AI Leadership Insights: Advancing Social Media Comment Intelligence with Respondology’s Erik Swain

Hello and welcome to the latest edition of the Techstrong AI video series. We're gonna be talking today about content moderation and how AI can help us with that. Joining us today is Erik Swain, a CEO for respond ology, and they just picked up an additional $5 million in funding for a platform that helps us navigate all these issues.

Eric, welcome to the show. Yep. Thank you, Mike.

Nice to meet you. Appreciate, uh, you having me. Sadly, our websites are inundated with comments and social media networks.

Not much better, um, that are, shall we say, unhelpful. There's all these trolls out there that kind of just ruin the experience for everybody else. And I think people stop paying attention to a lot of these things, and it's a shame.

Is there some way that we can regain control of the conversation? Unhelpful is probably a, a nice way to put it, and the answer is yes, there is a way we can do it. And there's about four 50 brands around the world on our platform doing it right now and have been doing it for the last several years.

So, uh, modern technology does allow a brand today, um, to, let's say, enforce a code of conduct in their social stream. The same code of conduct they probably wanna enforce in their brick and mortar store or maybe their stadium. So yes, Mike, it can be done, it is being done and it's expanding throughout the, uh, marketplace.

And how does that work? What does it take to get that accomplished? 'cause I think a lot of folks a, may not even know that they can do it, but b um, you know, is the cure gonna be worse than the disease in their mind?

Because sometimes when they look at these AI things, the cost is off the charts, but is there some way to do this cost effectively? Yeah, uh, I mean technology, in this case, our platform is, is actually making it a cheaper event than what most of our brands or clients were doing prior. So a lot of our clients and brands would've junior staff going into their, their social media apps, Instagram, Facebook, what it is, and manually trying to remove really damaging comments.

And we're not talking about negativity or product feedback. We're talking about vitriol, toxicity, porn, bots, et cetera. And that costs money to have people doing it.

They can't do it 24 7, they can't do it the scale technology can. And so we come in with our platform, which is AI powered, and we can remove all the, the junk, the abuse, the bots, the scams in the social media stream. And we can do it in less than a second.

We can do it discreetly and we can usually do it for about a fourth of the cost that a brand was paying humans to do it prior. So this is a classic case of tech and powering, uh, a marketing team to do more with less. Mm-hmm.

And how does the platform work? I mean, what exactly went into this and how come you're able to solve this issue where others might not have even attempted? Well, um, the platform has three, three layers, if you will.

So I'll give you the how on 60 seconds, then we'll take on your second question. Uh, the first layer is 30,000 keywords, phrases and emojis, fully customizable, ready to go plug and play. So you launch in 10 minutes, you immediately start removing the abuse or whatever it is you want.

If a comment gets through those 30,000 keywords and phrases, first layer, it goes into our gen AI layer, which is really the meat of the platform. That's where the technology's really sophisticated. So, or the gen AI is one can imagine can, it doesn't need a keyword or a phrase to trigger on it.

It is comprehending the context of a particular comment. It's actually savvy enough that it can read the image, what is in the image of the post or the ad that the brand made on social media, the text above it. So it's reading the whole context of the page to decide is this comment abusive?

Is it damaging, is it innocuous? Is it spam or bots? And then it decides to remove it or not in real time, as in a less than a second.

If anything gets to those two technology layers, we have a third layer of human moderators. But as the software gets better and better, the human moderators are really just data labelers feeding data back into the ai. So it gets smarter every comment, every day, every moment.

The key is this, not only does it happen in less than a second, it's discreet, meaning Mike, the troll still sees their comment that made it, they have no idea they've been moderated, the rest of the world never sees it. And so it's very discreet. It won't inflame the situation.

A brand is enforcing a code of conduct in their social stream without anybody knowing it. So that eliminates this whole argument that people have around freedom of speech and whatnot on online platforms, which is, doesn't equally apply to everybody, right? If I'm a company and it's my website and it's my branding, I'm not really obligated necessarily to give everybody equal voice.

So I should have more control. Is that different than what say a Facebook might encounter or is it roughly the same? No, that's a great topic.

In no way is it freedom of, is it a stepping on freedom of speech for a couple reasons. Um, first off, if I'm a brand, a massive fashion retailing brand, one of our clients in my store, my brick and mortar store, I have a code of conduct. Uh, you, you have to behave a certain way to come into my shopping experience in my brick and mortar store.

