Six People Trolled Me. It Felt Like Sixty Thousand

Embracing Marketing Mistakes

The episode explores the psychological impact of social media trolling and provides strategies for building professional resilience. Asif Ch

Key takeaways

• Asif Choudly learned that being targeted by trolls is often an inevitable byproduct of maintaining high visibility.
• The best strategy for handling social media pile-ons is to ignore them rather than attempting to justify oneself.

Main topics

• Social media trolling
• Professional resilience

Notable quotes

If you're getting trolled, then you're visible.

Conclusion

The takeaway is that marketers should embrace visibility and focus on

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) This is Embracing Marketing Mistakes, the show that teaches you growth from failure. I'm Chris Norton, and every week, a senior marketer sits down with me and my colleague Will Ockenden and tells us what went wrong, what it cost them, and what they would do differently. This is one of those moments, so enjoy. Speaker 1 (0:19) Just to take you back to the superhero mistake. So you've had the positive side of Twitter and then you've had the Elon Musk side of Twitter as well. So what happened with the superhero theme that went wrong then? Speaker 2 (0:34) Yeah, it was interesting because just like many people in those early days of Twitter, so this is 2014 we're talking about, and everybody was really nice. I classed it as like the Facebook for business. And I wasn't on Facebook and I'm not on Facebook, but I was having conversations with CEOs about running and running shoes and things that I would never in a million years have been able to talk to them about. So it was a really friendly place, talking to customers and prospects about X Factor on a Saturday night and then having some deeper connection with them, which from a sales point of view, it takes years to build that kind of level of... knowledge because people were just now freely and with their own permissions just being human. Speaker 1 (1:27) So Speaker 2 (1:27) I found I really enjoyed that part of doing business with people and being on Twitter for that reason. And after that first event, we had the superhero theme and some of the stuff that we had in there. You know, I went, I can't Speaker 1 (1:42) remember, it Speaker 2 (1:43) might have Speaker 1 (1:43) been Speaker 2 (1:43) Home Bargains or something. I bought like superhero. pencils, because we had to give a pencil or a pen and what have you. And there were these little, like, I think they were designed for children, to be honest with you. And I put them in the swag bag and they were all bang on theme. They were bang on the creative. And then somebody commented afterwards saying, oh, it was just, you know, we went to this event and there were capes and masks and the stuff that most of the 80-odd people enjoyed. And then saying, oh, there was loads of this tat and stuff like that. What do we pay for? All that tap didn't actually make up the budget because resource took the hit of that. And it was the first time I'd had any negative feedback on social media. So that stopped me in my tracks, to be honest with you. And I did genuinely, that turned into somebody else jumping on that bandwagon and someone else.