How to Tackle Social Media Auditors: Learning from Our Experience

By Rachel Mackay, Head of Hampton Court Palace, Historic Royal Palaces

Last week at Hampton Court, we had what at first seemed like a run of the mill visitor encounter. A man appeared at our main gate and said he would like to do some drone filming. This is a common request at the Palace, and staff began their well-rehearsed process of politely and kindly finding out more about the request so it could be directed to the relevant teams. They approached the man in good faith, thinking that his enquiry was a genuine one.

What they didn’t know at the time was that this man wasn’t just a general visitor and drone filming was very much beside the point. His real motivation was to generate and film conflict with frontline staff and put it on YouTube to generate clicks and money. He is a Social Media Auditor (SMA), a name which sounds far too much like an actual job title for my liking. A better description would be ‘professional troll’.

If this interaction sounds familiar to you, you’re not alone. SMAs have increasingly focussed their attention on visitor attractions in the last year. If you’ve never heard of this before, you’re also not alone; until this incident, I had no idea this was a thing.

Often, their way into the conflict they seek to incite is the use of drones, a frustratingly grey area in UK law. Whilst we as an organisation prohibit commercial filming on site, there’s only so much you can do about it when it’s taking place 400 feet above your head. We’re not an active royal residence, so like most visitor attractions we don’t have a no-fly zone. We also have another feature which makes us vulnerable to such attacks: a team of people who will go above and beyond to help our visitors.

Our particular troll was able to take two hours of footage at Hampton Court, with only around five minutes being the actual drone film. Looking at other videos on his channel, this isn’t uncommon. The valuable asset here is the human interaction, and the harder the staff try to reason and argue, the more he fights back, and the more clicks and views he’ll get.

Halfway through our experience, our staff realised they were being filmed and asked him not to film or post them online. The next 24 hours were an agonising wait before it was finally released at 17.00 the next day, with a 70-minute countdown during which his followers gleefully speculated about how bad it would be. The live comments were buzzing with excited anticipation. At Hampton Court, those 70 minutes felt very different. When it did drop, it had the chilling subtitle ‘Part 1 of 3’, so we knew we’d have to go through this for the next two days as well.

I don’t mean to suggest that the films are a hard watch because our team did anything wrong. On the contrary, they were extraordinarily professional, polite and calm throughout. Their pride and love for the Palace shone through and I have nothing but admiration for them, along with a little guilty trepidation; would I have stayed so calm? Probably not. But they are a hard watch, because his goal is to humiliate our team, to make them look stupid and hold them up as straw men for his followers to take pathetic swings at. No matter how well they did, it’s his grubby motivation that makes your blood boil.

Our troller suggested he would blur faces or turn off comments, but of course he did neither, leaving our team exposed and vulnerable in one of the darkest corners of YouTube. As a manager, you plead with the team not to go home and read the comments. As a human being, you know that of course they will. The result is an incredible amount of hurt, shame, embarrassment and rattled confidence, even for those who weren’t there. I get that, because I wasn’t there either, and it rattled me.  

What made this incident such an absolute curveball is that it went against all our professional instincts. Both in visitor engagement and security, we talk about the power of conversation and ‘killing with kindness’. Even when dealing with hostile reconnaissance, we teach ‘the power of hello’ and how engaging with people, forming relationships and understanding motivations is everything. In this instance, our determination to do all that put our colleagues in the firing line. Half of me thinks I set my team up for failure. The other half says we will not let a couple of basement dwellers stop us from delivering world class visitor engagement.

Key to this is finding ways to protect ourselves. After obsessively researching this over the past week, I’ve learned how common this sort of thing had become. This in itself was a shock. I spent a while oscillating between deep shame that I wasn’t aware of it already and anger that although this seemed to be an increasing phenomenon within cultural attractions, nobody had reached out to warn us. The guidance that exists on this is incredibly useful, and we would have responded in a totally different way if we had read it. We could have stopped our troll earning more money from other people’s diligence and more importantly, limited the exposure of our team members.

But the important thing is that the experience and guidance and advice is out there. Since this happened to us, our troll has visited other prominent sites, and copycat SMAs have written to us informing us of their intention to come and do the same thing at Hampton Court. At least now, we know what we are dealing with, and in this respect forewarned is forearmed.

I asked colleagues who were affected by this if they minded me writing this piece. They told me that if sharing their experiences meant other colleagues in the sector wouldn’t have to go through it, then they would be happy to. Taking control of the story gives them back – gives us all back – a bit of the power he took away.

Learnings and Advice

So, here’s what we have learned through our experience:

• This government advice is excellent and outlines the recommended approach in an accessible way. There is also a handy video here.
• Staff filmed are often identifiable. Consider name badges with first names only and think about how visible security passes are.
• Don’t film the SMAs on your phone. It might seem tempting to give them a taste of their own medicine, but these people have the potential to turn nasty and any effort to ‘fight back’ could backfire.
• Drone and filming legislation is complicated. Take legal advice to ensure your policies don’t trip your staff up when they are put to the test.
• Support each other: everyone reacts differently and just because someone is okay about it today doesn’t mean they will be okay tomorrow. The fallout could last a couple of days, a couple of weeks or longer, so be generous with support.

We all hope this advice helps others, and if anyone has any questions or wants further advice, I’m more than happy to be contacted on Rachel.Mackay@hrp.org.uk. The more we talk to each other, the more protected we are.