You’ve got an amazing idea for your company’s social media, like maybe a fun TikTok series or a bold new approach to customer engagement or brand repositioning. You’re excited. You’ve done your homework, but the moment you present it, you hear these dreaded words, “We can’t do that.”
The constant wall of “no” can make even the most passionate social media manager feel stuck and defeated.
You’re not alone. And, more importantly, there are proven ways to break through that resistance.
And that’s exactly what Agorapulse’s Chief Storyteller Mike Allton explores with our guest, Chelsea Napolitano in this episode of Social Pulse: Retail Edition. With over 10 years of experience, leading social media and influencer marketing for Fortune 500 brands, Chelsea has mastered the art of driving change in risk-averse environments. As a strategic communications expert at Stanley Black and Decker, she’s successfully transformed social media operations from outsourced to in-house launched innovative community management programs, and pushed the boundaries of what’s possible in corporate social media, all within traditionally conservative environments.
[Listen to the full episode below, or get the highlights of the Social Pulse: Retail Edition, powered by Agorapulse. Try it for free today.]
Overcoming Resistance
I’d love it if you could share a specific example of a time when you encountered some significant resistance to a social media initiative and how you initially handled that pushback.
Chelsea Napolitano: Sure. I would love to. And I think you captured it perfectly. This is an experience that as a social media professional is not unusual or foreign to any of us. We deal with this all the time, especially with people who are not embedded in the social space. I think a lot of the time when we bring ideas to the table, especially at conservative brands or historically conservative spaces, it can be met with a lot of resistance, hesitation, fear, and uncertainty.
So I think we could probably all have one or more of these stories that come to mind when you have an experience where you have to prove why you want to do something that you already know is a great idea.
I would say when I first was thinking through one of the examples I could reference for when I experienced pushback on an idea I have like a core formative memory that comes to mind whenever I think about being told no or having to plead my case for something when it comes to a social opportunity. And this is when I started building my toolkit for how to overcome these moments when you’re hitting that wall of no. And it was quite a while back probably 5-10 years ago when there was a trending moment about Gen Z versus millennials and side parts and skinny jeans, and there I was working in a retail business at the time.
And I wanted to jump into that conversation and create some content around that. I said, “We sell jeans, why don’t we jump into the conversation?” My idea was to personify a pair of jeans on TikTok and give it a face and make it talk and have the jeans chime into the conversation and as someone on social, you see weird silly things like that all the time. I had a very clear vision of what I wanted to do. And of course, I took that to my leadership … they were obviously within the marketing team, but not necessarily embedded in the social space. And they looked at me like I had 10 heads, like “You want to put a face on a pair of pants and make it talk?”
The answer when I initially proposed that the answer was no, but I knew that this was going to be a good idea.
I had the vision. I wanted to make it happen. And so I went about trying to figure out what is the way that I can try and persuade my leadership team to see the vision that I can see. So that was one of the experiences that I know really brought or made that light bulb go on and brought me to the reality check that not everyone sees social the way that you do.
Not everyone is on social the way that you are. And seeing all these things and sometimes things that you think require no context or explanation are going to require a lot of context and explanation even if you’re sure that it’s a good idea.
One of the ways that you’re tackling retail brand repositioning is by creating cross-team and cross-functional partnerships. Do you have a framework for building these?
Chelsea Napolitano: I definitely do have a couple of things that I keep in the back of my mind as I navigate these conversations. Transparently, I’ve come a long way and social has come a long way since that initial conversation, the talking pants never made it to social despite my best efforts, despite making mock-ups and bringing it to life.
It sounds silly when you then tell someone I put together a PowerPoint pitch deck about why talking pants were a good idea. That’s a pretty unique social-specific moment that I’m sure people who are listening to this will probably relate very much to. If you told someone else that, they’d be like, “What is your job?”
But I do now have a framework because at that moment, as I said, it made me realize [that] especially when you surround yourself with like-minded peers and professionals, people who get it, you don’t have to prove your case all of the time. When you’re speaking to people who maybe aren’t as familiar, the first thing I say is to give people grace and understand that they’re not having those constant social experiences that you are.
As a social media professional, we are chronically on social in our professional lives, and in our personal lives, we see all the weird stuff. We see what works, we get why it works, and we understand social in a very different way than probably your average other marketing person, even.
