Testing Livefyre Sidenote for Commenting

We’ve moved between commenting systems a few times on the MarTech Blog. Luckily, all the key platforms will synchronize comments (we don’t use them if they don’t). Comments are becoming a topic nowadays since comment spam is rampant and many of the most colorful conversations are happening offline, leading some very large blogs to turn off commenting altogether.

I’m with friend Lorraine Ball on this one who states:

To me, a blog without comments is like a school without students or a concert without an audience. To me, engagement and interactivity with readers is a fundamental attribution of blogging, and really its main benefit for the blogger.

I’m also never a fan of quitting a strategy because it mostly doesn’t work. There’s not a ton of comments with each post on the MarTech Blog, but when there is it’s always important to me. I don’t care that I have to curate a thousand spammy comments to dig and find one nugget – it’s still worth it.

That said, since most of the conversations are happening off the blog – I want our readers to find and join those conversations. Disqus has some nice features to follow one another but it doesn’t quite fit the need for identifying who and when the content is being shared and talked about. I mentioned that in a conversation with Nicole Kelly and she said that Livefyre did it – so I’m going to give their system another shot.

They’ve also added Sidenotes – a means of grabbing a quote or section and then commenting on it locally or socially. So – comments aren’t simply something that you do after you’ve read an entire post, now you can insert your conversation directly within the content!