Mathew Ingram over on Gigaom has once again addressed the issue of ‘Real Names’ in comments and the perceived pros and cons of using FB comments.

Having being involved with Comments for 4+ years, Echo has a little experience in this area. The truth is that ‘Real Names’ has never been the real issue.

First,  any commenting product can enforce login with FB Connect and force ‘Real Names’. So in terms of the key differentiating feature, it isn’t much of one.

The real issues for major media companies (i.e. not long-tail bloggers), however, have nothing to do with real names at all.

Lets define ‘major media’.  For us, it means sites that are profiting from their content and their audience. It also means that they have a real strategy and product team who focuses on long term value creation rather than short term tactical distractions.

For this class of site, the real issues include the following:

1. Do they own the branding
2. Do they own the data
3. Do they own the the customer relationship (e.g. when a user logs in, are they able to know who the user is and reach them for newsletters, offers and other business activities). In other words are they being disintermediated from their audience or is all the wonderful engagement turning into a valuable business asset.
4. Are they able to customize and differentiate the experience to tailor it for their unique community needs (every major brand has it’s own style – McDonald’s doesn’t work for everyone). If all your competitors are using the same vanilla system, there is no point of differentiation.
5. Are they able to integrate single sign-on so that when you log into the site you are also logged into the comment system in a seamless way. Major media don’t appreciate silicon valley b2c companies leveraging their audience to grow their own user base and engagement numbers. They want it the other way around.
6. Cross integration into other onsite experiences such as trending content, forums, community streams, live blogging, moderation dashboards etc
7. Are they able to leverage their investment into those other on-site products into the comment product. E.g. Plugins written to modify the Forum product behavior can/should be usable in the comment product and vice/versa
8. Control over the bad word filters, spam filters
9. Game mechanics to drive more desirable behavior and curtail negative behavior in ways that go WAY beyond ‘real names’
10. The ability for users to log in with other social networks – each who have important user bases/contexts (Twitter, Google, Yahoo, etc)
11. Most importantly, the ability to share to multiple social networks so that they can not just get return traffic from FB, but ALSO from Twitter
12. Aggregation of conversations from other social networks so they can get a complete view of the reaction to their content.

The list goes on.

Our customers make this calculation every day and choose to pay for their social infrastructure from Echo because they understand that the business of publishing means owning your own platform and leveraging social networks as distribution. Not the other way around.

Nothing is more expensive than Free.

Or as our CEO Khris Loux put it back in 2008, “there is no such thing as a free lunch”