Engadget, one of the leading gadget blogs on the internet, recently decided to turn off commenting on articles. Their claim is that in in recent days commenting has got 'out of hand', with a few people creating an environment that they feel is 'ugly, pointless and threatening'.

It's a bold move, and one I suspect they did not take lightly. By their own admission, and inline with the oft cited 1% rule, only a small percentage of their readership comment. However, the feature is considered one of the basic tenants of social media - allowing motivated readers to become part of the debate. Indeed, it's features like commenting, along with the low barriers to entry, ability to syndicate across multiple platforms/channels, etc. that have helped the format grow to the size, variety and popularity it has today.

Benefits aside monitoring comments, filtering out the spam and ensuring abuse is kept at bay can be a difficult process. Blog authors have options, which include:

• Moderation - before a comment is displayed online, it must be 'cleared' by a site administer, ensuring no detrimental posts get through. However, this can take away the immediate gratification users have come to expect and cause commentors to feel they're being censored. Such a process also becomes unfeasible for a site that is as popular (and has such a high number of generated comments) as Engadget.
• Spam filters - Great for some removing the 'v1Agra' type of spam message we have all come to despise, but limited when it comes to deciding if a well composed comment is inappropriate
• Community-managed voting - only displays comments that have been given a positive vote by readers. Very 'hands-off' for site owners, but requires an extra level of interaction from users
• Register to vote - Great for blogs with a small following - e.g. personal holiday blogs, but becomes difficult to track with large and manage with large user base. Equally, as user names and passwords are required each time, barriers to entry for commenting (especially for casual commentors) become very high
• Threading - this allows people to comment on comments. It doesn't stop spam comments, but it does conversations to diverge. Sites like Slashdot take this approach to the extreme, allowing unlimited 'threading'. The side effect is that this can quickly become confusing to the casual observer. Limited threading is a useful

Our advise at Dub is to try and take maximum advantage of the medium and be as open to viewer comments as possible. As you can see, there are a myriad approaches to helping mange comments. Unfortunately, for some publishers all the options in the world can't stop the trolls and spammers of this world.

Read Engadget's full statement here

We've said for a long time that online research communities provide better research experiences for both clients AND respondents, or members as we prefer to label them. Fun and enjoyment can be quite hard to measure, but seeing the feedback we've just received from a community that we've been running in Brazil, I think it speaks for itself. It's so good we had to share it with you.....

"I would like to thank you for the opportunity to be part of the project, I hope you enjoyed my ideas....I loved it and wanted you to know I did it with affection. I found it really cool, I hope you have received lots of good ideas."

and then there's this one..

"Thank you! I really liked taking part, I found it to be very dynamic and different."

and this one..

"I am available when if you need more research, okay? You can count on me."

I think you get the idea. These people thrived on the  creativity and fun that the tasks we designed offered them, and of course the very personal relationships they struck up with our moderators. I your research needs an injection like this, we'd love to hear from you.

Creating a universal set of metrics that can be used to gauge the success and returns achieved by using social media has long been a hot topic of debate, so to join in the debate we decided to visit Measurementcamp yesterday.

The event took place at Dare and was fronted by a very affable chap by the name of Will McInnes. The purpose of the collaborative initiative is to create open resources, be they guidelines, frameworks, metrics etc, which allow us all to measure the impact of social media online and offline. As Will put it, the initiative is un-owned and relies on feedback, hence this post.

The 2 hour event kicked off with some introductions among the nearest group of people - within which we had Beth Granter who later gave a presentation on work she had been doing at her agency The Good Agency, Claire the PR lady who has been working with Metia, and one other lady whose name escapes me but who I recall came from a job/recruitment site.

Next up were two presentations, one from Beth (mentioned above), the other from Robin Wilson, one of Measurementcamp's co-founders.

Beth walked us through her work with an animal charity (sorry, didn't scribble down the name!) and how specifically she used social media to a) Drive traffic to their website, b) Increase awareness of the charity and its campaigns, and c) Increase charitable donations.

Much of Beth's efforts were concentrated on Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, with the likes of QDOS, Samepoint, FlickrStats and Google Analytics used to create reports and metrics that could be fed back to the client to validate the project.

The second presentation from Robin (of McCann) focused on his work with Durex, and in particular one of their newer female orgasm heightening products. The campaign was aimed at a) Increasing sales, b) De-stigmatising the category and c) Making Durex less clinical and more fun. The campaign was aptly titled 'Things that make you go oh'. Like it Robin!

Robin used three main constructs to report back to his client, namely Conversation Triggers, Conversations Created and People Engaged. Most interesting however was how he used 'reach' statistics to allow a direct comparison with his work and that taking place in other channels such as advertising and DM. The conclusion of this was that social media was twice as effective, though how much post-rationalisation that went on here is anyone's guess!

The big take-outs that I came away with from the session were:

1. There are lots of ways of measuring social media, though practitioners don't trust them all yet
2. Facebook still provides the most powerful vehicle to engage in conversation and build brand and campaign awareness
3. There is a need to create bespoke social media dashboards since each social media platform has its own and it can take a lot of time gathering the data up and wrapping it for onward presentation to clients
4. Their is often a delay from 'input' to 'response' that needs to be carefully considered when seeding content
5. Tracking sentiment is, and is always likely to be, very difficult due to its subjectivity. Get over it and move on!
6. This is an extremely young practice, and the many ways in which people are approaching it, from agencies to individuals, further supports this fact.

All in all it was a great event and I praise the co-founders' attempts to iron out some of the differences and negativity around social media. It is a powerful medium that should be considered as part of the mix, but objective planning is oh so important to truly understand whether or not social media can offer a solution. As both speakers bravely confirmed, their campaigns did not meet all their objectives, but certainly hit most of them. With shared learnings comes a stronger, more forthright approach. Onwards and upwards Measurementcamp!