How Can We Facilitate Conversations BETWEEN Commenters on Our Blogs?

[Michele Martin]

Via Skelliewag (Thanks for the lead on this blog, Christine!), there's an interesting post asking how we can get our blogs to look more like Figure 2, with commenters interacting with each other, rather than just with the blogger. This is something I've wondered about myself, because I think that while it's great to have people commenting to me, it would be even better if everyone was interacting with everyone else. Any thoughts on how to do this? Has anyone had success?

I tend to think that what happens is that people read our blog posts and then want to respond to us. They may or may not read other readers' comments. Do you think this is true? Do you read through comments on other blogs when you want to post a comment yourself? Do you tend to respond to the other commenters or just to the blogger?

[Christine Martell]

I read the comment strings on most blogs, except for those that are clearly just trying to get links (ProBlogger, for example, which I tend to skim looking for things that are more substantial). Most of the time I respond to the blogger, but sometimes I do respond to the other commenters. I have noticed that once I do, or someone else does, it can inspire others to do the same.

This may be one of the informal unspoken kinds of norms of blogging. It might just take asking or encouraging people to talk among themselves as well as to us? I think many of us have learn from discussion groups and forums to lurk and see what the norms are, and then try to do the right thing.

Might be an interesting test to make an effort to have conversations with commenters as well as bloggers and see what happens. Michele, your blog gets pretty consistent comments, maybe we could run an experiment there?

[Michele Martin]

Absolutely this would be an interesting experiment to run and I'm happy to do it. What thoughts do we have on how to make the conversations happen? I use Typepad, so I don't have the advantage of the conversation plug-ins that might help (like being able to have threaded commenting). So it would have to happen through what I do. I already try to respond to commenters via email and in the post. But that's just another version of them interacting with me as the blogger. I can also post something encouraging commenters to interact with one another. Beyond that, what other ideas do we have?

[Christine Martell]

I was thinking we might intentionally make cross comments to your commenters. Model the behavior and see if other people start chiming in.

[Michele Martin]

That makes sense--I also like Robin's suggestions below on maybe using "Question of the Day" or something like that, maybe with a specific instruction for people to engage with each other.

Obviously not every blog post is going to lend itself to discussion anyway--I'm realizing that it's a big mistake that I make. Whenever I try to have all the answers, that's when I get a lot of bookmarks, but not a lot of conversation. Makes me realize that we have to remember that in blogging, as in real-life conversation, we have to leave the space and the questions for conversations to develop. This does NOT tend to happen when we present our posts as though we have all the answers. At least not in my case.

[Simon Thomas]

I think the most important factor is to allow your readers to follow the emerging conversation easily. The two ways I try and do this are both through Wordpress plugins. One provides a post specific comments rss feed and the other allows people to get email notifications of new posts after they have posted themselves. There's not a great deal you can do to force people to read previous comments, but making it easy for them to see any new ones works.

And I completely agree with you Christine, there are certain blogs where the comments are pointless because of either the sheer number, or the blatant link posting. Thankfully, this tends to only be a problem on the bigger blogs.

[Robin]

I was very interested in this story too - and found it the same way, via Christine's comment. The problem of having commenters who respond only to the blogger is analogous to the problem of students responding to the teacher instead of to one another. If the analogy works, then I suspect that all of us who are educators have thought about this before.

The concept of modeling, as Christine says below, seems to be key. For example, on Michele's Bamboo blog, have you ever noticed how many of the comments begin with "HI Michele"? I think the reasons for this are: (1) Michele responds to almost every comment using the commenter's first name, (2) Her writing is highly voiced so that readers feel a person behind them, rather than a "wizard of oz," and (3) She has a fairly specific idea of her audience and remains consistent to them/us. When it comes to seeding conversation among readers, these seem like good strategies to me.

Sometimes on my blog The Other Mother I post a Question of the Day, and these posts seem to generate a lot of comments that address one another. Usually these are genuine questions on my part, and I follow up either in a new post or as a comment what I decided to do and the results, thus far.

I think this is a great topic to keep mulling over. I would love to learn more.

[Michele Martin]

Hmm, Robin--this is actually taking me in another direction, so forgive the digression--as a professional teacher of writing, I think it might be really valuable (if you were willing) for you to teach us a little more about what it means to have "highly voiced" writing and how you go about creating that. I find it a huge compliment for you to say this about Bamboo, although I admit that I don't feel like I've necessarily found my voice. So I'm very interested in learning more about that idea and what we should be thinking about in creating our own blog voices. What do you think? Could we start a forum on that?

[Robin]

As my favorite 3-year-old says, "Sho-wah!" (Sure!)

[Michele Martin]

Do you want to start it or do you want me to? I'm also beginning to think about the idea of us doing a "live" event--maybe a Skype group chat or something. It would be cool if we could have sort of a "lecture" series or something on a particular topic and this might lend itself to that. I know it would be harder for the folks down-under though.

[Robin]

I don't mind starting it, if you give me instructions about where it should go. And what was the name we thought of... the writing studio? the writer's studio? something like that.

[Michele Martin]

Yep--we called it "The Writers' Studio." I'm thinking that maybe we start either a group or a forum. Maybe a group would be better because then we could more easily have multiple strands there. If you set it up, I'll send out a broadcast notice.