Never use your brand name to sign comments. You are a person, not a brand.
How do you want to be perceived?
As a person?
Or as “advertising-disguised-as-conversation”?
There’s nothing wrong with representing a brand. You can even sign “Judy Smith (MyGreatBrand)” if it’s important to you — but be aware that it will make you sound like a commentor-for-hire or a “community manager” (note the quotes and the lowercase, not to be confused with the Community Manager, reserved for people who “get it” and usually occupy a senior position).
Signing with your brand name is also the surest way of being identified as spam — whether you really are spam or not.
You don’t want to make things difficult for the blogger who is deciding whether to approve or trash your comment: identify yourself clearly as a human being. Whether you use a name or a stable, recognizable nickname is not a big issue (at least for me). But using your brand as your nickname is so… cheesy.
And also impolite. You know who I am. Your comment is an open door to a conversation. Why would I not be allowed to know who you are? Even the robots who answer the phone in the worst of customer service call centres tell you their name.
Don’t be a ghost, hiding under the big white sheet of your brand.
Please do not sign comments with your brand name. Be a human being. Give me a name.
I’m toying the idea of replacing brand names with something witty (“Insert Brand Name Here”, or preferably something better I’ll think of under the shower tomorrow morning) and making them link to this article when people try signing comments with them. What do you think?
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Je suis tout à fait d’accord avec vous sur ce point. Je tiens un blog mais à l’heure du SEO à grande échelle, des backlinks et de la promotion gratuite de ses produits et services via les commentaires de blogs, il n’y a que du spam. Une vraie déferlante. De devoir répondre à un commentaire en faisant @bijoux bla bla, ce n’est pas très joli j’avoue.
Sorry for my french comment. My english is not so good as i wanted. I will do my best to give my opinion in english for the next time.
PS : Je découvre votre blog, je suis même abonné à vos flux RSS, et j’aime bien le ton employé. Il m’inspire. De la subjectivité à l’état pur.
Sachant que nombre d’outils de blog mettent un “nofollow” sur les liens en commentaire, c’est complètement inutile de faire ça pour des questions de SEO… (Et pas de souci pour le français, c’est bilingue par ici!)