Blog Comments as Social Currency

by Alan Belniak on August 31, 2010 · 5 comments

in Social Media

currency

When I peruse blogs every day, I find a lot of stuff I like, some stuff I don’t like, and a little bit that I really like.  Like enough to warrant a comment, anyway.  But I don’t always comment.  I read through the comments first, and see if someone already said what I am planning on saying.  If so, I try to think of a different angle.  I try very hard to not simply say, “Great post!”.

What value does “Great post!” add?

None.  It gives the blog author a 0.1 second hit of euphoria, but that’s about it.  Blogs should be treated like conversations (despite what Mitch Joel has to say).  Let’s use the standard cocktail party analogy again (see item 8), because it works so well.

Imagine you’re at a cocktail party, in a circle of seven or so other people.  You have the floor, and are closing up a salient, original point on a current event.  You finish, take a sip of your drink, and someone in the circle says, “Great point.”  Then a pause, silence, and someone next to you says, “Great point.”  More silence, two seconds pass, a third “Great point.”

This isn’t a conversation.  It’s barely even dialogue.

Instead, someone else in the circle jumps off your point and starts up another, related conversation.  Partway through, she references something you said 60 seconds prior, thus tying the two thoughts together.  How much more interesting and engaging is her point, in addition to the total conversation?

The (new?) social currency among bloggers and readers these days isn’t so much “great post”, but rather heading on over to what they have to say and seeing if you can add value to one of their conversations on their site, if applicable. n That’s far more valuable (and euphoric) than “Great post!”, don’t you agree?  After all, isn’t that what this is all about?


Thanks to Tamsen McMahon {http://twitter.com/tamadear}, who inspired this post.

image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/bradipo/1435739708/


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  • Stan

    Great post!

  • http://brasstackthinking.com Tamsen McMahon (@tamadear)

    Excellent point: blog posts are often just the beginning of a conversation. My post drafts are a boneyard of ancillary ideas that got stripped away from what I finally published. I love seeing which points readers bring back from the dead–particularly the ideas a post sparked that I hadn’t even thought of. I feel an obligation to those who’ve continued the conversation in that way: I want to explore *their* ideas further and see what new ones might develop. I feel the same obligation with others’ blogs–and will withhold a comment that I don’t see as moving the conversation along.

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  • http://twitter.com/Matt_Hawk Matt Hawk

    I don’t know, Al. I kind of look at the comments as a self-congratulatory pat on the back. I blog, and do it for personal satisfaction. To say I don’t care if no one reads it is a lie, but also a truth. I post, then I share with my twitter/facebook and occasssionally LinkedIn networks. For the next hour, I’m checking obsessively for comments and rereading the post for qa/qc purposes.

    But I truly write for myself, and perhaps that is where you and I diverge on this topic. I write, generally, nonsensical poems, fiction-ness, and commentary on usually unimportant issues that perturb me. Sometimes there isn’t room for comment, other than, “great post.”

    Writing is so condensed now that I look at much of it as vignettes to take away the salient point, stash it and use it when the time is right. I’m not getting stimulated any more. I’m inundated with peoples thoughts and ideas and points that I’m numb.

    Rock n Roll is dead, Al.

  • Anonymous

    Matt,
    You make a great point. Perhaps I was lumping all bloggers’ intentions and purposes into one basket. You and I blog for different reasons. To me, it *is* like a conversation that I can’t have concurrently (and instead irbid asynchronous). So, I value the comments hugely.

    I see your point about being numb, but it doesn’t apply to me. I’m picking up bits and pieces in everything I read.

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