Beyond that, your average C-suite leader, like any other person is going to see this, and often our marketing leaders understand that people outside of marketing are going to see this, too. They’re going to have to explain why there’s a talking pair of pants on our brand’s social channels.
What to Do
- Give people grace. Know that they also need to understand and that they probably don’t have the same background context and knowledge that you do. Speak the language of the people that you’re talking to so try to help them understand how what you’re proposing might sound odd or very scary or risky, but here are the ways that that can contribute to our shared business goals and try to paint that “what’s in it for me” picture.
- I also like to pry and probe into … well, who do you think does social well? Who do you look at as a vision of good? What social do you like to engage with? And then try to draw some of those parallels between, well, if you’re engaging with funny content or relatable content, and that’s this kind of stuff that you like to send to your friends. Like, here’s how our audience is going to connect with the content that we’re sharing, and that’s exactly the type of emotional connection we’re trying to create. That’s exactly the kind of moment that we want to create when our followers see this content that they’re bookmarking and that they’re going to share it with their friends.
- Make it relatable to them. “Oh, okay, like now I get it. Maybe I’m not the target audience for this content. Maybe I don’t get it, but maybe I’m not the target audience for our brand.”
- Try and make it relatable, even if it is very much outside their comfort zone or wheelhouse, and show how our shared goals can be met by doing this content or by enacting this idea or social change or a new program or a new approach to something. It doesn’t have to be a specific piece of content. It can be a different way to approach community management. It can be migrating to a new platform. It can be changing your KPIs.
- There are a million good things you’re going to have to be able to make a case for and paint the picture for people who don’t necessarily speak your language. Try to translate and fill in the blanks and create those connections where they can understand what it is that you’re talking about and how it relates to maybe something that they do understand a little bit better.
- And for me, more than anything, I like to stay solution-oriented. So, painting the picture of how what I’m proposing is going to solve a problem that we’re facing, make our lives easier, free up time, create more connectivity, or be more collaborative. What or how can I directly connect this to an issue/pain point/roadblock that we’re experiencing? Paint the picture of how that solves that problem for us.
Framing Innovation
How do you frame innovation when you’re trying to come up with some new ideas that people might be averse to from the start?
Chelsea Napolitano: Well, I think it’s almost 2025. There’s so much evidence as to what makes good social content these days that it’s pretty easy to call out some research studies or some best practices that maybe platforms have shared or case studies of other brands that are making strides or are best in class to show that when you do certain things, good things happen.
And you definitely want to be original, and you definitely don’t want to just do something for the sake of doing it or because somebody else did it. But again, trying to paint the picture of, “How does this relate to what we’re trying to accomplish? What are our higher-level, bigger marketing goals? What are our higher-level business goals?”
If we want to be a brand that isn’t just keeping the car on the road, which is another challenge I think a lot of us run into, is we get to a place where we are just doing the same thing over and over again. And I can guarantee you, it is a little bit of a scary question to ask, right? Like, “Who do you follow? What is your vision of good?”
But it’s always illuminating. And what I can say is coming out of those conversations is 99 times out of 100, whatever they’re going to reference is probably a brand that has done something interesting, disruptive, and different. Otherwise, we’re not going to be talking about them because guess what?
Every single brand is on social media, but the ones that you think of as an example or that you can reference as somebody who’s doing something cool or fun or interesting or worth following or worth talking about or worth remembering are the ones who are doing something a little bit different. Or doing it first or leading the way.
So if you don’t want to get noticed, and that’s what social media is literally all about. We are all out here trying to create a moment that goes viral, that gets our brand noticed, that gets people talking about, thinking about, and exploring who our brands are.
That’s the ultimate goal.
You can’t achieve that if you’re not willing to do anything differently than what you’re doing today. Or you’re not willing to step out of your comfort zone and do something different than maybe your competitors are. Or just do something differently that maybe you could try a different approach to or try making small tweaks to the way that you’re doing things to try and make a difference and just see.
Social is also fast, and it cycles out. As afraid as people are of getting canceled or doing the wrong thing, you have to have a huge part of my philosophy and approach to social. (I’m sure we’re going to dive into this a little bit more.) It’s just professional courage and being able to say, “I’m going for it. Whether or not you do see the vision, we’re doing the talking pants.”
And for me, now that I’m in a space where I have a team of direct reports who are trying to do these things, I try to encourage them to have that professional courage to feel empowered to test and try different things and approaches.
Guess what? It’s not always going to work.
