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I mentioned it at the beginning of yesterday’s article: A troll invited himself to my interview on Twitter.
Answering questions from a host and an audience can be stressful. But add a disgruntled individual to the mix, and you have the perfect recipe for failure.
Depending on your reaction, and even if you are completely in the right, you could put your reputation in jeopardy within minutes.
I am not going to share the details of what happened because it was a very long conversation — and I do not want to give this individual any publicity.
However, here are the two arguments that he used to try to destabilize me:
- I do not know anything about content curation – Apparently, doing it on your own blog is akin to content scraping and aggregation. “Content curation is abused by plagiarisers,” he said.
- I faked my credentials – The fact that you cannot find anything on my blog before 2011 does not mean that I lied about my 7-year experience as a blogger. I opened and closed several blogs in my career, until I finally discovered what my audience needed from me. Plus, I deleted and re-purposed a lot of the content I wrote before 2011.
How did I deal with his comments?
I used humor and the conversation with other participants to keep myself grounded. I also made sure that I remained polite and professional at all time.
When the guy realized that I would not lose my cool, he let me be.
After the interview, I received several DMs from people who mentioned that they were very impressed with the way I had handled him. They also said that it was not his first attempt at destabilizing women. He seems to enjoy making false accusations.
So, what is the lesson?
You cannot please the entire world. No matter what you do or say, there will always be someone, somewhere, who will take a malicious pleasure in questioning your motives and credentials, or even dragging your name through mud.
My best bet is that they are just calling for attention. It has nothing to do with you or what you do. They want some of the spotlight. So, they attack anything they see.
The way you handle trolls and haters will say a lot about you as a person.
Take a deep breath. Be nice and polite, and use a little humor to alleviate the negativity.
Should they continue pestering you, end on a respectful note. Wish them a great day and stop responding.
Trolls and haters can teach you a lot about customer service and business. If you can handle them without losing your cool and mind, you will be able to emerge unscathed from pretty much any difficult situation you encounter in social media.
And you will gain the respect of your audience in the process.
Have you ever had to deal with trolls? If so, how did you respond?