This is all we are enforcing for our four plus brands is they want the same code of conduct in their digital channels. I am in that brand space on social media, so I have to behave a certain way. So there's nothing different here than, you know, I can't go in and shout profanities and attack people and shout scam if I walk into an Apple store today, so to speak.

So it's the same as that. Plus I can still go onto social media and say whatever I want, I just have to do it on my own social channel, not in somebody else's space. So freedom of speech still wide open.

You can go say what you want on social media. Um, and that's the big difference here, you know, and I think that's why this is becoming a standard way to operate in social marketing very quickly. It's also security implications here, if I understand it correctly.

'cause a lot of the bots are inserting links into the comments that then are designed to try to take people to some sort of site somewhere where they'll get infected with malware or whatever it may be. So, um, do the cybersecurity people need to be part of this conversation? Yeah, they're usually pretty happy about it.

You're right, Mike. So there's, there's several value props. Why, if I'm a brand, should I moderate comments and social media security's one, there are nefarious links that are dropped into social comment streams that if you click on it while you've opened up a security breach, there is the time and energy we already talked about your team trying to mainly remove those things.

Um, protecting your brand 24 7 365. Most companies, most of our clients invest millions into their brand perception out there and building their brand and having a brand voice. And if several billion people can attack you and say whatever you want, um, and, and, and slander your brand, well you're losing your brand leakage.

That money's going up the top and it's leaking out the bottom. So protecting your brand's a big one. Here's a really interesting one, ROI.

3 billion in paid social spend. 3%. 3% more than they had prior investing in social.

Their cost per click went down 33% on all their ads. They're running across Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, and they got a 13 x return on investment they spent on the moderation in terms of the revenue they made off it. So beyond protecting a brand's equity, saving it time, security savings and, and plugging those leaks, we're helping brands make more money in their social media operation.

And these are why, you know, it's, it's spreading like wildfire that this is something you have to have in your social media. Tech stack Also seems to me that the average person kinda wants some level of moderation, otherwise, you know, the site you visit, if it looks like it's a cesspool, then they get turned off and they go somewhere else. So, um, is this becoming fundamentally a requirement for any kind of marketing effort?

Yeah, it is. It's funny you say that. We see all the time when we turn a brand on the bots, the spam, the attacks on their brand, their executives, the products go away and you start to see people comment like, wow, this is like a such a more friendly place, or this is a more welcoming social stream, or this is the best comment stream I've been to today.

What a relief. You know, so you see these comments and yeah, people do like it. I mean, if, just take yourself, if you walk into a shopping experience, a brick and mortar store, back to that analogy, you kind of want a clean, sane shopping environment.

So does the retailer. Same idea, right? You don't really wanna go shopping and social media and looking at products and it's a spool.

So it's the same idea. Everybody likes a clean well-run store. Uh, it's the same thing happening here for the most part.

So what's next for you guys? Where do you go from here? Well, you know, I went around last year and I talked to our, uh, you know, about 40 CMOs and SVPs and said, Hey, you're a client of ours.

Uh, what do you like about our brand, our product? Uh, what do you not like? What are you doing in social media?

Where's your tech stack going there? And we heard two more things come back. We heard, yes, we love the moderation.

It's protecting our brand. Our sales are improving. Alright, great check.

We've done that and we're leading that space. Then they would say, Hey Eric, you and our team have all our comment data in your platform by by the tens of millions for some of our really big clients. What can we learn from that?

Like, people are talking about our product out there, they're talking about our marketing, their buyer intent raising their hand. We wanna learn from that. So we took that feedback and we rolled out the very end of last year a product called Discover.

Our second product, our first is moderate everything we've talked about. The second is discover. And what it does is in three clicks, in 30 seconds, any marketer can know everything being said about their brand in their comment stream, which is golden information, real time feedback about what your, your, your strongest buyers and consumers are saying about your product, what they want, the content they want, et cetera.

We also expanded that so you can run the same report on your competitors or your influencers or your partners. So now you can not only know everything happening around your brand, you know what's happening around your category and what your competitors are posting and how people are reacting to it. What are my influencers saying and how are they being reacted to?

