Uncategorized | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Blogging 113: Comments Policies for Blogs

In Charlene Li’s presentation yesterday, she showed the JNJ BTW blog, and its comments policy, which reads in part:

All comments will be reviewed before posting. Since this blog is about Johnson & Johnson, comments that don’t directly relate to the Company or to topics covered on this blog won’t be posted. That said, some comments may be forwarded to other people within the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies for follow-up as appropriate.

We generally won’t post comments about products that are sold by the Johnson & Johnson operating companies. Product questions should directed to the companies that sell them. A list of the products sold by our operating companies is available on the Johnson & Johnson website.

If you’re starting a corporate blog, I think this is a good example of a “plain english” explanation for comment moderation, and also highlighting that some of the issues that may be raised that would be more appropriately handled 1-1 with the customer will be done that way, instead of on the public blog.

The Marriott on the Move Blog also has some good language in its Terms of Use:

The primary rule when commenting is to be relevant and respectful in your postings. Just as we would not allow someone to stand in one of our hotel lobbies shouting profanities or engaging in other disruptive behavior that upsets guests, we will not allow that same type of action here. While Marriott assumes no duty to pre-screen or regularly review posted content, the blog will be moderated by an Editor and an Editorial Board who will have the right to refuse to post or remove any posting that they believe violates these Terms of Use.

These are good examples of ways you can set expectations for your blog, so that if you want to moderate comments and be able to deal with an individual issues off-line, it doesn’t interfere with the overall conversation.

What do you think of the JNJ and Marriott comment policy examples? If you have other examples to share, please add them in the comments below.

Speaking of comments, I may publish a Terms of Use or a Comments Policy for SMUG as a separate page, too, but for starters here is the policy I follow:

I LOVE comments. If what you have to say relates to the topic of the post, I’m delighted to have you join the conversation. That’s why I don’t use a Captcha, because I don’t want to make it harder for real people to comment.
I use the Akismet anti-spam service, which is part of WordPress.com and has spared me 42,792 comments so far. It’s really good, and I don’t even check the Akismet queue any more. In medical lingo, it’s both highly sensitive and highly specific. It catches most spam, and it rarely falsely labels a legitimate comment. So if your comment gets caught by Akismet, it’s not going to be posted. I won’t even see it. But if you’re a real person instead of a spambot, that’s not going to be a problem.
Negative comments are fine. I don’t even really mind personal attacks. In fact, I published a highly negative comment from a reader here, and it caused me to do this follow-up post. If you use profanity, however, I will delete the expletives and do the cartoon representation (such as &#@!) to maintain a family-friendly atmosphere.
I don’t moderate comments in advance, but I might take them down or mark them as spam if they fall into Category 5 or Category 6 below.
If you’re just selling something and not adding value to the conversation, I may not mark your comment as spam, but I will take it down. So, for example, if I’m reviewing the Flip video camera and you are the manufacturer of a competitor, I would welcome you to comment, talk about your camera’s capabilities and feature differences, and include a link for more information. But if you’re running an on-line store for various video cameras and just post a link to your site, with no other value added, I will remove the comment.
If you’re selling Viagra or its alleged herbal equivalents, and if somehow your comment and link makes it past Akismet, I will mark it as spam to ensure that you will be caught the next time you comment on an Akismet-protected blog.

Since SMUG is an on-line university dedicated to the exchange of ideas, our comments policy is more open than is appropriate for a big brand or a corporate blog. If you have thoughts on this draft policy and its appropriateness for a personal blog, or ideas on something I might be missing, I’d be glad to hear those in the comments, too.

A Tale of Two Pregnancies

On Friday I got some delightful news from my oldest daughter, Rachel. My previously unknown grandchild now has both an identified gender and a name, thanks to the medical advances of ultrasound. Meet Evelyn Grace Borg, who is scheduled to make her appearance on the seventh anniversary of 9/11. (Her aunts, whose birthdays are 8/31 and 9/14 are hoping she’s a birthday present for them instead.)

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7749271792776786660&hl=en]

The news from Rachel and Kyle made this story from yesterday’s Star Tribune all the more poignant for me personally. It’s an example of how a blog begun in advance of a tragedy has helped to bring comfort and support to Matt, Madeline and their family. After reading their story, I’m praying for them, and a little bit harder for Rachel, Kyle and Evelyn, too.

ALI Social Media Summit Discounts

I will be presenting at the “Social Media Summit: How To Use Blogging, Podcasting & the Latest Web 2.0 Technologies To Engage Your Employees, Reach Your Customers & Build Your Brand,” June 9-12, 2008 in Chicago, IL. My session topic will be: “Integrating New Media With Traditional Media To Multiply Results.”

This looks like it will be another strong event. I’m part of Day 1, just after Michael Rudnick’s address. Andy Sernovitz of GasPedal will deliver the afternoon keynote, and Duncan Wardle from Disney Parks will keynote Day 2 (here are some highlights of a presentation I heard him give earlier this month.) I know you’ll enjoy Chris Heuer from the Social Media Club, Paula Berg from Southwest Airlines and the Best Buy guys. The other case studies should be interesting, too.

Here are two ways you can save on registration:

If you register by May 1, you save $400.
Since I am one of the speakers, you can save another $200 by using the code “SPK” when registering.

