Viafoura Automated Moderation Changes the Game for Community Moderation

Don’t Sacrifice the Flowers for the Weeds Have you ever had the pleasure of digging through the comments that pollute the web? If you have…

Last updated June 14th, 2018

Don't sacrifice the flowers for the weeds

Have you ever had the pleasure of digging through the comments that pollute the web? If you have, then you are no stranger to the spam and hostility that overwhelm the comment boxes that are a huge effort for teams to manage.

While spamming and trolling are challenges faced by many organizations, top media companies and brands know that community is everything, and that it’s crucial to be able to listen to and engage with customers online in real time. Unfortunately, that means constantly sifting through the many hateful comments in order to nurture a healthy online community.

Community Growth

It’s not just frontline digital teams that want to foster a healthy online environment – it’s important to their audiences and customers as well. In fact, when the quality of conversations increases, so does their audience’s engagement.

35
Increase in comments per user
34
Increase in replies per user
62
Increase in likes per user
22
Increase in likes per comment

*Analyzed data gathered from 600+ media organizations, compiled both before and after the introduction of Viafoura Automated Moderation.

Cutting Through the Noise

With smart technologies like Viafoura Automated Moderation, content producers can manage, moderate and listen to their communities, with the protection of pre-moderation in real time.

Automated Moderation automatically eliminates up to 90% of the time and effort spent moderating communities, analyzing comments and responding to customers.

How does it work? Our team of linguists teamed up with our engineers to build an engine that automatically looks for patterns in language. It determines the topic, how the person felt when they wrote it, and also its context. They did this by programming every 6.5 million variation of each word in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French, with more on the horizon.

This engine is then used to moderate and listen across all owned and third-party social networks to manage engagement, provide insights into urgent customer complaints, and display data and insights in one dashboard. It immediately removes comments outside of your community guidelines and sends suspect comments to a queue for resolution in real time.
That means that community managers don’t need to spend their resources looking over each comment or manually monitoring social networks. When a moderator logs in, they can easily review what needs their attention, focusing quickly on issues that really matter. By cutting through the clutter and allowing the most important comments to get addressed in real time, it allows you to deliver the best customer experience.

Creating Meaningful Relationships

By flagging and removing inappropriate comments, Viafoura Automated Moderation allows authors, community managers and social media managers to spend their time addressing important inquiries quickly and creating meaningful conversations with their audiences.
And when your teams are empowered to engage with audiences in a timely and meaningful way, it leads to the best customer experience, higher engagement and ultimately a higher lifetime value for each customer.

Interested in learning more?

Connect with us today to learn how Viafoura can help you build, manage and monetize your audience.

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CBC and The Weather Network Discuss Online Commenting

The Importance of Commenting from RTDNA 2017 Conference

In the RTDNA session, Commentary, Commenting and Diversifying Your Voices, our Head of Marketing, Allison Munro, moderated a conversation with news media executives from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and The Weather Network (Pelmorex Media). The two panelists included Jack Nagler, the Director of Journalistic Public Accountability and Engagement at CBC, and Carrie Lysenko, the Head of Digital at Pelmorex Media. Their discussion explored the pros and cons of online commenting and how news media organizations can overcome the challenges.

How Important is Commenting in News Media?

For the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), commenting is not just a value add; it’s critically important for their brand strategy. One of their goals is to provide Canadians with a place to explore their diverse opinions, and commenting supports this vision. Nagler states that commenting has helped them become a better newsroom because their readers improve the stories being told.

At The Weather Network, Lysenko stated that commenting is important because nature-enthusiasts want a forum to share their opinions, photos and videos. Lysenko also noted that when they turned off comments, there was a significant drop in pageviews and attention time.

This echoes our findings that brands with commenting can increase their pageviews by 248% and attention time by 364%. Researchers for the MIT Sloan Management Review also confirm that users’ willingness to pay for subscriptions increases with their growing online social activity.

“Only an engaged user will become a long-term subscriber.”
—Tobias Henning, GM of BILD

A majority of website visitors would also agree that website commenting is valuable. In a recent survey of their audience, CBC found that 70% of respondents said that comments were important to them. Furthermore, they saw that 70% of website visitors spend at least 15% of their time onsite just reading comments.

