I was reading an article today titled,  Behind the Wheels: An all-too-real Cinderella story it had 12 comments. The piece was beautifully written and it was interesting to see what those 12  people had to say. Which got me to wondering:

How come useless throw away blog posts and articles have tons and tons of comments and the good stuff gets next to nothing?

Part of the question also emenated from this post, Why Your Networking Sucks — And the Secret to Doing it Right which had 30 comments, but also sucked people in, including me, because it held the promise of revealing a…secret.

I felt like a sucker. I knew that the post wouldn’t really reveal a secret that I had not read countless times before. So why did I click on it?

I have narrowed it down to these five things:

1. It’s all in the title of the post
2. Salacious content always works
3. People are suckers for lists
4. People like  a good car wreck
5. People want the Cliffsnotes

But the next component after you have read the post is, what do you do? Do you share it, save it, or comment? Why should you comment? Here’s a couple of ideas or thoughts.

1. Something in the post moves us
2. Agreement-You want to let the writer know you are with them
3. Disagreement-You have been moved to tell them they are wrong
4. A desire to be seen or heard-self promotion/branding
5. The notion that someone else will read what you have written and respond to you and maybe something else is kindled
6. The desire to be a jerk-Happens a lot more than you think
7. The need to pick a fight-Bored people with nothing better to do with their time

Social media has changed the game for journalists, for newspapers, for magazines, for bloggers and readers. It’s created a two way mechanism to have a conversation. When you write a blog post or an article, do you write it for the purpose of being heard, to offer up your two cents, to share your perspective, or to have conversations, or for SEO purposes?

As a reader, should we all be obligated to comment on a blog post? What would our world be like if we all were required to provide an educated, thoughtful comment to anything we read? I know some of us barely have time to respond to emails let alone a blog post, but I take solace in the fact that we all now have the opportunity to be heard should we so choose. Though we  have an obligation to comment thoughtfully, it just doesn’t happen that way. As a reader or “blog commenter”, have you ever thought about what you wanted the outcome of your comment to be? Think about that.