Why the FT still cares about reader comments

Lucinda Southern of Digiday writes about how the Financial Times remains committed to reader comments on its stories.

Southern writes, “Up until recently, the strategy around comments was more about damage control. Last year, Renée Kaplan joined as head of audience engagement and has built up an 11-person team. Now that team is getting more proactive and is using comments as a tool for engagement. ‘For other media companies, the comment strategy is more about growth,’ said Kaplan. ‘For the FT, we have a unique commitment to make something of these comments, the readers are entitled to being part of the quality conversation and what the community has to offer.’

“Currently, FT readers can comment on news stories, analysis and opinion pieces, where the highest volume of comments is. The FT routinely disables comments on more explosive news stories, though — Russian politics, climate change, Islamic extremists — because no productive discourse took place here.

“That said, here’s how its strategy is shaping up.

Putting a commercial value on the commenter.
“Only subscribers can post comments; therefore, the FT already knows a lot about them. Not enough, though. Leading the research into understanding the commercial value of commenters is community manager Lilah Raptopoulos.

“‘We want to know whether they are, as we suspect, our most engaged users,’ said Raptopoulos. ‘We need to understand what the commercial correlation is, what effect does a comment have on our subscribers, will commenters share more, or visit the site more often?’ Anecdotally, the team has hunches about these hypotheses, but for now, this is a work in progress.”

Read more here.