Using Comments to Create New Stories

CBC receives story tips and article corrections within their comment section from their loyal readers and watchers. Nagler asserts that audience contributions add a lot of value to their articles as they spur further discussions and stories.

He gave an example about an article on a wedding party that fell ill during their stay at a resort. After reading the story, another reader commented that she too got sick at the same place. From there, an investigative story was born, providing valuable information to other travellers.

CBC now takes their top comments and creates stories from them in the Revenge of the Comment Section. As these stories are made from comments, they offer a quick and cost-effective way for publishers to post new content.

Similarly, users share their photos and videos with The Weather Network, which drives further engagement and new content. Lysenko described when The Weather Network connected one of their website contributors to Canada Post to create an official stamp. After viewing the photo he submitted, they made arrangements to create the stamp and tracked his story on their website.

 

Three SEO Benefits of Online Commenting

User-generated content, such as comments, can be indexed by Google if it’s placed higher on the webpage. For example, editors can choose their favorite comments and place those quotes within the body of an article.

Furthermore, pages with active content updates, such as new comments, can trigger additional reindexing and improve the recency and relevance of the page in search results.

Your audience may also use keywords around a topic that differ from what journalists write, and can provide closer matches to search terms.

The Truth Behind Facebook Commenting

While your Facebook page may be a hotspot for online commenting, it can’t take the place of commenting on your website. And it’s not only because your direct website visitors are more loyal than your Facebook readers, but also because Facebook doesn’t give publishers all their first-party audience data from commenters. (Similarly, Facebook’s free commenting platform for websites also keeps your invaluable data.)

Both CBC and The Weather Network recognize that publishers should focus on getting readers to comment on their websites and collecting their audience data. That doesn’t mean Facebook or its tools shouldn’t be used at all; in fact, Social Login is an extremely valuable tool for news media websites.

When users are able to register for news websites through their social media account, this greatly reduces friction when signing up. It can even increase conversion rates by 20% to 40%. Lysenko adds that if you have the capability to import data from their social account into their user profile on your website, then you’re taking advantage of Facebook login without giving away your data.

“Direct visitors are more loyal than Facebook visitors.”
—Terri Walter, CMO of Chartbeat

Moderation is the #1 Challenge for Community Management

Both panelists say that the greatest challenge to commenting is moderating online discussions in real time. With so many trolls online, moderation is vital for publishers who want to provide a safe space for their users. And according to Engaging News Project, users’ interest in returning to a website almost doubles if they know the discussion will be civil.

CBC found difficulties with both pre-moderation and post-moderation. With the former method, moderators review comments before they get published. But this time-consuming task doesn’t allow for real-time discussions, which are so important for timely news and weather events. With the latter method, users are able to post comments without review, and inappropriate comments only get removed if they are flagged by the community and reviewed by a moderator. While this avenue is much less time-consuming, brands risk having content on their website that doesn’t align with their guidelines.

Like some media companies, CBC has even opted out of commenting altogether on certain stories that may trigger heated arguments. Similarly, The Weather Network chose to disable commenting on stories about climate change, finding too many undesirable comments between advocates and deniers.

Since then, The Weather Network has decided to employ automated moderation to manage their online communities. Automated moderation uses artificial intelligence to automatically detect and delete offensive comments. This allows conversations to unfold in real time while maintaining a brand’s community guidelines.

Human Moderation

81
Accuracy

Automated Moderation

92
Accuracy

They have also decided to offer self-moderation tools that allow users to personalize their online experience. These include the ability to mute other users and to dislike and flag comments.

Save Time and Resources with Automated Moderation

Website commenting has been an important feature for both the CBC and The Weather Network, helping them increase brand loyalty.

It’s also been invaluable to their audiences, who enjoy reading the comment section and sharing their content with others. However, many users get deterred from engaging on your website if the discussions aren’t civil and respectful.

Automated moderation is the latest solution to this problem, giving media brands a cost-effective way to moderate their communities. Media organizations have also shown that automated moderation drives further engagement, by increasing comments, likes and registered users, while significantly reducing flagging and the time and effort needed by moderators.

Interested in learning more about Automated Moderation?

Connect with us today to learn how Viafoura can help you build, manage and monetize your audience.

Connect Now
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