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A Go-To Guide to Screwing Up Your Landing Pages by Lindsay Kolowich

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Landing pages are the core of the conversion process. They are one of the best ways you can convert website visitors into leads and leads into customers. But a high-converting landing page isn't just a random form, a little description, and a kind-of-related image thrown together onto a web page -- you have to build each component thoughtfully and strategically.

To get people to convert on your website, the conversion process needs to be a) easy, and b) enjoyable. The key is keeping visitors on your page long enough to get them to fill out your form, which means clean formatting, concise language, and a compelling offer.
But it's not as easy as it sounds. There are a lot of really awful landing pages out there. To help you convert as many visitors as possible into leads, here is a comprehensive look at the things you shouldn't do on your landing pages -- and how you can fix them.

The 12 Ways You Can Totally Screw Up Your Landing Page

1) It takes more than a second or two to load.

Did you know that 40% of people will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load? That means you will lose 2 out of every 5 people who come to your landing page before you even have a chance to show them what you've got. Fast page load times means better user experience and it helps your Google search ranking.

How to Fix It:

Catch the problem early by monitoring your page load times and fixing them as soon as you notice they're slow. Learn how to monitor and improve your page load time here.

LEARN AND READ MORE HERE
 

 




  

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 Lindsay Kolowich

Lindsay is an inbound marketing blogger at HubSpot. She's into business, marketing, the ocean, and the Boston Red Sox. Hoya Saxa!

How to Spot a Bad Email List and Turn It Into a Good One~ By Lindsay Kolowich

Email is still one of the best ways to reach your target audience, contrary to what you may have heard. In fact, customer acquisition via email has increased by 4X in the last four years.

But it’s not the best way to reach people who don’t want to hear from you. Bad lists won’t just stall your marketing efforts, they’ll actually undermine your business. If you don’t regularly clean your email lists to ensure everyone you email has a valid email address and actually wants to receive your stuff, here’s what you can expect to happen: 

         

1. People will ignore, delete, or mark your emails as spam.
2. Your deliverability and sender score reputation will decline.
3. Your open and click-through rates will drop.
4. Your unsubscribe rate will rise.
5. You might get in trouble with the law.
6. Your boss won’t be happy to see your email marketing metrics start to tank.

Since you probably don’t want any of those things to happen, we’re here to give you info on turning your bad email lists around. In this post, I’ll go over what bad and good email lists looks like, and what steps you can take to transform your bad ones into good ones. By the end, you’ll be in much better email marketing shape.

What a Bad Email List Looks Like

It was bought, rented, or borrowed.

With aggressive goals on the horizon, it can be tempting to acquire email lists the quick and dirty way. But sending emails to people who don’t have a prior relationship with your business will severely hurt your reputation with your prospects, your internet service provider, and your email server.

First of all, any email list that’s for sale or rent is guaranteed to be low quality. Nobody with a good email list would give it up to somebody else because its value would decline as more and more irrelevant content is sent to it.

Secondly, people really don’t like being spammed. Recipients of your emails weren’t expecting to get an email from you -- and they likely didn’t want to get an email from you. Many of them will mark your message as spam, which hurts the Sender Score of the servers you send from. This taints your IP reputation and makes it harder for your future emails to get delivered. Many email service providers will cut off senders that violate certain limits because of the impact on IP reputation and delivery. You’ll also put your company in jeopardy because you’re all on the same IP address, and those can take months to recover.

Plus, you’ll be known as a spammy marketer -- and you’re better than that!

There are other options people can take besides hitting “spam” -- and they can hurt almost as much.  According to the 2014 Science of Email report, The most common responses to unwanted email are, in order: 1) ignore or delete, 2) unsubscribe, and 3) mark as spam. This isn’t good news: ignoring or deleting emails are also terrible for your reputation and can cause you to get caught in spam filters more often and will reduce your conversion rates.

It has steroidal growth.

