Too Many Exclamation Points – An Outcry! A Natural Evolution!

Look! Exclamation points are everywhere! In personal emails! In texts! In business email subject lines! In business email newsletters! In business correspondence! They are even burgeoning on websites!!!

Believe it or not, this trend has not gone un-noticed. Just Google “overuse of exclamation marks” and you’ll find a healthy conversation going between those who resist and those who accept this movement.

Those who lament the proliferation believe we should stick to the traditional grammar rules and reserve exclamation points for expressing strong emotion or astonishment, or indicating a command. They quote Strunk and White, for example: “Do not attempt to emphasize simple statements by using a mark of exclamation. ‘It was a wonderful show!’ vs ‘It was a wonderful show.’ The exclamation mark is to be reserved for use after true exclamations or commands. ‘What a wonderful show!’ ‘Halt!'” And The Chicago Manual of Style: “An exclamation point (which should be used sparingly to be effective) marks an outcry or an emphatic or ironic comment.”

On the other side are those who believe that this increased use of exclamation points is a natural adaptation of the written language to our use of electronic communications as conversation. A recent Boston Globe article quoted Lera Boroditsky, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at UCSD, as saying, “People are using the written word in a much more conversational manner… What people do with written language is that they adapt it to meet their needs.” In the same article, Jean Berko Gleason, a Boston University psycholinguist, commented “[Exclamation points] can mitigate the brusqueness of a brief reply by indicating the writer’s enthusiasm, sincerity, surprise ­- it all depends on the situation.”

Using Exclamation Points in Business Communications

In the grand scheme of things, the overuse of exclamation marks is not high on the list. But we’re curious. What about you? How do you use exclamation points in your business communications?

Whether you limit your use of exclamation marks or embrace them when texting or emailing among friends and family, we believe that it’s better to not go overboard when communicating on behalf of your business. I once received a promotional email from a company that ended every sentence with an exclamation mark, from the subject line (there were actually two exclamation marks there) down to the signature (“From Our Team!”). I didn’t read it!

This is not a new debate, it’s just one that is taking place around a new medium. We leave you with this Seinfeld clip from the 1980s (“Seinfeld and the Sniffing Accountant”).

Ok, one more (same episode!).

Quick Tip Tuesday: June Digital Marketing Advice Roundup

Each month we start our Quick Tip Tuesday series with a roundup of useful, hands-on digital marketing advice from experts in their fields. We’ve extracted the most useful information into tips you can use, and we’ve also provided a link to the full articles in case you’d like to learn more.
Looking for more information like this? Check out our Advice from Across the Web page. Here, Sales Renewal selects the best, actionable marketing & technology advice and, importantly, adds our perspective. Think of it as a Marketing Clipping Service for the modern world.
Here, then, are our favorite tips for the month:
1. Why that Video Went Viral – Studies back up instinct: “If you want to melt the Internet, best to traffic in emotion, researchers have found. The emotional response can be happy or sad, but the more intense it is, the more likely the story is to be passed along.” Researchers are beginning to explore the motivations that turn a link, like a video of a firefighter saving a kitten, into click bait. It didn’t work for one site that reported that the kitten eventually died. Read the full story.
2. Measuring the Right KPI – “As marketers have been under more pressure to prove ROI on their efforts, leads have been an easy KPI to measure. Unfortunately, leads don’t always lead to revenue, which is of course the most important KPI for any business.” Read the full story.
3. Grammar Refresher – Affect vs effect. Compliment vs complement. Farther and further. Do you know when to use these words? Here are 30 incorrectly used words that can make you look horrible – and how to use them correctly.
4. SEO and Semantic Search – “SEO and semantic search overlap, but the key to success lies in finding how to mesh them together, so that they complement each other, rather than simply overlapping.” This article gives some insights as to how this is done, including: “Stop trying to just salt your content and meta data with keywords, thinking that’s all you need to get to the top of the search results. And that doesn’t mean to just concentrate on synonyms, either. Instead, focus on conveying the concept of your pages.” Read the full story.
5. Rules for Brainstorming – As we work with our clients on new projects like introducing new programs, rebranding and the like, it’s important to come together as a team. This article from 2009 offers up some good advice for making the brainstorming process work, including:

• defer judgment
• one conversation at a time
• be visual
• stay on topic

Contact us for more on these and other helpful advice.

