Bury the Trolls

Amplify resident voices, go get the average resident who’s busy living their life, and bury the trolls by outnumbering them with real conversation. Don’t govern from fear of a few loud people.

Every communicator I know can name them. The two or three residents who comment on every post and show up to every meeting to say the same thing they said last time. You can count them on one hand.

And if you are not careful, those few people start running your whole strategy. They are part of your community, and they still deserve a clear, consistent way to be heard. But they are not your whole community, and they should not be allowed to define the tone, priorities, or direction of your communications. You need moderation guidelines, response protocols, and sometimes a little humor or personality to disarm the disruption. What you cannot do is build good communications, or good government, around the fear of a handful of people who show up louder and more often than everyone else.

In the first piece I wrote with Orlo, I said the conversation about your city is already happening whether you are in it or not, and your job is to show up and listen. Here is what comes next. It does not even have to be you doing the talking. Some of the most powerful things you can amplify are the voices of your own residents. When you can walk into a room and say “this is what our residents said,” you are educating the council and staff with something a lot stronger than your own opinion.

But you only get there if you stop listening only to the angry ones.

The average resident is busy living their life. Not having a grievance does not mean they do not have an opinion. It just means they are not going to drive to a Tuesday night meeting, and they are definitely not going to get into a fight in your comments to defend you.

So you have to go get them, and you have to do it before there is a problem, not during one. That is the part people underestimate. Managing these conversations looks easy from the outside. It is nuanced, complicated work, and the whole point of it is to have the relationship in place before you need it.

Here is the shift that changes everything. You are not going to win the argument with the people who live to argue. Every reply you give them is oxygen. So stop trying to beat them and start burying them.

A colleague of mine, here at Orlo, who did this work inside a fast-growing Arizona city, describes engagement as PR tokens for local government. Every small positive moment, a like, a save, a real comment, a resident who feels heard, drops a token in the bank. Get enough of them and something quiet and powerful happens. The mean comment shows up and nobody bothers to engage with it. People with something nice to say will not walk into a comment section that feels like a brawl, but they will show up to one that feels like a neighborhood.

She told me that on the pages she used to run, you now have to go looking for the trolls. They are still there. You can still count them on one hand. But they are buried under so much real conversation that they have lost the power to set the tone. You do not delete them. You out-number them.

And you stop governing from fear.

I have mentored communicators who were genuinely terrified of three specific residents. Not because those residents represented the community, but because every negative comment seemed to trigger a wave of concern from stakeholders, department leaders, or elected officials. It only takes one angry post for someone to ask, “Should we take this down?” or “Is everyone upset about this?” Over time, that pressure wears people down. Reading criticism day after day can also take a real toll on the wellbeing of the communicators doing the work.

You learn, with experience, that a handful of loud voices rarely reflects the broader community. You cannot run a city, or a communications strategy, from a place of fear of the people yelling the loudest.

Reevaluate where you are. A lot of cities are still pouring everything into a Facebook page they mostly keep alive for Boomers. Meanwhile the residents you actually want to reach are somewhere else. They are on TikTok, which for a lot of normal Americans is where the news lives now. I know all the reasons government “can’t” use TikTok, and it is a shame, because that short, human, reel-style way of talking to people works no matter where it lives. Put it on Instagram. Put it wherever your residents are. The format travels.

Give them a reason to weigh in. Sometimes you have to go out and get the opinion. When I was the Chief Digital Officer in Gilbert, we put a QR code on a park survey and set up where the average resident already was. Free ice cream after school, a pint at the local brewery. I cannot tell you how many people took that survey and said the same thing: “No one has ever asked me what I think about my community.” They may have been asked. Just by mail, and by a landline that stopped mattering twenty years ago, in places they no longer live.

Teach them how to actually see you. Most residents do not know how their own feed works. So show them. A quick post on how to turn on notifications. A reminder that if they want to see your stuff, they should like it, save it, drop even a single emoji, favorite the page. It feels almost too basic to bother with. It is one of the highest-return things you will ever do.

There is absolutely a place for the transactional. When the trash schedule changes or a road project is about to tear up a neighborhood, go tell people directly. That is what Nextdoor is for.

But that cannot be all you are. When you are only ever reacting, you create more room for frustration, not less. The channels that build trust are the ones that also sell the community, and I do not mean the way a company markets business to business. You are selling to people’s hearts. You are showing them what makes this place worth living in. That is what makes a family want to move here and a business want to come. Economic development is not some separate thing happening down the hall. It starts with residents who are proud of where they live.

That is the difference between posting updates and selling a lifestyle.

Part of this is knowing your own trigger words. In Gilbert, we learned to say “multifamily housing,” not “apartments.” We were careful about how we framed anything that sounded like a tax. That is not spin. It is knowing your community well enough not to hand the loud voices an easy fight. The rest is being proactive: get out in front of things, and do things that are fun, relevant, and actually trending, so people have a reason to pay attention.

Government is not an exception to how the world works. Your resident is a person who consumes information exactly like every other person. Your IT guy may have been at that desk since 1985, but your residents are not living in 1985, and they expect more than to be talked to like they are. Stop being an agency. Be people. They are your neighbors. Talk like it.

It even holds in a crisis. When misinformation starts flying, every instinct says to jump in and correct it right now. Take a breath instead. Go get a cup of coffee. More often than you would think, if you have built the relationships, the voice of reason weighs in for you, and it is a resident, not the city. I watched that happen when a little police activity in one of the safest cities in the country set people off online, and the community itself decided the whole thing was really about excitement over a new Trader Joe’s coming. They handled it. We did not have to.

None of this survives without proof. You will have to sit in front of a council or a city manager and defend why it matters, probably more than once. So show them. Fifty thousand people saw this video. Three saw the press release. Here is what residents said. The numbers are how you protect the strategy the next time fear comes knocking.

But don’t stop at impressions or views. Leadership isn’t asking whether a post performed well. They’re asking whether communications helped solve a problem. Did fewer people call with the same question because they found the answer online? Did more residents sign up before the deadline? Did attendance increase? Did complaints decrease? Did trust improve? The metrics that matter are the ones tied to organizational goals, operational efficiency, and better experiences for residents.

Great communicators become trusted advisors when they connect communication to outcomes leaders care about. Data isn’t there to justify your work after the fact. It’s there to shape better decisions before the next campaign, crisis, or council meeting.

The loudest voices will always be there. Every city has them. Your job isn’t to build your communications strategy around the few people who show up to every meeting or comment on every post. It’s to go find everyone else. Build relationships before you need them. Give residents a reason to participate. Amplify their voices until they become the conversation. That’s how you build trust. That’s how you create better communications. And ultimately, that’s how you build better government.

Stay tuned for a podcast episode with Orlo’s Lauren Evans, where we’ll share real stories from the field, what worked, what didn’t, and the lessons every local government communicator can use.