I’ve recently installed a relatively new WordPress plug-in from the good folk at Backtype.
This is what it does: it scans the web, including social networks like Twitter and other blogs, for mentions of your post and draws those mentions in as comments on the post. This is a good thing in many respects. It helps to give readers a sense of the whole debate, not just the point of view of people who manage to stop-by your site and leave a comment. It links to all its sources.
So why am I fretting?
In some ways, it feels like cheating. When people measure website engagement, the ratio of comments per post is a key indicator. Someone who gets 100 comments on every post is clearly more *cough* important than someone who gets 1 comment, when it comes to blogging and such.
My recent post on the #PRDebate event that we produced at NMK a couple of weeks ago ostensibly has 17 comments. Yet I know only a couple of those were from people who came to this site — the rest are collated from Twitter and other people’s blogs.
Have I stolen those comments in some way? In a way, I have. If other bloggers are competing to be the most popular, then they lose if they don’t use this plug-in. It seems like they’ve got less engagement than an entirely-equivalent-in-every-other-way blog that does use it. Which isn’t true and so that’s not really fair.
However, until people start complaining, I’m going to carry on. Conversations about blog posts are distributed nowadays – you’re more likely to get a reaction on Twitter than your own page; people reference your post on other people’s blogs. Blogs are less important as destinations as people dip into the flow rather than visit sites. Creating a resource, and multiple resources, to let people get the whole picture is a valuable thing. The engagement metric based on comments/posts is in some ways flawed since if people are discussing the post elsewhere, then that’s equally (more!) important than them discussing it on your own site.
Be delighted to hear others’ thoughts on this – comment below or via your own blog, twitter or anything else, it seems.
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You’ve raised some interesting points here, Ian. However, I don’t think I really agree with the “stealing engagement” argument. Aside from the “Blogs” source for the plugin, all the comments we pull in are people engaging with your content. If anything, people looking at the ratio of comments per post will get a clearer picture of how many people are engaged. That being said, I don’t think people who measure website engagement should be looking solely at the number of comments per post, because as you said above, conversations are distributed.
Thanks!
Thank you, Christopher. I agree with your points — if I didn’t think it was useful, I would have uninstalled the plug-in.
However, since blog measurement is necessarily comparative, it is somewhat disingenuous to suggest the playing field is still level.
Hi Ian — Thanks for this post. I’ve equally grabbled with capturing conversations around a blog that are taking place in the social web. I’ll install the Backtyple plug-in and report back. Cheers, Wadds
Can i take a one small pic from your blog?
@Tania: Go for it.
@Wadds — be interested to see any feedback you get. As I say, I am a little ambivalent in some ways.
The problem with the new plugin is that it only support WordPress and not the high traffic… Blogger.com
As I recall, Blogger doesn’t support the Trackbacks standard. Which makes it a poorer platform as far as inter-blog discussions are concerned.