Blog comments and treasure troves
Happy New Year. It’s January 1, and traditionally time for making resolutions and commitments. (I got stuck in wondering what the difference is between a resolution and a commitment and found this interesting sounding book, The Logic of Commitment).
Thinking about resolutions, my mind wandered to my very frequent thought that I must/should/ought to respond to people who comment on my blogs. Each of my blogs ends with the invitation, ‘Let me know’, and often people do. I get comments posted on LinkedIn, on my own website and through emails. I read them all, they’re helpful to me at least, and I appreciate getting them.
I feel churlish and anxious in not replying to the public ones – though I invariably reply to email comments. There’s really only one reason I don’t reply: I don’t have enough time to give each one a thoughtful response. And a quick ‘thank you for your comment’ response, doesn’t seem sufficient.
Now, I’m wondering if I should I resolve (or commit) to respond to any comments I receive in 2019, (and what to do about all the ones I haven’t responded to in 2018 and before that) or alternatively stop saying ‘Let me know’, or switch off the comment box and not feel the churlishness (but also lose the value in the comments) or come up with something else that isn’t quite so binary.
To see what others do I took a look at HBRs most popular 8 articles this week. Only one of the 8 had no comments. The rest had between 3 and 16 with an outlier one which had 25. Blog authors varied in whether they responded or not. Most did not. Only 2 of the 8 blogs had a response from the author in which they were responding to a posted comment.
Then I looked at what the prevailing advice is. There are lots of differing views on the pros and cons of responding to comments. A well-balanced piece discussing disabling the comments feature, with data to support, asks the question ‘With no clear consensus from the content marketing community, how are you supposed to decide what to do with the comments on your own blog?’ and concludes ‘Since blog comments don’t have a huge effect on your traffic, they don’t have a huge effect on your revenue either. … Comments can be used to further relationships with your existing readership, provide social proof, or to elicit feedback. … it is completely up to your own personal preference [whether you disable comments or not].’
An idea I have, that is somewhere between not responding to any, responding to some/all, or switching off the comments feature is to take an arbitrary date – maybe a month after I’ve posted the blog and at that point draw on all the comments to synthesise/interpret them in relation to the blog topic. And that activity might become a blog topic in itself.
I came across a piece in the Journal of Organisation Design that does that, for a suite of journal articles: ‘An Interpretative Synthesis in Three Themes’ where author Richard Burton says ‘I was asked by JOD to monitor the discussion and identify the broad organization design themes that emerged [from the inaugural issue of the Journal of Organisation Design]’.
Maybe doing that for each blog that had a reasonable number of comments would be useful to organisation design practitioners (and others)?
Aiming to get to my view on the answer to this question I took a look at the 52 blogs I wrote during 2018 – one per week. I post each one on my own website and on LinkedIn. Looking only at LinkedIn, the blogs that got both the most comments and the most views were:
- A big issue 38 (323)
- What I talk about when I talk about structure 25 (645)
- Overloaded 11 (389)
- HR business partners or not (11) 1503
- A toolkit of toolkits 10 (645)
The blog Agile: is it hype? got a higher number of comments, but not as many views as some other blogs – 29 (265).
I re-read A Big Issue and all the comments it got. It’s about systems thinking. I followed all the links and references people commenting have put in. It turns out to be a treasure trove of views, ideas and references on systems thinking from a diversity of perspectives. The trove includes:
- A discussion on the Cynefin Framework with Dave Snowden stepping in to clarify
- A lead to Pete Burden’s provocative piece ‘Is systems thinking the root of all evil?’ which has its own 130 comments arguing to and fro.
- Several books on systems thinking were mentioned in comments on both Pete’s blog and on mine. Books included:
- Mitroff and Linstone’s book (I assume it’s The Unbounded Mind .
- Nora Bateson’s book Small Arcs of Larger Circles, where ‘there’s a lovely essay called Framing the Symmetry’.
- The Heretic’s Guide to Management (Culmsee, Awati) ‘which is all how to divest people of unsuitable models of the world when working in complex, ambiguous situations’.
