Haters: How to Deal With Haters and Trolls of Your Business

Have you ever been publicly criticized or mocked for something that you did?

Are you wondering how you can deal with this type of negativity when it happens on social media?

To learn about haters and how to deal with them, I interview Marcus Sheridan for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Marcus Sheridan, who blogs at The Sales Lion, is host of The Mad Marketing Podcast and is a partner at River Pools & Spas. Marcus is a consultant and keynote speaker. In fact, he was the closing keynote at Social Media Marketing World and he simply killed it!

Marcus shares the various types of critics you might attract and how you can deal with them.

You'll discover the differences among haters, trolls and critics and what to do when you are under attack.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Haters in Business
Haters are the type of people who seem to get great joy out of saying nasty things about you or your company online. If you haven't dealt with haters yet, the chance of dealing with one in the future is pretty good.

I'm going to share a story with you that happened recently to us, and my hope is that it will prepare you for these types of people. If you let them have their way, then they succeed and you fail. This will impede your progress.

The story is about an entertainment piece that was made for Social Media Marketing World 2014. Phil Mershon, who is my event director, created an original jingle called "Let's Get Social," which was sung by Mary McCoy from Continuum Marketing Services.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itvvFfeLh84

The song was performed just before Jay Baer took the stage with a panel, which included Ted Rubin, Nichole Kelly and Jeffrey Rohrs. The panel discussion was entitled "Have We Lost The Social in Social Media?"

This particular piece of entertainment was designed to be funny, and was to set the stage for the panel discussion. Even though it was corny, attendees got into it. Although on the video, you can't grasp the audience's reaction.

The video was originally released on the event page for Social Media Examiner, on my personal Facebook profile and on Social Media Examiner's Facebook page. It was never intended to be released to the public.

The day after it was uploaded, it started to go crazy viral. The first day alone it received 75,000 views on YouTube. The number of negative and nasty comments on YouTube was unbelievable.

Phil and I had a discussion as to whether to close off the comments, but I didn't feel that was appropriate. You'll hear the reasons why I kept the comments open, and what I hoped would happen.

An article was then published by Gawker called The Devil Is Real, and He Made a Song About Social Media Marketing. Gawker is a gossip blog that has a section called Valley Wag, which covers the social space.

This very negative post spurred a lot of the video's views and negative comments on YouTube. Following this blog post, Mashable, Huffington Post, Slate and CNET also covered the story.

By the Friday of that week, VH1 created this 90-second comedy piece of the video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv6byr_JKuk

To date, our video has been viewed nearly 500,000 times, with just over a 1,000 comments. At one point it ranked #15 worldwide. Someone has even made an acoustic version of it, which is quite good.

Now the plus side of it all is that Social Media Marketing World was referenced or linked back to within all...