Our Blog: where do you stand?

Approving comments on a corporate blog is a delicate process. On one hand, a corporate blog team wants to encourage its readers to have a voice and engage in two-way communication. On the other, the blog team must ensure the comments displayed publically are genuine and in the best interest of the corporation that owns the blog.

Standing operates with the "living room" comment policy first coined by Robert Scoble: if you wouldn't allow someone to enter or something to be said in your living room, don't allow them/it on the blog. This may appear to be common sense, but when you think about whether you'd allow a traveling salesperson to come into your living room, the answer would probably be "no."

Some examples of these "traveling salesmen" are:

• An anonymous comment, a comment that is received that appears to be overly commercial
• Acomment by a person whose purpose appears to only be to promote another Web site or service
• A comment that links to a Web site or blog with the sole purpose to aggregate other blog posts

When it comes to moderating comments, the key is being genuine. If the comment is one line (or one word) long, click through to the commenter's blog to evaluate whether it is a genuine blog, with updated, original content. That's not to say that non-bloggers can't leave comments; in fact a good corporate blog would encourage anyone to join in the discussion. However, if a commenter is attempting to draw you to their Web site, it's important to ensure that they are doing so for the right reasons.

When a trackback is received (a trackback is notification of a link from another blog), investigate the blog that links to the corporate blog before approving it. As mentioned above, some blogs simply aggregate content of other blogs and make revenue from ads contained on the site. In this case, a corporate blogger would not want to help promote that blog or Web site by approving the trackback.

Comment moderation is complicated and there is no science. By keeping "the genuine" in mind, however, the process becomes a lot simpler.

Have you ever found yourself in a dilemma regarding whether to approve a comment? If so, we'd love to hear about it.