Helping Google Understand the “Meaning” of Your Pages Improves Their Rank

A report from SearchMetrics finds pages with Schema.org markup rank an average of four positions higher compared to pages without semantic markup. Read it.

4 Secrets to Making Project Management Work – The Magic Wand

Ahh, the perfect project management system.

It waves a magic wand and all your company’s tasks and projects are organized. It takes into account the availability of each member of the company and other resources needed. It lets everyone know what is due when, and can produce a schedule that is accurate to the day. Most important, it adapts to all the changes to strategy, project enhancements, client delays, new tasks, and new business that invariably make even the the most perfectly planned schedule obsolete before the weekend arrives.

Too good to be true? In a word, yes.

Sales Renewal recently invested in LiquidPlanner, a very powerful PM program, and, although we diligently tried to make it work for several months, its full potential was always just out of grasp. But then we had that “aha” moment, and things began to click.

Here are the four secrets we now know:

1 The schedule doesn’t update itself. Even though I might know when my task is complete, unless I check off “Done” next to that task, LiquidPlanner does not. This means it’s still waiting to schedule the next task.

2 New projects – or even tasks! – don’t add themselves. No project management system is a mind reader, so if there is a new task, or a new project, a human has to add it.

3 The program can only pester so much. Yellow warnings, red alerts, emails and on-screen notifications are all great for highlighting scheduling issues. But without a human in charge, that’s often all it is – a way to highlight a problem. Whether at the task, project, or sub-project level (and this can vary by project complexity!), a human has to take responsibility for using those warnings to follow up and get the project back on track.

4 The program has to accommodate multiple work styles. I may not always agree with how a particular project is structured, or how the tasks are broken down, but as long as basic structural guidelines are followed and tasks are assigned correctly, it is up to the person in charge of the project or task to set it up so it works for them.

Our Quest for the Perfect Project Management Program

When we were starting out, “project management” meant keeping a “to do” list with the tools we had on hand – mainly Outlook tasks, a spiral notebook, and occasional attempt at Microsoft Project. The work always got done, and done well, but nothing we tried seemed to be quite the right tool for guiding us through the process.

As our client list and company roster grew, it became clear that we needed a better way to maximize our efficiency and consolidate our hodgepodge of management tools. Our Director of Build Services took 23 online PM programs for a test drive before presenting her top 10 to the rest of us to take for a spin. Sales Renewal sales people, marketers, SEO experts, writers, and engineers tested the programs, and a clear winner – LiquidPlanner – emerged.

We invested time in setting up folders, tasks, appointments and tracking features for all our clients and projects. We watched the video how-tos and spent weekly meetings discussing structure and best practices. Then, because our work was all set up, we were good to go.

Well, not quite. Before the first day was done, the schedule was out of date.

The Magic Wand

We saw so much potential in LiquidPlanner and knew its magic wand capabilities were well within our grasp, so we were fully committed to making this work. Sure, there was internal resistance at the beginning, and many of us still use Outlook tasks, white boards, spiral notebooks and other ways to manage our own time. But since discovering and embracing the four “secrets”, we are now able to manage workloads, create realistic schedules and plan for future projects with relative ease.

We’d love to hear what works for managing your company’s projects and resources scheduling – let us know in the Comments below. In the meantime, gotta go check that “Done” box…

What is ‘Heartbleed’ and Why Does it Matter to Me?

So what is it?

Without getting too technical, Heartbleed is a software bug with a product called OpenSSL. Some sites use OpenSSL to provide a secure connection between themselves and your computer, and they use those secure connections when you are sending or receiving sensitive information. Normally, when information is communicated over a “secure” line, it is encrypted so that anyone who might be snooping around in cyberspace can’t read things you don’t want them to. Exploiting the Heartbleed bug, a less-than-scrupulous person could trick the server into giving up a chunk of its coveted secure data which could possibly include parts of its recent transactions.

The OpenSSL group has already fixed the problem, but affected sites have to install the fixed version of the software in order for the problem to be solved.

What does this mean for me?

