TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

So what is the best way to respond to people who get angry with you in social media?

Speaking. The show about effective speaking in public to the media, at work and in Life. Speaking with T.J. walker.

This is a question that comes to us from our colleagues over at the Brocast, Jared Breaux's excellent webcast, YouTube series and what he puts out on YouTube, excuse me, on Twitter. His question is, how do you best respond when people get angry on your social media site? Now, like a lot of things in the media world, po world, and in life, it's complicated. There's not a one size fits all. Donald Trump, for example, typically responds with even more anger with rebuttal, with attacks. And you know what? That works for him at least some of the time. So I can't give you this generic blanket advice of never respond. Never respond in anger. You must always wait 24 hours. Now I'm being a little bit flipped there. That actually is the best advice most of the time for most people. But you have to look at what your objectives are, who you are, what you're trying to accomplish. For many people in life, whether you're an author, an expert, a politician, being a contrarian helps. It generates news media attention. It provides contrast. It's interesting to people. People like a good fight. You think of some of the literary giants of the last 50 years, whether it's Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal. They are known quite often by the enemies they make, by the fights they pick. So I can't tell you it's never a good idea to pick fights. And as I mentioned, Donald Trump, at least as of the day we're producing this show in March of 2016, his strategy of fight, attack back, and always escalate in social media seems to have helped his at least the beginnings of his political career. However, let's talk about what's relevant to most people most of the time, whether you're a consultant, an executive, a CEO, a political figure, someone who works for government or in public office. What I have found, and I'm sure most of you have too, is that it's very, very easy for people just to get angrier and angrier. You respond, they ratchet it up a notch, and before you know it, people are calling each other all sorts of obscene names. You don't really win a debate, you just get angrier, and it becomes a massive, massive sort of time suck. And that really doesn't help anyone. It's one thing if you have a huge, huge audience. Donald Trump, for example, has 6 million Twitter followers. So when he picks a fight with someone, it's more for the audience of people watching, plus all the news media that follow it. Now, if you have a Twitter follower of five people and you're constantly getting in a fight with one person who's never going to be a customer of yours, never going to be a client, never going to vote for you, and only four other people can see it, it's hard for me to justify how that could possibly be useful to you in any circumstances. One great response to people who get angry with you and I don't follow this 100% of the time myself, folks, so I certainly don't want to sound holier than that. But one great response when people get angry with you in social media is nothing, Absolutely nothing. Especially if they are attacking you for something you didn't say or implying you said something and you clearly didn't. And if they're just off the charts angry, spewing vitriol, not, not making any sense, taking cheap shots, sometimes it's just best not to respond. Now if it's in a social media platform like Twitter, where you can't control it, just let it go. If it's on a platform like a YouTube and they're just spewing, for example, racist nonsense, what I do these days is I just delete it. I don't bother responding. I don't bother saying, well, that shows the level of intelligence you are. This exposes you. You know, I used to do all that and it's tedious. You don't really impress anyone. It kind of wastes time. Where I do like to respond is when someone makes a specific fact based rebuttal or criticism. And I feel like, okay, this person might not agree with me, but at least they're being honest, they're being fair, they're actually trying to have a real conversation. And then I will respond. Especially if I think the argument or the debate or the question in play would be of interest to other people. One of the things I found is it is extraordinarily difficult and rare to change someone's mind in social media once they have publicly come out attacking you for a particular position or thing you've said or allegedly said. But you can strive to convert or persuade other people looking on. So for example, the other day I received some heated criticism on Twitter. I just want to share with you a few of the comments. Some of you who are regular listeners of this show know that recently, a month or so ago, I criticized the well known Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy. She is Famous, or I would suggest infamous for her TED speech, which is the second most all time viewed speech on Ted.com for suggesting that putting your hands on your hips in a Wonder Woman pose before a big event like a speech or an interview will help you dramatically make you feel a lot better. To sum up, my criticism is not that she's wrong, but it's just such an irrelevant, an even irresponsible way to point people when they should be doing what Amy Cuddy actually does when she gives a speech. Namely she has an interesting speech, she's narrowed it down to a few points. She has interesting, compelling stories and she uses when she's using graphics and slides, images, not text and words. So that was my criticism. I went out of my way to say Amy Cuddy seemed like a lovely person. She's not a fraud in the sense of financial scam or SEC violations. But I did hit her as giving fraudulent advice and I stand by that. Interesting. Some of the response that created this is from a woman, Christina Watke, on Twitter