“Gaily bedight

A gallant knight,

In sunshine and shadow,

Had journeyed long,

Singing a song,

In search of Eldorado.”

– Eldorado by Edgar Allan Poe

Businesses don’t have to journey long to find Eldorado of marketing. Most companies start right by establishing a Web site. However, some don’t make the most of having a Web site or build it without considering the requirements for building successful Web sites.

Some build Web sites more like elaborate brochures touting the company’s many qualities and competencies. A few companies, like Amazon.com, and retail giant L.L. Bean, have turned these online retail brochures into success stories. Many try to replicate this success with uneven results.

Web pages tend to require prospects to find them. Then, if the customers find them, they forget about it when they need something.

A few businesses counter these problems by complementing direct email offers with their Web sites. For example, a reader visits Amazon.com to look at the latest fiction releases. Later, the reader starts receiving emails Amazon announcing new releases of fiction, and some accompanied with a discount. These emails contain links taking the reader to the Web page.

Mining Internet for Prospects

Almost three-quarters of American adults are online with half of those having a high speed internet connection at home according to Pew Internet. They still use the Internet for two primary purposes, email (93 percent) and research to find information or driving directions (over 85 percent).

A JupiterResearch report indicates that over 40 percent of email users say that email compelled them to make at least one online or offline purchase. The report also emphasizes the importance of delivering relevant information in emails. Combine email marketing efforts with social networking to have the greatest impact. JupiterResearch also reports over half of business professionals with decision making power say that advertisers have the best chance of reaching them by internet and email.

A successful online marketing plan takes advantage of all online marketing tools including emails and social network sites. A newsletter should contain links to the company’s blogs, RSS feeds and social network identities and vice versa.

A Return Path study states that 85 percent of business people sign up for emails. Furthermore, marketers can reach them on the go as an Exact Target study in 2007 reports one-third of business professionals read emails on mobile devices on a regular basis. In 2007, Wall Street Journal writes that 81 percent of American executives subscribe to business-related email newsletters for product and business information.

What do all of these numbers say? The scream email and internet are important marketing tools.

Compel Readers to Read the Newsletter

Business professionals get over 50 emails a day with plenty surpassing the 100 emails mark. When opening their email, they have three thoughts in mind:

• Which do I read?
• Which I save to read later?
• Which do I delete without opening?

Rule number one: send your newsletter to people who want it, so encourage readers to opt-in to your newsletter.

Rule number two: provide value in your newsletter so they continue subscribing, opening, reading, and acting on your emails.

Most marketers want to thump the company’s chest by talking about great new products or amazing services, touting recent awards, or announcing new hires or mergers. However, the better strategy focuses on the newsletter’s content.

Pull rather than to push with your content by offering articles that explore issues, open dialogue, and solve problems your readers face. Do you care about Company ABC blowing its horn? Americans receive too much email, so they trash anything smacking of a pitch.

Keep your newsletter in the “read and saved” by making sure your content meets the following criteria:

• Relevant: The content speaks to the customer’s interests and not your company’s.
• Anticipated: Distribute on a regular basis so people expect your newsletter to arrive around a specific time, but don’t publish so often they tire of hearing from you.
• Monitored: One of the best online marketing channels benefits is reporting. Monitor how readers are looking at your newsletter and alter it to conform to their interests.

Email newsletters with timely, interesting articles have a greater likelihood of readers forwarding them to others, which increases the number of readers with time. Everyone who reads the newsletter and decides to opt-in to a company’s turns into a qualified lead. Business to business newsletters remain an Eldorado in a Web 2.0 world.

As the Edgar Allan Poe poem ends with one modification…

Down the Valley of the Shadow,

“‘Ride, boldly ride,’

The marketer replied-

‘If you seek for Eldorado!’”

OK, if this poll by British pollsters of YouGov is accurate — then prepare to cringe. The ten most hated words on the Internet — based on a poll of 2,091 adults — reports the following words making the list:

1. folksonomy
2. blogosphere
3. blog
4. netiquette
5. blook
6. webinar
7. vlog
8. social networking
9. cookie
10. wiki

Folksonomy earns its rightful place on the top. Can’t tell you how much work it took me to understand what it means, spell it right (kept writing “folksomy”) and pronounce it (probably still saying it wrong).