Suppose you purchased a case of shiny new widgets from the online retailer of your choice. Suppose also that this retailer relied on OpenSSL for its secure communications. You put the case of widgets in your cart, and you check out. During the checkout procedure, you fill out a form that includes your credit card number, expiration date, security code, and the name (“as it appears on the card”). Maybe for good measure the site also asked you for your billing ZIP code.

When you click the “Purchase” button, all of this information gets sent to the retailer’s server where it gets stored in the server’s memory.

So what do I do about it?

The first thing to do is, to quote Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Don’t Panic”. There is no guarantee that an affected site has been compromised. And unless an attacker has exploited the bug shortly after you have been active on that site, there is only a tiny chance that he got access to any of your information.

With that said, there is something you can do. You can spend some time and try to find a list of affected sites on which you have important accounts. While a comprehensive list is hard to find, there are some decent places to start:

The Heartbleed Web Site

A partial list of affected sites

Once you find an affected site that means something to you, you can check with them to see if they have fixed the problem. Most reputable sites should have already reached out to you with their own notices about the issue and information on when you can expect them to have installed the fixed version of OpenSSL. If the site has been updated, then you can safely log in and change your password.

If not, then changing your password will do no good since the bug makes the new information as easy to get as the old. In this case, you might consider logging in and removing your sensitive information. One possibility is to delete your credit card information so that the attacker can’t get it.

If you can’t delete it, replace your card numbers with test numbers. You can search online for a list of test credit card numbers which are numerically valid, but have been set aside for testing credit systems. Use one of these numbers in place of your real number until the site in question installs the fixed version.

As always, the best practice is to be vigilant with your online life. This applied to internet commerce before the Heartbleed bug made news, and it will apply just as much after the hype has faded away into history. You should always be scrutinizing your credit card statements, bank balances, and other account summaries very carefully to spot things that don’t belong there. If something appears, contact the vendor immediately and let them know to minimize the damage.

What if I have a secure web site?

If you are a Sales Renewal customer and your site is hosted with us, you have nothing to fear. None of our sites use OpenSSL for their secure connections, so we can categorically say that none of our customers’ sites are affected.

If you are not hosting with us, then you need to contact your hosting provider to find out whether your server(s) are affected by the issue. Most reputable providers will have taken a pro-active stance on this issue and applied the necessary fixes already. If not, then it’s time for a priority support request to fix the problem. If that doesn’t get it done immediately, then it’s seriously time to think about switching hosting firms.

Quick Tip Tuesday: Facebook Etiquette for Company Pages

While your Company Facebook page may at times feel like an extension of your personal page, there are certain rules of etiquette to keep in mind when managing your Company page that may not apply when using Facebook as yourself. Of course, having different sets of rules for business and pleasure should come as no surprise. In most situations – how we answer the phone, conduct ourselves socially, dress – some level of professionalism is required when representing our business that is not always necessary when you are just being yourself.

What follows are answers to some of the most frequent questions our clients ask us about managing Facebook Pages.

Liking, Commenting

Can I Like my Company’s status update?

It’s fine to “Like” or “Share” your own company’s updates as yourself, but don’t “Like” your own posts as your Company. Unfortunately, if you’re a Page manager, it can be easy to fall in to this trap. So, if you want to personally like one of your updates, go to the Company page, click the small You are posting, commenting, and liking as [Your Company Page] – Change to [Your Name] near the top of the page, and then click the Like or Share.

I’ve found something on someone else’s page I’d like to share with my followers. Is that ok?

Sure. Just give credit where credit is due – if you’re re-sharing someone else’s content, give them the credit they deserve, using the @Company or @Name convention.

I used to see updates that always ended with something along the lines of “‘Click Like’ if you like this post, ” but not so much anymore. What’s up with that?

Gone are the days of blatantly “asking” for a like, for either your posts or your business. Good content, good customer service and some time is how you can grow a solid and loyal following.

Content Subjects

I’ve been told I need to “engage” with my followers. Are there some guidelines about how controversial I can be to get the conversation going?

In a nutshell, Facebook is not the place for companies to raise controversy.

• Stay away from politics and religion
• Stay positive, keep it clean, and be professional
• Proofread your posts – typos and bad grammar do not help your professional image
• Remember 80/20 – 80% of what you post should not be all about you

Scheduling and Automation

I’ve found a setting on my blog that allows me to automatically send my posts to Facebook and all my other social networks. Good idea, right?

