Don't Succumb to Trolls

Anyone like me who answers questions online as I do with Quora, knows that sooner or later you are going to have to confront a troll.

It is the same old story of dealing with people online, a certain percentage will be nefarious types who have nothing better to do than make life miserable for one and all. In fact, they do not even make sense and their rhetoric is very limited.

They certainly do understand foul language and cannot actually engage respectfully in any conversation. Their sole purpose is to trip you up, deny everything you say is true, call you down and disrupt your channel, website or posting in general.

Just to be clear, we are not talking about unhappy customers. We are referring to those who spend most of their time online because they do not have fulfilling lives and spread negativity to their heart’s content.

So what to do about them? Engagement is always a deep rabbit hole because that is what they want. The more frustrated you appear, the more emotional you are, the happier it makes them. So engagement is not the answer. Deny them what they want.

Do not react and indulge by trying to reason with them. The best thing you can do is to use your option to delete their entry which cuts them off completely.

If you have control over your posting platform, you can set policies that clearly define how you wish those that supply comments to behave. Spell out the fact that is is no tolerance for bad actors and their comments will be deleted.

Creating a safe space that encourages thoughtful posts is important and you must be prepared to defend it. Also to be able to keep up with all this, you might consider getting monitoring software or hiring someone to answer inquiries.

Hootsuite is a good social listening tool or you could use Streams to monitor those posts that do not use a brand name or yours. Once a system is set up, you should have a handle on these kinds of comments.