Professional website moderation is not about installing
the brain of Albert Einstein into your site. For professional website moderation,
all you need are two things: your computer and patience.
No joking! As long as you have yourself 100%, every
corner of your website can be moderated as if you are employing experts from
Google or from Microsoft.
Everything starts with a sketch of what you will be
doing:
1. Familiarizing
yourself with all parts of your website.
2. Learning
of laws and regulations concerning business ethics and online media.
3. Monitoring
of all activities within the site and moderating the contents.
4. Regular
evaluation of web contents.
5. Knowing
of tools and app that can help in the moderation practice.
6. Integration
of additional moderators and apps.
Now, what are you going to moderate? Check all the
contents of your business website. Check the forums, message boards, images,
videos, user reviews and articles.
There are three phases of moderation:
Pre-moderation.:
You approve all contents before these are published online. Examples are
articles and pictures. You check them to ensure that your site not violating
any law.
Current
moderation: You monitor live activities. Examples are messages on chat
rooms and live video streams. You place the right caption and the right
warnings to members.
Post
moderation: you observe all web contents to know the
feedback of visitors on the contents. You also monitor all pre-moderated
contents to know if you have missed disapproving problematic data.
Here are tips from professional moderators:
a. Do
not use jargons when making guidelines, unless you want miscommunication between
you, your visitors and your registered members.
b. When
communicating with visitors, its best to use words that promote the sense of
belongingness like “our website”, “our guidelines” etc.
c. Be
smart by creating filters, as your first screening for problematic submissions.
Example, use a tool that screens all comment submissions containing the most
used obscene words.
d. Never
forget to create a data base of all articles, images, submissions etc to have
backups.
e. Create
a list of problems that you usually encounter. And the solutions you can use to
solve them.
f. If
you have legal consultants, ask them to help you with dubious contents.
g. It
is better to concentrate on pre-moderation to prevent issues before these
arise.
h. Be
consistent in approving.
If you plan to hire freelance moderators or avail of moderation
services, you must ensure that there is clear communication between you and the
service provider. In choosing the service provider, think in terms of 3 things:
flexible integration, quick reporting and lowest cost. Moreover, ask the service provider if they can
handle social media moderation for a more comprehensive online moderation.
