Smart aggregation of social media comments: what is required
19/12/2009To those who came in late, ’social media comments’ or ’social media reactions’ have been coined to refer to the comments, reactions, and conversations around your blog post in other social media sites like Twiter, Friendfeed, Facebok, Linkedin, etc. Today with the plethora of social media sites around, it is not guaranteed that your blog readers will leave their comments on your blog itself. Rather they might Twitter it, post it on Facebook, discuss on Linkedin, and the list goes on. As a blog author, you are definitely interested in checking up all these comments. But how do you track all of these? Going manually to every site and checking what your readers said would be a waste of time. What if you could just gather all those comments and toss it on your blog?
In comes the social media comments aggregators. The basic version of this was started perhaps by two companies, Co.mments (now gone) and CoComments, which allows you to create a profile page that will aggregate all the comments you have made on different blogs. These were limited and confined to just blogs. They wouldn’t bring your comments from Twitter or Facebook.
Today, there are tools that can do those.
Backtype: Backtype offers a Wordpress plugin that does the aggregation for you. It gets comments from Twitter, Friendfeed, Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, and backlinks.
ChatCatcher: This is another like Backtype bringing Twitter posts around your posts linking back to your comments section on your blog.
Chirrup: This is another tool that you can use to aggregate Twitter posts and display it on your site.
Disqus: Comment management system Disqus also does the same thing with a host of other features to manage your blog comments.
However after checking out these tools, I realised that the conversations captured from other platforms are through one factor only – the inclusion of your post url. Suppose someone just tweets ‘ Palin has a nice post on social media aggregation’ on his blog today’, it might not get captured because the url of this post hasn’t been included. What we need next is now aggregators that can index social media conversations with intelligence and bring them back to your blog. Anybody listening?

Palin Ningthoujam, Digital Strategist @ 




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