Dave Briggs – Page 180 – An online notebook

Comments – is Facebook the answer?

March 2, 2011

Commenting on websites is a funny thing. Luckily for me, DavePress is sufficiently niche not to attract too many readers, so the problem of being inundated by moronic comments has never really been an issue for me.

For big, popular sites though, commenting can be a real issue. You just need to take a look through the comment threads on posts on Guido’s blog, for instance, to see how ugly things can get.

It’s not just the offensive, though, it’s the irrelevant that can be just as annoying. People leaving meaningless comments just to draw attention to themselves, or their own websites.

Part of the issue is the ease of anonymity with website comments. With a system like WordPress, all you need to do is enter an email address and your name, and you can submit any comment you like.

There are solutions, like Disqus and Intense Debate, which go a bit further to enable commenters to tie their contributions to existing online identities. This goes some way to improving the standard of comments, but it’s still relatively easy to subvert this and go anonymous. It’s part of the cost, I guess, of keeping barriers to entry low.

One new opportunity here though is using Facebook to power your comments – the page explaining it is here.

The technology blog TechCrunch has already implemented it as an experiment, and interestingly, with comments being tied to personal identities, the standard of commenting has risen:

In the past few hours, most of the anonymous trolls who have come to call TechCrunch comments a second home are gone. Of course, some people don’t want to comment with their real names for good reason (they want to speak freely without fear of reprisals), but for the most part in practice anonymity was abused. It was used mostly as a shield to hide behind and throw out invective…

The other main benefit is social virality. When you comment on TechCrunch, your comment also appears in your Facebook stream with a link back to the post (unless you opt out of that option in the comment box).

Seems good, but it isn’t perfect. Some of the issues:

Not everyone has a Facebook account, so won’t be able to comment
Facebook is banned in many workplaces, so people won’t be able to access or contribute to comments
There doesn’t seem to be a way at the moment to extract your site’s comment data out of Facebook
There probably are instances where anonymous commenting is a good thing, and Facebook comments makes it pretty hard to do

So, as always, the answer as to the best way of managing comments on websites is ‘it depends’. Having the Facebook option is a useful addition to the toolkit, though, and it will be interesting to see if any public service types use it in the future.

A Masters in Public Technology?

February 27, 2011

Tom Steinberg:

There is barely a not-for-profit, social enterprise or government body I can think of that wouldn’t benefit from a Duncan Parkes or a Matthew Somerville on the payroll, so long as they had the intelligence and self-discipline not to park them in the server room. Why? Because just one person with the skills, motivation and time spent learning can materially increase the amount of time that technology makes a positive contribution to almost any public or not-for-profit organisation.

I agree, though Tom’s developer-centric view of this should probably be widened for it to be a bit more inclusive.

Listening online

February 25, 2011

I’ve stopped saying it quite so much now, but the four point plan I used to trot out all the time when talking to organisations about their approach to the web was always:

Listen
Acknowledge
Create
Share

The only reason I don’t say it so much is that I got bored of repeating myself, rather than deciding it was the wrong way to go about things.

The first step, to listen (not monitor! that always sounds a bit big brother to me), is the most fundamental, but strangely it is also one of the hardest to get right, because it needs people, process and technology. Usually when this is the case the technology is the easy bit, but I’m not so sure in this instance.

Listening online is a case of tracking keywords and where they are used on the web. These keywords would be things like:

The name of your organisation
The names of the local area
Names of key people in leadership roles
Names of campaigns and issues, etc

You need to be alerted as to when they are used online, so you can respond if necessary, or just note it.

Why would you want to do this? Let me count the ways…

You want to be alerted immediately when people are saying bad / good things about your organisation
You want to quickly respond to online customer service queries
You want to quickly see who is talking about key issues and campaigns and join the conversation to raise awareness of your organisation’s activities.
You want to easily identify people active online in your local area and connect with them and involve them in what you are doing.

There are probably others too.

