Checklist For Using Comments

Welcome to the User Experience podcast!

In this episode we'll run through a quick checklist of what you need to be aware of when using Comments in your MV.

That includes enabling them for Products, Pages and Posts as well as how to Moderate Comments and work with Notifications.

QUICK CHECKLIST

• Add an Admin Profile Picture
• Enable Admin Notifications
• Switch on Comments where you want them
• Moderate your new Comments
• Check your User Notifications
• Tell your people about Comments

For additional resources on this feature, please check the list of links below.

AUDIO

LINKS

How To Enable And Moderate Comments

How to Add Commenting to a Product, Module or Lesson

How to Manage & Respond to Comments from Your Users

How Can Users Leave Comments on My Content?

Checklist For Using Comments - KnowledgeBase Article

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, I'm Steve knots. Welcome to the User Experience podcast where together we build fun stuff inside your member vault account. Today we're going to talk about a quick checklist for using comments. MemberVault just released a new feature that allows you to enable a field for comments underneath your member vault stuff. And last week, I did an in depth episode on how to find them, how to set them up, how to work with them, all that kind of stuff. Today, we're just going to run through a quick checklist to inspire you to get your comments up and running and engaging with your community. So let's jump right in.

First thing I want to recommend that you do is add a profile picture on your admin account. To do that up in the top right, you click on admin, click the word profile and a little button will pop up where you can change your image, upload a picture MemberVault crops crops it to a circle, and you should be good to go. That means when you drop a comment on your visitors, comments, when you reply to a comment, they're gonna see your face and they know it's coming from you. It's just for visual recognition, get your face out in more places and helps a lot. Let's move on to the next tab. Another thing you may want to do is set up notifications to tell you as an admin, when someone has left a comment, to get there, go in your dashboard under Users click Actions. Okay. And we'll get to this global action setting, I have some action set up for email consent. We're going to do this together right now. So I'll pause for a second while you find your MBA account, login users click Actions and get ready to set one up.

And now we're back together, click the button Add Action. When this happens, the trigger is leaves comments, look at that, how cool. When a person leaves a comment, do this send notification from that drop down. And email address I'm going to type in Steve at and what you do is type in your email address. That way, anytime someone drops a comment, it's going to send you a notification that you are going to be ready to go and see their comment and respond to them in the moment. Maybe they're asking about a course, maybe they're asking about their homework, maybe they're talking to somebody else, you want to be connected with it. Just like when you see a Facebook notification for a comment inspires you to go back in and spend some time on there. But now, instead of wasting time on Facebook, you can be inside your MV interacting with your people who want to talk to you.

So let's click and make sure we save that. And I'm really leaving that setup in my account. That's for real. As a little future forward note MemberVault will be tweaking the notifications feature a lot. This is a brand new feature, we just have the basic setup of having notifications in the actions field. In the future. What I'm hoping we're going to do, and this actually depends on you is add the ability to have a custom email go out as a response to a single comment, or really detailed stuff so that if people comment on a lesson, you can follow up with an email and say, Hey, I saw that you you added some input on this lesson really appreciate that. Do you want to go farther and check out the teaser or something like that? I don't know. There's a lot of things that can do. We're in testing. And the great thing about MemberVault is that the users like you people are giving us feedback on what you want from your notifications in your comments. And as we collect and tabulate all your input, we're going to shape how the notifications feature works to really make it work for memorable people. So that's what to do with that.

Now you have your admin profile picture set up so people can see that it's you commenting, and you have notifications enabled to make sure you don't miss a comment and leave somebody hanging. Let's move on to the next topic is just where to find comments and where to enable them for your products. Remember, comments can be set up at different levels for a product module, less than a page for your blog posts. And when I say different levels, that means if you enable comments at a product, people only see them when they first click into a product they own, there's going to be a field for comments under the main front page for that product. It does not automatically enable all the comments on every module in every lesson, because that would be way too many. This is a really nice feature, which means you can pick where people comment. And you can only have comments or discussions in one specific section. And how do you know if comments are enabled? Well, there's this really cool icon that looks like a little talk bubble like when cartoons are talking and there's a little bubble with words in it. We have a graphic right here. Let's pause for a second I'll move the mouse which product has comments enabled?

