How to Make Your Web Site More Conversational

Good advice from Steve Outing. How to Make Your Web Site More Conversational: "Allow anonymous comments, but encourage people to register first; screen anonymous comments. This recommendation no doubt will be controversial, but I think that requirements to register in order to leave an article comment discourage the conversation. (Here's a case study from Topix.net that explains why I think that.) If you require readers of an article to register before leaving a comment, you'll lose a significant amount of reader feedback. I suggest that you urge people to register, but don't prevent them from posting a comment if they don't want to. Let comments from registered users go to the webpage automatically, but screen anonymous comments before they're published. This will prevent the crazy forum free-for-all that has been seen with news sites that allow anonymous comments." He goes on with other suggestions. Like keeping people who comment on a story connected in a conversation

Auto-subscribe readers who leave comments to follow-up comments. If a reader leaves a comment on a story, then they should be alerted whenever someone else comes along and leaves another comment (which can include the original author responding). I suggest setting up a system where the default when leaving a comment is to receive follow-up e-mail notifications of later comment submissions. If the commenter doesn't want that, he/she can turn off this feature.

He urges an "upload photos" as a type of comment. Good feature for many stories. Adding photos of readers who register is a good way to encourage registration. All in all a good story. He does go off on the incentives. I say money, "yes" but T-shirts or coffee cups, "no."