Advanced Learning Institute is sponsoring the event. I’ve attended and presented (and blogged) at several of their previous conferences. Knowing or having heard several of the speakers, I’m confident you will find it worthwhile. I hope to see you there!

Top 3 Facebook Chat Feature Requests

Facebook‘s Chat functionality is really great. My youngest daughter, a big IM user, thinks it’s the best and easiest one she’s seen, and she loves how it is integrated into Facebook. I’ve had several conversations with it in just its first day of general availability.

That said, it still needs some features that would make it exceptionally powerful and valuable for business networking. Here are my top three:

Move from only 1-1 chat to allowing chat among multiple Facebook friends. This would enable work teams to have brief virtual ad hoc meetings on a particular tactical topic without the overhead of scheduling, walking to the conference room, waiting for everyone to assemble, and returning to their desks. This could enable more nimble reactions to business opportunities. In the PR world, it could be a great brainstorming tool for story ideas. It also would make it easier to get input from the people who are typically more reserved and quiet in face-to-face meetings.
Enable chat to take place in connection with Facebook groups. So, for example, if I have a secret Facebook group and would like to have a chat in which all of the members can participate, whether they are Friends with each other or not, that would be a valuable function, particularly in the work setting. This could be great for customer focus groups, for instance.
Enable users to filter their list of on-line friends according to their friend lists. This may not be a big deal unless you get lots of friends and they are all on-line a lot. But I can imagine that Scoble with his 5,000 friends would have something of a cluttered window. But still, since you can search by friend name to find whether someone is on-line, the clutter may not be a problem if you are purposefully seeking out a particular individual. If you’re browsing your on-line friends looking for small-talk, though, being able to filter (say, for instance, by limiting to your list of professional friends) would be cleaner.

How about you? What do you think of Facebook’s Chat function? What additional features are most important to you? Share your thoughts below…and maybe we can form a Facebook group to petition for our top priorities.

USA Today on Religious Podcasting

Photo: Oliver Lavery

Last week on the way back from San Francisco I read an interesting article in USA Today called “Religious Teaching Straight to Your iPod” that began as follows:

The Rev. Bruce Walker preaches to a congregation of fewer than 100 people in Greenville, S.C., but people all over the world listen to his sermons via podcast.

Evangelists have long used the airwaves to get their messages out to a mass audience. But now, podcast technology is opening the doors to a wider variety of religious teaching than ever before, available on demand and delivered automatically to the computers of a growing number of Americans hungry for spirituality.

A survey last year by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more people used the Internet to look for religious and spiritual information than to download music, participate in online auctions or visit adult websites.

While I’m skeptical of the relative “markets” for spirituality vs. smut, I’ve written before about the strong potential for churches to use podcasting as an alternative to broadcasting over the airwaves. And because music typically has copyright restrictions designed to protect profits, and because few pornographers are altruistically motivated to give their content away, these two sectors are probably less-suited for podcasting. Churches, by contrast, generally want as many people to hear their messages as possible, so religious content is ideally suited for this environment that encourages linking and sharing.

One of the main drawbacks of broadcasting is that sermons rarely follow the exact half-hour or one-hour format required for terrestrial or satellite radio. As a result they are either trimmed to fit, or may be stretched over two days, with considerable overlap. Neither of these solutions is ideal.

With a podcast, you don’t need to choose between redundancy or loss of meaningful portions of the message. If the sermon is 33:28, that’s fine, and so is 42:53. In fact, there’s no length that doesn’t work. A podcast is like TiVo for audio. Your listeners can partake whenever it fits their schedule, and you don’t need to meet a mass media-induced time limit. And pastors are already delivering the sermons; it’s just a matter of recording an existing activity, so there’s also no need to produce filler material to pad a broadcast slot.

Technology can’t replace genuine in-person fellowship, but it can enable more effective distribution of content at a lower cost, and far beyond the radius of a local radio tower.

The USA Today article mentions SermonAudio.com as a hub for Christian content, with a reasonable cost of $29.99 a month for churches to upload and distribute their messages. While that’s certainly not an extravagant cost, considering that $360 a year is far less than what you might spend for a single 60-second spot on a major commercial station in many local markets, churches do have cheaper alternatives, as SMUG podcasting curriculum students will discover. You can publish a podcast for $20 a year through the method I will be demonstrating, and to learn how to do it I have an offer for SMUG students to produce and distribute their own podcasts at absolutely no cost.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to check out some religious podcasts, here are the ones I recommend:

Desiring God Sermon Audio, featuring Dr. John Piper. This is perfect for the podcast medium because the messages are highly variable in length. In fact, as I wrote previously, Desiring God decided to do radio without radio and focus on the podcast because it was more effective.
Here are two others that are podcast-delivered versions of what goes over the air:

Renewing Your Mind, a radio program from Dr. R.C. Sproul

Truth for Life, featuring Alistair Begg.

This is smart, too, because it multiplies the geographic and temporal reach of the programs for almost no cost. They’re already producing the audio; the podcast just lets people subscribe to have it delivered conveniently instead of requiring listeners to tune in at a specific time.

Technology may not be completely values-neutral, but it is highly adaptable. Typically pornographers precede pastors in perceiving the potential of technology, but this USA Today article indicates that religious podcasting is gaining widespread adoption.