Actually, we recommend that you don’t auto-post directly from your blog. It may be easy to go that route, but take the extra minute or two it takes to write a thoughtful post – your followers will appreciate it.

Also, don’t post the same status on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+… You may have people who follow you on multiple channels, and it will be very obvious to them that you just blasted your message in as many places as possible. Since each network has its own personality, it deserves its own update.

How about setting up my posts in advance using Facebook’s scheduling option?

Scheduling posts in advance is a great time saver! If you go this route, though, be aware of what’s going on around you. If there’s a national tragedy, for example, review your scheduled posts – you’ll most likely want to cancel or delay them. Followers will see a failure to do this as a lack of sensitivity.

By the way, we couldn’t live without HootSuite – it’s a great tool for managing all these scheduling issues – we recommend trying at least the free account.

Bonus: We recently found this Facebook page: Condescending Corporate Brand Page. It offers some quite funny examples of what not to do as a company on Facebook. Check it out for real-life examples of companies who really missed their Facebook etiquette lessons.

Have a question about blogging, social media, or other internet marketing topics? Add it to the Comments field below, and we’ll try to answer it in a future Quick Tip Tuesday. Sign up for our Growth Spurts blog to get the whole series delivered to your inbox.

Quick Tip Tuesday: Putting the Social in Social Media

Quick – how many people do you have working on your content marketing team? At large organizations, this team can involve many players, from bloggers, content managers and community managers to social media strategists, social media managers, and community moderators. How can a small business keep up?

We periodically discuss ways to tackle some of the overwhelming amount of work blogging and social media can be for a small business owner, including setting realistic goals for what you have the time, budget and talent to take on. For example, scheduling three blog posts a week is unrealistic if you only have enough time to write two a month. Better to start with what you can handle and focus on writing two good ones. Focusing on one social media site and consistently offering content, monitoring and responding is a much better strategy than setting up accounts on six social media networks and having them inactive after a week or two.

But even this minimal level of social activity is a big time commitment, and it can also be a lonely job!

Don’t Go It Alone

Working with a team can go a long way to lightening the work load. It is also in keeping with the “social” part of social media and social networking. (Of course, one of the first steps to a successful program is making sure your employees are aware that you have one!)

Those who give social media advice often draw a parallel between social media networking and interactions at parties or in groups. Well, a party of one is no fun, and obviously provides no opportunity for interacting, learning, and exchanging of ideas, which is the ultimate goal of all of this. (To quote Andy Warhol: “One’s company, two’s a crowd, and three’s a party.”)

If your budget allows, hiring a community manager, bringing in an intern, or outsourcing your content marketing are always options for building your team. Remember, though, that anyone you hire will be speaking on behalf of your company, so even if you go this route, you’ll want to stay involved at some level to be sure your “voice” is consistently put forward. If hiring is not an option, consider looking to your existing staff for help. Is there someone in your office, or even a family member who spends some time on Facebook and would be willing to lend a hand?

Once you’ve determined how much time and resources you have for content and social media marketing, and who will be on your team, you can start working towards your content marketing goals. Teamwork starts at the planning stage (What are we writing about this month? What do our followers seem to react to on Facebook? What will we include in our newsletter?) and carries through to the actual implementation – writing the posts, sharing them, building your social community. We’ll cover this process in more detail in our next Quick Tip Tuesday post, Managing Your Editorial Calendar. Subscribe to our blog to be sure you receive this and for more tips on managing your content marketing program.

Quick Tip Tuesday: March Digital Marketing Advice Roundup

Each month we start our Quick Tip Tuesday series with a roundup of useful, hands-on digital marketing advice from experts in their fields. We’ve extracted the most useful information into bite-sized tips that you can start using right away. We’ve also provided links to the full articles in case you’d like to read more about the topic.
Here, then, are 5 quick tips we’re sharing this month:
1. Ever find yourself hunting around for the perfect image for your blog post? This is a list of great websites that offer free photos. Worth bookmarking!
2. How powerful is your writing? Take a look at Jon Morrow’s list of 317(!) power words that you can start using today. Of course, you don’t want to overdo it, but working in words like gullible, blinded, risky, bumbling, vulnerable, warning, devastating in the appropriate places can go a long way to punch up your blog posts.
3. When writing an email newsletter or promotion: “Cut your message in half, twice.” We like this advice for just about anything we write, from web pages to blog posts to email newsletters. Read the full story from Scent Trail Marketing.
4. Remember the “social” part of social media. Whether you’re having a conversation in person, on the phone, or through your social networks, here are 12 ways to be sure you have better conversations, including tips like:

