Sports Marketing 2.0 | Pat Coyle

When AJ and I proposed starting a social networking site for Colts fans, the first thing our bosses asked was, “how are you going to moderate it”

Amazing how fast the conversation turned from “this will be so cool, we’ll make millions” to “do you realize how ugly this could get?!”

And it will get ugly. We have seen some really bad stuff posted on the Web at large as well as on our own Fan Forum. We realize that creating a social networking site is only going to give offenders more opportunity to post their garbage.

So how can we build a great community and prevent it from being ruined by inappropriate posts? What’s the “best practice”?

Here’s our plan: First, it won’t be quite as easy to register for My Colts Network as it is for our current Fan Forum. Right now, all we ask for is a username and E mail. We don’t really check to make sure you are who you say you are. In MyColts.net, we’ll ask for name, birthday, gender, E mail and zipcode. All fields will be required, and we’ll run a check to verify E mail before activating an account.

In addition, we will promote a “colts cred” (i.e. street cred, reputation) system whereby members earn “fame” through positive behaviors, and from reporting bad behavior. Fans tell us they want their names up in lights, and the “Colts Cred” will be designed to give them what they want.

For text posts we’ll have three lines of defense. First, we’ll be using software to scan for bad words. This should prevent some major damage right off the bat. We do this in our forum already.

Next, we’ll employ people to moderate both text and photos. Some of these people will be direct Colts employees and some will be quasi-volunteers. Again, we do this in the forum too.

Finally, we’ll offer rewards (more Colts Cred) to members who find and report abusive or otherwise inappropriate posts. Reporters will be rewarded. Violators risk being blacklisted from the community.

We will take a more stringent approach to moderating photos.

As with text posts, we will allow members to post any photo they like to their own “private” pages. Those photos will be allowed to stay up until we happen to see them or until someone brings them to our attention.

On the other hand, any photo that could be seen on a public page (i.e. a member’s main profile photo) will need to be “approved” before it goes live to a public page. We will have a photo review process to help us prevent bad images from landing on our public facing pages.

Even with these lines of defense, a lot of bad stuff will find its way onto our site. We don’t think we can stop it without forcing too many resrictions on the overall community, but we do think we can find the bad stuff and erase it. We recognize that we’ll need to rely on the members of the network to do much of the moderation for us.

So our ultimate line of defense, and perhaps the most valuable, will be the citizens of the Colts community themselves. Human nature has two distinct sides. A naughty side and a nice one. Just surely as there will be people who abuse the system, there will also be people (more people in fact) who will want to keep the community clean. The more freedom we give these good citizens, the more they feel they “own” the community, the harder they’ll work to follow the rules and protect the community.

If anyone out there has another way of doing it I’d welcome your input.