I could not resist the cartoon above when I saw it in last week’s New Yorker magazine! Comments are tricky beasts! I get literally hundreds for every post – unfortunately, most of them are pure spam! Thanks to WordPress and it’s highly effective akismet spam filtering capability, these are virtually all caught for me with minimal intervention. It’s the real comments – or lack thereof – that take me to the analysts couch!
Keep the Emails Coming!
I get lots of Email about my blog posts. This is great – some are about requests for consulting or speaking. Others really are comments or questions about a specific post. I’m happy to answer these, but I WISH they were submitted as actual comments on the post, so we can all see, and if we wish to, participate in the discussion. Occasionally, I get so inspired by the comment, that I’ll create a new post based upon the Email I received and the response I created. This always seems to me to be a clumsy way of bringing an offline thought back into the mainstream, but it works.
So, yes – please keep the emails coming – but don’t be shy about inline commenting!
The LinkedIn and Facebook Effect
Another tricky proposition is that I choose to have my posts appear on LinkedIn, FaceBook and Twitter. When the post relates directly to one of the LinkedIn Groups in which I’m active, I will actually link to it from within a post on the group page. This is great – it expands the reach of the post. The downside is that my Twitter and LinkedIn connections and groups are vociferous and knowledgeable commentators. My FaceBook friends are often active commentators, even if not so knowledgeable in my topic areas! So much of the comment traffic happens outside my blog – uncaptured for posterity!
I’m not sure what to do about this. I’m reasonably happy to live with the situation (as I have for the last 6 years or so.) But when I saw the New Yorker cartoon, it prompted me to write a short post – and see if I get any comments!
Cartoon courtesy of New Yorker Magazine