We’re not going viral every single day. We’re probably not going viral every single year. But if we don’t try to do things differently, then we’re never going to break through the noise.
We’re never going to get noticed.
And that’s why we’re on social.
So if you handcuff yourself and don’t allow yourself to push the boundaries—within reason, okay, we’re not trying to do anything too controversial or that will jeopardize genuinely the brand or our reputation—but trying a trending topic or a trending sound or trending audio from a platform or incorporating a little bit of a different tone. Perhaps [it’s] starting to do maybe proactive community management, bringing the brand out into the wild, [or] starting to engage with things than just doing something a little bit different than you’re doing today.
Even if you’re running into that wall of “no”, knowing when there’s something worth saying, “Well, I’m going to do it anyway, and when you see how well it works, then you’re going to thank me.” Or you’re not even going to notice like you’re afraid that this is going to cause a problem. Maybe it won’t be the best thing ever, but we’re going to share a piece of content today. We’re going to share a piece of content the next day, the day after that, and every single following day. Nobody’s going to remember it, even if it doesn’t work out. Nine times out of ten
Learn more retail insights, strategies, and wisdom from our experts in every episode of Social Pulse: Retail Edition.
Calculating Risk-Taking in Retail Brand Repositioning
So when you’re thinking about some of these risks that you might want to take calculated risks, how do you determine what’s worth pushing for versus what might be a battle saving for another day?
Chelsea Napolitano: I think that’s a very case-by-case basis and sometimes when you know, you know.
I tend to personally want to fight about everything. It’s been an acquired skill to know when to hold them, when to fold them, when to die on the hill, and when to say, “Okay, never mind, that’s fine.”
With more impactful opportunities where you just know that this is going to make a big difference, you just know that you have a better way. The obstacles and barriers to entry to making the change are not going to be such that you’re going to need a lot of external help to support buy-in.
By the way, we talked about what would happen if we did change our approach to community management, or we talked about whether it was worth it to start doing this type of content that our in-house studio team maybe didn’t have the bandwidth to create. We went and created it on our own. Even though you know people had questions about whether or not we should do it, we went and created it on our own. We posted it, and this is an actual example that I’m pulling from. We wanted to do this content, but we got pushback (it’s not the kind of content that we usually do). It’s the most commented-on piece of content we’ve ever posted to our channel. So there you go!
I think just knowing the kind of internal barometer for what is going to make a big impact and, of course, being able to measure how big of a risk is this.
We’re not going to go forth and do something that will be a major significant change to the business without getting that partnership and buy-in. Or if it does require that partnership and buy-in, we’re going to have to do the work to change hearts and minds and get everybody on board with making the changes and contributions that are necessary to do the thing, whatever it is that we’re proposing.
I think just knowing how hard to fight back for something is a matter of the impact that it’ll have on the business, it’s a matter of whether or not you have the bandwidth also to lead the change because if you have pushback, you’re very likely not getting support resources buy-in from anybody else, like:
- Do I have what I’m going to need to be able to do this by myself?
- And then if I can do it by myself, is it worth taking that risk for the value that it could add back into the business?
- Evaluate a couple of different factors to say, is it worth digging my heels in on this one? Also, is this just an inevitable change that’s going to happen six months down the road?
- Do I have to argue about it now, or should we just wait it out?
- Evaluate a couple of different things to figure out: Is this something worth fighting back for, or should we just let this one go and focus our efforts elsewhere?
What role do you think data plays in overcoming resistance to change? How do you use metrics to support your case for something risky or innovative?
Chelsea Napolitano: It’s huge.
I think there is nothing better than data to prove a business case. Data is not a feeling. It’s not a thought. It’s not an idea. It is a fact. And I use data all the time, I’m a little bit of a data nerd. I love it. I am constantly in our reporting dashboards and I do a ton of competitive benchmarking, show best-in-class brands, track against the things that are working for other brands, do a ton of social listening, try to consolidate, and bring all these things together.
Chances are if the social team has ideas or an observation, even something like, hey, I think we need to prioritize community management. It could move the needle for us: “Okay, well, intuitively, as a person who is on social for the brand, you probably have many experiences that you can call back to that are making you think or feel that.”
Going back to the data again, bring that to somebody who doesn’t see all the things that you do every single day but can consolidate and distill that information into something that makes sense to them. Where you can say, “Hey, this is how many mentions our brand is getting outside of our own social channels. And we’re not responding to any of them.”
