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Lesson Info

Amber: Feedback, Negativity & Capturing Ideas

soliciting feedback. One of the things we fear when we build a platform online is when people give us feedback because it can be scary. Like I I put this out into the world and now people are going to react to it, and I don't know what to. But it's actually a really important and healthy way to grow a platform. And here's why. As humans, we love to know that our thoughts are heard and valued. So when you're building a business, your customers, your prospects, your community, the people that know and love you, they want to know that their voices are important and are part of the fabric of what you dio and that you're not only hearing them, but that you're taking them into account. So one really great way to build that kind of elusive trust and community is to constantly ask for feedback from people. What do you think of this? Is this a good idea is it's not a good idea. Did you guys like the e book we put out last week? What do you think about this blood post? One of my favorite techniq...

ues and blogging is to leave an open ended question one that I don't have an answer to because people love to contribute to ideas that are bigger than them. And you'd be surprised when you ask for feedback. Most people think that a lot of folks are gonna come out and just start yelling and complaining. That's not what happens most of the time when you ask for feedback from people there so delighted to be asked that you end up with a lot of really great ideas. Ah, bunch of really cool compliments. And if you're lucky, you'll get some constructive criticism. Are people telling you kindly how you can improve? But the very act of soliciting feedback means that they know that you care about how well you're doing. And especially when you have a social platforms like, Do you guys dig what I'm doing or not? I mentioned Gary V before, and he does that all the time. Help put up a video post and be like, What do you guys think? And a bunch of people will say, Man, that was lame. It would be like, Okay, I guess it won't do that again, but he you know, he's so great about absorbing whatever feedback he gets and taking the stuff that he finds valuable and dismissing the rest. But he does it on an active basis because he really cares about what people think about what he's doing in a really good, healthy way. But of course, the flip side to that is that every once in a while there's a troll. We all know them. We've seen them. They hide behind their keyboards and say nasty things. And, you know, somebody asked a question earlier about how toe handle negative requests or negative comments on things like Yelp or Yahoo. Handling negativity to me is actually a really simple equation. The problem is, it's were emotionally tied to negativity. So when something negative happens, it immediately raises all of our defensive mechanisms because we either want to explain. We want to clarify or you want to defend. What we really have to do is step back and do a couple of things. One. Why is this person upset? Are they disagreeing with me as a person? Are they taking issue with an idea? Is this something that's personally directed at me, or is this a criticism of something that's happening between those two things. If you're gonna personally attack me, I will say thank you very much for your thoughts and that's it, because the people who are trying to incite that sort of stuff online are doing that very deliberately, it to see if they can get you toe to feed into it. So when people get nasty on a personal level, you ignore, you walk away from that, absolutely walk away from that. There is no such thing as having the last word on the Internet. You'll never have it ever in a 1,000,000 years. So when somebody starts to get into it, there's a healthy debate, respectful debate. All of that stuff is really great, But people can be mean and nasty online. And one of the things I hear from a lot of people endeavoring into social is they'll encounter eventually. That person who's just really unkind. The only way to deal with that is to walk away the only way, and as a business, it's inevitable. It happens to all of us. Somebody is gonna be nasty. Somebody's gonna be rude, and the only thing you can do is walk away. Now, dealing with the second side of that, which is actually either constructive feedback, criticism or some other kind of negative comment. The truth of the matter is we talked about this before. Two powerful words. I'm sorry. Two more power for words. Thank you. I'm sorry you had a poor experience. Thank you for your feedback. What can I do to make it better? Those kinds of things go a long way to resolving 99% of the conflicts online. Now, if it's an issue of somebody taking issue with your blood post or if they disagree with your opinion, my rules about conflict online, you can always have a debate with me. We can always disagree about ideas, weaken, disagree about, um what I wrote, we could disagree about politics, any of the ugly things that people are afraid of. But you must keep it respectful and you must keep it on topic. And if those things happen, we're cool. We can have a whole. I have blood post with debate threads that air like and people go off in their own corners. And I'm not even involved, you know, they're having conversations. Negativity isn't always a bad thing. We recoil from it because again it ignites all of our emotional responses. But negativity isn't isn't by nature awful. Sometimes it's things that can give us Great insights about our business are cut our content, our ideas. I want people to challenge my thinking. I want them to push me so that my next iteration of content is that much better, stronger and better informed. So I think negativity in terms of criticism can be a really good thing. But remember, trolls don't feed the trolls, so they always say, Don't feed the trolls as a business, Don't get tempted. Those are The thing is that