Marketing Magazine recently published an article by me on dealing with internet trolls.They’ve been kind enough to let us reproduce it in full below:

In The Dark Knight, Bruce Wayne seeks advice on his latest foe, Joker, from his astute cockney butler Alfred.

Mr Wayne (logical, measured, likes to dress up as a bat) is stumped.

“Criminals aren’t complicated,” he tells his trusty manservant, “we just have to figure out what he’s after.”

Let’s pause there. Substitute the word ‘criminals’ for ‘customers’, ‘fans’ or ‘followers’, and you’ve about summed up the way most brands approach community management:

‘Customers aren’t complicated, we just have to figure out what they’re after.’ 

Most brands have a list of pre-approved responses, an escalation matrix, tone and style guidelines, brand voice guidelines, community guidelines and so on.

They probably have directives to respond to each post or tweet within a set period of time (after all, brands are being judged on how quickly and efficiently they respond to posts), and community managers are tasked with being the arbiters of these directives.

But these directives, these guidelines – these community management ‘principles’ – fail to take into consideration posts that don’t play by the rules.

Picking up where we left him, Bruce Wayne is failing to grasp why someone would commit crimes seemingly without motive.

“With respect, Master Wayne” Alfred tells him, “perhaps this is a man that you don’t fully understand.

“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with.

“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

Alfred is of course referring to Joker, but his advice is also true for the arch nemesis of the community manager: the troll.

You can put in place all of the measures and matrices and management you can think of, but there will always be exceptions.

Trolls aren’t looking for customer service – in all likelihood they aren’t customers at all. They aren’t looking for a measured response or a reply within 15 minutes. They aren’t trying to make a point or a serious criticism.

They’re looking for opportunities to create chaos.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a top ten brand or a mom and pop shop, if the trolls see room to ruffle feathers, they’ll have a go.

So if the usual measures don’t work, how then do you deal with a troll?

In The Dark Knight, Joker is ultimately defeated by the people. They refuse to play his game, not giving him the satisfaction.

You can always do the same. You’ve probably heard the expression ‘don’t feed the trolls’, and certainly, that is one way to go.

But comments left unattended look messy and can result in more trolls joining in. And if the troll hasn’t used offensive language, or insulted or threatened anyone, then you really have no room to delete their post or comment.

No, feeding the trolls isn’t the issue. It’s what you feed them that makes the difference, and to understand that, you need to understand the fundamental reason they behave the way they do.

In their own words, they do it “for the lulz”.

So give them what they want. Next time you have a troll, try this; simply reply to whatever they post with ‘lol’.

By ignoring the rules, you’ll both diffuse the troll and let them, and the rest of your community know that you’ve got a personality – that you’re not a machine stocked with automated responses.

Batman had to go to extreme lengths to defeat Joker, building a machine with the power to spy on every citizen of Gotham. But you don’t need to be that rigid, that inflexible. You don’t need to take the hard line.

As Joker would say: “Why so serious?”

So, have a little fun every now and then. Lol the troll.

Marketing magazine recently published an article from me about putting people first. They’ve been kind enough to let us reproduce it in full below:

A few years ago I attended a screenwriting class taught by a friend at UCLA. The topic that night was television.

After some discussion about the major television networks, a student asked what they generally looked for in a script.

“Well, who are their customers?” my friend asked the class – mostly mature students looking to break into full time writing. Hands shot up, and we all agreed that the viewers, the television audience, were the customer.

“Okay,” he continued, “what is their product, what are they selling?”

“The shows are the product,” a student answered, voicing the consensus.

“Nope,” my friend, a film and television producer, smiled. “Advertisers are the customers.”

He paused.

“The product is you.”

Mind blown.

It makes sense, of course, when you consider the origins of the televised serial narrative – the soap opera – funded by detergent brands in order to promote their wares.

It makes sense, and yet hearing it put like that, well, left a sour taste in the mouth. Something about that model just felt wrong. Obscured. Perverted.

But I’m not here to talk about television.

‘Advertisers are the customers.’

When Facebook went public earlier this year, much like television, people were no longer the customers. Brands were. Users simply became product to sell to advertisers.

