And the major disappointment that is Disqus

This is part three of a new series on “Rise of a startup: Cruiseable.” Today’s installment looks at how we’re using Glip and Disqus. Also see:

• Part 1: Great tech startups begin with a great development team
• Part 2: Followerwonk: A powerful tool to up your Twitter game

Target audience: Entrepreneurs, startup teams, angel investors, venture capitalists, developers, businesses, innovators, educators, students, journalists, travel analysts.

For months, we’ve been hacking our way through the launch of the Cruiseable website and mobile app by relying on a frankly random collection of collaboration tools, including Dropbox, Google Drive, Gmail, Google Sites, Google Groups, Google Hangouts, Skype, Basecamp, Asana and Trello.

It’s a small miracle we managed to launch with a beautiful-looking site despite the mishmosh of tools that resembles a five-car pileup on I-80.

But now we’ve hit upon an integrated tool that brings order to the chaos: Glip.

It’s the coolest project management tool that you’ve never heard of. And we’re a startup, so we don’t have a big budget for this stuff. We’re paying $5 per team member per month for 10 staffers, which isn’t nothing — but it’s well worth the investment.

A screenshot of Cruiseable’s Glip account.

Glip is one part communications platform, one part task management tool and one part resource clearinghouse. Up until a month ago we still had team members and contractors emailing each other on their personal accounts (and I’d wince at every hotmail and aol email address) and we’d wonder why our correspondence would get lost or go unanswered.

Now, Glip tracks every written communication you’ve had with each colleague, either one one one, or as part of a Team (Cruiseable General, Growth hacking, Marcom, Business Development) or an ad hoc group that you set up with specific individuals. It’s like an archived Skype chat, only friendlier and more versatile.

You can set tasks for people to carry out (or to ignore — but at least there’s a record!). You can create a resource database by adding relevant Notes. You can add other documents in other formats to a nearly bottomless directory of Files.

Business video chat at an affordable price

The coolest feature, though, is the one that still needs some work: video chats. We switched from Skype (which kept crashing with six or more participants) to Google Hangouts (which has always had shitty resolution and maxed us out at 10) to Glip and were stunned at the fidelity of the video. WOW! The videocam images really pop, at least for those of us with modern laptops.

You can invite outsiders into your circle, which we’ve done, to good effect. And you can share your screen. (Goodbye, overpriced GoToMeeting and fussy JoinMe.)

On the downside, Glip still needs some work. Its video chat feature appears powered by a third party, Zoom.us, and every time I start a video chat, it prompts me to download the zoom.us app. [Note: Glip has now partnered with RingCentral.] And Glip’s Twitter presence is pretty much nonexistent.

Glip has integrations with Dropbox, Box, Evernote, Google Drive and Hangouts, which we have yet to explore. All in all, it’s genius. For an agile startup like Cruiseable, this is just what we needed. Thank you, Glipsters!

Disqus: We’re using it, but we’re not happy about it

Our mantra at Cruiseable is, build where we need to and borrow where it’s good enough.

Any modern startup has to offer customers and users a voice on your site or platform. So we needed a conversation solution that wasn’t a bulletin board.

I’ve long been disappointed by the dismal state of comment plug-ins. Intense Debate wasn’t an option; we built our own CMS instead of using WordPress. We’ve heard good and bad things (but mostly bad) about Livefyre. Facebook Comments was tempting, but it lacked the ability to integrate with our users’ avatars/icons. There are others out there, but none seemed particularly robust.

So we went with dull and serviceable but reliable Disqus.

What we didn’t realize is how utterly unconfigurable it is.

Want to increase the tiny font size, which was clearly engineered by 20somethings and not for an audience of 40- to 70-year-olds? You can’t.

Want to add color to the bland gray color scheme? Want to link to the user’s profile page on your site instead of to her previous comments on Disqus? Want to say ADD IMAGE instead of relying on the teeny tiny hidden-away image icon? Want to add a Flag link at the bottom of a comments on your site? Can’t, can’t, can’t, can’t.

Disappointing would be an understatement for a product from a company founded in 2007.

The discussion industry, such as it is, needs a serious kick in the ass.

The post Glip: A dazzling new project management tool appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Consider commenting systems, rewards & removing barriers

Target audience: Businesses, brands, marketing professionals, SEO specialists, bloggers, Web publishers, agencies, nonprofits.

Guest post by Jacob Klein
Distilled

If you’ve spent any amount of time reading up on content creation, you’ve probably seen articles spelling out tactics to get you more comments on your blog posts by “writing compelling content” and including “calls to action.”

While those are certainly important ingredients to soliciting more comments, I’m going to assume you’re already on board and looking for something more specific and actionable.

Why are comments important?

The benefits of user generated content are compelling: Not only are you generating original, topical content for your pages, comments may even contribute to your article’s freshness score. While it’s debatable whether the number of comments on a page is directly correlated with higher rankings, we all understand the value of having more fresh, relevant content on a page to say nothing of user engagement and community building.

No matter how in-depth your keyword research is, you’ll never be able to naturally incorporate every iteration of a key phrase onto your landing page – and you wouldn’t want to. With user comments, you’re able to get some of those alternate search queries — you know the search engines index comments too, right? — without having to shoehorn them into your copy.

Let me give you an example of this in action:

The highlighted text above isn’t actual copy from the page itself. It’s from one of the comments toward the bottom of the page. Google has determined that this page is relevant to the query in part because of a comment that includes text that the blog publisher hadn’t even thought to include on the page. Would the page have ranked without the comment? Possibly. But to me, an example like this shows that Google clearly uses comments to help determine page relevance. In a competitive space where most competing pages look startlingly similar, you’re going to need any edge you can get.