Doesn’t that seem like a huge miss, or this is the amount of content that we’re generating external to our own channels, and we’re not out there mining any of it or curating any of it to use it as user-generated content? Doesn’t that seem like a huge myth? Isn’t that low-hanging fruit? Like, data drives change.
No brilliant thought, creative idea, or any other persuasive tactic you could reference. You cannot argue with numbers, data, and insights. And I spend a ton of time in all of our reporting platforms looking at the data, digesting it, sharing it, processing it. It also helps you prove your success, right?
When you do something risky, weird, or controversial, you can say, “Hey, look, it did great. This idea was a good idea. We should do more of this.” Again, whoever you’re talking to, whatever feeling they had about whether or not that was a good idea? We don’t have to have feelings because we have numbers, and I think people in the social space often are a lot more on the creative side or tend to be—at least I was when I first started my career in social. I tend to just be more of a creative person, numbers in earlier in my career, or something that I was like, “I don’t want to know about the math. Don’t send me an Excel spreadsheet.”
Creatives vs. Data
I don’t like that. That’s why I got into a creative space. Stay away from me with the spreadsheets—but as you mature in your career, it becomes much more apparent to you that you cannot do one without the other and that they are not so far apart. They’re so closely intertwined that I mean at the end of the day, we all have goals to meet. We all have benchmarks. We all have KPIs that we’re measuring against, and you can’t do that just based on feelings.
I guess you could, but you’re never going to know if you’re succeeding or if you’re moving the needle. We all have things that we’re trying to accomplish or that we’re tasked with achieving.
The only way to know whether or not we’re advancing in any of those spaces is to keep track of it with some data.
And again, data is your friend when you’re trying to do something new. Chances are, unless you’re doing something really weird and on the cutting edge, there might be an example or two or at least some data to help you back up why you think this is a good idea, how good of an idea it is, like how much of an impact can it really have on the business, and that’s going to just help remove a lot of those barriers and blockers.
Even proactively help you get ahead of answering any of the questions and the pushback that you know you’re going to get because again, this is not new or foreign to any of us. We know that when we come whether it’s a content idea or a process idea a change to a workflow a change to how we approach something.
We’re going to get that pushback. What? No, it works better this way. Why do we have to change it? You have to do a lot less convincing and persuading when you have data to back you up, the data can do the talking.
How do we connect the dots between taking some risks, calculating and achieving some success on social media, and measuring a business impact? How are you doing that today?
Chelsea Napolitano: It’s a very murky space. Especially if you come from currently my employer, we’re not heavily in the B2C space. So D2C, we don’t sell directly from our websites. We are trying to drive traffic into brick-and-mortar retail. So it’s a very nuanced conversation when it comes to how we measure success, right?
Because we cannot tie it directly back to somebody putting something in their cart. Our efforts are not going to lead directly to a sale without some stops in between elsewhere. Whether that’s a stop to our website that leads to a retailer’s website that leads to a sale. A stop at our website leads to a trip to Amazon that’s gonna lead to a sale.
Maybe somebody just sees something on social and walks into a store and buys something. Maybe somebody sees something from an influencer and goes to a retailer’s website or brick-and-mortar. But I think clarity on what you are trying to achieve and I think there’s like social media is not a monolith like when we say social media I think a lot of times people think of the owned content feeds of a brand or just the outbound content that is getting pushed out by any given social account. But there’s so much more to social media than that.
And there are so many different ways that we’re going to have to measure and identify what are we asking for these channels to do and what our customers expect and want from us in these different spaces. So our organic outbound content is going to have very different measures of success than a paid social ad which is going to have different measures of success than our community management strategy, which is going to have different measures of success than our influencer strategy. So social media is so many different things.
I think just having clarity on what is our high-level vision and purpose and what we want social media to be able to do for our brands. And then what are the right things to measure for that high-level goal? And then in each of those kinds of subcategories of social, and those metrics and, and what success looks like in those spaces are very good.
Social media, especially organic social media is top of the funnel. It is about building relationships. It’s about building awareness, consideration, and getting to know the brand’s personality. What are the values that align with my personal values? Why when I walk into a store or I’m browsing on a website and I’m hit with an unlimited amount of options of very similar products and many ways or for many brands, right? What’s the big difference between two different kinds of lip gloss, and shampoo? There are so many different options that it is going to be about the emotional relationship that you’re able to establish with that customer. When it comes time for them to make a purchase that they prefer you over something that’s probably at the end of the day, for most of us, a very similar competitive product, why choose you?