The other words make sense. They feel phony. Especially in the earlier days of blogging, it always felt weird to see “blog” and even “weblog.” Saying it sounds too personal like mentioning certain parts of the body.

Cookie may not sound bad, but who wants to see the delightful treat in a sometimes bad light? While cookies save us typing, the bad sites also abuse them giving them a bad name.

Wiki … Hawaiian sounding words are fun, but this one just looks out of place especially in the world of business. “Hey, have you checked the wiki for changes?”

You may have seen “View of the World” art depicting a large city like Chicago, New York, Washington, DC and other cities by Saul Steinberg. A View of the World from 9th Avenue is perhaps Steinberg’s most famous work from the series. I have Washington, DC and New York.

Paul sent me this online communities version that resembles the “View of the World” style. He loves “Blogipeligo.”

In 2000, I wrote an article about Internet and tech terms for Webreference and followed up with others. I revisited the capitalization of Internet, email vs. e-mail, and e-words. Reading WebMarketCentral Blog’s entry (including this one that’s mentioned) motivated me to visit the topic again.

The #1 rule remains: consistency. No one will get cursed writing email vs. e-mail, internet vs. Internet, web site vs. website vs Website vs. Web site. AP Style users need to check with the guide under its entry for Internet, which contains about five pages of terms and how to write them.

Email vs. e-mail

I did a comparison of email and e-mail. It looks like email is finally catching up as the gap gets closer. I think email has been around long enough to earn its own word without a reference to “E” for electronic. I use email without the dash. AP Style uses e-mail with a lower case and a dash as does Webster’s. However, when writing for a source that relies on AP Style, I use e-mail as I follow the source’s style guide not mine.

Internet vs. internet

Wired News online switched to internet, but it doesn’t look like it’s caught on. Wired made it part of its style guide to keep its articles consistent in the writing of internet and I respect that. For me, I can’t bring myself to do it. Internet still rules in my book. AP Style also capitalizes Internet.

In reading a handful of Wired articles, it looks like the magazine uses web, website, and online.

All things web

Capitalize web or not? When should a word with web in it be one word not two? Wired uses web and website. Neither capitalized and website as one word. AP Style says Web is capitalized as in Web site and Web page. However, webmaster and webcast are single words and not capitalized.

Meryl-style: I’ve been using Web site for a long time, but starting to change to web site. Like AP Style, I use webmaster and webcast as one lower-cased word. Webster’s references webmaster and noted that it’s often capitalized.

Other natterings

AP Style says: Login, logon, logoff, plug-in, and online. That’s what I use, too. Although on occasion, I’ll debate whether to use login or logon. I like login better. I’m sure I’ve gotten lazy with plugin, but it looks more like you’re misspelling plugging thus the need for the dash.

Emoticons in sentences

I’ll put a smiley at the end of a sentence and then take too much time debating what to do with the period :). (It makes the smiley look like it has a dimple or worse, a pimple). Or I’ll put a smiley in () and then delete it because the smiley gets lost (Like this sentence :)).

Someone wrote asking about this and I replied there’s no standard. But if you need a standard, this is what I do:

* Treat a smiley at the end of a sentence as the closing punctuation mark. In other words, the smiley behaves like a period :) Then I start a new sentence.

* Avoid having a smiley at the end of a () by leaving it out, rewriting the sentence, or putting it elsewhere in the note.

URLs in sentences

I’ve got a bone to pick with Microsoft Publisher. It hyphenates every article unless you tell it not to. Unfortunately, it’s on an article basis, so I can’t turn off hyphenating for the entire newsletter or document. Can we please have this option, Microsoft?

I work with newsletter editors who use Microsoft Publisher. They’re volunteers, so I don’t like to nitpick. But it can be problematic when the hyphen appears in an email address or URL. Hey, email addresses and URLs CAN have a dash in them. So the reader wonders if the dash is a hyphen or for real. Some readers aren’t tech-savvy and won’t consider trying it with or without the dash.

