Content moderation has made the headlines lately as social channels like Facebook and Twitter tried to deal with “fake news” stories and inappropriate content. There is a torrent of video and written content being produced and distributed through the various social platforms, and content moderators work around the clock, deciding what needs to be taken down and what can remain. But what about content moderation for your brand’s social channels, or for your sweepstakes and contests?

The overwhelming volume of social interaction on most brand social channels may have us believe it is impossible to keep watch over it all. Some brands even contend it is too time consuming to monitor social content and have elected to leave social content alone and let their followers call out what is untrue and controversial so that it could be taken down. That’s not advised for content created by marketers. We recommend that you actively moderate content to ensure that:

• it is appropriate for your brand,
• it is not offensive,
• it is not using material copyrighted by another person, entity or competing brand,
• it does not incite violence,
• it does not contain misinformation,
• it does not depict minors without parental consent, and
• if is in not in English (or the language understood by your audience) it does not contain offensive content in that other language.

Without content moderation in place to prevent any of these, you could alienate or incite your customers, and lose their loyalty to your brand.

Content Moderation of Social Content

There are many resources available to handle content moderation of your social channels. Most are technology based and offer sophisticated filtering software that search for problem words or phrases. These are helpful for general social content and to flag content for later human intervention. Another solution involves employing a full-time social community manager or multiple people moderating all content 24 hours a day.

Content Moderation for Contests and Sweepstakes

Content created for contests or sweepstakes, even if the call to action involves a simple post to your social channels, is a bit more involved than content moderation of typical social content.  The added incentive to create content with the possibility of winning a potential prize amplifies the need to moderate for content and ensure the entry meets requirements as set out in the official rules (such as required hashtags).

Finally, when you want to judge and otherwise rank or score content based on criteria you select you will need humans, but you won’t need a full time staff. A good judging organization has staff and technical solutions at the ready to handle small, medium and large amounts of content in your entries. They should be able to assist in creating actionable criteria and advise on other structural issues surrounding a user generated content contest.

Marden-Kane has been running contests and sweepstakes with businesses of all types for over 60 years. Contact us and we can help.

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