does the tampa tribune understand social media?

At the end of a recent blog post by Brett McMurphy, who covers the University of South Florida sports for the Tampa Tribune, was the following paragraph:

I’ve been told by the higher ups we’re doing away with the comments portion of the blog. Instead, you can go to the Forum: Talk Bulls link at the top of this page. We’ve created the Forum as a place for Bulls fans to gather and discuss various topics.

A quick peek a the TBO.com Bulls forum shows very little activity, except for recently. One poster asked why the switch to the forum. Brett posted the official reason:

“While we’ve generated a very good amount of traffic to the sports blogs, and have seen a spike in the number of comments being posted, we’ve begun to migrate the discussion away from the blogs and into our TBO Discussion Forums.

We encourage the interactivity, but this is a site-wide attempt (not just Sports) to make our Forums the gathering place for a lot of the back-and-forth discussion we’re seeing in the blogs. The hope is that the users themselves will initiate a lot of the discussion, rather than just reacting to your blog posts.”

Ah. Well, there is one problem. You see, USF fans have three major discussion forums already:

• The Bulls Pen – An independent website owned by USF alumn Brad Meyer.
• USFNation – Part of the Scout.com network.
• USFBullsEye.com – Part of the Rivals.com network.

These are in addition to the forums on media sites like ESPN, CBS, and CSTV

On many of these sites, fans talk about what Brett (and other Tampa Tribune reporters/columnists) write about USF. So why does TBO.com feel the need to create yet another message board?

Yes, I know – blogs and forums are both social media. By using forums, TBO.com is trying to fit into the new communications model. For this, they are to be commended. They are doing something that their main competitor, the St. Petersburg Times, is not doing.
However, I don’t believe substituting forums for blog comments is the right way to go.

Forums are great when there are a number of die-hard posters willing to engage in dialogue about a topic. That’s why the USF forums listed above do so well. They each have a siginificant number of Bulls fans postingon a large range of topics every day. The media-based forums don’t draw the same number or intensity of fans.

That being said, why not marry blog comments with forums? If a TBO.com blog generates a large response via comments, the blogger (be it McMurphy or any of the other Trib bloggers) should shift the discussion to the forum by starting and maintaining a thread there. Then s/he could simply post a blog entry that asks readers to join the discussion on the forum. TBO.com bloggers could even “break” stories on their forum, and drive traffic with a blog post indicating “breaking news on the … forum.” There are a number of ways that forums can be used that will work far better than saying “Want to comment? Go to our fourm and…”

TBO.com needs to understand that it’s not about forcing their readers into avenues that “Mother Trib” (as Steve Otto calls it) wants. It’s about giving the readers as many options to communicate as possible. It’s far easier to comment at the bottom of the post than to find a link to the forum, register for the forum (or log in), find the thread on which they want to share their thoughts (or start a new post), and then comment. One step is replaced by four.

As an avid reader of several TBO.com blogs, I hope they reconsider this decision.

UPDATE 11am:Rusty Coats, Vice President and General Manager at TBO.com, replied via my work blog:

rcoats Says:
April 2nd, 2007 at 8:16 am

Thanks for sharing this via email.

We’re not migrating away from comments – they are active on most breaking-news stories and blogs. However, a limitation to the “comment on this story” feature is that these comments don’t have the cohesion of an ongoing discussion. We’re looking to strike a balance between forums (topics that are evergreen) and one-off stories.

In other words, we’re not substituting one for the other; we’re doing both. What that balance looks like depends a lot on the feedback of users – like this. That, to me, is what social media is all about.

Rusty Coats
VP & GM, TBO.com

[Cross posted on my work blog: www.AffariBlog.com.]