The size of your list doesn't account for the quality of email addresses on it. Steroidal growth of email lists either means your team is buying or renting email lists, or there are bots filling out your forms. List quality suffers significantly either way.

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Lindsay Kolowich

Lindsay is an inbound marketing blogger at HubSpot. She's into business, marketing, the beach, and the Boston Red Sox.

You Must Live Tweet Live Events~By Chris Abraham

I can’t believe you’re still hiring professional photographers with expensive DSLRs who shoot your events live but time-delay the results by days and weeks. Yes, I am looking at you!
I am not saying you shouldn’t hire a professional team for posterity, the Annual Reports, and your organization’s archive; but why are you time-delaying your fundraisers, events, conferences, gatherings, jamborees, and rally by hours, days, and weeks when you have all the cheap-and-accessible tools all around you to take dozens of “good enough” images real-time, allowing hundreds, thousands, and millions of friends, family, fans, and potential donors, clients, customers, attendees, and members to get a selective and well-curated peek into all the cool stuff you do every day, as it happens, live, en masse, over the course of the entire event, instead of only the tightly-edited album you may only share with your current friends and family, all in one dump, at one moment, well after the event is far in the rear view mirror.
Yes, those professionally-shot 16.2 megapixel photos may well be well-lit, hi-def, perfectly posed, and color-corrected, but they’re also planned, dull, and edited down to so few images that all you’re left with are some boring photos of some random “celebrity” at a dais, some sponsors, board members, and honored guests mugging in a huddle, some glad-handing photos, and maybe a snappy of plates of rubbery chicken on linen-festooned banquet tables. Lame. Keep the pro shooters but see if they might be willing to live tweet, Vine, Instagram, Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumbl on your behalf, logging in to your Twitter, Vine, Instagram, Google+, Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumbl accounts before the night begins; alternately you can follow my advice below and get the sort of impact you need from the events that you’ve spent a lot of money and energy on already — events that could really help your brand profile in the noisy, noisy, world — but at which there are only dozens to hundreds of attendees and not the thousands-upon-thousands you’ve acquired through social media marketing across all of your social networks and social sharing platforms. Plus, there’s the excitement of the check-in, be it checking in on Foursquare, Facebook, Google Plus (or even on Foursquare through Instagram, actually).

LEARN and READ MORE
HERE

CONNECT with the AUTHOR
HERE

Authored by:

Chris Abraham

Chris Abraham is a leading expert in digital, including online reputation management (ORM), Internet privacy, social media marketing and digital PR with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement and Internet crisis response. Chris is Principal Consultant of Gerris digtial
A pioneer in online social networks and publishing, with a natural facility for anticipating the next big thing, ...

See complete profile

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WANT TO LEARN MORE: 

7 Little Tricks to Spruce Up an Ugly Excel Graph by Ginny Soskey

It's really tempting to let terrible Excel graphs creep into your marketing. Your boss doesn't care about little things like how graphs look, right? And whatever Excel comes up with as the default is probably fine ... right?                                                  

Not really. You're using data to spur action. Maybe you pull data to convince your boss to adopt inbound marketing, give you an extra sliver of budget, or adjust your team's strategy, among other things. Regardless of what you use data for, you need it to be convincing -- and if you display data poorly, the meaning of your data is more likely to get lost.
To make sure you're making your data as convincing as possible, you should always customize your graphs in Excel. And by customization, we're not talking about big sweeping changes. Below are some quick tweaks you can make to your graphs convincing, easy-to-read, and beautiful.
Note: I'm using Excel from 2011 on a Mac. If you're using another version or operating system, implementing the following tips may look different. 

1) Pick the right graph.

