By Marie Dollé head of content and digital strategy Kantar Media
Relevant reader comments can act as as useful content for publishers and brand alike. Marie Dollé, Head of Content and Digital Strategy at Kantar Media, looks at the pros and cons of the alternatives such as encouraging users to post on social media platforms and the rise of a new type of contributor, the ‘reactfluencer': a combination of reactive comments from influencers.
Reader comments are the bedrock of participatory media, however they can sometimes appear to be a puzzle for editors, with some going as far as disabling user comments on news stories. This is a controversial approach, considering that publications should be actively seeking to encourage greater readership and engagement on their news stories.
Moving the discussion to social platforms
Many news sites, including Bloomberg, Reuters and The Week, have eliminated the ability to post commentary on their sites in favour of having users post on social media platforms instead. The reason? The supposed mediocrity of website comments which are often time-consuming, irrelevant, unconstructive and even aggressive, not to mention expensive to moderate. This choice is equally motivated by the changing behaviour of readers who tend to express themselves more on social networks than on dedicated media spaces online.
However, confining the possibilities of interaction to social media alone could eventually cause a series of undesirable effects. Firstly, content publishers are required to maintain lively, interactive sites so being profitable online requires not a passive audience but rather a committed and loyal audience.
Furthermore, the fragmentation of audiences across social networks makes gathering feedback and collecting information particularly difficult. Migrating users to comment on social platforms, rather on the online media space itself, makes it much harder to obtain an overview of the site’s readership, not to mention smoother and more regular interaction, which helps to build a unified community. Let’s not forget that the power of this medium lies in its ability to know its audience and develop a unique relationship with it. During an era of fleeting, distracted audiences, it is essential to maintain and enhance this relationship by creating quality conversations on the website.
Read the article in full: Comments are dead. Long live comments!
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