidence does show, is to the contrary… Microsoft has made a significant investment in the industry. The investment is likely a boon to Apple’s largest brick-and-mortar retail competitor, [Barnes & Noble]. Google, too, rather than retiring from the e-book field, recently has announced a new investment in a tablet computer intended to promote its own ebook sales, through Google Play.”
Powerful Enemies
The comments for the settlement had drawn in some heavy caliber political opponents, such as Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), who made an impassioned plea on Apple’s behalf in the July 17 edition of the Wall Street Journal.
“While the claim sounds plausible on its face, the suit could wipe out the publishing industry as we know it, making it much harder for young authors to get published,” Schumer wrote. “The suit will restore Amazon to the dominant position atop the e-books market it occupied for years before competition arrived in the form of Apple. If that happens, consumers will be forced to accept whatever prices Amazon sets.” (For more, see Why Senator Schuman Wants the Apple E-Book Pricing Lawsuit to Disappear.)
The DoJ isn’t buying what Apple and its allies are selling, and it’s doubtful consumers will, either. “When Apple launched its iBookstore in April of 2010, virtually overnight the retail prices of many bestselling and newly released e-books published in this country jumped 30 to 50 percent — affecting millions of consumers,” the DoJ response stated. This was not due to agency pricing, the DoJ maintains, but to illegal conspiracies.
The DoJ reiterates that it is not out to kill agency pricing. And that’s good for book buyers. Agency pricing on its own is likely to keep prices more uniform than wholesale pricing, despite what Apple and its allies are claiming.
Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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Linkedin Now Lets You Mention People and Companies in Updates, Comments
Apr 8th
Posted by Webmaster in Uncategorized
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Professional social network LinkedIn has introduced a Facebook-style tool that allows users to mention and hyperlink people and companies on the network in status updates and conversations. Name suggestions appear in a drop-down menu as users type.
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