Here’s a followup to my post, This Entry Is Full of Silent Failure (incidentally, one of my more favorite headlines) — I got a Facebook message from a reader who pointed out that this blog included some silent failure of its own: When commenters submit their comments, they’re held for moderation, so the comments don’t show up immediately. However, we didn’t have a notice to that effect, so to would-be commenters, it looked like an actual posting problem — sssshh, silent failure.

I passed this along to Shashi, so now there’s notice telling people about the post moderation (along with this blog’s terms of use), just above the comment field, which should help a little bit.

Now, from what we know of participation inequality, it’s usually hard enough to get people to comment (unless you’re YouTube and your problem is too many morons) so you want to make sure you’re not putting up unnecessary barriers that drive people away from commenting.

Here are a few other thoughts about how you can make commenting easier and better for your readers and yourself (noting full well that I’m in a glass house throwing stones, though I’ve made a few suggestions to the team on how we can improve the commenting here).

* Registration: Let’s face it — requiring registration to comment is a fact of life. (Especially for higher trafficked blogs. Thank you, spammers and trolls.) The problem is that there’s a difference between requiring a valid e-mail address, and making people register for yet another account, with another password I’m going to forget immediately (unless I do what I’m not supposed to do and use the same password all over the place).

Theoretically, this is where Open ID would really shine, although it’s still not living up to its promise. We’re seeing some comment registration portability by platform (register once and your WordPress or Blogger identity carries across the network), but there are still a lot of one-off blog registrations, especially on news sites.

I tell you, I have to be really motivated to register for Yet Another Blog Commenting System. Though this is also mitigated by…

* Centralized commenting systems: Not only do comment aggregation and centralization services (like Disqus, which we use here) help reduce the need for one-off registrations, but they also help take fragmented conversations, siloed in disparate blogs, and turn them into a more unified conversations. Theoretically, anyway — there’s a lot of room for improvement here.

Related (and available as a separate set of tools are)…

* Comment tracking: When you get notified when someone replies to your comment, it helps close the conversational loop. coComment and Commentful are services available to users, though even with browser extensions or bookmarklets, it’s up to the user to remember to use them. (I still forget to track my comments with annoying regularity.)

More and more, though, we’re seeing blog and other Web publishing platforms provide the built-in option to notify commenters via e-mail when there’s a reply. It helps turn one-way postings (à la guestbooks) into something more like two-way discussions.

* Comment activity indicators: The benefit to this are pretty straightforward: No one likes talking to an empty room, so things like comment counts and recently posted comments help show where people are talking.

* Comment preview: Different commenting systems allow different things. Some accept HTML tags (like <b></b> and <i></i>), some don’t; others automatically turn URLs into hyperlinks; others don’t allow anything except plain text. If you don’t have the ability to preview comments, you run the risk of looking like a n00b because your HTML link code is visible (oh, and also broke your link). People generally don’t like looking dumb.

Like I always say, a blog that doesn’t allow commenting isn’t a blog, it’s just kind of blog-ish. Even though accepting comments opens a whole lot of headaches, they’re still valuable and part of what makes the platform so valuable, so it behooves us to make the commenting process as smooth and as valuable as possible.

Got your own thoughts about improving the commenting experience? Please feel free to… leave a comment. (Duh.)

It took me until late morning to realize that, of course, I wasn’t in the middle of an unusually long lull, but rather my e-mail client had decided to stop working. Worse, it had petulantly decided not to let me know with any error messages. So it was a silent failure.

(Any actual programmers out there, feel free to smack me if I’m playing too loose with the terminology, but apparently there’s a distinction between silent failure and fail-silent. Failure lingo is pretty interesting, even if it’s been clichéd to death by kids today and their wacky FAIL memes — you’ve got fail-safe, which became a nuclear war movie — twice… three times, really. Although I think the movies actually demonstrated fail-deadly behavior.)

So what’s this have to do with social media?

Um, that’s a very, very good question. I’ll torture this metaphor to bring it around to what’s now an old social media chestnut: The conversation is happening, whether you’re a part of it or not. It’s part of the nature of communication — silent failures on the receiving end have to be among the worst, most insidious kinds of communication failures, because someone’s trying to talk to you and you don’t realize anything’s wrong. You end up missing out on the conversation, and the other side gets pissed off because they think you’re blowing them off. It leads to heartbreak all around.

(In another example from fiction, in Michael Crichton’s novel The Andromeda Strain, a stray piece of tractor-feed printer paper silences the dinger on a “hotline” printer, causing the heroes to miss out on crucial information. That one was a literal silent failure.)

So how do you avoid silent failures in social media? Well, you could continually send out a stream of “Is this thing on?” pings, which would have the added effect of annoying everyone else into blocking you, which I guess is one way of solving your problem.

A better solution would be to be aware of the communications channels people are trying to use to reach you, monitoring all of them, and maintaining a steady stream of genuine communication. By keeping up the flow, you’re sending messages that you expect a level of response from, and if you don’t get that expected level of response, you know there’s something you should look into. (It’s like when you talking to someone face-to-face — even if you’re doing all the talking, you expect some level of feedback — grunts, nods, gestures — that indicate they’re still listening to you.)

Whether it’s willful, ignorant, willfully ignorant, or accidental, your failure to receive communications is still failure. So here’s to failing at failure.

Are you receiving? Feel free to leave a comment and close the conversational loop.

This is not nearly as obsessive as it sounds, because I’d gotten to know the owners after they mentioned they’d seen some photos I’d taken at the place during a party, and posted them to my blog and Flickr.

How did they find what I’d posted? They searched on their restaurant’s name, of course. For a business, it’s more important than a mere vanity search, and it’s something you should do regularly.

