Does Grammar Matter?

Oh, boy. If you know me, you're probably amused by the title of this post. A former English teacher, raised in a house where a slipped "between you and I" was never allowed to slide, and now paid to communicate effectively for others, I safely qualify as a grammar-obsessive. Of course, it makes sense that I'm that way-it is, after all, my job to care about grammar. But even I, the grammar-policing, eagle-eyed writer and editor, sometimes miss things. And my latest obsession, the Times grammar blog After Deadline, can make me feel downright careless about grammar. (The weekly quizzes are guaranteed to try even the most nit-picking grammarian.)

So what about everyone else? If even the experts struggle with commas, modifiers, and the occasional tense issue, is it really fair to expect everyone to measure up grammatically? Probably not, but if you've learned anything about life so far, you'll know that fairness and reality don't always go hand in hand.

The truth is that bad grammar in any sort of professional capacity reflects badly on the brand-your personal brand and your company brand. Okay, the real truth is that 90% (a totally random number, I admit, but my guess is it's pretty high) of your audience-clients, customers, prospects-won't notice or care about grammar mistakes. But when it comes to the other 10%, watch out.

This 10% aren't necessarily of one mind: Some are those self-righteous, smug grammar-correcting types who look for any opportunity to kick a poor grammar-oblivious slob when he's down, others are just quietly judging you, some are distracted by an obvious error, and sometimes people are genuinely confused by your lack of clarity (odds are good that if this is the case, you'll sweep a good portion of that otherwise-indifferent 90% into the mix). But cause isn't really the issue here-the real problem is the effect.

Regardless of why your grammar mistakes get noticed, the real issue is that you have managed to distract your target audience from the message you actually want to communicate. While you were passionately trying to convey an important concept, you managed to open the door for your listener or reader to start thinking about other things. This can be everything from the nature of the error to "Do I really want this person representing my company?" or "How expert can this company be? They can't even string together a proper sentence."

Not good.

So what's the fix? Well, I could offer a list of common grammar mistakes, but those might not be much help-common grammar mistakes aren't necessarily your grammar mistakes.

Instead I'd say that first and foremost you should probably start taking grammar-and writing-seriously. You likely have an accountant who handles your company finances, so why would you have a marketing associate write copy for your website? With traditional media laying off people right and left, there's a glut of good, grammar-aware writers out there now looking to ply their trade-think about hiring one of them to write the words that publicly represent your company. At the very least make an investment in a good editor, who can look for grammar errors, tweak style, and generally bring a professional flow to your writing.

What else? Pay attention to good speaking and writing. The more you read well-written books and articles or listen to eloquent speakers, the more you start to notice the way words work together to their best effect.

Finally, if someone does happen to correct your grammar, don't react with a knee-jerk defensive dismissal. (Though you should feel free to make that person feel like a jerk for correcting you. Because unsolicited grammar correction is pretty jerky.) At least stop to think about it. It's never too late to learn the difference between "lay" and "lie" or the simple rules for "if" clauses (a conditional can't be dependent on another conditional!).

And when you do finally become a grammar master, just remember: resist the urge to become the jerk who corrects other people's grammar.

Death and Social Media

The idea for this blog post came from my weekly phone conservation with one of my best friends, Leanne. As we discussed friends', old friends' and ex-friends' Facebook updates, the conversation turned serious. It turns out that Leanne has established rules in the unlikely event that she's taken from Earth before we get the chance to grow old in the same way we grew up-sharing a backyard. She has recorded all of her passwords-from email to Snapfish to Facebook-tucked them in a lockbox and given specific instructions in case of emergency. The first order of business? Remove her Facebook profile before anyone has the chance to write, "R.I.P.," "Your [sic] a star in heaven," or "I know we haven't spoken in 15 years, but..."

Leanne feels that Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, et al are not the places for these public displays of emotion and I have to agree. Obituaries and tributes used to solely be the domain of print media. A longer obit meant you were more well-off, or at least that you had paid the newspaper more, than the Average Joe. Making The New York Times' obituary section meant you were golden, though, undeniably, it also meant that you were dead. But now, social media has gone ahead and robbed print of its last vestige of a business model and made its advance on a previously cornered market.

What is all my overuse of back story about? The fact is that there are proper ways to use social media (Gretel expounded upon the virtues of Twitter here) and not-so proper ways to use social media.

