Using Chat in Content Marketing - Observations Several Months In
I’ve been struggling with the right way to enable commenting on this blog for a long time. In 2013, I wrote a post called Letter to the Editor about my challenges with comments.
Most notably, comments meaningfully changed readers’ perceptions of the content they read, even if the comments are not sound. In addition, I haven’t found a way to effectively moderate comments at scale.
Several months ago, I deployed a chat widget at the bottom off this page as an experiment. Here are my observations so far:
Chat volumes are similar to commenting numbers. The amount of communication coming in through chat is roughly equivalent.
The types of interactions are more personal. By their nature, chats are one-on-one. Chatters often write in with their points of view, ideas for new posts, typographical errors to fix, or just saying hello. Often, the conversation ping-pongs a few times, which is fun.
I do get a fair number of questions to the effect of, “Is this actually you writing back?” It is.
I haven’t received any tirades. I find overall it’s much easier to manage than comments.
I know the identities of the chatters and I can track their visitation patterns through the site. I hope to use that data to reach out to founders of startups and also to optimize content over time. Combining this data with email newsletter data gives me a much better sense of the composition of this blog’s audience than any other analysis.
There’s a great benefit to having the chat history each time you interact with someone. It reminds me of great customer support tools that provide all the context you need to engage.
I’m very sensitive to page load speed. My goal is less than 1 second to full page render and fortunately the chat widget loads asynchronously, maintaining fast page load times.
Chat doesn’t build community in the same way as commenting. Since the chats are not public, readers cannot comment on each other’s ideas. Rather, chatting is more one-on-one; more personal and direct.
I imagine SaaS startups prefer chat to commenting in their content marketing efforts because the startup can exert tighter control over the prospect’s experience compared to a commenting platform. A brand is the sum total of all interactions a customer has with the business. A prospective customer can engage with an SDR and be guided through the buying journey over several low-touch, personal conversations. This establishes rapport early on with the company and reinforces the brand.
Overall, I think it’s been a successful experiment but I’m curious to hear if readers and other content marketers have different impressions. Send me a note on Twitter or a chat at the bottom of the page.
Executive Leader- Business Strategy, Product Development, GTM, and Customer-Driven Innovation.
8 年Hi Tom I completely agree. Chat would be best option. It solves the problem and helps to build brand. But if the chat does not server then purpose.. then system should be in position to turn it on as comment. That way we can find ways to solve problems in new way.
CEO & Co-Founder at Bilendo
8 年Totally agree. What most people forget is that visitors only engage with high quality content. They tend to see chat as a conversion optimization tool, put it on the home page or every other conversion point and wait for chatters... In my career I placed dozens of those plugins on clients websites and deleted them few months later. Besides a lot of traffic you need to have 1. High quality content, 2. A strong point that leads to discussion or 3. Existing engagement with your audience... ... to use chat. A good starting point are comments. If users comment your contents (blog posts, FAQs, support pages) you can try implementing a chat. Don't think that they will only engage by chat if they didn't on any other way before. If chat is working for you, great! Use it because any conversation with prospects will make a conversion more likely, strengthen your brand and gives a chance for word of mouth.
CTO @ UENI
8 年Hello, Tomasz Tunguz Thanks for your experiment, few points after reading: If you are interested in decreasing page load time, probably, comments may be loaded in asynchronous mode also? Like Disqus plugin does? As for “Is this actually you writing back?” problem - this is because chat is not structured. Moreover, as for analysis of data on the page, it is harder, especially in new structured data Internet era that search engines try to build through schema.org project. So, completely agree that "Chat does not build community" like comments do. Also, I agree that chat pushes you to write shorter phrases. However, here is the question: what the limit number of people in one chat room(page) is? Probably comments functionality has a higher threshold number. I think chats are cool for real interaction of few people or 1 to 1 convos, especially with the last modern way of AI for automation responses that may help you faster than a human. Once again thanks for your experiment and sorry my "tirades" here. :) P.s. Is there any possibility you can share the Data you was writing about in this post? I mean, maybe it may be analyzed & visualized by the community. Thanks!
Bachelor's degree - Lviv Politehnika
8 年Www.50wb.org
Bachelor's degree - Lviv Politehnika
8 年I need yours help