When analysts spoke of Facebook’s need to monetise the platform, what they were really saying is that Facebook needs to monetise the users.

Since its IPO earlier in the year, Facebook has been building and testing, deploying and upgrading, optimising and tinkering. Why? To make its ads more effective.

To make users, Facebook’s product, more valuable. Users. You.

But I’m not here to talk about Facebook.

‘The product is you’.

Twitter is battening down the API hatches and locking the doors to its user base in order to more effectively monetise. Tumblr has begun rolling out (thus far relatively un-obtrusive) ad-supported content.

But I’m not here to talk about those platforms, either.

I’m also not here to talk about users, followers, likers, players, gamers, subscribers or customers.

Today I want to talk about people.

Today I want to consider the human.

Humans are an okay bunch. Most keep to themselves. They eat, they sleep, they love and laugh. They live. For a while anyway.

Humans have limited time, which makes them worry. They want ways to make their life easier, less complicated. They want less clutter.

They like new, shiny things. They like information. They like stories. In fact, humans love stories.

Humans buy what we sell. Sometimes because they need it, sometimes because their neighbour has one. If they like it, they’ll tell other humans. Sometimes, those humans will buy one too.

As marketers, humans are very valuable to us. But a single human can be subjected to as many as twenty thousand marketing messages a day.

Twenty thousand.

That’s not very human friendly.

Marketers are human sometimes, but probably not often enough. Instead of finding ways to talk to other humans, to listen, to understand their needs, we spend time and money trying to shout louder than other marketers, and creating new places to put our messages.

How often do you hear a human say, ‘Well golly, those clever souls at Brand X found a devious and downright genius new way to show me ads. It’s amazing – the ad followed me around every other site I visited for days until I just had to buy one of their products. I just had to. It’s brilliant. I’m telling everyone!’

That’s not a speech I’ve ever heard a person give. Marketers… maybe. Perhaps this one is more recognisable:

‘I just read/watched/heard the most amazing/heartwarming/incredible/funny story. Brand X just shared it. It’s really good. I’ll send it to you.’

Humans love stories, not adverts.

When you’re thinking about your marketing plan for next year, when you’re allocating your budget and planning channels; consider the human.

Take some of that budget and hire content producers. Hire storytellers. Start campaigns that put humans first.

2013 is not the year of mobile, or whatever new social network your kids are using. 2013 is the year of the human. 2013 is about finding the right platforms and the right campaigns for the people who want to buy what you sell, and creating stories just for them.

Marketers are human sometimes. Why not think and act that way all the time.

Marketing magazine recently published an article from me on rethinking social strategy. They’ve been kind enough to let us reproduce it in full below:

In Rocky, a mumbling underdog boxer goes toe-to-toe with a big-talking, well-funded opponent by using unorthodox training methods designed to help him go the distance with the best fighter in the world.

Social media was Rocky a couple of years ago. It allowed the smaller, creative brands to compete with the multi-nationals and their colossal traditional media budgets.

In Rocky II, an injured Rocky has to learn to fight left-handed in order to take on Apollo Creed in a rematch. He adapts to his limitations, evolves, confounding his opponent and ultimately beating him.

Social media was Rocky II about a year ago. Brands who had adapted and evolved quickly were able to gain traction by blindsiding competitors with huge gains in social, ultimately beating bigger, better funded brands in their industry.

Right now, social media is somewhere around the second act of Rocky III.

In that film, a complacent Rocky, a long-time world champion who has learned to rest on his laurels, is soundly battered in the ring by a younger, faster, stronger, tougher, meaner opponent – aptly named ‘Clubber’.

As more brands pour money into Facebook, as the bigger brands get better at social, as your radical approach turns into complacency, you’re now finding it harder and harder to cut through, to grow your followers, to achieve high engagement.

In all likelihood you’re being beaten, and it isn’t pretty. Something has to change.

Back to the film. Shell-shocked, Rocky completely rebuilds himself as a fighter. He starts from scratch, re-thinking his entire strategy, re-learning how to box in a way that will let him compete.

In the rematch, a leaner, fitter, faster Rocky lets his opponent hit him. And then he lets him hit him some more. He lets his opponent concentrate all his energy on hitting him hard for long enough that the bigger, stronger fighter tires himself out.