How to do this though? There are 3 approaches I think:

Cobble your own – using Google alerts, Reader, Yahoo! Pipes, maybe iGoogle or Netvibes and a bunch of other tools (SocialMention, BoardTracker, Addictomatic, Icerocket, etc) you could put together a pretty decent monitoring dashboard. Downside is that they are a pain to set up and even more annoying to maintain. Plus, any one of those services could disappear at a moment’s notice.
Use a tool – such as Tweetdeck, Seesmic or Hootsuite, for example. These tools have grown from being purely about tracking Twitter to allowing you to manage multiple accounts across multiple channels, such as Facebook Foursquare and others. They tend to be pretty cost effective, even for the pro versions, but are limited in terms of the data sources they pull content in from, such as blogs and forums for instance.
Buy a service – there are plenty of social media listening and tracking tools out there, each with their own unique features. Many offer deep data and sentiment analysis tools, telling you how much of the online chatter about you is positive, etc. These systems can be pretty expensive though, and for those organisations that just want a simple listening tool, can be very much in sledgehammer and nut territory.

(The apparent lack of a decent option somewhere between the free and the quite expensive is why I am so excited about the potential of RepKnight, which promises to be a simple, straightforward and cost effective tool to track keywords and to follow up results as necessary. I got to have some input into the specification for the product, so am hoping it will meet the needs of the public sector dead on.)

Once you have the technology in place you can think about the process and the people.

In terms of process, it comes back to Steph‘s neat little phrase that ‘interactive websites need interactive organisations’. What I mean here by listening is active listening, taking into account what people are saying, and acting upon it.

This means acknowledging what people are saying, answering questions and following up on queries. Most of the time it should be possible to reply using the same medium, but obviously occasionally communication will need to be taken offline. Sometimes – but certainly not always! – you might even have to document an interaction using your organisation’s CRM system.

None of this is particularly risky or difficult stuff – it’s just a case of getting the procedure in place and ensuring staff are trained to follow, and adapt to it.

I’d be interested in hearing from folks about the way they are doing online listening, or perhaps the reasons why they don’t! What are the issues you are facing?

101 cool tools: Instapaper

February 24, 2011

Wow! Number 4 already! At this rate I’ll be through all 101 by 2020…

Instapaper is a really neat service for saving content for consumption at a time that suits you.

You create an account, and then add a bookmarklet to your browser – when you spot something you’d like to check out later, just click the bookmark and a few seconds later the content has been sent to your account.

Your page on Instapaper then lists all your saved content, and you can then click to read them – and what’s really clever is that the content is stripped from the rest of the original web page, allowing you to focus on the words.

The next great thing with Instapaper is the way it integrates with mobile devices. The iPad and iPhone apps are excellent, and a great way of consuming content on the move.

But the real winner is the Kindle integration. By visiting your Instapaper account via the Kinde’s experimental browser, you can download your recent saved items, cobbled together into a single ‘ebook’. Genius!

Distraction

February 24, 2011

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian:

The biggest complaint, in both my Twitter sample and the expert essays, was about the quality of thinking in the online era. What the internet has done, say the dissenters, is damage our ability to concentrate for sustained periods. Being connected meant being constantly tempted to look away, to hop from the text in front of you to another, newer one. One tweeter replied that he now thought “about more things for shorter amounts of time. It’s like ADHD.” Anyone who has Tweetdeck fitted on their desktop, chirruping like a toddler tapping you on the shoulder urging you to come and play, will know what he means.

This, the worriers fear, is not just irritating; it might even damage our civilisation. How capable will people be of creating great works if they are constantly interrupted, even when alone? “What the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” angsts Nicholas Carr, who believes the internet is steering us toward “the shallows”.

Jeff Jarvis responds:

It is ever thus. Think back to the early days of TV and cable: My God, with so much to watch, will be ever get anything done? The exact same argument can be made—indeed, one wishes it were made—about books: With so many of them unread, how can we possibly ever do anything else? But, of course, we do.

Twitter addiction shall pass. Have faith—faith in your fellow man and woman. I was busy doing other things yesterday, important things, and so I pretty much did not tweet. I survived without it. So, I’m depressed to say, did all of you without me. I just wrote in my book that Twitter indeed created a distraction to writing the book, as I was tempted by the siren call of the conversation that never ends. But it also helped with my writing that I always had ready researchers and editors, friends willing to help when I got stuck or needed inspiration.

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