With my work at the CBC, I struggled with explaining the value or ROI of certain tools or mediums, others are much easier..
Take TV for example. We can measure the lift of traffic to the website for any given advert. We were able to successfully measure the lift in traffic to a particular site (Steven & Chris) when they had a bottom third ad which came across the screen. Something like “For the recipe visit www.cbc.ca/stevenandchris/” We could measure when that message appeared on the screen, and the corresponding entries to their site. Neat stuff.
Social media I find a little more difficult. You can measure tweets with campaign IDs, however with the multitude of platforms, readers and aggregators, re-tweets and so on it begins to get a little fuzzy. Not to mention that is only measuring a direct conversion, whether that is a visit or a product purchase. If you put that up against the costs, then it becomes a real struggle. How many visits do you require to justify paying someone a salary to do nothing but tweet?
Lots of companies have made a business out of measuring sentiment, and calculating the value of Facebook “like”. And you could make arguments for goodwill, brand recognition, & customer service, so maybe social media isn’t a complete wash. Personally I think it’s value is grossly overstated. I do not want to be friends with my insurance company or get Facebook posts from an office supply manufacturer. I think the ROI would be better with other tools to solve specific issues, but that being said social isn’t the biggest black hole; that goes to commenting.
Commenting is the biggest waste of time, money, and human resources on the entire internet.
Lately, I have noticed a shift across the media, away from commenting and I say good riddance. The Sun and The Star have both eliminated commenting. The cost of mediating commenting is astronomical. Even if you leverage keyword culling or similar technology sooner or later you have to pay someone to deal with the filth that pervades the web, and the bile that spews from every troll.
A few times at the CBC I had to pull data about how many people had read a particular story within a specific period of time because someone had written a libelous comment and someone was suing so we needed to see what the damage was.
With the other major sites no longer allowing commenting the trolls have migrated to the CBC. In fact the CBC had to remove commenting from their entire aboriginal section because of the racist shit people were posting. The biggest hurdle is the anonymity that trolls enjoy. Now I comment on the CBC all the time. But I do it under my own name. If you don’t want people to know you said it, then you probably shouldn’t say it.
Now commenting on a blog is different. Someone is adding to the conversation or asking a question. With commenting on news sites there is no information added. The typical comments go like this: If the story is about someone dying then the comments are “RIP”, “They’re with the angels now”, “So sorry” or similar. They’re usually not offensive but they add nothing.
If the story is about an animal dying then, “Cats are way better than dogs”, “Humans suck – Animals rule!”, “Won’t someone please think of the animals!” It usually devolves into a sob feast about poor animals.
If the story is remotely politicized, such as legalizing pot in Canada the comments break into camps (Liberals vs. Conservatives) For example this comment from book planet media “The Conservatives just keep coming up with irrelevant excuses why doing nothing for no good reason was and still is their favourite approach to governing.” or this one by jimmydean “Justin is not like his daddy … he’s not a leader but a follower.”
Neither provide new information or move the discussion in any meaningful fashion. They aren’t malicious, just irrelevant. When you get into the true vileness is when the story is about a minority group, be it gays, aboriginals or immigrants.
FreshOutDeTrap
“These aren’t immigrants. Immigrants that speak English or French and have job prospects are valuable. These people will not contribute as we have seen in Europe. Most are on welfare.”
And the CBC filters their comments. They have to. There are too many trolls. So what is the ROI? Comments might increase page views or return visits, but unless you monetize the crapped out of the page you won’t make the cost of moderation back. You could paginate comments and insert rotating banner ads but to what end? So some prick from butt-fuck nowhere can enlighten everyone with their view on how awesome Donald Trump is and how all immigrants are bad?
No. the time has come to kill commenting on news sites completely. Let the haters hate and the trolls crawl back into the darkness where they belong.