And then Rocky attacks. He hits Clubber hard when he least expects it, and beats him convincingly.

Let them concentrate on Facebook. Let them take it, they can have it. When they’re not looking, hit them from different angles, from different platforms. Hit them hard.

You need a Facebook page like you need a .com, but Facebook is not a social strategy.

There are over five million brands on Facebook, and counting. You can’t win at Facebook. But you can still win at social.

The 2012 Presidential Election is an excellent example. Barack Obama didn’t win by going after the big majority where he would have probably lost, he won by gaining huge percentages among minority groups – Mitt Romney largely ignored or insulted these groups, he didn’t think he needed them, and it probably cost him the election.

Many brands are doing this exact thing right now in social. Consolidating their foothold in Facebook, relying on the majority user base for engagement and return on investment.

Change your approach. Go after the small percentages, target niches.

Look at Tumblr, 80 million blogs worldwide, more than WordPress, and serving more than 20 billion page impressions per month, more than Wikipedia. Part blog platform, part social network, the potential for great content to go viral is huge.

Look at Pinterest, the fastest growing website in history. Look at Twitter. Look at Instagram.

Sure Facebook has over 11 million users in Australia, and Tumblr only has three million, but add that to the three million on Twitter, the half a million on Instagram and the half a million on Pinterest and those percentages start to add up.

You’re not going to win by trying the same old tactics, or by fighting competitors on their terms. You’re going to win by evolving, by changing tack, by trying something new.

Ultimately, you’re going to win by thinking outside Facebook.

There are exciting times ahead. Social media is only a few years old. New platforms are emerging all the time, each with unique opportunities and user bases, each allowing the savvy brand to refresh their strategy, to change, to adapt.

Each offering another chance to win.

If the coming year brings as many changes as the last, by the end of 2013 we’ll be in the middle of Rocky IV, training in the Russian wilderness trying to work out a way to beat an unstoppable opponent.

Forgive the analogy. My point is that as long as there are new platforms and new opportunities, there will always be a way for you to write your own underdog story with social media.

Whether you decide to get in the ring or not is up to you.

Marketing magazine recently published an article from me on how to think outside the Like box. They’ve been kind enough to let us reproduce it in full below:

In the movie Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise has an epiphany. He writes it down. The gist is this: less is more.

He stays up all night working on his mission statement, and when he’s finished, he sends everyone a copy.

They fire him.

When the world is convinced that more is more, trying to convince people to do less is a difficult task. But that’s exactly what I’m about to do. Here goes.

Facebook has us hooked on Likes. We’re addicts. We collect them fanatically, often at great cost. We compulsively check to make sure competitors don’t have more than us.

And it doesn’t end there. We want our Likers to Like everything we post. So we tell them to ‘Like this’, because if we don’t they might not, and if we’re not being Liked then we can’t justify our budgets and – golly gosh – the whole social economy we built might come tumbling down.

But the problem isn’t that we don’t have enough Likes. The problem is that we’re measuring the wrong things.

Take the prompted engagement for example. The prompted engagement is a Facebook-wide pandemic; it’s a virus infecting the content of thousands of brands. You’ve seen these posts. Some of you have posted one: ‘Like this if you X’, or ‘Comment if you Y’.

This isn’t a new tactic in social – just ask the Twitter and Tumblr users who were getting asked to ‘RT if you love Bieber’ and ‘Reblog if you have a head’ years ago.

The prompted engagement isn’t new to Facebook, either. But what was once a quirky engagement tactic used by a handful of brands has now reached such a level of saturation that it’s both difficult to ignore and impossible to escape.

These days when a brand asks me to ‘Like this post’ I unlike them.

How’s that for cut through?

Maybe if we all did the same brands would stop doing it.

A post where you have to ask for engagement is like a cold call. Yes the person picked up the phone, but they didn’t want to talk to you.

You got your engagement, ticked off the KPI, scored well against your competitors, but is that going to help your business? I doubt it. Probably the opposite.

It’s disingenuous. Cheap.

You’re better than that.

Social is not a cold call. It isn’t about meaningless KPIs and empty metrics. It’s about conversations. It’s about brand management and customer value.