If you're watching the video, you can see the one called Ableton instruments and effects presets. That's my freebie has a little comment bubble meaning this product has comments enabled, the other ones do not. So that's how I know which ones in the list have things enabled. Let's go a level deeper and check modules. So I click into edit the product. I see my list of modules, there are no little comment bubbles because I don't want comments at the module level. The module is something people click in, they see a list of lessons and then they go to do the lessons they're going to do. So I don't really want to collect comments about the list of modules. That's not really something to talk about. However, in the lessons within a module, I do want to have some comments. If you're watching the video, take a guess which lesson has comments enabled? It's a really easy question. You look for the top bubble. You can see right there less than two. And the reason is when I put up a lesson that's something where I might ask drop a comment if you like this freebie, or drop a comment and let me know what else you would like pertaining to this freebie. Something where I can get feedback on what I'm putting out there. And people can tell me how to update my member vault, so it's better for what they want to do.

Just like I was saying, MemberVault itself wants to hear from you about notifications. So we can just get right into what you need. I recommend you do the same thing with your people and your comments, to collect stuff that's going to help you make your MV better in a feedback cycle. It's all about the feedback. It's not like, let's argue about who's the best baseball team, we're not having that kind of comment thread, we're having some interactive feedback for the relationship you have with your people. And to make it really easy, you can look into any list of topics and see which ones are enabled. Then, for any place where you want to turn them on or off, you can click into the lesson module or product. There's a drop down menu to enable or disable comments. I'm going to click no on this, click Save. And then when I go back out to the bass instruments module, you can see the comment bubble is gone. When I go to that product, Ableton instruments product, you can see the modules that I just looked at the same one, base instruments there. Now you can see the comments are gone for that one lesson within that module. There are no comment bubbles at the module level. And in the product settings, if I wanted to turn off commenting, I would scroll down and scroll down and scroll down. So more to the additional options. Enable comments, no. And you turn it off right there.

That's where you can find comments on and off for your different levels. So what did we do so far? Number one, add an admin profile pic so people can see your smiling face number to enable notifications so that you find out when people dropped a comment. Number three, review, review your products to make sure you have comments enabled someplace that's going to be useful in your strategy of using member vault, and don't turn them on everywhere. Just because we have them doesn't mean you have to use them. Same thing works for pages, you can click into your list of pages and see a little bubble where the little icon to show you which page has comments enabled. And remember, for blog posts, the comments are going to be enabled globally, which means you turn them on or off in the general settings for your blog. We do not have the feature yet to have comments enabled only on a specific blog posts are turned off by blog posts. That's going to be something we test out with user feedback and see if people want that or not. And for now, comments are enabled globally for the whole entire blog or not. So remember to do that in your settings. Check my little checklist. So we got profile pic notifications, enabling comments, global settings. Now you got some comments coming in.

Let's moderate the comments. We're gonna go to the next window. Here we have the comments master setting. This is kind of like the quiz, the quiz responses where you can go and see all your quiz answers at one place. So in your dashboard under activity below the quiz answer is there's a comment section. Notice there's a little parenthesis with a number in it that tells you how many new comments you have. So when you have some new comments, come here and you can moderate them, you can read all the comments in one place. If there are any. Any of them that you don't want to keep around, you can click the little red X and delete them. And of course, you can reply to comments from right here within your admin area. Let's go down I'll show you the here's a comment where the person says number five is my favorite. So I'm going to click the green arrow. Say I like that one too. I will make more like this. And then reply. And now that user is going to have a little comment on their reply or reply to their comment. And notice again that my admin comments are highlighted with a green box to make it really clear that those came from me and the other ones came from someone else.

As for deleting comments. I don't think we're going to have a very big spam problem in MemberVault, Vault member vault as account owners and content providers. Because member vault is so relationship focused, we're all bringing in people who are part of our community. And it's not the kind of thing where people are going to come in and say, just garbage like you might get on a YouTube video or something about people advertising like air conditioners or mattresses or whatever. It is possible. I know this as a Facebook group moderator. One thing that seems to spin off out of control sometimes is that one person drops a comment about something, and another person has the feeling of wanting to add advice. So they put in their opinion, like opinion number two, and then the first person feels the need to defend their comment. So you get this little comment war going on where the two people are both saying, I understand it really well. Let me prove how much I understand it. And the other one is going, Oh, I knew that too. And I want to be I want to show you how much I understand that too. And they're all trying to show off how much they understand this one topic and it can get into this like competitive thing. So if you ever have one of those happening, you can delete the comments and let your people know, hey, we don't have to argue about who's got the best opinion on, you know, whatever topic we're doing.

