One piece of advice you’ll see over and over again (yes, from me too) is to engage your audience with blog posts, newsletters, email, Twitter and Facebook. This means writing in such a way that your ideas are communicated clearly to your readers.

(Puts on hat of Mrs. Spurlock, fifth-grade English teacher)

Grammar counts!

I followed a link this morning to a blog post that looked interesting, on the subject of making your WordPress installation hacker-proof. The first two sentences read:

Today there is more and more security breaches than ever before. Web browsers seems to fall behind faster than they can spell to themselves and this really makes an online business or venture quite hard work.

Web browsers spell to themselves? Who knew?

The entire article was unreadable because of numerous subject-verb number disagreements. Simple homonym problems such as “boarders” when the author meant “borders.” Not to mention the usual suspects of “it’s/its” and “you’re/your.”

I must be fair. Since there was no contact information on the site, I looked up the domain name WhoIs to find out that the site was registered in Sweden. English is obviously not the writer’s first language. On the other hand, if he is writing for an audience who will read in a language not his own, it seems reasonable to have a fluent speaker review and edit the article. This reads like he ran it through Babelfish.

The writer of this blog post failed in his most important task — he did not communicate his ideas clearly. He was so muddly, in fact, that I have made a note not to follow any links to this particular website in the future. It’s just not worth my time to try to puzzle out what he means.

Spelling counts too!

CBS42.com, which really should know better, recently ran a story about former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy and his ongoing battle with the courts over hidden assets.

Attorney for HealthSouth shareholders John Somerville was quoted:

”[The] IRS back in 2003 documented some 300 million dollars worth of property he had and that frankly a lot of it is missing. All the jewelry, 21 carrot diamonds, artwork is missing…”

Although the meaning of the sentence is still clear in this case, the absurdity of the mental image completely stopped this reader’s train of thought.

How many readers are you potentially losing because of unclear writing or poor spelling skills?

I’m not obsessive about keeping track of my Twitter followers, but I do tend to keep an eye on the total number. If I see a big jump all at once, it’s likely that the spammers are out in force again, and I go check to see who I need to block. If I see a big drop all at once, it might be that Twitter is cleaning out the spammers that I didn’t catch… or… was it something I said?

I may regret this, but I just signed up with a service called Qwitter.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The correct URL is UseQwitter.com. If you try to go to Qwitter.com, you’ll end up on a soft porn page.

You don’t need to give your password, just your Twitter ID and your email address. Qwitter watches your followers list and sends you an email like this when someone unfollows you:

John Gruber (gruber) stopped following you on Twitter after you posted this tweet:

What’s the difference between Arial and Helvetica?

I say I may regret it because it might crush my ego that people don’t like me (sniffle), but on the other hand, it could be good information about who thinks I am boring or offensive (although I’m not nearly as potty-mouthed as some of the bloggers I know. Okay, I’m not really potty-mouthed at all. Don’t want to raise false hopes either). This could help me post more useful information for those who do like what I write.

I’ll report back after I’ve had a chance to collect some data. In the meantime, do you keep track of your followers, or let ’em fall where they may?

Over the past two days, hackers have posted the stolen login information and passwords for thousands of email accounts at GMail, AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. While Gmail has taken steps to remedy the problem, there are some things that you should do immediately to protect your accounts:

– Check your email account for suspicious activity
– Reset your password NOW
– Don’t use the same password for every login you use.

I’m not going to lecture on why it’s a bad idea to use your first pet’s name as your password. I’m just going to show you one way to choose a secure one that isn’t easily cracked.

If you have other methods, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

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In one of my earlier work lives as a quilt book editor, I went to just about every major quilt show and festival held each year. We looked for great examples of quilting art and craft to feature in magazines and books… and like everyone else, we shopped a little while there.

Only a little. Those rumors you heard about my not being able to see out the rear view mirror coming home are completely unfounded. I promise.

Because I was there on business and had to maximize the use of my time, I had to develop an efficient way to see everything and then to whittle down to things I was most interested in. I also have a mild sensory integration dysfunction, which means that I get overwhelmed really easily. I needed to create a checklist to keep myself on target.

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Recently I had an unpleasant experience with a quilting retailer. My personal email address ended up on a list that I did not join. I have never had any business dealings with this company and I suspect my address was harvested from a two-year-old trade show list of attendees.

When I asked politely for her to unsubscribe me because I hadn’t signed up for her list, she replied that I had to go to her website to unsubscribe myself, and then accused me first of lying about not signing up for her list and then of trying to use other peoples’ problems to increase my own web design business.

Obviously this person has some serious customer service issues, but let’s deal only with the email debacle.

Was it Spam?

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Not a friendly way to deal with your customers!

This morning I received a blog post notification email. If you have a WordPress blog or have ever followed someone who does, you know what I mean — you can subscribe to receive an email when an update is posted. It’s a great way to keep up with blogs that you might otherwise forget to check on a regular basis.

Only one problem… I had never even visited this blog, let alone signed up for email notifications.

Make that two problems: The blog owner didn’t provide an unsubscribe link in the email. While this isn’t required by the 2003 CAN-SPAM act that regulates all commercial emails in the US, it is modern standard practice, and people expect to be able to hit the “unsubscribe” button and delete the email.

So I replied to the email with a polite note: “Unsubscribe, please. I have never visited your blog and certainly never signed up for your email notifications.”

To which I received a fairly chilly reply that this person doesn’t subscribe individuals and I should go to the main website page to unsubscribe myself.

This is not my responsibility.

Even if were not required as a matter of law, as a matter of courtesy the site owner should apologize and immediately remove the name from the mailing list.

Oh, but then it got worse. I went to this website to find out that it was using an outdated version of WordPress, known for almost two months to be subject to a serious scripting vulnerability. I notified the site owner that the WordPress installation was unpatched and that the site was possibly being used to send out spam. I received a rather ill-tempered response saying the site was not compromised, and again telling me that I needed to go to it and unsubscribe.

Even if I were interested in this site’s products, they’ve lost me as a customer forever. In addition to which, I’ve now written about it (although without naming the company) and several thousand more people now know about this bad customer management practice.

Be courteous not only to your customers, but to those who might be customers as well. It’s only good business!

UPDATE: I have received one additional email from the company’s spokesperson. I signed my last email with my full name, website address, and “webhosting and web design services” to indicate that I knew what I was talking about. The final email accused me of going out to look for other peoples’ problems in order to build up my own business. Definitely some ill temper going on there. And definitely some customer service problems.