A Like doesn’t represent your power as a brand. A prompted engagement doesn’t represent success. Real, meaningful conversations do. And you can’t buy a conversation with anyone worth conversing with (ask a telemarketer).

With a good strategy, 10,000 highly-engaged fans will provide more value than 100,000 indifferent ones.

The trick is, as I said in my previous blog post, to offer valuable content. Hire great people to make your content. Then if you absolutely have to spend money, use it to promote that outstanding content.

Case in point: General Motors. In May, GM pulled $10 million out of Facebook. ‘The ads don’t work,’ they said.

Facebook told GM to try putting that money into community management. ‘Create good content,’ they replied, ‘give people a reason to talk to you.’

The addiction to Likes has made marketers so focused on growing their communities that growth is taking presidence over nourishment. If things stay like this, we’ll be left with a starving mass of under-fed communities producing anaemic engagement.

Don’t be afraid of fewer Likes. A smaller, content-focused community is more likely to attract actual customers, or those who would like to be. Prize pigs need not apply.

Also, don’t be afraid to measure yourself differently. Measure referrals, for example, not engagements. Measure sentiment. Pay attention to comments. Talk to your fans.

Less can be more in social. Fewer ads, more valuable content. Fewer fans, more valuable engagement. Don’t worry about what your competitors are doing. Focus on what your community wants and deliver that.

Back to Jerry Maguire. In a famous scene at the end of act two, Tom Cruise begs his only remaining client, Cuba Gooding Jr. to “help me help you”.

You can help social help you by changing your thinking.

Spend your time and money creating great content, not on telling your fans what to like.

Ultimately, if you’re listening, they’ll tell you.

Marketing magazine recently published an article from me on the value of relevant social content. They’ve been kind enough to let us reproduce it in full below:

In traditional media there is an old phrase you may have heard: ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’

Tabloids, television news and even broadsheets know that if they post a story involving death, gore and general maiming, then they’re going to sell more copies or retain more viewers.

The values of the brand get thrown under a bus in exchange for higher ratings.

Social media, it seems, isn’t immune to this kind of selling out, though it is of a far less macabre, far more furry variety, one that deserves it’s own adage. It goes a little something like this:

‘If it’s a cat, post that.’

Everyone loves a Lolcat. Or dog. Or sloth. There are any number of cute creatures that will make the internet weak with joy at the very mention. I’m not disputing the power of ‘awww’. What I am disputing is their place in your content schedule.

Let me put this as clearly as possible: if your brand isn’t involved with cats, if it doesn’t sell cat food, or find homes for rescued cats or provide any number of other cat-based services, then you have no business posting cat pictures on your brand page.

I know they’re good for engagement. I know people like them. But there are websites for that. There are dedicated Facebook pages. Yours is not one of them.

Good social content has two very important ingredients: value, and relevance.

If you can create content that is valuable to your fans, relevant to your brand and your fans’ interests – and you can present it in a compelling way – then you will have a highly engaged, highly active community.

Pander to cat meme culture and sure you might get a few likes, you may even get a few shares, but what you won’t get is affinity. You won’t create community.

Think about why your fans are your fans. A 2011 study showed that 58% of your Facebook fans clicked Like because they are already a customer.

These are people who already buy into what you do. They want to connect with your brand. They want value. They can get cat pictures from their friends – what they want from you is insight, expertise, information and inspiration.

And why do you want to provide it? Because the same study showed that 56% of fans are more likely to recommend your brand after becoming a fan. Your raison d’etre should be to give them the tools to do that.

Give them great, informative, sharable content. Provide tips, tricks and hacks within your field of expertise. Make them fun, visual and engaging.

Facebook is not an experiment. Twitter is not a test. You can’t just ‘dip a toe in the water’ and expect not to lose a leg. If you don’t have a solid content strategy, you need one. And fast.

Think of it this way: your Facebook page is a magazine. Have a serious look at the posts on your Timeline. Is that a magazine that is relevant to your industry? Is that a magazine you’d read?

If the answer is no, find someone who knows how to optimise content for social media.

The value of relevant social content is conversation, and the value of conversation is return on investment.

For the sake of a few likes on a cat picture, is that a value you can afford to miss?