Receiving spam comments on your blogposts can unfortunately be a common occurrence. Despite the use of spam detection tools, spam comments can often be missed. It is important to moderate comments on your blog to ensure only genuine comments are published and seen by visitors to your blog.

However recently we have noted a little confusion over what constitutes a spam comment on your blogpost. Usually you receive a vague, complimentary blog comment that arouses your suspicion over whether or not it is a human who has posted it!

So here is a little checklist with our 6 ways to spot whether a comment on your blogpost is spam:

1. It doesn’t mention anything about the post its responding to

2. It isn’t on any topic related to what our blog is about

3. It’s written in poor English

4. Could the comment just be cut and pasted into every blogpost he/she comes across on any site, regardless of content? 

At Reach Further we’re often asked by clients for whom we’re setting up blogs what they should have as their blog policy.  Where a company or organisation has a very clear handle on its image and brand and the way it wants to appear to its customers, potential customers and the world in general, then there may be a place for a full blog or social media policy that is integrated with procedures for print and other marketing. 

Microsoft, have a very simple policy: “Blog smart”. Microsoft employees are encouraged to blog honestly about the company.  Common sense and knowledge of the company ethos can be good enough for an intelligent blogger.  For those who need a bit more guidance than “blog smart”, there are a few major principles of corporate blogging that can serve as a starting point for a blogging policy:

Five main principles:

1. be honest, open and responsive,
2. stay on topic,
3. abide by existing rules, eg corporate branding guidelines, copyright,
4. be aware of and respect the company’s confidentiality and proprietary information,
5. be polite.

A full blogging policy can contain several more points, but they develop from the above principles. For example, a policy on encouraging and responding to comments develops from point 1, being responsive. These five principles are an positive start in creating a company blogging policy.