Um, so you suddenly get this 360 vision AI power that in 30 seconds you get a view at any point in time. So that's discover. That's our second product.

So here what we have is brands that wanna protect themselves in the wilds of social, they wanna learn from the common streams, realizing there's a lot of great data in there. The third, which we're rolling out later this year by market demand is called Respond. And brands want to systematically engage the audiences in social streams, but in a personalized way back to the manual labor, a lot of our clients are paying people to heart and like emoji audiences out there answer simple questions.

Where do I get those red running shoes? That's expensive, that doesn't scale. AI's gonna take over that the second half of this year.

So then if you zoom all the way out, like I'm a brand now where I used to just put ads or posts on social media and it was the Wild West, well no longer now I'm protecting my brand. There's a code of conduct around it. I'm learning from the audiences in real time and I'm engaging with them in a systematic, scalable way.

I am now getting a lot more value outta my social media operation than I did 2024 beyond. That's really what's happening here. Marketers are looking at this communication channel and going, this is massive.

This is my connective tissue to my audience, my consumers, my prospects. I've gotta get this under control. I have to optimize that.

And that's really what we are doing leveraging AI tech. Mm-hmm. And the other part of this equation too is just plain old affinity.

Um, if I go to a website, I don't, I just don't want to talk to the brand all the time. I want to talk to other people and have a passion for something that I'm engaged with as well. But I don't want that to turn into some sort of, you know, attack about on a topic that has nothing to do with that particular website.

I think people want to have a conversation within a reasonable set of bounds. And so is that part of the reason to do all this? Yeah, it's a great point, Mike.

'cause a lot of times we, our clients say we now you've enabled us to have a two-way conversation with our, our, our prospects, our consumers and social, you know, I can now talk to 'em, uh, without the being a CES pool, but you make a great point. What's happening, we see it is now people are talking inside a social stream, not with the brand, but amongst each other. And if you go to a brand that let's say is a little bit polarizing or, and they're, they're not moderating, you're gonna see a lot of attacks, you're gonna see a lot of spam bots, porn bots, Bitcoin dm me pretty hard to wade through all that and find somebody and say, Hey, what did you really think about that new GoPro Hero eight battery?

Or whatever it might be. Um, so yeah, yeah, it's opening up the conversation inside the social stream as well. It's making social a social place, which is where we're trying to take it.

So I think a lot of folks when they first think about this, they get overwhelmed because, uh, you know, if you wade into those conversations, you're kind of like, oh my, this is all over the place. What's your best advice about how to get started? Is there something somewhere that you've seen people do that kinda gets them down the path sooner because it can be a little intimidating?

Yeah, I would say it's pretty easy. You know, uh, take a look at some technology. Somebody will show you.

We will show you if you wanted to give us a call and we'll say, look, what problem are you having? Let us show you our tech. Here's how we could solve those problems.

You'll pretty quickly get an idea of like, is this for me? Do I see value in this? Or call a competitor of ours, right?

Let's take what's move, respond ology, and just take the issue at large. There's other technologies out there that can solve this problem for you, but I would say just, you know, reach out, uh, a quick chat, GPTA quick Google search. You know, comment, moderation.

You're gonna find four or five companies, we'll come up, call one of them, take a look, see the tech, ask how it works. From there, you'll be pretty, you'll be pretty educated on whether you wanna move forward with this. Should you see that and go, yeah, you know what, I wanna do that.

I think that's gonna be better for my, you know, my business. Two things to note. One is you can test it for a month.

You know, you don't have to commit. Try it for a month. Find out, see what value you see for yourself.

Um, two, launching literally takes 30 minutes. It's very easy. Software.

We are already approved. The partners of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, we're already plugged into their APIs in 30 minutes in a quick call, our account team can just turn you on and have you test drive it. So it's pretty easy to launch.

It's pretty easy to vet. You just gotta make the call and figure it out. And like you said a minute ago, this is new for most people.

This is new technology. This is a new practice and social operation. So you just gotta kind of dive in and kick the tires Folks.

You heard it here. Hey, the way the Wild West was tamed was because people enforced a code of conduct inside of a town. This is no different.

Hey Eric, thanks being Analogy, Mike. I'll use that one. Thank you.

All right, well, thank you all for watching the latest episode of the Textron AI series. We invite you to check this one out and others on our website. Till then, we'll see you next now.