my most famous commenter

Yesterday I got an alert from WordPress that “sloanphotographers” had left a comment on my junebug best of the best entry.  WOOHOO! That’s exciting, right?!

A close up:

Obviously the world-famous Sloan Photographers are not subscribed to my blog and I definitely don’t have a relationship with them (other than as their blog stalker), but because I included a link to their blog entry, they got an auto “comment” saying that I had linked (see below). I think the technical term for this is “ping backs” or “track backs”.

From a personal blog standpoint, that’s really cool. Every blogger dreams of comments from famous people and even though I haven’t sent this URL out to everyone I know, it would be cool to eventually build traffic and maybe even make friends with other bloggers, brides-to-be, and wedding professionals.

From a business standpoint, I think Mark & Angie Sloan’s comment on my blog is a sign that they’re actively trying to manager their brand online, even in the smallest of ways. It probably doesn’t take that much time to notice that I linked to them, click a link to see what I said, and leave a “thanks for the love! :)” comment, but at the same time, it made me, the recipient, swoon and want to may a little more attention to what they post and how they’re doing. Branding brownie points!

On the other hand, a lot of other businesses could care less who posts about them (especially the smaller, newbie bloggers without a following). But, I think this is a mistake. As a professional with a reputation to maintain, wouldn’t you want to know if someone else is talking about you, good or bad? Especially the bad. There are tons of horror stories about companies and one person’s complaint turning into a huge PR fiasco– example, Dooce and the Maytag washing machine fiasco (a hilarious read if you have a couple minutes to spare). Yelp is another great example of this. A lot of businesses will email/private message/publicly respond to any negative reviews and make sure that one angry review doesn’t ruin it for everyone else.

Caveat: Of course some people aren’t going to link to you so you can easily see what’s goin’ on, but if they’re going to link to you, might as well find out what they’re saying! Technology makes things so easy, it’s almost like there’s no excuse.

Anyway, just wanted to bring some attention to my famous (probably one-time) commenter and chew on some of the PR/branding thoughts that came with it.

Famous commenter!! Yay!!