What You Can Learn from Jane Genova
If you’re a read of Gawker, you might remember the commenter “Jane Genova,” who had a tendency to start every comment with her name.
So, she’d comment on things like this:
“Jane Genova.
blah blah blah point.”
For awhile, she was leaving a link back to her site, but she stopped doing that after a few people-including one of the Gakwer writers-informed her that doing so was a big no-no.
She’s also an excellent teaching tool for going over general do’s and don’ts of blog commenting.
Her actually comments-aside from her clearly promoting herself-weren’t BAD, but it was pretty clear she had absolutely no idea about
- The type of site Gawker is.
- The type of comments and commenters frequently found lurking on Gawker.
- Gawker commenting protocol.
Lesson # 1: Know the site your commenting on.
Look, if you’re commenting under a pseudonym and you don’t bother to look into what the commenting protocol is-as long as you’re not being blatantly disrepectful-it’s not the end of the world.
If you’re commenting under the name you do business with/your legal name in an effort to get your name out there and show the internet that you have a least a vague understanding of your industry, you better make damn sure you know what commenting protocol is.
If you don’t understand the protocol and you leave a clearly out of place comment-you’re not going to look all savvy and knowledgeable-you’re going to look like kind of a dumbass who can’t be bothered to read a few posts and the comments on the posts to get a general feel for the site-which is going to do more harm than good to your credibility.
Most sites have a comment policy that’s pretty prominently displayed near the comments. If it doesn’t, use common sense and other posts/comments as a guideline.
Lesson # 2: Other Commenters Can Tell When You’re Commenting Soley for Self-Promotion. Seriously.
There are a number of benefits for commenting on blog posts that relate back to self-promotion. Most sites let you include a link back to your site, you can leave a thought-out comment that showcases your knowledge, and if you’re a frequent commenter, other frequent commenters along with the site’s writers get to know you. Blog commenting can be an amazing way to self-promote and network without taking a ton of time and effort.
With that said, you’re first priority when commenting should be contributing to the discussions, NOT blatant self-promotion. People can tell when you’re just blatantly promoting yourself and it’ll cause you to lose credibility. Plus, once you get known of a blatant self-promoter, people will stop paying attention to your comments and miss out on your brilliance.
That was a major mistake on Jane Genova’s part-she was CLEARLY commenting to promote herself and was pretty shameless in doing so what with making sure to state her name in every comment and posting a link back to her site’s main page.
Gawker comment’s identified it immediately. Now, on most sites if you do that, other comments will just ignore you. Maybe some of the more vocal commenters or someone who writes for the site will tell you to knock it off. But, that’s about as far as it will go. On Gawker, they will make fun of you. And they did make fun of her. A lot.
Which led Jane Genova to write a post on her experience. A post that showed that she STILL has no idea what type of site Gawker is, what Gawker commenting protocol is, and that she is definitely lacking in self-awareness.
You can read the full posts here and here, but in short, she mainly wrote that she was flamed because she’s old.
No, she was flamed because she was clueless and overtly self-promotional.
In fact, there are a large number of older commenters on Gawker. Seriously. (If you don’t believe me, go Google “site:gawker.com qualuudes” and then read the comments on any of the posts that come up.
Lesson # 3: Have Some Sense of Self-Awareness:
If you’ve started commenting on a site and notice people are making fun of you, it’s probably a good idea to look back over the comments making fun of you, then look over your comments, and see if anything matches up. If Jane Genova did this, she would have noticed that people were making fun of her for being clueless and self-promotional, not for being old.
Don’t notice a correlation? Ask a reliable friend to check for you-they might be able to notice what you didn’t.
Both you and the friend didn’t notice any sort of correlation? Ok, maybe they’re just being mean. Or you’re friend is just as clueless as you. It could go either way.
Either way, just try not to be the Jane Genova of the industry blog of your choice when commenting.