that are small pitfalls that can lead to lots of distraction and blow up in your face. You just curtsy. You say thank you for your feedback and you walk away. Anybody had that problem? Any questions about? Yeah, you have that problem you want to share. This is an interesting one, because for some of the restaurants that I do social media for one of the things they hate is having Teoh address negative yelp reviews like because they're so emotionally invested in their restaurant. It's so hard for them to kind of hold back and not, you know, have not a confrontation. But, you know, some people can be really nasty. And the reviews So some have come and ask you, Could you answer these yelp reviews and just say something nice? And, you know, I know you'll do it better than us. And so I do that, Um But one of the things that I feel is important as a yelp user is when I see something negative and then I see below it when a business owner addresses it publicly right under the post, Right? So it's like, Oh, wow. Hey, you know, this person had this problem. Then they went, Oh, I care. And, um but some of my restaurant restaurant tours air like, No, I want to just address them in a private message and say Thank you for coming in. And here, you know, come and we'll try and make the experience better. What do you do you have feeling about that? Addressing it publicly versus absolutely publicly? Absolutely. Um so I always say that you should criticize privately, but you should accept criticism publicly. And the reason is people are just like you. They're watching how you handle that kind of situation. And so when something negative happens in your business, whether you make a mistake or the staff member makes a mistake, believe it or not, what becomes more important in the long run is how you respond to it, not what happened. So people are quick to forget the details of a situation, but they will always remember how you made them feel during that exchange. So if you publicly go out and apologize, it's not just that patron that you're making feel better. You're also reassuring the rest of your community that not only do you care about that feedback, but that you're willing to address that feedback. So you're showing something passively to the other people who are observing that. That's a statement of your values, like I value this information. I respect the fact that you brought it to my attention, and I want to acknowledge it in a public forum. And I think, you know, people talk publicly on social, Um, and it's fine. If there's personal details that you need to share. Sometimes it's great to say I'm so sorry that happened. We really want to make it right. Can I get your email address or could you email us at such and such so that we could take care of the details, So sometimes you need to take the conversation offline. But I think acknowledging that feedback in a public forum if it's been given to you in a public forum is actually a really good thing to do. Any other questions on that? Okay, good we talked about this before. If you don't have a notebook, get one. And if you don't dig on pen and paper, try Evernote. Try the notes. Function on your phone. Do a Google doc. I don't You know there's any 1,000,000 number of things, but your social platform is a reflection of your ideas, your concepts, your beliefs, your values. And if I know any of you at all like me, your ideas happened in the shower, in the car, all of the places where you cannot write them down. It always happens that way. You have brilliant strokes of genius. At two in the morning, when you're getting up to feed the cat, that's what happens to me. So I have a notebook by my bed I have ever note on my phone. I've resorted to bathtub Kranz, but the getting yourself in the habit of capturing ideas whenever you go. If you can't write, use dragon dictation. You guys know dragon dictation. It's a dictation app on your phone and you can talk to it. So no excuses. If you could just talk to the air and have ideas captured, you can do this. But what are the keys to having a vibrant, lively, dynamic platform is fresh, engaging content all the time. If you're gonna have fresh, engaging content, you need ideas for that content, and those are going to occur to you in the most random, inconvenient times. So get in the habit of capturing your ideas on an ongoing basis so that you constantly have something to draw from. Like I said in my Evernote, I have, I don't know, 100 something draft post titles for my blogged. Random business ideas will occur to me, and I write them down and Evernote so that when I'm feeling uninspired or would have had a particularly rough day. And I know I need to nurture my social platform and still let everybody know that I'm there. But I'm not really feeling it. I can go to those sources of inspiration and immediately usually lashed onto something that inspires me that day. So if you know me at all, I have several different things that I care about. Animal rescue is one of them, and it never fails that if I have nothing else to talk about, I can always find a dog that needs to be rescued. So that is my go to Is it related to my business? Heck, no. Is it related to social business? Uh, but is it a way for me to connect with people in my community? Absolutely. So don't think that you need to be relevant and on topic all the time. You just kind of need to be seeding the system with you and your personality and your voice and capturing ideas. Trust me when I tell you, this is so important. I have moleskin notebooks like stacks of them that are beaten and battered. They go with me everywhere because my social platform is really the amplification of all of those ideas for years and years and years. And if you're gonna do anything for a long time, like this. You better have a fresh source of ideas all the time because I didn't I certainly didn't build a social platform overnight, and it's taken lots of inspiration and ideas to keep it going, so have a place toe to keep those.