Tracking Comments and Conversations – the Next Generation of Reputation Management

One reason RSS feeds only give you part of the picture of the blogosphere: comments.

Often, the comments are more interesting then the original posts. And comments let you discover writers who either don’t have their own blog, or whose site you’ve never visited before.

From an organizational perspective, comments can be important to track. That’s where a lot of the most damning condemnations of corporate behaviour happen.

Co-comment plans to expand their comment tracking service to include better tools for searching out interesting conversations in comments, allow tagging, and allow commenters to rate their peers on the value of their contributions. The kinds of comments tracked goes beyond just blog comments, too.  Comments on a bulletin board or forum will be included, if that’s where someone is holding their conversations.

As Co-comment CEO Matt Colbourne tells Media Post (free registration required):

“Version two of the product becomes more about individuals not just keeping track of, but making sense of, the world in terms of how they want to interact with conversations. So they can look at a conversation stream of tens of thousands of comments and say, I only want to see those answered by people that I know. But then it is useful if you can start to pick up on the individuals who have natural authority on the topic. So we are building a ranking system or a behavioral system where people rate other people. But after a while, once the experts start appearing, they in turn should be able to bring other people up quickly. So an expert on medieval history can see I actually do have something to say on it and give me a positive ranking. That will give me a much higher rank than someone else who knows nothing about it. So it is like a peer review and commenter ranking system, but against the taxonomy of topics that allows the natural experts to appear. “

Like every service that tracks behaviours, Co-comment has built a database of people’s comments. The additional tagging and ranking will give that database more value as a research tool into trends and attitudes, says Colbourne: 

“Obviously we are building a considerable behavioral database. Comments are being tracked. What we end up with is how often people are commenting, where they are commenting and even what they are commenting on to a defined taxonomy. You do get a buzz index. We are trying to put together behavioral — i.e. recency, frequency, and a value measure from the community — and put all that together with potentially psychographic information.”

 Co.mments.com is another service that lets you follow comment streams.  There don’t seem to be any plans to extend the service to forums, but as a straight comment tracker, it works well.

How do you track comments for yourself or your organization? Leave a comment, and let’s start a conversation!