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Ever since the idea of allowing comments sprung upon the Web, they have been managed in many different ways. Consumer facing sites seem to have the most Open Door policy for allowing comments on their content, while B2B users have been much more cautious. As an experiment, I opened all of the pages on my B2B Web site for comments. The only way to know what will happen is to test, right? And how do you know what the limits are until you go “all the way?”  I didn’t promote it openly, just sort of left that doorway open to the world. It has been only a few weeks, but here are some of the results.

Overall I was completely surprised and found the experience extremely gratifying. In bullets:

  • Instead of emailing me, potential clients and partners left comments. I had the option of approving them or not, so often I concluded the business at hand with the commenter, and then posted the comments.
  • Interesting discussions have started that help illuminate the skill sets and interests of my customers and partners
  • Clients and partners that I haven’t heard from in YEARS came by and said ‘Hi’ in my comments and asked to reconnect
  • Potential employees wrote in — coworkers from more than five years ago commented that they were available for hire

So what now? I’m going to keep the comments open. My pages are getting a little messy long, but the dialogue is interesting and helpful. 

Would I recommend opening comments to others? I think that it would be an interesting (and not as dangerous as you think) experiment for others to try.

 

Marci Devries

By: Marci Devries 

Marci is the President at MDV Interactive and President-elect for the Baltimore chapter of the AMA. She has spent her career in marketing, focusing on communications vehicles in online media. Since 1997 she has specialized in online marketing strategy with a primary focus on developing communications channels for customer acquisition and increased revenue generation.