A quick run-down:

Proper

• Announcing your latest happenings or product launches in addition to your usual (t)witty banter.

Not-so Proper

• Only announcing your latest happenings or product launches so you sound like a cheapo late night commercial.

Proper

• Using links from others to bolster your ideas, claims and articles.

Not-so Proper

• Using links from others as the entire basis of your site.

Proper

• Having a personality on your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or MySpace page that demonstrates that you're a well-rounded human being.

Not-so Proper

• Having no personality on your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or MySpace page and existing only as an extension of your company or late-night partying.

Proper

• Asking for help from your followers, friends, or connections and reciprocating the favor.

Not-so Proper

• Only chatting when you need something.

Proper

• Updating and tweeting sparingly with useful content.

Not-so Proper

• Updating and tweeting nonsense at such alarming rates that smoke comes out of your keyboard.

Proper

• Finally, announcing the birth of your child, your engagement, or your wedding is fine.

Not-so Proper

• Announcing the play-by-play of each and every life "event" ("My two-year-old did number 2 on the potty!") is a little much.

And so, laypeople, I sit atop my social media high-horse and tell you this: Use social media wisely and it can be an effective marketing and social tool. Use it improperly and you run the risk of being incredibly annoying at best and blacklisted at worst. And for goodness sake, as the headlines cry "Print is Dying" and "Newspapers: Black and White and Dead All Over?" let's take a step back from social media's endless messages, memorials, tributes and posts and leave death to the medium that knows it best: print.

Our Clients' Extreme Makeovers...

 

 

Even more exciting than taking on a new web project is taking on a web redesign project. I’m not sure why this is the case, but it brings me back to an old Brady Bunch episode where Marcia decides she’s going to take the geeky girl at school and gussy her up a bit. Of course, after taking off her glasses and letting down her hair, geek becomes chic and the rest is history. It’s an exciting proposition but not one that’s easy to come by. You see, you can’t just go after a prospect and say, “Hey, your website really blows, but not to worry, we can make it awesome.” Well, you can, but we don’t. So, when that geek comes a-knockin’ at your door with a plea for just a little bit of cool, well, you just have to jump right in and lend it a helping hand.

That’s what happened with two of our most recent projects and, since we haven’t updated our website for months (new one coming in April), I thought I’d display them here while we’re geeking-to-chicing our own site. I’ll make this quick and painless. First up is HuntBigSales.com. What was once a template-lookin’ disaster, laden with a bunch of “About Us” info and a couple of black-backgrounded blogspot blogs (paging 1997), is now a content rich (e-books, webinars, essays, podcasts, custom blog, newsletters, you-name-it, etc.) dream girl of a site with traffic it never thought possible.

When we started working with Hunt Big Sales’ CEO Tom Searcy he was a bit skeptical about the whole giving-away-free-content thing, but he tried it anyway. Working with someone who’s open to jumping head first into new ideas—he’s even a Twitter expert now, bless his heart—is always fantastic.

BEFORE:

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AFTER:

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Our second before and after tale revolves around USWellnessMeats.com. U.S. Wellness Meats is a grass-fed meat company (a real one that feeds its livestock ONLY grass, rather than half grass, half grain or whatever the loose government standards allow). Their site was once a garbled disaster with a bunch of randomness going on (yes, this is the professional diagnosis). When we first started talking to John Wood, the managing farmer/owner/partner he complained about the lack of accurate information out there about grass-fed meat and sustainable farming practices. He hated the loose definition of “grassfed” and that you have to pay someone off to have the “certified organic” label on your products.

But why wasn’t anyone talking about it? Of course, this is where we turned that question around and asked him why he wasn’t talking about it. And thus was born USWellnessMeats.com 2.0.

What was once a traditional e-commerce site is now a regularly-updated destination site for those looking for facts on sustainable eating, the difference between grass-fed and grain-fed meats, and the health benefits of their products. Inspired by their customers’ passion for health and cooking and the many communications they’ve received over the years, the newly-launched U.S. Wellness Meats 2.0 features regular professional and home chef profiles, a Wellness blog, and “Wellness Kids “among other features. Now, instead of relying on outside media to educate its consumers, U.S. Wellness Meats can do it on their own with full knowledge that the information they’re offering is accurate (not to mention, encased in a gorgeous skin, if we do say so ourselves).

