I’ve been thinking a lot about discussions recently. Blogging is about starting conversations, and if you’ve read the Cluetrain Manifesto, you know that markets are conversations too. If you don’t talk often and clearly with your audience or customers, they’ll find someone who will.
The problem here is that I can’t figure out the best way to get that conversation started and keep it going. Anything that encourages discussion on the web has to be easy to use, inviting, and simple to read and find out what others have said. There’s lots of things out there that do this to some degree or another, but what’s the best?
In rough order of complexity, we have:
Blog comments. If you run a blog, this is the easiest way to go. Nearly all blogging systems support comments, and for those that don’t you can add them after the fact with something like HaloScan. If set up properly, blog comments are easy to post, easy to read, and very easy to see to what they refer. The problem with blog comments is that you have to be on the blog to see them, and once a post scrolls down the page to make way for new posts, comments drop off as fewer and fewer people see the commented post. And once you’ve posted a comment to a blog, there are few ways to see if anyone replied to you. Comments are really just that: comments. They’re not all that conducive to conversation because there’s no mechanism to keep that back-and-forth going.
Mailing lists. These usually take the form of a Yahoo Group or Google Group and they work fairly well for back-and-forth conversation. In fact, that’s what mailing lists are for. The downside to mailing lists is that they can quickly diverge off topic and there’s really no clear way for someone to jump in mid-stream and know what’s going on. There’s no strong connection to the original post that kicked off the discussion, even if, as I do, every blog post is also emailed to the list to start a new thread. Mailing lists also have a tendency to become very “clique-ish”, with regular contributors making up the bulk of the traffic and, often inadvertently, making it uncomfortable for newcomers to speak up. I quite often see people subscribe to the Writing On Your Palm Yahoo Group and then unsubscribe two days later having never posted. So while mailing lists are great for creating a community, I’m not sure how well they work for focused conversations.
Online forums. More common on “news” sites like Brighthand and Tapland than blogs, online forums give people a discrete place to discuss specific topics. It’s easy to see what people are talking about, and it’s easy to jump in. But the structured nature of online forums makes them obviously less flexible than the other two options. While you can get email notification when someone responds to a thread in which you’re interested, it’s fairly uncommon to be able to read a forum comfortably on a mobile device. Reading and replying to discussion forums is a lengthy, sit-down activity and it can take quite a while to get caught up on an active forum. Does this requirement for extended focus make it harder to people to stick with a discussion?
If you were going to set up a web site where conversations with your readers were absolutely vital, how would you do it?
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