and she says TJ Walker, not name calling, pointing out the effect of a sensationalist approach. That said, I'm sure it puts butts in seats. She was this is part of a dialogue she had with me and she claims I'm being sensationalist. Now the irony of that is I'll do a video telling people, you want to give a great speech, do hard work, practice your speech on video test, keep doing it until you're happy with it. I'll do a video like that and it gets a hundred views because it's not a simple gimmick. Amy Cuddy does a video, it gets 23 million views because it is the sort of thing that gets butts in seat. So I found that comment of hers I didn't respond to. She also says she claims I'm not classy, that I need to follow the advice of another commentator in the field. She says I'm not classy. She says that I'm shooting down other people's work and it makes you look petty. And she claims that I'm misreading her talk. And she says I discredit her validated peer review science. And she puts discredit in quotation marks. Now I did write back to her the first few times and I said okay, where am I factually wrong? You're saying I'm misreading it. State where I wrote back saying because she did seem to be someone who was not just smearing me and attacking me, she appears to be someone in A similar related field of presentation coaching and expertise. So with someone like that, I try to be fair, I try to be responsive and frankly, I'm hoping for a little more attention. Start a debate going not in a sensationalistic way, but just in an honest, interesting way. But where I was frustrated is she accused me of being petty. She accused me of being sensational. She said I wasn't classy and she said I'm shooting down other people's work. And again, petty. But she never said why. So I asked a couple of times, can you be specific? She never said so that's my frustration. What I do find is if you just calmly ask people for questions for clarification, as in the case of this, they often just don't respond. And any fair minded person who looks at both sides would conclude you're not the unreasonable person, the person making a taxes. So Christina Woodke may be a lovely, reasonable person in every other aspect, but I have to say I was not impressed with her exchange here because she really, while it was polite by the standards of Twitter and YouTube, basically just attacked me without ever saying why. I asked if she had actually heard my commentary about Amy Cuddy. I'm not sure she really did. I think she just saw the headline in my headline was deliberately provocative. I said, is Amy Cuddy A Dr. Oz style fraud? Now, Dr. Oz. And I picked that for a very specific reason. Dr. Oz has impeccable medical credentials. He went to Harvard, he's on the faculty at Columbia. He is someone known for being smart. He's a great surgeon, brilliant, great communicator. And he is someone known for having written a lot of great books. Oprah's endorsed him. And as someone who gives a lot of good advice most of the time. But what he's also known for in the last few years is saying, hey, you want to lose weight? Here are these magic beans. When Dr. Oz knows the way to lose weight is to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, don't eat a lot of processed foods, exercise daily, eat smaller portions, drink water, don't drink. So Dr. Oz knows that. He tells people that a lot too. But you can't do a show every day on that topic. Therefore he sort of succumbed to this gimmickry to get gimmicks. And I think that's what Amy Cuddy did. I'm not saying she went into it in a malicious way, but Amy Cuddy knows how to be confident. Giving a great speech. You actually give a great speech. You rehearse it every turn. You Practice on video, you have personal stories and when you use visuals, you use pictures, not text. Unfortunately, if you do a TED Talk that says that demonstrates that, you'll have about five views. If you come up with some gimmick, some sensationalistic gimmick of putting your hands on your hips like Wonder Woman, boom, you get 23 million views. So that's kind of my frustration. But I wanted to give this to you just as an example of one type of criticism. Now, like anyone who's posted things on YouTube, I have had criticism there of just TJ, you're a bald, ugly, fat loser and there's really not much point in responding there. I think you really have one or two options. Either one is fine. Just hit delete and it doesn't matter if you leave it up there. I think a lot of people will see that and think, oh, this person obviously is not thin skinned. This person is obviously not censoring. This person lets people say whatever they want. So I don't think it hurts you to put negative cheap shots and leave them up on your social media. If it's something more personal, like your Facebook page, that's more personal, I would delete anything that you think is just cheap or nasty or vicious or unfair. Just delete it. Who needs friends like that? But for larger platforms then I would in fact typically leave it up more in just a moment.

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How do you respond to criticism on your own social media sites? Again, this question comes from my colleague Jared Breaux. I'd urge you to check out his brocast on YouTube and check out his website. We've mentioned him here from time to time and his Twitter feed as well. I'd like to hear from you. How do you respond to negative comments, criticism, fair and unfair criticism on your own social media sites? And what do you think is the best strategy? Post your comments. TJ Walker on Twitter jwalker. You can also go to my blog, mediatrainingworldwide.com, click the news section and that will take you right to the blog. You can post on our Facebook page or wherever you're hearing or watching this program. You can post your comments. I'd love to hear from you. I'm TJ Walker. As always, may all of your presentations in life be a huge success.

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