The Word Doctor: 15 Grammar Gaffes to Avoid

Should you ever break the rules of grammar?
Professional writers know that there are some rules to break (but only intentionally) and others that should never be broken. Misusing words is a common mistake of the neophyte, and rather than serving a linguistic purpose, simply hurts one’s credibility.
 
Image Source: BlueGlass.com

How Executives Are Using Social Media

How do CEO’s you’ve worked with look in comparison to this data?
While many still fear the lack of control that social media has introduced onto the corporate messaging stage, executives are using social media in a variety of ways—as this chart from penn-olson.com shows.

How Entertaining Can Increase Readership

One of the biggest challenges of any communicator is getting the attention of their target audience.
 
As businesses, our messages arrive at the consumer’s eyes and ears but are allowed in only with their permission. Very often, they’re not seeking what we have to say.
 
The entertain-engage method of communication is one way to break through the sea of communications. Give your target audience something they’re hungry for—whether it’s entertainment, inspiration or a mental break—before you give them the message you want them to absorb.
 
We recommended this method for a university’s recruiting piece we helped develop targeting high school sophomores. We know that messages that carry entertainment value are more likely to be allowed in, and chose to pay an irreverent visit to age-old clichés that parents use to get the readers’ attention and build a platform for a deeper message.
 
Besides increasing the chance for engagement with this audience, its unexpected approach provides a fresh take on college recruiting material—much of which looks very similar.
 
Are there opportunities for you to tell your brand’s story using this method?

4 Ways to Get Your Online News Release to Rank Higher in Searches

If you’re trying to increase the ranking for news releases you’re posting on line, consider these simple tips offered by Adam Sherk with Ragan.com:

1. Identify keywords likely to be searched for. You can find out popular words by using tools like Google Adwords Keyword Tool and Google Insights.
2. Include some key words—but don’t go overboard—in the text, title and quotes if you can.
3. Include links (3–4 tops).
4. Keep your release short.

Want more details? Read his full article.

How to Make Your Complex Message Easy to Read

Need a way to deliver difficult messages quickly and easily? Consider infographics. Whether it's static or animated, this increasingly popular communication tool allows the reader to digest key points—even difficult and complicated points—at a glance. By using visuals, it accelerates the time the brain takes to translate words into images in the brain—and also makes it easier to remember.
 
Here's an infographic from BlueGlass that unpacks some health myths in a way that draws the reader in. It drew 800,000 visitors over five months.
 
Have you ever used an infographic? Did you find it successful?

A Simple Way to Increase Your Facebook Impressions by 50 Percent

Jeff Bullas cites a study by Roost.com that evaluated 10,000 Facebook and Twitter posts by 8,000 small businesses across 50 industries and found the following content drives engagement the most:

1. Photo posts. They received 50 percent more impressions than any other type of content.
2. Quotes. These provided 22 percent more interactions compared with other types of posts.
3. Questions. They generated nearly twice as many comments as any other post type.

The report also showed that links were 87 percent more likely to be shared than any other type of post.

What pages do you frequently visit that do this well?

Showcase: Making the Case for Bread and Water

This week the entrepreneurial Wilkinson Baking Company launched the in-store testing phase of the world's first fully automated commercial Bread Bakery—a technology that mixes and bakes fresh, healthy bread from start to finish without any human involvement.

We worked with them to develop a series of electronic billboards (see below)—among other promotional elements—that deliver in-store key messages.

This one-of-a-kind technology has been in development for nearly four decades—and introduces a completely new way of thinking about bread. Using only the purest and best natural ingredients, Wilkinson bread is more affordable than other premium brands and has a smaller carbon footprint than national brands. They never sell any loaf older than 24-hours—and natural enzymes keep it fresh for at least seven days.

Taking inspiration from the creator of Tom’s shoes, WBC took the bread concept one step further and has committed a portion of every loaf’s sale to drilling and maintaining wells in Africa. Each loaf provides 77 cups of fresh, pure water to people whose only source of water is often filthy and several hours’ walk by foot.

This is a company to watch, so if you’re in eastern Washington, stop by Super 1 and follow your nose.

Building Physician Practices: Success Stories

For more than two decades we’ve worked with physicians to build their practices, and this experience has helped us create a formula for driving patients to a new practice—which accelerates the revenue stream needed to sustain them. Using our proprietary methods, we’ve been able to track up to 57 new patients per month which can be linked back to a very modest investment in advertising. One practice resulted in a 25% increase in hospital surgical cases—just two months after the campaign was launched. (We know this because this practice was already in business when they hired us, and the volumes went up after the campaign launched.)

It’s good to use a mix of advertising media—and fine-tuning this over the years has helped us devise an optimal mix for launching a physician practice. The best results occur:

• Where there’s sufficient market demand for the specialty
• When the physicians have good patient relationships
• When the physicians and hospital have a strong partnership

Even without this, it’s possible to accelerate patient volumes through marketing—but when all of variables above align, the growth can be stunning.

Consumers Prefer Direct Mail and E-mail

According to a 2011 study,  consumers prefer to receive direct mail and email when hearing from companies who want to do business with them.

• Three in four people (71%) welcome receiving direct mail from organizations they are already customers of, and 57% said it was appropriate communication for prospective customers, as well.
• 78% of people say they willingly accept emails from companies they patronize; the figure dropped to 52% for prospective customers.
• Less than one in 10 (9%) of existing customers feel that receiving marketing text messages is appropriate, and just 4% feel it is acceptable for companies to contact prospective customers this way.

Consumers are using technology to control their relationships with brands and filter out unwanted communications. Chris Combemale, executive director of the DMA (Direct Marketing Association) UK states: “As Acxiom’s survey highlights, consumers are very clear about how they want to be contacted, with mail and email continuing to be their preferred channels. Above all they respond best when the communication is timely, relevant, and targeted. This should be at the forefront of every marketer’s mind in these tough times, as they fight to retain customers and win new ones.”

Source:  Marketing Magazine, Consumers Use Technology to Filter Relationships with Brands, Says Report, September 1, 2011. The survey, commissioned in July among 1,000 UK consumers and 200 marketers.  The full results can be found in: 'Tug of Love: How technology is changing the relationship between consumers and brands – and what marketers can do about it'.

Communication Trends: How Google and Facebook are Shaping Your View of Reality

In this TED Talk, Eli Pariser pulls back the curtain on the filtering techniques of Google and Facebook, reminding us that your news and information is now being filtered by someone else. Searches now bring up information tailored to you—so two people sitting next to each other and searching for the same thing will get entirely different results.

Pariser says the torch is being passed from human gatekeepers to algorithmic gatekeepers, which don’t have imbedded the ethics that humans are capable of. Right now these algorithms decide what we get to see—and what we don’t get to see—based on relevance to us. What they don’t show us are differing points of view, information that is important, uncomfortable and perhaps even challenging—creating a reality with us as the center.

Pariser suggests that these algorithms must be coded in a way that supports a sense of public life, a sense of civic responsibility—and that they are transparent enough so that we can both understand and have some control over the kinds of information we access.

This 8-minute video is a must-see.