How can your outsourced content moderation team live your brand?

It’s easy for an outsourced service vendor to say that its content moderation team can live your brand. Doing so, however, is an entirely different story.

Living your brand means delivering the exact experience you promise your market and actualizing the core value you claim your organization has. This includes every interaction between you and your market on your brand’s website. So if your brand statement is “swift service,” but your website is non-responsive, then you’re not living your brand. It’s the same thing if you brand yourself as an avenue for opways to live your brand through the content moderation process of your outsourced staff.

Living your brand is the duty of everyone who is part of your company, particularly your immediate brand ambassadors and your employees, including the outsourced ones. You may not have problems injecting your vision to those under your direct management, but how about the staff managed by a third party organization? They may be under a firm with a different brand image to project, but being affiliated with you, your outsourced team should also embody your brand’s message.

Here are some ways to live your brand through the content moderation process of your outsourced staff:

Include the author in the moderation process

Anyone who sends in content to your website is automatically part of the moderation process. In fact, moderation starts from them because their adherence to the house rules you apply already clears out unwanted messages. But their role shouldn’t stop the moment they hit “submit.”

Your moderators can show that your brand encourages collaboration by letting users (content authors) moderate their own submissions. One way of doing this is by notifying the authors why their submission is pending and giving them a chance to revise the content.

Be open to feedback

Submitters may question why their posts weren’t published, and they may contest the moderator’s explanation for it. Your staff should be open to feedback and repeat reviews to ensure that no misjudgment was done on their part.

Facilitate fair posting

In some forums and online communities, certain types of members have higher posting privileges because of factors such as membership level and points (comment votes, number of posts). This can be unfair to new users whose submissions may not become as visible as the content by pioneer members.
Moderating should not be completely robotic; the moderator should have conscious judgment if something should be highlighted no matter the status of the author. But if your community guidelines oblige authors to gain a certain point before getting featured, then make it clear to newbies that they should reach a status before getting additional privileges. This will be fair for those who strived to garner high posting points.

Act quickly

Moderators should be quick to act not just on weeding out undesirable posts but also on posting moderated content. Conversational posts, like comments, should be published in real time to not break the conversational flow. Time-sensitive content such as news and seasonal features should stick to the schedule so that their subject stays relevant.

Timeliness is even more important if you practice post-moderation where the content is published before being reviewed. As this gives you a higher likelihood of getting submissions that go against your brand’s image, the moderator should promptly remove or edit those posts before they cause reputation damage.

Living your brand lies not just on the work you do but also on how you do it. So if your web visitors say that your post moderation is quick, fair, and transparent, these are also the exact things they will say about your brand.