The World’s Greatest Content Marketer Hates Comments (Revisited)

We like to believe that we are ahead of the curve or pretty damn close to it. In January of 2013 you were given the gift known as The World’s Greatest Content Marketer Hates Comments. It predates the great comment war of 2014.

You know that one right?

It is the one that is discussed in Why We Won’t Shut Off Blog Comments Spin Sucks.  Since we run a green blog and believe in recycling good posts we are going to share our initial post with you again.

And we’ll even give you another picture of a sock monkey. Hope to see you in the comments.

I am the world’s greatest content marketer and the world’s greatest dad blogger and I hate comments.

Do me a favor and try not to get caught up in the self-appointed titles of greatest content marketer and greatest dad blogger because those titles are meaningless. They have the same authority as the lists that some media organizations compile of the top 50 or 100 Sock Monkeys who blog.

Heck, it is an insult to hard working sock monkeys everywhere to compare their work to some of the bloggers on these lists, not to mention a bunch of other big names. Don’t ask me to name names either because it won’t happen.

Not interested in a flame war with people who can’t write better than Sock Monkeys.

Forget About The Sock Monkeys

This post was going to be called Is Triberr Divisive but I stumbled across a post at Mark Schaeferâs place called Social media “engagement” is not a strategyand decided to go in a different direction.

It is a very smart piece and it deserves to be read. If you are not able to get over there then read this:

Let’s not forget that all that engagement comes at a cost! We have to be careful that we’re ready to staff-up to effectively meet those demands. And for some companies, that may not be a good business decision.

Let me give you a micro-example. Last week I wrote a blog post that had more than 100 comments. As a small business owner, if I had this level of engagement every day, I would not have time to work on the consulting and teaching activities that feed my family.

Now if I really wanted to, I could pump up this level of engagement all the time¦ but it would be foolhardy for me to do so. I need to strike the proper balance of commercial activities across my customer base that optimize my business results. In fact, I purposely plan my blog postings to DEPRESS engagement on days when I don’t have the time to properly handle it.

In other words, if you’re not careful, you can talk yourself broke.”

Smart businesses work hard to build relationships with their prospective and existing customers. One of the ways they do it is through creating channels that funnel conversation towards places where they have an active presence.

But once you open that door you have to prepare to answer the comments, calls, emails and visitors that come by to visit.

No one wants to be ignored and if you don’t respond in a timely basis you will alienate people and make them feel like you are ignoring them.

The beauty of our instant gratification society is that our collective attention spans are shrinking so our willingness to wait isn’t what it used to be.

I Have A Love/Hate Relationship With Comments

Remember me, the self-proclaimed World’s Greatest Content Marketer?  I have a love/hate relationship with comments. Blog comments are not currency but many people use them as such. It is how they measure their success but it is a funny sort of metric to use.

That questions and others that are related to it are responsible for posts likeWhat is the value of a comment? and Can You Build Community Without Comments?

Hell, sometimes I think the comments are the reason why some bloggers have gone off of the deep end. Blogging is a two-way street and when you start to view your readers as groupies and sycophants you are headed to that place Yoda referred to as The Dark Side.

Forgive the tangent, but it irks me to no end that my kids view Darth Vader as being some sort of sympathetic figure.

He used to be scary. He used to be the icon of evil and now since Lucas messed with my childhood he is not the same.

It makes me wonder if Lucas spent too much time reading all of the positive comments and not enough time paying attention to the criticism.

What I really want to see in a comment section is a conversation that we can learn from. I don’t mind banter because that can help build community, but if all we ever see is praise I begin to wonder.

Blogging Questions, Concerns and Ideas

I have to get some shut eye so that I can try to stay a step ahead of the sock monkeys but before I go I want to state again that Writing Is Not The Hardest Part Of Blogging and that blogging/social media isn’ free.

Our time is worth something and that is part of why I like mixing up the posts here. It is not just to maintain interest or because I love to write but because posts like this one stimulate conversation that builds community and educates.

I like learning and I think many of you do too.

The floor is open. Would love to hear your thoughts.