BEFORE:

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AFTER:
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ME FEEDING A CALF:

 

As an interesting aside: We had a chance to go out to Missouri and spend a few days on the farms, interview the farmers, and really dive into U.S. Wellness Meats’ story (check out the picture of me feeding a calf). We learned that because of their sustainable farming practices, while all of the farms in the area flooded last summer, John’s didn’t (naturally-occurring ponds somehow contributed to a flood-proof environment, although I couldn’t give you an intelligent explanation as to how). We learned that John’s farm relies purely on the elements—meaning that he doesn’t even have an irrigation system. For years, neighboring farmers scoffed at his “alternative” farming practices, but the delineation between his farm’s health and his neighbors’ couldn’t be more pronounced. He spoke of turning solar energy into protein energy, showed us how he gives the cattle a plot of grass everyday so that the pastures can replenish themselves before the next grazing (as opposed to free-roaming cattle that eat only the healthy tops of the blades and don’t give it enough time to grow back and gain the proper nutrients), and even answered the obvious question I couldn’t help but ask: “Do they know they’re going to die?” Nope, but a lot of traditionally-farmed animals do. You can tell by looking at the meat: burst red capillaries indicate an adrenaline rush right before slaughter. They realize what’s going on and “freak out,” for a lack of better words. There’s a lot more to tell, but you get the picture.

Smelling the Desperation

Yesterday's New York Times featured an article on content/information sharing on the Web. The gist of it was that a number of traditional media outlets-that also share their content online-are beginning to resent the fact that popular blogs and content aggregation sites (like The Huffington Post) are excerpting their best content, thereby drawing away visitors and, as a result, ad dollars.

In the old world (or more recent Internet past), people were happy to be linked to-after all, someone else with a loyal audience was directing their loyal readers to your site, and the hope was that they would become your loyal readers too. Share and share alike-the best content would ultimately win.

But these days, the situation is getting a lot more heated. Traditional media's business model depends on advertising dollars (and subscribers) for success. But advertising dollars go where the audience is. And the audience is going where the content is free (and easily digestible, accessible, etc.). Thus the popularity of sites like The Huffington Post and other blogs that do all the sorting, sifting and thinking for you-all for free. All of which explains the battle for advertising dollars.

Why should major media outlets think it's fair when other sites waltz in and benefit from their hard work? If someone else is profiting from your content, it's hard to see that as "fair use." You can be sure Nike or Apple wouldn't sit back as someone stole their best work. Why should a company whose product is information?

Which is why, according to that NYT article, some media outlets are returning to their subscriber models, limiting access to content, and making it more and more difficult for anyone other than those who pay to access information.

But here's the problem. Information is a whole lot more complicated and diffuse than an iPod or a pair of running shoes. No one has a lock on most pieces of information or news. People have become accustomed to a world where they don't have to pay for content, which means they aren't going to be easily persuaded to go back to a subscriber model. In the age of the Internet, the reality is that if you can't find a story one place, you can probably find it somewhere else. Maybe it won't be as well written and maybe it will be more "truthy" than truthful, but that's okay.

Sure, there will still be a self-selecting audience that is concerned enough with the value of certain sources that they will be willing to pay, but these people will be few and far between. And they'll become even rarer as older audiences who spent much of their lives paying for news are replaced by people who have never known what it means to pay for any kind of content.

Even worse for mainstream media, these consumers are learning to be just as comfortable getting what they consider reliable information from businesses, bloggers and other sources that would have been considered unreliable not too long ago.

So here's the deal: Yes, I appreciate the level of information that my favorite media outlets (the NYT, WSJ, etc.) give me and in an ideal world, their content would be valued by everyone. Yes, I'd even be willing to pay for them because I really care. But who cares? I'm in the minority.

The reality is that there is no returning to the pay-for-content model. There's too much free stuff out there. Those advertising dollars aren't coming back. Furthermore, even those upstarts like The Huffington Post, which are seen as stealing dollars from mainstream media, are at risk. Why? Because more and more advertisers are realizing that they don't need the New York Times or The Huffington Post-they can just hire the journalists to write targeted content for the very audiences they are currently trying to reach on others' sites.

So get over it mainstream media: it's time for a new business model.