Pepsi
Coke
Whitehouse
Now lets not get into the pros and cons of online social presence of these brands.. as it is perhaps well accepted that increasingly brands and organizations are going to have more intense and open ended free-flowing interactions with its constituents which for companies are the consumers and for organizations/institutions like Whitehouse, the citizens of USA. What I am interested in is the moderation of these pages !! As we know there are no shortages of people who will spare no effort while trying to deface one of these pages either posting derogatory or obscene messages there by completely hijacking the whole purposes of having these pages. There can also be spammers who would try to flood these pages with their own messages. Bottom-line is organizations need round the clock moderation of these pages in order to protect them from aforementioned challenges. Now let us see whether there is any in-built out of box feature of the application (ex: Facebook) itself in place which can provide some automated rule and dictionary based moderation engine to the organizations?
To start with I started exploring the options that you get when you start setting up a fan page or brand facebook page
- When you start setting up a new Facebook page you get the following set-up page where you need to select the type of page you want to set up (Artist, Band or Brand or Company etc.)
- Once you set up the page you are the default page admin and have your own dedicate page view including a small portlet on the left side of the page
- if you click further on the "Insights" portlet you are going to be presented with an analytic dashboard page giving you a holistic picture of the overall page activities
- So far all we have seen is how to set up your page and then getting a feedback on the activities on the page. However the only moderation example that you have is the "Delete Post" option given to the page owner for any flame message on the thread as shown below and the "Fan Permission Settings" that you can control
Obviously the moderation facility given in the facebook is rather crude and manual in nature requiring 24 hours moderation of the user generated content which by no means an easy task for popular brands and important institutions. You can always set up "Policies and guidelines" page where you can unequivocally express what is permissible and what is not in-terms of user generated content however there will always be people with intent to ignore them hence we need solutions which can be automated and rule based to carry out moderation activities in social network pages. Keeping this in mind I searched around a little bit and stumbled across quite a few COTS products which claim to do exactly that. Make your opinion about these products and worth of their claims by visiting their sites.
Two of them are
Nevertheless as we are increasingly focusing on getting more interactive with our constituent user base, more options are likely to be provided by the social platforms to address the moderation challenges in the social networks to make them more automated and less resource intensive at the same time preserving the vibrant, dynamic and democratic flavor of social networks and their advantages.
notable articles on the same topic
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