Troll control (Social Media)

By Gonzalo López Martí @LopezMartiMiami

Social media community managers have to deal with them on a daily basis.
Make that an hourly basis.
They are known as “trolls”.
Folks who need to channel their frustration and aggression by attacking others and disseminating gratuitous doses of bile.
People who are disgruntled with life.
You’ve seen them hundreds of times: the nasty review on Tripadvisor, the inflammatory comments at the bottom of an online newspaper article, the vicious meme on your second cousin’s Facebook wall.
They are the wallpaper of the internet and as such they must be utterly ignored.
Easier said than done.
When old school marketers run into this type of noise on their branded social platforms their first reaction is to put on the high heels and start running in circles.
In a traditional marketer’s minds, one has to “do something about it”.
That’s what common sense dictates, right?
An action must beget a reaction, no?
No.
As counterintuitive as it may sound, sometimes the best thing to do is to not do anything.
I’d have a villa in Cap Ferrat had I collected a penny for every occasion I had to explain the following:
If you respond to trolls, they bask in the attention, they thrive on it and they tend to become more aggressive.
If you block or delete their trolling they decry censorship and become more aggressive (they even get some sympathy from otherwise indifferent digital passersby).
If you bribe them to appease them (eg, send them a goody bag or a gift certificate, which inexplicably happens ALL the time) you’re opening the door to more blackmail in the future.
If you apologize too profusely you’re kind of admitting your fault so the troll “wins” (plus, you turn your social media feeds into a customer service hot line, which is not quite desirable and, generally speaking, is a perception that should be averted).
In short, trolls should be duly ignored.
Treat them like the little gremlins they are: don’t pat them in the back and do not add water.
In search & social media there’s quite some truth to the old clichés: all publicity is good publicity; it doesn’t matter what they say about you as long as they spell your name right.
Do like those single-minded, tunnel-visioned politicians who never seem to answer the questions they’ve been asked.
Stay on message. Stick to your script.
Don’t let them fool you into putting your foot in your mouth.
Don’t let your ego drag you into a dialectic minefield with a contender who’s got nothing to lose.
Take a deep breath, count to 100.
This too shall pass.
I know, I know: it takes cold blood and a clear mind to pull this off.
There’s an entire cottage industry in the PR racket deemed “crisis management”.
A “crisis” is different.
If a company suffers an explosion at one of its factories costing the lives of employees, this is obviously a totally different situation requiring hands on damage control and proper media maneuvering.
A stonewalling play will only make things worse.
But back to trolls.
Let’s dissect a recent episode of trolling gone haywire.
It just so happens that a few days ago some Dutch starlet, some bottle blonde in need of visibility, tweeted a poorly photoshopped rendition of two Colombian soccer players snorting those sprayed white lines refs are using at games in Brazil.
This girl is a C-list actress with 250k followers on Twitter
The image was just another of those idiotic memes clogging the arteries of the web, a figment of the imagination of some teenager in his bedroom.
The shelf life of these silly “memes” is usually a few seconds.
Happens everyday, every hour, every minute: some idiot tweets, a few more idiots retweet and shortly thereafter the meme fades into oblivion.
However, in this particular case, the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo somehow got ahold of the tweet and ran it.
Of course, they added the obvious whiny rant denouncing how offensive said tweet was to the proud, hard-working and mostly sober Colombian people.
The usual banter by some hack on a deadline.
Boom.
The genie was out of the lamp.
The worms came out of the can.
With a vengeance.
Overnight, hundreds of blogs and news outlet out there picked it up and started running the meme for everyone to see.
Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands or even millions of people who otherwise would’ve never seen the stupid tweet retweeted and reposted it.
If El Tiempo wanted to protect Colombia’s reputation, well, let me tell you: the outcome was precisely the opposite.
I hadn’t seen a cocaine-related joke about Colombia in years.
Colombia is now represented by Sofía Vergara, Shakira, Juanes, a thriving economy, solid institutions, orderly political transitions and a kick-ass national team that’s playing a beautiful brand of world-class fútbol.
Yet El Tiempo took us all back ten years in the time machine (blingual pun intended)
Talk about retaliation.
The Dutch bimbo apologized profusely, her name is Nicolette Van Dam in case you wanted to google her, and was stripped of her Unicef ambassadorship.
Yet I wouldn’t be surprised if public opinion in Holland took her side and her social media fan base grew considerably after the little storm in the teapot.
Her fellow citizens must be like: really? All this furor about a silly meme with a coke joke?
In the Netherlands, snorting cocaine off the bosom of a Red Light district sex worker is known as “tourism”.
In short, if you ever happen to have to deal with trolling, you’ll be way better off if you simply apply the so-called “Frozen strategy”: let it go.