So I think having an understanding of what role you want social media to play, and then what each of the different components of social media can do and how to measure whether it’s working and then building, I think, really good dashboards and having tools that help you track whether or not you’re, you’re hitting those KPIs as well.
Tools/Resources
Are there any tools or resources that you found valuable in helping you maybe not just social media overall, but in the specific context of what we’ve been talking about today?
Chelsea Napolitano: Yeah, I think again, like just demonstrating and proving like data-backed evidence of what works and what inspired this idea. Why would I suggest this? It’s not like, you know, social media professionals just wake up in the morning and say, I feel like blowing up our brand social media today.
Something, somewhere inspired the team to have this idea or there was a moment in time when it became apparent that a solution was needed to a problem that was a pain point for our team or a team that we work with that we could help solve for. So, I think from each different social media subcategory, I think has nuances, right?
Depending on what we’re measuring and how we’re quantifying success. But for me, I rely a lot on dashboards that I create in our social media management platforms. I rely a lot on social listening and competitive benchmarking. I rely on also peer resource groups and just knowing intel from different peers and partners in the social space.
What are people doing? What are they using? What are they experiencing? How have they tackled different things in the past and tried to arm me with as many different data points as possible and information from various sources ,even newsletters, staying up to date on different changes to algorithms, or what comes down the pipeline that we need to keep an eye on?
I think just a combination of those things and then trying to, again consolidate that and translate that into something meaningful for whoever it is that you’re speaking to or trying to convince or persuade, make it mean something to them, answer what’s in it for me, why should we do this, how hard is it going to be, how much is the payoff going to impact the business, how does this meet our higher level business goals.
So, I think those are easy tools to kind of rely on to help get somebody supportive of your idea or on your side or help have an advocate or an ambassador if you do need to buy in from different parts of the organization to help you sell that story, spread that message, and get buy-in and support for whatever it is that your idea is.
Looking back on this journey that you’ve had, what’s the one thing you wish you would have known from the start when you were trying to work to overcome this culture of no?
Chelsea Napolitano: I was thinking a lot about this. And. I think early in anyone’s career, you hesitate to push back on the pushback. You don’t have or feel comfortable accessing that professional courage or proving your case or maybe you doubt like maybe this isn’t a good idea. Maybe we shouldn’t do this especially depending on who you’re speaking to, but I think now even in my current position, understand that seniority on the team does not necessarily equal subject matter expertise and that just because you’re not the chief marketing officer doesn’t mean that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
And you are likely much more of an expert and a resource and a knowledgeable participant than probably people who are, you know, above you on the org chart, so to speak. So just because someone says no to you does not mean that your idea was wrong or that you shouldn’t still do it, right?
It might be that that person doesn’t get it and that there is space to push back when it’s appropriate to prove your case, to not take no for an answer. I think that takes time, and that takes experience, and that takes building confidence, and self-assurance, and being sure and understanding that, like, no, I do know what I’m talking about, and just because somebody doesn’t see my vision does not mean that my vision was wrong, or my recommendation was wrong.
But it just means that maybe I haven’t spoken to the right person or the right advocate or the right partner. Perhaps I haven’t framed my message in a way that makes sense to this person—especially as a communication professional—understanding that you have to speak the person’s language that you’re trying to convince.
You have to make it make sense to them just because intuitively, it’s a good idea, or you can look at a dashboard and say, “Well, obviously we need to do X, Y, and Z.” Or you can look at a report about how being responsive to inbound customer engagement is critically important to a brand.
Building that business case or explaining that to somebody who doesn’t necessarily intuitively get it is going to be part of your job, and it doesn’t mean that the idea that you have is bad or wrong or shouldn’t happen.
It just means that maybe you need to reframe the argument. Maybe you need to talk to someone else. Maybe you need to tell a different story. You need to use different data. You need to pull someone else into the conversation and not just give up on things. But then at the same time, as we said earlier, some things are not worth fighting for.
Don’t just give up on an idea that you believe in and that you know is a good idea just because somebody may be telling you no.
Thanks for reading the highlights from this episode about retail brand repositioning. Don’t forget to find the Social Pulse Podcast: Retail Edition on Apple or Spotify, where we’re digging into the challenges, successes, and stories of social media and community professionals in the industry, just like you. Until next time!