I’m sure you’ve all had the experience of landing on an article after searching for something only to “ctrl + F” your way to the comments section to find your answer. Content from users can provide real value, and this article will arm you with tips to help increase your user comments.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve founded several fan community pages covering such nerd-tastic staples as Magic the Gathering, Nintendo and Game of Thrones (yes, ladies, I am that cool). While building these communities, I’ve picked up a few tricks for attracting article comments that I thought I’d share with you. Here are six ways to attract more comments.

Make it as easy as possible to leave a comment

1Does “website” really need to be a required field? Are your CAPTCHA images harder to solve than a Rubik’s cube? Sometimes the effort it would take to comment on your blog outweighs the potential benefits to users. Take a look at each field and ask yourself “is this a hoop I’d be willing to jump through to leave a comment on a blog I’ve never visited before?” Most users are wary about giving out an email address, so assure them that their data won’t be used for anything other than unique identification or just let them log in using Twitter or Facebook (more on that below). In the end, you should be mostly concerned with their user name, email address (to distinguish their comments from others, gravatars etc.) and the comment itself. Anything else is a barrier to entry that should be scrutinized and jettisoned wherever possible.

Placement of the comments area

2So many widgets, so little real estate. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think that the end of a blog post is the hottest piece of property on the net these days. After you’ve pumped your full author bio, social buttons, “other articles you might like,” opinion disclaimer, and multiple ad units, the comment section often ends up an entire page screen below the actual content. I know, I know, it’s tough to demote any of these widgets, but if you’re truly serious about getting the conversation going on your article, then you should consider giving the comment section a more prominent position on the page.

At the very least, consider giving users an anchor jump at the end of the article that reads “Leave a Comment” or “Join the Conversation” that bumps them down to the appropriate level.

Social log-ins for authenticating users

3If for whatever reason you simply must require users to register to leave a comment — a rather large barrier to entry — consider allowing them to log in using the social media accounts they’re already using. If you’re running WordPress, this can be done by installing one or two plugins of your choice. Simple Facebook Connect will get the job done and the Twitter version will do the same. If you’re looking for a more comprehensive solution that covers other social networks, try Social Login. There are also the all-inclusive commenting systems Disqus, IntenseDebate and LiveFyre that you’ve probably seen on many blogs.

Not only does this offer users a one-click log-in option for commenting and other community activities around your site; it also gives your users an automatic avatar and social identity. Comments coming from a person with a traceable identity are almost surely of higher quality than those coming from completely anonymous users. And hey, once they’re logged in with Twitter or Facebook, it stands to reason that the chances of someone sharing your page on one of those networks increases considerably.

Profiles, awards and rankings

4Perhaps you’ve used a piece of ego bait in a link building campaign. The same principles of human nature apply to community building. In-depth profiles, award systems and commenter rankings are great ways to encourage your contributors to keep coming back for more. A simple database comment count for each individual is all that is required for deployment. Attach fun titles such as “Youngling,” “Aspirant” or “Padawan” to these values and you’ll not only please current commenters, but you’ll also give readers a way to gauge that person’s standing within the community.

Grab the Top Contributors plug-in for WordPress and show your top commenters some love. You could also display “X-Year Club” awards on user profiles or a “She’s Over 9000aaaand!” badge for your most ambitious contributors. Anything you can do to give your loyal commenters a feeling of community and importance will encourage more comments.

Join the conversation

5This one’s straightforward: Respond to comments on your articles. You took the time to write the piece, so get in there and stand by it! Keep the conversation rolling with questions of your own and address things you may have glossed over in your initial post.

Try highlighting author comments so that they stand out a bit. This immediately communicates to readers that the author is paying attention and will most likely respond to their comment if they take the time to write one. The reality is that articles with comments get more comments. Articles without comments have trouble getting initial comments. The difference between 0 comments and a handful can mean everything. Who wants to be the first person to comment on a post? Each new user post offers an entry point for new lines of discussion. Help get the chain reaction going by helping the initial conversation to get started.

Email notification on reply

6With great power comes great responsibility. If loyal readers have given you their email address and contribute to your site on a regular basis, the last thing you want to do is lose their trust. You’ve got their email address but no one wants a “quarterly site update” or “Jan 1st Happy Birthday” email from every website they’ve ever commented on, right? But what most people would probably be OK with is a notification that their thoughtful comment has just received an equally thoughtful reply thus giving them the chance to respond.

Try Comment Reply Notification for WordPress if you’re looking to add this feature to your blog. You can choose to alert everyone on the thread whenever anyone replies or limit it to personal replies. You could also allow users to choose for themselves with a simple checkbox as they reply. Disqus also offers this feature.

Tracking your progress

7For many blogs it will be obvious when the influx of new commenters come in, but on larger sites it might be more difficult to track your progress. One simple and universal way to track your progress is to set up a Google Analytics goal associated with a new comment. Here are some instructions on how to do this. You can also easily set up GA event tracking any number of ways using the Raven GA config tool.

Have you found other effective methods of attracting commenters?  Try some of the above and leave a comment below!

Oh, and don’t forget to “create compelling content” and “have a call to action.”

Related

• Top 3rd Party Commenting Systems – Reviewed (Hongkiat)

The post 7 ways to get more comments on your articles appeared first on Inside Social Media.