How do you market your blog?
A couple of days ago TechCrunch gave its readers the ability to leave video comments on their posts (that’s a screenshot of Mike Arrington’s video comment announcing them on the above link).
The Wordpress plugin is powered by Seesmic (a company Mike Arrington from TechCrunch is an investor in, and the company that recently acquired Twhirl). Many blogs have followed TechCrunch’s lead and installed the plugin on their own blogs.
There is some debate at the moment whether it is a good idea or not for a blog owner to implement video comments or not. Read Write Web weighed into the conversation today with ‘Video Comments? No Thanks - 5 Reasons they don’t work’ and I’ve got to say, each of the 5 points mentioned are valid reasons why you may not want them on your blog (being harder to moderate is the one that most worries me).
Enabling them on your blog or not is a choice that you need to make yourself, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t consider leaving them on other blogs that already have them installed.
At the moment they are still a novelty, so unless the comments section is flooded with video posts, you’ll probably get some people watching it just to check out how they work, it also gives you a chance to brand yourself a little more in the comments by regularly posting on the same blog and always making sure a clear shot of your face is showing as the still frame. If you’ve got a great presentation voice and can leave some interesting comments, it shouldn’t be long before regular readers start to recognise your videos and make an effort to listen to them.
If you do leave a video comment, I suggest you also follow it up with a regular text comment. One of the key complaints about video comments is that they are impossible for people to scan - unless they watch your video, they have no way of knowing what it is about, so a follow up text comment that summarises your main points and adds any links you reference would be a welcome addition for sure (at least until they give us the ability to add a combination text/video comment).
The only caveat I will leave you with is that your video comments do need to be relevant and interesting - if you’re boring and off topic, I don’t think you’ll do yourself any favours in terms of branding or direct promotion, best to let them slip by if that’s the case. Don’t let that stop you from trying though, most comments are short, so it’s not like you need to hold someone’s attention for 5-10 minutes or more, introduce yourself, get to the point of your comment and finish by plugging your site and saying you’ll leave links to anything you referenced in a follow up text comment. Keep it short, keep it sweet and you should be good.
So what do you think about video comments? like them, hate them? have you seen any really good ones? leave a comment and let us know (no sorry, I haven’t enabled video comments here yet).
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