We had quite a few conversations with some prospects in the past few weeks about moderating user content.

As a first instinct, our fear will drive us to want to make sure we see ALL content before it gets posted. For small-medium businesses and organizations, this adds significant cost to your effort to enable an online social tool for your members/customers.

As an alternate, we suggest Simply Monitoring as a more viable alternative.

Your community members can help you police and monitor for abusive postings. Let them alert you when there is such content that needs your attention.

Yes, such content will be exposed on your community site for a period of time. But in cases of small-medium sized communities and especially for closed communities, the consequence is probably not significant enough to prevent the opportunity for the business/organization to employ online social tools. You should not fear that it will happen. You only need to evaluate if the consequence of such incidents is material enough to fear it.

We believe that while online social tools carries some risk, the benefit that can be derived far outweighs the consequence of the risk of the occurrence of abusive content.

These discussions have generated an idea for an improvement for our Orbius Platform. In the near future, we will be building an "abuse content monitoring system" that will selectively quarantine content that may be suspected of being abusive.

But nevertheless, Orbius Platform lets community administrators experiment with various degrees of openness of their community that fits their comfort level. Over time, the administrator can choose to allow more flexibility for their members to post content.

Start with baby steps! Don't let fear be an obstacle to using social tools to improve your business or organization relationship with customers/members.

C.H. Low
CEO, Orbius Inc.