Common Challenge

Getting a ‘comment notice’ e-mail from Mashable today got me thinking - it clutters my inbox, but also it helps me track the conversations I commented on (disqus and co.comments were not very helpful with that). So I clicked the included link and followed this conversation. It served mashable at least one page view, and probably some more from other people that commented the story (thus it’s effect could be expotential instead of linear). So using the simplest possible tool Mashable helped me engage into conversation and also helped itself by increasing revenue.

Modelling it for the rest of the web-world, we should focus on helping our users interact with our content - simple RSS is not enough anymore (although it probably could be used here as well if I had an auto generated channel for posts that I commented on) - as it brings users only once. You need mechanisms that constantly remind your users that the conversation (interaction) is on, and they should take part in it.

Seek balance though - if you push too much on your users they might stop coming back at all. Give them an instant opt-out to any incoming information (but don’t cut the whole stream, just one thing that’s not currently appealing) and keep the total interaction at a reasonable level (thus reducing the overeat effect).

Photo credit (cc): afroswede