Pissy Internet Trolls and A Content Strategy for 2024 KDS: 129

The Kim Doyal Show

There's nothing like pissy internet trolls to help you get crystal clear about who you engage with and that you don't owe anybody anything. Not to mention the joy of choosing to block these people from your life. My friend Karen Michaels (a brilliant social media strategist) repeatedly repeats that it's vitally as important to curate your feeds as it is to post and engage. I won't get into a bunch of details here- because the entire exchange was, quite frankly, a little wackadoodle. I re-posted something on Facebook about the Barbie snub of Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie not being nominated for Best Director or Best Actress. The FB repost was a quote from Bette Midler. To which a friend replied that it was typical of Amercians to lie and omit only to advance a narrative. Um... excuse me? What I should have done was delete him and block him immediately. But because this person was a "friend" (we've had actual conversations on Zoom, I've interviewed him, etc.), I was pretty respectful in my response. Why a white male from Canada has a dog in the fight when it comes to American women feeling this was unjust (and just a little bit ironic considering the context of the movie) is beyond me. Little fact for you: In the 100 years of the Academy Awards, only EIGHT females have been nominated for director, with only three winnings. Either way, it was a ridiculous exchange and out of left field. After I deleted all of his comments and blocked him, all I could think was that this person must have something deeper going on and decided to pick a fight. I'm all for differing opinions, provided you can be respectful. The implication was also that because the movie received other awards, people (i.e., women) shouldn't be upset. Here's the thing: I'm at a point in my life when I'm done trying to appease idiots. I don't need to justify or explain myself to anyone. That being said, I'm pretty sure social media isn't the place where meaningful change is going to happen, especially with someone shows up just to be a dick. It makes me think of the Maya Angelou quote: "When someone shows you who they are the first time, believe them." Maya Angelou Here's another internet troll story from last week that happened with a friend. I'm going to be a little cryptic since it's not my personal story, but you'll get the gist of it. A friend posted on Twitter that he was deleting a large quantify of cold subscribers from his email list that had come through one specific growth strategy, then asked if people could guess what it was. Someone from a company that sells this growth strategy jumped in with what appeared to be an attempt at a diplomatic reply, only to end up basically blaming the issue on the creator/business owner not having a good onboarding sequence. Sigh. Huge opportunity missed for creating a conversation about doing better. My friend is pretty brilliant when it comes to email marketing, growth, data, and automations. By the way, the growth strategy that was called out was referral programs. I'll go on the record now and say that if these programs don't improve, in other words, stop shoving 3-8 more opt-ins in someone's face after they subscribe, a lot of people will stop using them. I also think advertisers will stop paying for sponsorships in newsletters with big subscriber lists and crappy conversion rates. Moving on... WAY too many people are running their businesses with their egos driving the bus. Internet trolls aren't going anywhere anytime soon. It always comes down to how we handle what shows up. And even then, we're all human and have bad days, engage when we probably know we shouldn't, and get riled up by people... especially when you think the troll was a friend. Ideally, though, we move on. This also validated my goal of mastering paid traffic this year. 😉 A Content Strategy for 2024