eModeration: Farewell to 2009 (A Good Year)

This year has been incredibly exciting one for anyone involved in social media and virtual worlds. We’ve seen interest in this space explode through 2009, as brands start to realise fully the potential of online environments as a way of engaging consumers.

It’s been a great year for eModeration, too. Now operating from two US offices (New York and Los Angeles) and still headquartered in London, we’ve grown enormously. We now have getting towards one hundred staff and between them our amazingly patient and wonderful moderators and community managers offer our services in over fifty languages. It’s developed into a core specialism: for example, one of our projects (for Nokia) requires round-the-clock attention in twenty-four separate languages. You can see our current 24/7 language offering on our website.

We’ve worked on around 100 different projects for some fantastic brands and their agencies. These are from the UK and US predominantly, but we’re also starting to see activity from Asia and South America. Some of the highlights from our work this year include the FA Cup live Twitterfall, ITV’s X Factor and I’m a Celebrity communities; Hyundai’s awesome ‘Genesis’ UGC contest; the RadioShack ‘Netogether’ simulcast linking New York and San Francisco; Sprint’s Now Network Human Clock; NASCAR’s ‘Pit Wall’ , Orange Rock Corps; consultancy for some major new virtual worlds and children’s gaming sites and .. well, here’s a list of just some of the brands and agencies we’ve been working with recently.

Next year’s also shaping up to be a bumper year. We’ve expanded our international presence, particularly in the US and as I said, we’re expanding our portfolio of multilingual projects and will be working with some great new partners too. Another huge growth area for us has been our community management and consultancy work, as brands compete to engage and retain audiences in online environments.

There is much more awareness from brands around the impact of user-generated content on their online reputation, and a real understanding of their responsibility to keep users safe from abuse in those environments. As a member of the IWF and the moderation sub-group of the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, I’m delighted with how seriously big brands and social networks are taking this issue, and at the progress of initiatives to make online environments safe for kids. There’s still a long way to go, but at least there is a growing awareness of the issues, and a lot of great organisations (CEOP and Beatbullying in the UK for example and FOSI in the US) doing good work in this field.

All this adds up to a market that is changing fast, and growing in sophistication. To help brands and agencies navigate this change, we have been producing a series of white papers and guides covering online safety, virtual worlds and other interactive environments for teens and tweens, and the growing trend of user interaction within advertising campaigns. Look out for our new white paper ‘Moderating Social Networks’, due early in the New Year. We’re also blogging (including our now indispensable Social Media Round-Ups), tweeting and speaking at various industry events.

In February, I’ll be at Engage! 2010 New York (where I’ll be speaking on the issue of moderation in virtual worlds and MMOGs for children), so it would be great to hear from anyone who’s planning to attend and who would like to meet up with me there: just email me at tamara@emoderation.com, or follow me on my personal Twitter at @tlittleton.

In the meantime, I hope everyone has a very happy holiday and a peaceful and prosperous New Year. I’ll leave you with the eModeration Christmas Choir e-Card that will be going out to our friends and Clients this year. In case you hadn’t guessed it, I’m the one with the eyebrows (not sure what my designer is trying to tell me?!)...