In writing a URL in an article, I’ll let it break and go to the next line rather than split it. It’s harder to read a URL that’s split up even without hyphens. The drawback is the break could leave too much whitespace in the sentence prior to the URL. For example:

You can read more at

http://www.meryl.net/blog/story/folder/too_long.html

The above may not look weird, but it can in the middle of a paragraph like this one. See

http://www.meryl.net/blog/story/folder/too_long.html

to learn about writing long sentences that bore the reader.

AP Style works around this by recommending that if an address breaks because it reaches the end of a line, break it before a slash or a dot and don’t use a dash or hyphen. Two examples:

http://www.meryl.net
/blog/

http://www.meryl
.net/blog/

AP Style also says to use a period when a URL appears at the end of a sentence. For example:

Check out http://www.meryl.net/.

You can read more at http://www.meryl.net/story.html.

Again, it all goes back to picking one way and sticking with it. Use your best judgment when dealing with URLs, emoticons, and hyphens.

Last year, I made predictions for 2005 along with the other InformIT folks. The original list isn’t online anymore, but I posted the 2005 predictions along with what really happened. I batted average. Some on the mark and some way out there.

So continuing the tradition, I wrote up my thoughts for this year and linked to those who did the same. Not too many common themes popped up. Most of us mentioned Web 2.0 and Ajax in some form, but we said different things.

* Web standards will neither gain momentum nor slow down because it’s become an old topic and people want to move on to new topics. Furthermore, sites coming out with standards-based design aren’t as frequent.

* Ajax and Web 2.0 will continue to buzz though they shouldn’t. Ajax has been happening long before it got a name and Web 2.0 is explained here. However, I can’t imagine them being buzzwords for the entire year.

* More asynchronous Web-based applications using XML and Javascript will make news and impress.

* More sites go for simplicity.

* Colors? Every year a designer predicts a color trend. There’s has yet to been an “in” color since “Zeldman orange.” Sites will do what they see works best for their needs.

* Style. I don’t think the last ten years have seen a style in terms of clothing compared to the past as everything in the past comes back in style and then some. Design has reached that same stage in the past six months that we see few “styles” used repeatedly like rounded corners. The only time we see a lot of the same are with blogs and their templates.

* Big text is finally cool! I’m already seeing a trend and a great one at that! I hope it becomes a permanent fixture.

* Designing for mobile devices picks up speed thanks to more phone / PDA hybrids.

* RSS will steadily climb and we’ll see more sites add feeds and more users adopt it, but it won’t be a dramatic change. Still many sites don’t have RSS feeds as I was trying to find feeds having to do with writing.

* More businesses will jump into blogging especially with an influx of books on the topic coming out in ‘06.

* Blog / Web site advertising. GoogleAds has gotten a lot of competition toward the end of 2005 in Yahoo and Chitika. More will enter the arena.

* Podcasting continues growing. Since speaking and listening are faster than typing and reading, podcasting is more convenient especially since people can take it with them in MP3 players. Of course, this does those with hearing disabilities no good.

* Video / vodcasting. See podcasting especially with the video iPod. Expect to see more players coming out with video versions.

I didn’t mention Ruby on Rails because the business world doesn’t even know what it is while it knows about Ajax and Web 2.0. These predictions try to look at the picture of what we’ll see across the Web.

Other folks’ predictions:

* Baekdal.com

* Robin Good

* Anil Dash

* John Battelle

* Conversion Rater

* Cameron Moll

* Andy Budd

Quickly Learn How to Be a Graphic Designer

A once complicated profession is now something you can do on a standard computer; even with no “artistic” ability.

I had forgotten to post a review of Speed Up Your Site is a must-have for every designer and webmaster’s library. This should be on your desk, not the bookshelf because books on the bookshelf aren’t used as much as those within arm’s length.

Doug Isenberg is an attorney and founder of GigaLaw.com, the Internet law Web site. You can’t beat these qualifications in choosing an author for this book. Anyone who does Web design, manages a Web site will want this book as Internet law is exasperating topic with few clear answers. There are few Web sites on Internet law that can be trusted because the information is flawed or doesn’t accurately explain the law.

The book is divided in seven parts, the major parts of Internet law, for easy referencing. The parts being copyright law, domain names and trademarks, patent law, privacy, free speech and first amendment, contract law and high technology, and employment law. Each part has a case study (Playboy and Electronics Boutique are mentioned) to explain how a real-life situation is impacted by legal issues and lessons learned. Ever notice the copyright symbol on many Web sites? The book clearly explains how it works and the correct way to use it.

