Comment Response Choice: A Step Backward?
18. Apr, 2009 
65 Comments - Leave your comment
Recently, at RA Project a new brand idea was born to allow, through WordPress and in general, each and every website commentor the choice to specifically tell a website owner whether or not that specific commentor would like a comment response. I call it the RA Project Comment Response Choice Idea. I wonder about the effect of this idea on other things in the blog-reader and business-customer relationship arena and wanted to discuss that with you today.
Should all comments be answered, or only the ones asking for a reply?
So far, in the blogging world and in the online world in general, when you leave a comment on any website, you usually expect or want a response when you ask the website owner, or the article owner, a question or for some info. Unless an author of an article explicitly says that they will reply to all comments to their article, expecting a comment response is considered kind of voluntary and dependent on the tone of a comment. The actual reply depends on the philosophy and the mentality of an important question: is it an obligation to respond to all comments?
While the concept of allowing people to specifically ask for a comment response to their comment, or let a website owner know that they do not want a response to their comments, is very interesting to me, it also raises a very important question for me: can such a concept, of making people specifically ask for a comment response to their input, be manipulated or abused a bit to give more leniency to website owners and others when it comes to the idea of replying to people who comment on their websites?
How can businesses use this new response requirement model?
Let us take this concept one step further. How can companies use this concept when dealing with their customers? A company can require all customers to actually specify if they would require a response when dealing with that company. The Comment Response Choice can greatly help in allowing companies to focus more on responses that are directly asked for. This should also help customers be more satisfied as they will realize that a company may not be replying to them because the company has not been directly asked to respond.
At the same time, however, I wonder if it is a good idea to make a customer, or anyone else, go through an additional layer of customer reader action in order to actually respond to them? I see a very interesting implementation for this: by default, such comment response choices can be modified very easily to have the “I do not need a response” option chosen by default. In such cases, if a customer forgets to look at the Comment Response Choice or something similar, the default “No” will be chosen automatically. That can make it easier for people or businesses to say later on that the reason they did not reply was because the reader or the customer specified that they did not want a reply.
What do you think?
I love good ideas, and I love new ideas that are good. RA Project has many brand new ideas on their way and many good ideas already. Though as with probably anything, ideas need to be handled with common sense, including this Comment Response Choice idea. What is your view on this? Would you, as a website or a business owner, follow such a trend of making people specifically choose an extra option if they want a response from you? Would you, as a customer or a reader, want to specifically take an extra step to ask for a response?
Please let me and others know what you think in the comments below, thanks! 
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Responding to a comment is always necessary. It is a way of saying your appreciation. It is like an auto rsponder to an email. A comment deserves an equal attention. Thanks for asking for a response.
I have three blogs where i religiously respond to every comment put on my blog.But not for the spam one.A person might just give you a link or a suggestion, then i try to go to that link and reply back about my thinking.If somebody posts something against my blog i want to make clear what exactly is the cause.I try to respond each comment.
Travel Insure
Thanks for information
Thanks
I think the idea is good but I think its still the discretion of the site owner if he or she will respond or not.
I think in any “business” where customer service is important you should know exactly if a response is wanted not necessarily needed. I think something like this could definitely open the eyes to those who think a comment is a comment.
Great concept about asking for a reply. I think in most cases the commenter doesn’t come back to the post and will not read the reply.
That’s really interesting post, I just get over and what? Such a usefull post. Thns for sharing!
No business will ever like a comment response. But if you are on Twitter all the time, maybe this suits your personality.
Comments are one of the most valuable assets a blogger can have. When a comment is sincere in asking for a reply, I think it’s generally in the best interest of the author – though not his or her obligation – to reply.
A generally accepted and easy to use system for notifying the author would seem to help both parties. But it would have to have guards against abuse.
I’m in the marketing research business and this issue is akin to asking for feedback with a satisfaction questionnaire. If you keep the survey simple and easy to answer it will provide useful information on how to improve the blog. But if it’s overly complicated and long, you’re likely to run into problems with incomplete or garbage responses.
In both cases, it’s disrespect and a general lack of regard for the reader/subscriber that’s the root cause.
Andy Perkins
TheCustomer Satisfaction Questionnaire Blog
No business no money, we are always respon that
The default should be to “not respond” to a comment. Webmasters are busy and many comments don’t deserve a response.
I think that the “no response” option is built-in or implied. There is no need to create a software function for this.
For some business models, this may be a valued feature however.