Registration walls and user exodus water falls (or, how do you get people to comment on your stuff?)
Go Big Always takes some “older” new media companies, such as CNET and MacWorld, to task for not fully embracing social media and declares, consequentially, that “they’re getting their ass handed to them by blogs.” And that’s quite a large collective ass at that!
The rationale for the ass handing basically boils down to the fact that those companies/blogs who do “get it,” such as TechCrunch and Wired, make it easy for you to leave a comment, while the CNETs and MacWorlds don’t, forcing users through a more laborious registration process.
I agree that a “registration wall” is a great way to drive away potential commenters and active site users, but I would argue this is but one reason among many why some online media companies are more successful than others in embracing social media and fostering active communities.
But just to take a step back for a second, I think it’s hard and in some ways to unfair to compare CNET directly with TechCrunch, for instance. CNET is a monstrously huge online property. It has news, reviews, and features coming out of its ears. It’s a big bad go at a technology portal, with all the ups and downs that come with that. One of the downsides is that it probably can’t be quite as immediate and accessible as a TechCrunch, which remains a straight-ahead blog in terms of structure.
So that said, registration is but one place to look in terms of making it as easy as possible for users to engage with the site and interact with each other.
CNET does call out “latest posts from CNET blogs” on its front page, but they do run beneath the fold on my decently large monitor (Buzz Out Loud podcast makes it above the fold though!). How content is presented on the front page and other key or top level pages plays an important factor. Are blogs and user generated content the most important things on the page, or is editorially-driven or selected content the most important?
That’s not to say that having your pages dominated by user generated content will drive up page views or your number of comments, but it does play a role in telling your community how important your community is. It’s easy to make fun of MySpace, but one of the first things that you see when you hit the front page is “cool new people.” That’s a nice way of telling the audience that you too can be one of us. And let’s face it, it’s difficult to argue with that level of success.
Staying with CNET blogs, I checked out “Mytopia: Yet another casual-gaming start-up goes live” by Caroline McCarthy. Before I read the article, I was thinking about how blogs can be more effective at fostering community by publishing articles that are, well, more bloggy. Bloggy can be a duel-edged sword of course, which is merely to say that content quality is a factor. If it’s consistently great, people will be back.
At the time I read it (a fine article by the way!), the story didn’t have any comments, which might let you circle back to Go Big Always’ registration argument. But then I realized that CNET’s front page recent blogs section also makes no mention of recent comments.
So just to put it all together: what if McCarthy’s Mytopia story ran above-the-fold on CNET’s front page, with the three most recent comments running beneath the headline (with associated profile thumbnail pics of the commenters) and finally a call out to comment now!
I bet if CNET did that and didn’t put up a registration wall they’d see an increase in site comments. And once you get people “in the door” by taking action to leave a comment, your odds go up dramatically that they’ll stick around, create a profile, and do other stuff that drives page views and the bottom line.
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