People throw around terms like reputation management, but it’s just a fancy way of seeing what people are saying about your business, and figuring out how you should respond. And remember, with all this fancy Web and social media stuff, regular folks — your customers — are all potential reviewers and publishers.

So, say you’re a business owner doing your due diligence, and you find some negative reviews somewhere; things that you feel are blatantly false, misrepresentations of what you do, even outright attacks. What you do? How should you respond?

(In this entry, I’m going to focus on reactive stuff — strategies for responding. In a later post, I’ll look at some proactive strategies.)

Here a few things NOT to do:

* Immediately fly off the handle, get into a public flamewar with the poster (or a private one, as they inevitably become public), make threats, or generally do anything while you’re angry.

* Create a series of fake accounts so you can post glowing reviews of your business, to offset the negative ones (it’s pretty obvious when you do this, especially if you’re on a review site and this is your only contribution. Or if you post the same thing to lots of sites, which is especially clumsy and lame.)

* Beg and bother your friends to shill for you. This is also pretty obvious.

* Start harassing or threatening to sue the review site operators to take down negative reviews. This smacks of desperation.

How to respond to reviews depends on the nature of the site you’re looking for, its culture, and what kind of provisions it has for business owners to respond.

For example, one of the current big “It” social review sites is Yelp; an article that’s gotten a lot of traction online is How to Manage Your Yelp Review, and Yelp has its own guide for business owners, which has some pretty good general guidelines, as well as tips specific to the way things work at Yelp. (Also see this NYT profile of Yelp and Yelp users.)

Be sure to check out all the sites that have reviews of your business. These may include other social reviews sites (for example, other restaurant review sites include Chowhound, Menuism, and ChefMoz, to name only a few), newspapers (including their entertainment or city guides), local and regional magazines and Web sites, business directories, and the like.

Before you get into the comments and reviews, make sure that all of your business’ basic information is correct — address, contact information, operating hours, etc. (and find the site’s corrections policy or contact information if you need to send a correction request — politely).

Next, look at the user-submitted reviews. Sure, you’ll like the positive ones, but look closely at the negative comments: Do they contain any truth — things you can improve on? If so, consider it unvarnished feedback that you can use to help improve your business.

Now, say you take an action specifically addressing someone’s complaint. Responding to individuals is always a tricky thing.They may have legit grievances, or may merely feel that way. They may have unrealistic expectations, or an honest difference of opinion. And they might be cranks, nutjobs, or malcontents.

The best general strategy I can offer, subject to the norms of the site you’re responding on is: Acknowledge the feedback; apologize for any perceived bad experience; discuss steps you’ve taken to address the complaints, and if necessary, offer to make things right. It’s pretty much the same way you would respond in person to someone with a complaint, only this way is crawlable by a search engine and will live a long time on the Web. So be careful.

We know that “the customer is always right,” and we also know that some people will never be happy. However, it’s your public response to complaints that will help other people figure out what to think about those negative reviews.

Remember, anytime you respond to a comment, you’re not just responding to the commenter — you’re responding to everyone who’s ever going to see that comment. If you respond to someone’s rants and raves in an authentic and open manner, and they still throw the crazy at you, other people will see this.

Community review sites are an important resource for people, and they could be a big driver of business for you. Next, I’ll look at some suggestions for proactive things you can do to help improve your reviews and word-of-mouth.

Do you have experience dealing with feedback on social review sites? Have tips you’d like to share? Please leave a comment, I’d love to hear from real-world success (or horror) stories.

Network Solutions has made the commitment to gather your ideas! We are proud to announce:

IdeasArePower.com was created to provide a place for your input. But it’s so much more than that!

- Post your ideas – tell us what you think!

- Vote for the best ideas

- Talk – discuss the ideas & share

And the ideas don’t get all mixed up. You can read & review in the following categories:

- Business Solutions

- Education/Support

- MySolutionSpot.com

- Offers & Pricing

- Products – Domains, E-mails, Online Marketing, Online Store, Web Hosting, Web Sites, Website security,

- Storefront Accounts & Usability

Take a look at IdeasArePower.com & let us know what you think! We’re looking forward to your ideas!

We’ve have made it a company wide focus to request feedback from customers and review it on a daily basis. We’re paying close attention to our customers concerns, issues and ideas and are working on some easier ways for you to talk to us. For example, our social media team gathers all feedback from this blog and shares it company-wide and we’re also using social media tools like Twitter ( You can send a message to @netsolcares).

The other two initiatives in Roy’s letter include::

MySolutionSpot.com – networking and educational resource
Small Business Newsletter – monthly educational newsletter – Sign up Today!

Roy expresses our vision & how we’re investing our resources to provide more services. Did you see the email ? Please leave your comments here on the blog. They do make a difference! In case you didn’t see the email here it is :

————–

Dear Network Solutions® Customers,

As the new CEO of Network Solutions, I am delighted to make your acquaintance and thank you for giving us the opportunity to serve your online business needs.

At Network Solutions, our goal is to provide the tools and resources to help small businesses and Web professionals successfully build and grow their business online. We recognize the value of listening to the voice of our customer, as it is your opinions and suggestions that help us prioritize our future product and service enhancements.

For example, you told us the importance of having access to educational resources to help optimize your online business.

Because of this feedback, we recently launched two new initiatives:

MySolutionSpot.com – networking and educational resource
Small Business Newsletter – monthly educational newsletter

In addition, over the next few months I look forward to announcing additional initiatives that will benefit our small business owner and Web Professional customers. Meanwhile, I invite you to share your feedback and suggestions with us about your Network Solutions experience. Provide Your Feedback

I look forward to hearing from you, and invite you to take a moment to explore our new customer resources, as well as our new corporate Web site.

Thank you again for allowing us to serve your business needs.

Regards,
W. Roy Dunbar
CEO, Network Solutions