All responsible brand-custodians are extremely anxious about engaging with social media as the prospect of lost control is a frightening one. But social media can be as much about gaining as losing and at Chat Moderators we can give you an appropriate amount of control: enough for you to leverage your Web2.0 initiatives without upsetting lawyers or customers.

User-Generated Content, whether on your own site or microsite, or on your branded pages on third-party sites like Facebook, Bebo, Flickr and MySpace, will sometimes attract brand-damaging material. Some of it illegal. Some of it off-putting to the bulk of your audience.

Chat Moderators

You can control all of this though, through moderation. By getting a sensible, trained human being to assess what’s being uploaded, and then remove unsuitable content and unwanted authors, you will be in control of the environment. That’s what we do here at Chat Moderators, and we do it so that you yourself don’t have to.

• We believe in the Cluetrain Manifesto (www.cluetrain.com)
• We believe in brands.
• And we believe brand owners have a part to play in making their bit of the (digital) world a better place.

Having been moderating continuously now since 2000, a client engaging us inevitably has their future journey into the unknown illuminated by what we’ve since learnt in community building, moderation, engagement and reporting back.

A flavour of our learning can be found at our sister website targetedmoderation.com, where a couple more underlying principles of ours might be inferred... that in order to do a job right, data needs to be collected and analysed; and that it’s hard to manage what can’t be measured.

If you are anticipating a long, collaborative relationship you’ll be in good company as some of our existing client relationships extend back to 2004, 2002 and 2001. You’ll also find that we’ll be doing all we can to offer consistently high standards of work at consistently good prices – which is what these organisations have benefited from:

The web generally, and in particular websites supporting user-generated content (UGC), has empowered us all. The upside for branded UGC sites is a more engaged audience, driven to interact and create. The downside is that every Tom, Dick and Harry can act as a columnist, a leader-writer, a commentator or an investigative journalist when in fact there are some who (knowingly or accidentally) create offensive and/or illegal material – let’s call it ‘bad’ for now. Bad content is bad content on the web or in hard copy, and few respectable brands would want the risks that come with being associated with such content. And why take a sedative when you can engage an agency as professional and experienced and good value as Chat Moderators?

Judging and, if necessary removing, ‘bad’ UGC each day, evening, night, weekend and public holiday is our core service offering. It is available to you 24/7 in any language and is charged at an hourly rate. Since the year 2000, brand custodians at Amnesty, Bauer, COI, DCSF, Friends Reunited, GSK and many more have slept more easily at night because of our presence.

To prevent arbitrary, inconsistent judgments we agree with each of our clients a ‘Moderation Policy’; a bespoke-created document that codifies where the line is drawn between acceptability and unacceptability on all forms of content. This document enables us to judge submissions in a way that allows even the most risk-averse of brands to enjoy the higher visiting frequency, longer visiting times, and more brand-engaged audience, that the provision of UGC functionality brings.

And what of The Law? We’re frequently asked these three questions by brand custodians;

1. “am I responsible for UGC?”
2. “won’t my terms and conditions protect me?”
3. “is it true that if I don’t moderate then I’m not liable?”

Now Chat Moderators is not a legal firm, and even if we were, there’s usually a lawyer around who is willing and able, for a fee, to disagree with any other lawyer. That said, we’ve had many dealings with many lawyers in the area of UGC since we began moderating in the year 2000, and the prevailing views seem to be these.

The law of defamation, even the 1996 Defamation Act, has struggled to keep pace with technology developments and with how people use technology in the 21st century.

Parliament gives libel protection to websites which allow UGC only if, when a complaint is made and upheld, the item is deleted reasonably quickly (within 24 hours at most, in all likelihood). More recently, the Courts have taken the view that it is not proportionate to allow expensive libel actions over postings seen by a handful of people – perhaps a dozen at most. But the law of libel is not the only problem for websites – your audience may choose to upload their speculations on the guilt or innocence of celebrities caught up in the criminal law (potentially a Contempt of Court risk), or to upload copyright protected works, use obscene or racist language or other offensive slurs or material, all of which fall outside the protection of the Defamation Act 1996 and so leaving brands potentially exposed to damaging allegations that they tolerate discrimination, race hatred, or incitement to violence and more.

Furthermore, un-moderated sites risk being hijacked, and a critical media may opine that for its owners to rely simply on terms and conditions that have been flouted may have been too trusting at best, negligent at worst. And for a brand which offered a platform for UGC to pretend that it doesn’t read or care what it is used for, the defence of ‘innocent dissemination may well not prove robust.

Where children are concerned, the issue of sexual predation and grooming is now a criminal offence (Sexual Offences Act 2003) and although it is the predator that is criminally liable, respectable brands will surely want to be seen to exhibit a responsible attitude in matters of child protection. Where websites themselves become criminally liable is around the publication of indecent images of children (or adults who appear to be children), unless genuine steps have been taken to remove such material and ensure no further publication. OK, so there has to be an element of proportionality, and the Crown Prosecution Service would have to determine not only that there is a good chance of a successful prosecution but also that it is in the public interest to press charges, but again, what brand wants the association?

An increasing problem for UGC-enabled websites is privacy - a new area of judge-made case-law based on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Privacy invasions are going to be the subject of increasing damages awards, whether what is said is true or not. The invasive comment may be enough to justify a claim and this is something that needs alert, human moderation as it is now largely accepted that individuals have a right of privacy and any breach of that right, unless justified by some sort of public interest defence, can result in awards of substantial damages.

