Community management software company, Crisp is noticing a 10 per cent, month on month increase in spam targeted at the brand pages of social media sites, such as Facebook.

Chris Hildreth, Crisp’s Founder

With the world’s biggest brands currently paying hundreds of thousands of pounds per year to protect their online communities from spammers and profanity, Crisp Founder Adam Hildreth argues that the widely adopted human moderation techniques are no longer scalable or indeed feasible when used in isolation.

In 2005 Hildreth (27) founded Crisp to make the internet a safer place for children. After realising that simple human moderation methods would never be able to spot online predators – their numbers ever increasing – the British entrepreneur invented a new type of technology that could accurately spot the underlying context of online conversations and ultimately the behaviour of a user. The technology went so much further than simple keyword filtering.

Using behaviour analysis technology Crisp can identify harassment, spamming and predators on the lookout for victims with over 98.4 per cent accuracy. Since 2006 Crisp has helped hundreds of global child entertainment brands – including Sony Online Entertainment, Nickelodeon, Electronic Arts and the LEGO group – keep their online game areas a safe place for children.

By applying the same intelligent technology it uses to identify online child grooming, Crisp is now protecting global brands; their social media and online communities from a different kind of threat.

The Crisp Community Management platform allows a brand to pull in content from its social media, forums and other community applications. The content is intelligently categorised according to business goals and placed into priority queues for action to be taken.

Crisp’s intelligent classification algorithms prioritise which content to moderate, who to engage with and what to listen to, making it easy for the brand to manage and monitor all online activities. It not only helps brands respond to customers quicker but the technology also captures key business changing insight.

Says Hildreth:

“There are already plenty of tools to help customer service and moderation teams manually manage content from social media but none have any real intelligence when it comes to finding what content needs to be reviewed. Simple keyword filtering is more likely to block an annoyed customer’s comment for using a mildly offensive word than a commercial spammer.”

Crisp currently analyses over 600 million pieces of data for clients each month, to examine online behaviour. This is something that human teams simply cannot compete with alone. Its software complements the work of human teams by prioritising content and cutting out ‘noise’.