Favorite comments: altered jeans & duct-taped babies
Another week, another wave of hilarious, insightful, fabulous commenting across the Offbeat Empire blogs. In this morning’s staff video conference, we discussed how one of the upsides of the shift toward people being too lazy to comment anywhere except Facebook is that the quality of blog comments on our posts has generally shifted upward. For the most part, folks who want to snark or leave a crappy drive-by comment are too lazy to click through to the post, type their names and email, and then type their comment. The snarkers seem be self-selecting to stay on Facebook, which is fine by us. The result is that the folks who ARE invested in the comment communities on the Offbeat Empire sites have a (generally) safe haven to have (generally) valuable conversations. It’s honestly kind of amazing.
So gather close, my little offbeatlings, as I run through a selection of the Empire staff’s favorite comments this week.
Don’t be that guy: why wedding vendors shouldn’t publicly rant about work
Every once and while, a wedding vendor will perhaps forget that Offbeat Bride isn’t an industry publication. Every once and a while, we’ll get ranting, vitriolic comments from vendors about how stupid brides are, how little couples understand about what vendors do, how this one time this one couple did this totally awful thing, how they want to strangled a certain mother of the bride, etc etc etc.
But wedding industry friends, for the good of your business: don’t be that guy.
Acculturating new readers who find us on Facebook
Offbeat Bride’s Facebook page has blasted into the stratosphere this month, with our Like count going from 33k to 43k in the last 30 days. This is basically an average of about 400 new Facebook followers every single day — way above our baseline. Ok, so this is great, right? So many people finding Offbeat Bride and being introduce to the awesomeness, right? So many new readers! So many new eyeballs! Well, yes and no…
Is social media sharing the new commenting?
As a publisher, I’ve always prioritized toward comments because it’s content that I “own.” Yeah, someone else wrote it, but I own the pageviews (and the related ad sales)… and in exchange, I bear the responsibility of keeping those conversations in-line with my brand. Hence, our stringent commenting policies because I believe VERY strongly that if your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault.
That said, it’s started to sink in that readers aren’t coming back to blog comments… and really, social media shares are more valuable for me anyway. Here’s why…