Lessons - This Is How You Deal With Trolls | Samantha Kelly, Marketing Leader & Author

Welcome to Lessons Episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upskill your personal and professional life. When businesses put themselves out there and they start to build a profile, they're probably concerned with falling outside of the box or doing things that are a little bit differently. When I look at the average business account, again, it's just, it's very boring, but then I look at something like, I'm just using one reference point, like a morning brew, which is all, you know, it's a news, it's a news outlet that's very off the wall when it comes to their Twitter account. And that's actually probably how they've built a lot of their following. But brands are always concerned about, if I put myself out there, I'm going to get some negativity. I'm going to get some, like you said, some, you know, some trolls or whatnot. So how do you deal with that? Is that just in your own head, you have to get over it? Or are there actual strategies that you have to deal with when you start to get some, you know, colorful comments that they call them on, on social? Well, you won't really start getting those until you go over like 5,000 followers or so, right? And if you do, just block them, okay? If you get a customer complaint, that's a different story, okay? So let's say you get a complaint, I had a coffee shop, I was running their Twitter account. And this lady said, oh, I was in there yesterday and the waitress was wagon and, you know, she didn't, and my coffee was cold or whatever she said, right? So I said, right, okay, hi. So the first thing you do is you engage, you engage, I said, I really, we're really sorry to hear that you had this experience. Could we please DM you and get more details and investigate? So you take it offline. So even if she doesn't go to DM, you've shown the public that you're dealing with the issue. So you've shown the public that you've tried to deal with the issue, which looks good, right? And then if they do go offline, what you do is you follow up, so you say, right, give us your number, give us your email or whatever. And then you get the person in charge, the decision maker to contact that person and find out what happened. What we did was we found out what happened. We sent the lady a gift voucher to come back in and have lunch. She came in and had lunch and guess what? She did a lovely tweet saying, thank you so much for the gorgeous lunch. She became a brand advocate because we helped her and we dealt with the issue. So that's the only thing about like people here about these big stories, big mistakes, get the right person running your Twitter account or get them trained properly and that will never ever happen. So it's having social media strategy, having a policy as well, like so that if such and such happens, this is what we do, you know, have it all in place so that they know what to do. But the worst Twitter accounts I've seen have been bigger companies that think they know their audience, but they actually don't and they just don't engage. They don't say thank you to simple things like if someone, like I mentioned a brand a few times because I liked that brand and I used to mention the brand because I'd be sitting there at my cup of tea and I'd mention the brand and they never even thanked me for mentioning them, which was a huge missed opportunity because if they had retweeted me or if they had engaged with me, I would have actually retweeted that to make them look good, you know, because I'd be impressed by that. So I also always give kudos when I get great customer service and I never complain. I never get involved in controversy. I stay away from all of that and I just keep it positive, add value, share my knowledge and help others and I help others by retweet them. It's not about me. My audience would like to see other people as well, you know, and usually my audience want to support businesses. So I did actually have a great story from last week. This lady rang me. She's a member of my Women's Inspire Network and she had ordered 500 lots and lots and lots of this vegan chocolate covered peanuts, right, because she does vegan chocolate and she rang me. She was quite upset. She said, I don't know what to do. That customer has cancelled the order and I've got it already ordered. I don't know what to do. How do I get rid of this much chocolate? And I said, wait, don't panic, I said, let's do a tweet. So we did a tweet and the tweet said, hang on, I'll find it now for you while I'm talking to you. I have this amount of chocolate, can you, if anyone is interested or whatever it was, we told the story basically in the tweet and I helped her compose the tweet and oh my god, it went viral because people said, oh my god, let's help this small business. And they all bought chocolates. Everybody, she got 100 orders, she got three new stockests, you know, she just was inundated with help from Twitter. And one guy just bought a box of them and she got the chocolate all, she didn't lose that any money. Isn't that just lovely, lovely story? And that's the kind of thing I do. So we just did, we just did a tweet and I supported her, I said, come on guys, let's support this small business. So we got behind her and everybody went and bought chocolate covered, vegan chocolate covered peanuts. So it's just a nice little story. But for everybody, pair of bucks, it only costs like 10 euros, you know, so you know, does that mean it's a little bit, yeah, it's easy when you get, when you get a crowd involved to like the crowdsource, you know, to crowdsource a brand, and especially it's small business, it can make a huge difference. But you know, one thing that I think always happens and I don't really know why still in 2021 is that brands don't place value on the person or the person who runs their social media. They feel like it's, I don't know why that is, it's like an extra priority. Yeah. It's like that. Oh, you know, you're, you're marketing and then tweet once in a while. Yeah. No. Or like post on Instagram. Yeah. There should be someone who is assigned this role and a plan and a strategy, or if you don't want to then outsource it to someone like me or someone else who does that. Like, you know, I don't understand that they don't make it a priority and it's so important because I remember seeing, I remember I put a tweet up saying, okay, ladies, best tinted moisturizer. Like it was just like for fun and I put it up and I got all these responses about the best tinted moisturizer, which by the way for the guys listening, it's like makeup, light makeup, right for the summer. And so I got so many responses and I was like, where are all the brands? Not one brand topped into that conversation and said, Hey, Samantha, we have a tinted moisturizer. It's really good. Here there's, by now, click to buy. Not one brand did that. That was such a missed opportunity because the tweet went crazy. We had about 200 responses. So that was 200 potential sales, you know, and 200 responses on Twitter is like thousands of impressions. Like thousands of people saw that for sure, for sure, for sure. Whereas a brand top didn't said, you know, oh, hi, Sam, I'm actually, we have a, but look, we'd love to send you one to try and if anyone else wants to try, here's a discount code. You know? Yeah. That's what I would do.