- Jacobson, I., Lawson, H.B. (2015) Software Engineering in the Systems Context
- Systems Approaches to Managing Change, edited by Martin Reynolds and Patrick Hoverstadt,
- Rethinking the Fifth Discipline, Robert Flood
- Systems Thinking Made Simple, Derek Cabrera, Laura Cabrera
- Articles and other blogs mentioned were:
- An idea on how to help solve poverty
- Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices
- Second Thoughts on Team Building,Bill Critchley and David Casey – ‘who argued that the more complex and emergent the work, the more vital the quality of relationship in it’.
- Antagonistic neural networks underlying differentiated leadership roles,
- Better architecting with systems approach
- Listen carefully, it’s the system talking
- A delightful cartoon story of questions and answers
- Video
- Russell Ackoff talking on a car is not the sum of its parts
- Websites
- On both mine and Pete’s blog were excellent comments from Chris Rodgers and also several people who mentioned him – see his Informal Coalitions website
- STREAMS wiki https://streams.expert/mediawiki/index.php?title=STREAMS looking at Systems Thinking, Real Enterprise Architecture and Management Science.
On Pete’s blog, Bruce Kay – someone following the discussion and commenting himself – summarises the discussions saying, ‘Thank you all for a very entertaining and illuminating discussion on the merits of Systems Thinking. In the following paragraphs I captured some notes … ‘
Also, Pete fostered the discussion by responding to every comment in supportive and questioning ways which kept it going.
My conclusion to this limited research is that thoughtful comments provide a rich source of additional information/resources on a blog topic. Someone fostering the discussion by responding to and extending each comment adds richness. (I’ve done this when I’ve been teaching on-line courses but not seen it done before on blogs). If there are sufficient comments it might be worth synthesising and interpreting them.
I’m still thinking over how I should approach the comments on my own blogs. Any ideas? Let me know.
Image: No comment graffiti
To my mind, the first question is about your purpose in blogging - are you just sharing your knowledge and current practice, are you seeking to stimulate thinking and discussion about thorny issues surrounding current theory and practice, are you seeking to build your profile with a view to generating business opportunities, are you seeking to build traffic / audience with some broader purpose in mind, are you pursuing some other purpose(s), are you pursuing a combination of the above? Being clear about your purpose will inform how you attend to the comments made, and their will be different responses for different purposes. ?It's no different to designing an organisation / enterprise - determine your purpose before you design the means of pursuing it ... where the design may well extend beyond publishing one article per week. Once you are clearer about that ... you may also feel less guilty about not responding (depending on which purpose(s) you have settled on).
Breakthroughs, not barriers - for organisations with purpose
6 年Happy New Year Naomi I think your post is great. And it's a very interesting point. I think you are tapping into something that is at the core of how we use social media. In theory, and in many people's hopes, I think social media should promote dialogue. But in practice it's often just production and consumption without much dialogue. You mention some of the comments on my post on systems thinking. Yes, some of them were brilliant and I loved that Bruce Kay made a summary. You also did a brilliant job of working through and pulling out all the references and sources - thereby creating a goldmine of useful material for others to follow up with! But there were also some comments on my post that I think were just people suffering from overload but still wanting to be part of the stream. Their comments seemed like throwaway comments without any real attempt to understand or engage. I recognise that in myself - I want to join - in, but am just too busy sometimes to give the topic justice. This is a symptom of overload from social media more generally I think. Anyway I think you are on to something - it would be great if we could find ways to use the comments more usefully. I think your idea of waiting and then summarising is brilliant. A way of 'panning for gold'.... This is, of course, all very dear to my heart because for me organisational development is all about how we change the way we talk together - including online! (PS I also very much liked your other idea of inviting comments but disabling them too - that would slow us down a bit!)
Transformation through Business Therapy...
6 年Naomi a really insightful post, and one that resonates with me... firstly let’s get it out there, you don’t have to respond - lol... As someone that is relatively new to posts and blogs I have found them useful in terms how people respond. As you mentioned, for the more serious I get some interesting and very useful insight to other peoples viewpoints and references which I find fantastic as this helps me to extend my research and knowledge. Like you, I also reflect back from time to time on what I have posted previously, what’s interesting, what doesn’t ‘float’ and how people have contributed... all fascinating stuff... For me, I think that LinkedIn and other social platforms are untapped gold for knowledge and wisdom... your post certainly gave me some ‘food for thought’ - thanks... Have a fab 2019...