The hot topic of online children’s privacy and protection is beneficial to parents and anyone who has a Web site that targets children. The requirements and exceptions of COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act) are clearly described.

This is the source to go to get the answers on how Internet laws affect a business and see bulleted lists of how tos. Though Internet law is a new and evolving area of law, this book’s companion Web site, gigalaw.com, will keep the reader abreast of the latest. The book makes an excellent reference because of the well-organized layout and jargon-free writing, something I thought not possible to do after my attempt in writing about copyrights in Web design.

VITAL STATISTICS:
TITLE: GigaLaw: Guide to Internet Law
AUTHOR: Doug Isenberg
PUBLISHER: Random House Trade Paperbacks
PUBLICATION DATE: October 22, 2002
ISBN: 0812991982
FORMAT: Paperback
PAGES: 432
PRICE: US$17.95

When I began writing articles about the Internet, World Wide Web, and email, I was unsure of how to punctuate or capitalize such words. Checking the dictionary was fruitless because the words haven’t made it there. I sent an article draft to my sister, my second pair of eyes and a former journalist.

She responded, “You must go buy this book: WIRED STYLE.” As the good little sister I am, I did as she commanded. Immediately, I used the book and it helped me through a few entanglements.

Later, I wrote my first article on grammar and used the book and its companion Web site as the primary source. The article was well received and disliked. Most readers were grateful to have someone clarify how to take care of these techie words. But some were horrified that I used such a resource as a reference instead of the Chicago Manual of Style or other favorite resource.

Wired’s introduction indicates, “…intended to complement those guides by digging into questions that writers and editors confront daily-questions of style and substance that Chicago and AP (not to mention Strunk & White) don’t even imagine.” That’s the reason why I used it as my resource. The others didn’t address the issues I confronted while writing my article.

But should this be the stylebook for everyone? It’s definitely not the book many companies use since many argue against Wired’s choice of usage of words. For example, the infamous “email.” Book says it should be “e-mail.” Many are against typing an extra keystroke for the hyphen.

The book lists ten principles for writing well in the digital age. Five relate to prose style and five cover copy-editing style. Principle #2 encourages the writer to play with voice. Personally, I like the casual style, first-person articles. They’re easy to read and enjoy. philophe.com values Wired’s perspective, but believes they do us a disservice by not explaining that realize content and site infrastructure are separate entities.

I agree with philophe.com that a Web site’s style is determined by its company and not by Wired or anyone else. Wired states “Web” is capitalized when referencing the Web, Web sites, Web pages and so on. I use “Web” in here in meryl world and follow the style of the site for which I write.

Not only it can be used as a style guide or reference, but also as a digital glossary. It includes ASP, grok, IP, MIME, push and more. But one term was odd – Unabomber. Excuse me, what does a lunatic guy who sent bombs to people have to do with technology? Other interesting words are “Pong” and “Tetris.” Yes, they’re talking about the addictive games.

Someone asked how do we punctuate around smileys ? Smileys are made of punctuation marks and if the smiley is at the end of the sentence, it could be confusing with a period, question mark, or exclamation mark immediately after it.

Typically, I add a space after the smiley. Wired Style had a smiley at the end of a sentence and the period came immediate after like so . It’s legible, but what if it’s a short smiley ? I think it depends on Principle #1: The Medium Matters. In an informal email using less strict grammar and style rules, I leave out the sentence ending punctuation mark. If a bigwig national magazine wants an article, then I’d ask for their rules. Make the decision based on the medium and the audience, and then be consistent.

This is a good book to have in your library especially for techie writers. The definitions are useful, but there are free web sites like Webopedia to help. I don’t recommend using this as THE digital style guide, but help you create one. The most important thing is be consistent throughout your writing or web site.

VITAL STATISTICS:
TITLE: Wired Style : Principles of English Usage in the Digital
Age
AUTHORS: Constance Hale (Editor), Jessie Scanlon, Hale Scanlon
PUBLISHER: Broadway Books
PUBLICATION DATE: December 1999
ISBN: 0767903722
FORMAT: Paperback
PAGES: 176
PRICE: US$13