Max Moseley's successful privacy action against the News of The World in 2008 resulted in a £60,000 damages award. He sued over publication of details of his sadomasochistic activities with a number of prostitutes and the Judge agreed that such details were indeed private and there was no public interest justification for their publication.

For brands offering community platforms on their own website, or utilizing 3rd party social networks such as Flickr, Bebo and Twitter, unwarranted infringements of privacy can be a particular problem, and far harder for inexperienced moderators to spot than the already challenging issue of defamatory postings. Privacy infringements, after all, do not necessarily have to involve anything offensive or derogatory, merely something private. And generally it doesn’t even matter whether the private information is true or false.

Our moderators have a slightly easier time of judging privacy infringements for client brands in matters relating to health or sexual preference/activity (as there is a reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to all types of sexual relationships whether they be adulterous, fee-paying or sado-masochistic) but the unwary are easily caught out. For example, information that can lead to someone's home address being identified might well constitute an unwarranted infringement. Daniel Craig (a.k.a. James Bond), recently complained successfully to the Press Complaints Commission about an article that appeared in the Mail on Sunday which published a photograph of a building in which he was said to have bought a flat, describing the area of North London where it was located and identifying a nearby park. Not an address, but the PCC ruled that the paper printed too much information about the apartment's location, and ran the risk of identifying the building without justification.

Social networking sites, chat rooms, forums and blogs all disseminate potentially 'private' information. Whether by photographs or through exchange of comments, what a person is doing and where and with whom may seem trivial, harmless and not open to legal challenge, but on closer inspection and depending upon the nature of the information being published, it can very easily intrude into someone's private life in a way they could not only take exception to, but successfully go to court over. For some, like Max Moseley, the embarrassment factor won’t dissuade them.

So in summary, the law is likely to remain "publish and be damned" with no
legal obligation to moderate, in the same way there is no legal obligation on an editor not to publish material that is subsequently found to be objectionable. Editors and owners of websites have

Article 10 Rights (freedom of expression). The law punishes what is published, not what might cause offence but then again might not. But as brands become increasingly aware of the power of their identities, and the damage that can be done by malicious posters, the likelihood is that moderation will always have to be carefully considered and often applied, especially by prestigious brands whose audiences have an expectation of honesty, truthfulness, accuracy, decency and fairness.

Insight Reporting is only possible where we’re providing community management services, as the feedback we give is based on having read, and drawn conclusions from, the content we moderate; it is not a word robot crawling through the user-generated content and simply regurgitating its findings! Not only do we capture meaningful content on your website, microsite or social network page, but we filter out or label as such, unrepresentative views and package them in a way that can be easily understood and by marketers and members of a product development team: either monthly or quarterly.

A Community Manager acts as a bridge between a community and you, the platform owner, and the main role of a Community Manager is to encourage users into using all aspects of the site as frequently as possible and in the way intended. This can range from helping to solve their problems, to explaining message board rules, to keeping users abreast of new product developments.

Plenty of large sites have full-time Community Managers who are constantly liaising with other staff to cater for the community’s every need, while other sites have no such role being played at all - the community is seen as a standalone entity, and if a user posts a forum question to the site owners it will stay unanswered forever.

• Creating/deleting categories, either independently or after liaison with a client
• Responding to users’ queries about the site and its functions
• Explaining to users why some facet of the site is as it is
• Managing the forums including locking, deleting and archiving threads
• Locking user accounts of problem users and inappropriate usernames
• Explaining the House Rules and encouraging users to abide by them
• Diffusing arguments
• Posting notices in conjunction with client instructions
• Encouraging correct usage of the forums, for example encouraging uses to submit posts to the correct categories and moving incorrectly categorised posts into more suitable categories as necessary (and where supported by software functionality, informing the author of the thread starter that such a move has taken place)
• Identifying changes in user behavior and suggesting to a client appropriate actions
• Trouble-shooting/investigating complaints, either complaints received directly on the forums or those forwarded from a customer relations department for example.
• Escalating certain issues to a client
• Liaising over general long-term site problems
• Helping with moderation on exceptionally busy/troublesome days
• Notifying user’s of forthcoming product developments such as software changes, especially where such changes may necessitate forum downtime
• Where the are sufficient hours, producing a regular report (frequency to be agreed but monthly or quarterly) showing (where supported by the software), the number of community members, the average frequency and duration of visit, and qualitative information gleaned from their work, including feedback commentary from forum users.

Most of the Community Manager’s time will be spent actually reading posts to identify what needs doing. They should be seen to be a part of the community, but slightly ‘above’ it; a little like a host at a party. It is most important that the community trusts them, as their role will be significantly devalued if users don’t believe what they say. They don’t necessarily need to know all about the site’s subject matter, but they do need to know everything about the platform’s set-up and rules.

So while here at Chat Moderators our core skill is the provision of trained, supervised, clever people tasked with judging user-generated content in its various forms, some of our clients first engage a few days of our time at a consultancy level. Usually within a day or two of work we can advise on how to set up a successful interactive area and decide on the kind of moderation resource that should be applied and technology that should be utilized, bearing in mind risk analysis and budget.

You may already have settled on your chosen platform, but which embedded features should be disabled and which enabled for the audience? And what about the moderation interface – how should that be designed or configured to enable us to work most efficiently and therefore at lowest cost to you?