• have a purpose
• focus on others
• follow up

Try them – it’s not rocket science, but these suggestions do work.
5. It’s fine – and important – for a business to show some personality in its social interactions, but there are some lines that shouldn’t be crossed. This list of Twitter etiquette tips from the Huffington Post offers some straightforward advice to consider. We would recommend keeping these tips in mind no matter what social channel you’re using:

• Eat it, think it, but please don’t post it
• Could a pastor discuss this at his Sunday service?
• Upload a professional profile picture
• Tag your friends with consideration
• Take your complaint offline
• It’s not all about you!

Read the full list here.
Please feel free to share these tips via the options below. And if you’ve incorporated any of these tips into your work, please share in the Comments section. Got a great tip you’d like to see in this list? Send it to us for consideration. Thanks!

Quick Tip Tuesday: 6 Tips for Writing Better Headlines

Write for the SEO value, write for the reader. Write to be clever, write for clarity. When you’re writing a blog post, or a page on your website, finding the right balance between writing for SEO and writing to make your content stand out for the reader can be difficult. And nowhere are these decisions more manifest than in the blog post title or the “H1” of the web page.

Here are some quick tips for crafting better headlines that you can use before publishing your next blog post or web page.

First, start by writing for clarity

It’s an understatement to say there’s a lot of content out there on the web. How do you cut through the clutter?

Begin with a headline that clearly says what your article or post is about – the topic. This is not the time to use cute, clever, or obfuscated titles that don’t provide any clue as to what the reader can expect. Save clever for within the post itself. This method not only addresses search engines (the “topic” in essence is your “keyword”) but also gives your reader a quick insight into what the post is about.

Keep it short – use a 65-character rule of thumb (again, advice that addresses SEO and the reader).

For example, here’s a clear, straightforward headline: Tips for Growing Daffodils.

Then, add some “clever” to make your headline stand out

Writing a clear headline doesn’t have to mean boring. We’ll take our basic headline and demonstrate how, using one or a combination of the following tips, you can embellish and add interest to your headline.

Of course, we don’t recommend using all these techniques with every headline – a variety of well-written titles will also help your content stand out from the crowd.

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A Powerful, Cost Effective Way to Market Locally: A Business Sign

Many online sources of business advice have online myopia: they seem to believe that marketing didn’t exist before Google or that the only way to market a business today is through the Web.

At the risk of sounding like the old guy who yells at the kids to get off of his lawn, “hogwash” I say.

In fact, one of the most powerful, cost effective forms of local advertising is as old as business itself: the business sign. I know it might be surprising to think of the sign on your building or store as advertising, but if you think about the key elements of advertising–branding, impressions, ability to bring traffic through the door–they all apply to signage.

And while the cost of a great sign that can really put your business on the map, help you stand out and be easily remembered might seem high at first, business signs last an eternity in comparison to most online ads (10 years, if you obtain it from a high quality manufacturer). This means that from a cost-per-impression perspective, business signs can be dirt cheap.

Sales Renewal knows this first hand because one of our clients, Metro Sign & Awning, is one of the biggest sign designers in New England and we created a free Signage ROI Calculator for them that compares business signs to other forms of advertising. Here’s the comparison that results when some pretty typical numbers are input:

Seems to blow all the other forms of advertising away doesn’t it?

Our point here isn’t to sell you a new sign (though contact us if you’re interested because we’re sure Metro Sign will be happy to help you), but to remind you that marketing happened before the Internet was invented by Al Gore, and that some of the old ideas and methods are still relevant–maybe even more so–today. This underlines the importance of always looking widely for solutions and not to simply follow the herd or rely on today’s “hottest” fad.

Because sometimes, if you’re looking to do more cost-effective local marketing, the answer can be right outside your front door.