But you know, hopefully you won't have too many trolls or anything inside your envy. More likely, you're going to be replying to comments with the arrow and when you have seen them all and you don't need to do anything else. What you can do is mark them all as read now, right where the mouse is in the right side corner of the comments area. You can see it says no new comments. If you had a whole bunch of new ones. There would be a field there that says Mark all as read If we can click it at once, neutralize the comments indicator back to zero. And then you'll know that you've checked all your comments for the day or for the week, everything's taken care of. And you can follow up with whatever replies you might have on another platform by email or something else, where you take the relationship to the next level. So that's managing comments, we looked at the indicator, replying, deleting mark, all as read, let's go to the user side of comments. To do this, I'm going to go to another tab where I'm logged in with my user profile. And look at this, there's this new little green circle, right here next to my user profile picture. That was not there before, what is that little green circle all about?

Look at this notifications, and admin has replied to your comment today at 145 During this video, and earlier today, I'm going to click see all notifications. That opens a new little page. The URL is my custom domain URL, slash products slash notifications. And check this out.

The Notifications panel says three things admin has replied to your comment. And if I click the notification, does it go to the actual comment? There it is. Okay, so there's Oh, that was a comment on a module when I had the modules enabled. And now that I disabled the mod, the modules comment field during this demonstration, so we can't see that comment at this moment. What about the one for most recently, synth instruments? That's module level? And I want to base instruments. Okay, well, I disabled comments at the module level. So this user cannot no longer see their comments. But what happened was the user put a comment under this module thing, and then the admin replied, so there's that. So what you can do to get your people using comments is, let's tell them about comments really basic. But this is a great fun thing about MemberVault. All dizzy, we have so much contact with our people.

So number one, let people know, hey, you can upload a profile picture on your MemberVault user account. So in other words, your customers, your clients, your users can add profile pictures to their member of all profiles, so that when they leave a comment, you can see who they are, and you know exactly who it is. And they do that the same way. They go to their user profile, click the word profile in the top right, and they get a little place to add an image and upload an image, then you can tell them, hey, there are comments available on this product that you just bought on this lesson where we're doing the homework, here's a comment field, let me know what do you think about the homework assignment? How did you like the activities? Is there something you want more of? Or is there a whole bunch of too much stuff that you think is boring, and we can just delete out of the course, it's a great way to get engagement feedback on who is doing each lesson, how many people are reacting to the same thing. And remember how powerful social proof is with online courses when one person comes in and sees the lesson. And there are four comments underneath where people say, I love it. This was so easy. This helped me so much everything changed after this lesson. When your other people see that they're going to be motivated to do the lesson, get the result, add their comments, share their testimonial, share their reality of what happened with them. And it's going to make the whole thing more fun. I know you know how comment threads work, I'm just excited for it to be happening inside of our own MemberVault accounts. So you can let your users know, add a profile picture and come in to add comments. And check their little profile picture for a notification icon like that little green circle to show that comments are coming in. And if you want a couple other tips, I think maybe Remy is going to be doing a podcast on how to get people engaged and what the whole comments process is all about.

But let's remember for a quick wrap up, and this is just a quick speedy little podcast today that you can send one click links by email, where people click the link and go directly into a product, a module, a lesson or a page or a blog post. So what I recommend, and this one I'm gonna experiment with myself, is I'm going to enable comments on one particular lesson. And then I'm going to send an email out and say, Hey, you all in this one product are part of my main crew, I want to hear your feedback, I made a space for you to get comments, you can say I made a space so you they don't need to know that Mike made it. And then send in the email a one click link directly to that lesson. So they can see your email, click the link, go into the lesson, see the comment field, drop a comment. And you'll get feedback, which means you'll get a tighter link between the people reading your messages, the people using your products, the community that you're interacting with, and they get tighter interaction with each other in the community to start the whole ball rolling. Now again, this is a new feature that member vault has just rolled out. We don't know how big this is gonna get or how big the Snowball is gonna get once it gets rolling.

And we do want to hear from you on how you like the comments feature and how you're using it in your MemberVault. So what you do is play with a little bit and then get with us in the collab on Facebook and let us know what you think about comments by dropping a comment a little bit meta, but I think it's going to work really well. Thank you so much for listening. I'm Steve Knotts. This is the User Experience podcast and I'll see you in the comments again. Bye bye