CMO Magazine, Australia: Cognizant Digital Works’ Australia Strategy Head Recommends a Mix of Automated, Community and Human Moderation of User-Generated Content to Mitigate Risks

Consumers’ information without formal consent can erode trust in the brand, damaging the brand’s image and sales, says Susan Brown. Having a robust system to reach out to UGC (user-generated content) producers to track acceptance of content use is critical to avoid harm to brand reputation and trust.

“The sheer amount of data and content collected by brands coupled with the complexity of ensuring privacy creates a significant amount of consumer anxiety,” she says.

For moderation to be efficient and make sense, strict policies must be set and applied to govern content authenticity, originality, privacy, as well as political and social correctness and legalities, both locally and globally, Brown suggests.

“I recommend a mix of automated, community and human moderation of UGC to mitigate risks,” she says. “Automated moderation uses computer applications and algorithms. Effective methods include the use of automated algorithms such as the Bayesian filter, most commonly used to detect email spams. Such filtering models can, for example, detect patterns of blacklisted words and phrases, color tone and other specific items that need monitoring.”

She adds, “Community moderation involves leveraging the online community to self-moderate content, such as flagging or volunteer administration. Human moderation, whether by dedicated staff or crowd-sourced, can become highly inefficient if one has to continue moderating the same UGC in different formats or if multiple moderators must continually track previously moderated UGC.”

It’s therefore imperative to leverage the right tools and adopt a cohesive risk management strategy, Brown points out.

“Content moderation must also continuously improve by leveraging scalable, effective and cost-efficient options,” she says. “In this way, we can ensure that we continue to provide an enriched, socially-enabled user experience. It is crucial to ensure that only appropriate UGC is posted by screening and filtering for mal-content.”

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