Before you start tweaking design elements, you need to know that your data is displayed in the optimal format. Bar, pie, and line charts all tell different stories about your data -- you need to choose the best one to tell the story you want.
Bar graphs and pie graphs help you compare categories. Pie graphs usually compare parts of a whole and bar graphs can compare pretty much anything ... which means often you should just use a bar graph. Bar graphs are easier to read and notice incremental differences between categories, so it's a good go-to. Pie graphs are best used when one of the categories is way larger than the other.
Want to see the difference? Here's an example of the same data set displayed as a pie graph and a bar graph:

WANT TO LEARN MORE

CLCIK HERE

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Written by Ginny Soskey

 

Ginny Soskey is a Staff Writer for HubSpot, creating written and multimedia content for the Marketing and Sales sections of Inbound Hub. Say hey to her on Twitter @gsosk.

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Recover Lost Data Under All Conditions

• Accidental Deletion Events


• Delete -- "Shift + Del" key entry (with no prior backup)
• "Delete All" selected in error
• Delete Files from the DOS command prompt
• Recycle Bin erroneously emptied (and no backup)
• Delete File Using Move or Cut command

• Accidental Formatting or Reformat


• Formatted Media/Device in error
• Accidentally format the storage device, even Windows reinstallation.
• Complete formatting of the partitions or the logical volumes
• Disk initialization when digital camera memory card is just connected

Free Scan Lost Data and Recover Now

*WiseRecovery will recover documents and other files after deleted or lost.

• Improper Operation


• Hard disk with bad sectors, Factory reset;
• FAT is damaged; MBR is destroyed;
• FDISK or other disk utilities have been run;
• Improper partition or partition error, even hard disk crash.

• Other Scenarios


• Computer viruses and worms infection or corruption
• Damage due to a power failure or surge
• When the partition structure on a hard disk was changed or damaged;
• Damaged or deleted partitions;
• After the partition with the files was reformatted, even for different file system;
• Disk corrupted, erased data, damaged device, reformatted disk. 

WANT TO LEARN MORE:

7 Reasons To Connect With Influencers by Becky Livingston

Influencer engagement is no longer a nice to have. It’s a must for businesses that want to expand their digital reach.
This fall I am teaching a Social Media Certificate program at the local community college, and the topic of engaging with influencers has come up. It’s an exciting topic and offers participants a chance to see how engaging with those who influence a topic, region, market, or product can help brand out.
Remember there is a difference between an influencer and brand advocate. Here is an infographic to help you to better understand the differences and benefits of each.

Some Stats

Earlier this year, Technorati released the 2013 Digital Influence Report, which outlines some pretty amazing statistics about the influencers’ role in online and digital marketing, such as:

• 65 percent of brands participate in influencer marketing; yet only 6 percent of social spend is allocated to marketing to influencers. I’m unsure how that makes sense.
• 86 percent of influencers blog. Do you have a blog? Maybe they can help you promote it.
• 31 percent of influencers have been blogging for five or more years.
• Blogs were found to be the fifth-most trustworthy source overall for information on the Internet. What were the other four? YouTube, Facebook, Retail sites, and Google Plus

WANT TO LEARN MORE: 

Justin Cofield on AMP Up Your Social Media

In this episode, Justin Cofield, Digital Strategist at Vector Marketing joins the show to discuss how direct selling powerhouse CUTCO leverages social media in its marketing efforts. He also discusses the power of great content in its impact on sales and engagment.

Have a full understanding of what your organization’s goal is with regard to social.

Subscribe and get the AMP Up Your Social Media podcast on iTunes or listen below. Tweet about the show using #AUYSM or Tweet at us @AMPUpSocial.
About Justin Cofield
Justin Cofield is the Digital Strategist at Vector Marketing. Justin is well-versed in the direct selling model, having demonstrated personal success as an independent CUTCO representative and District Manager, now developing and implementing high level digital marketing strategies in North America including social media and mobile.

LISTEN TO JUSTINS PODCAST HERE: 

Come Visit Me

How to Generate Leads Creating Articles Like Magic

Laugh at Google's Duplicate Content Ban when You Discover...

From the Desk of Alexander Krulik
Wednesday, 11:11am
Dear Friend,
There are tons of ways to generate traffic and build your business or practice online. There are new slick marketing ideas popping up all the time, one after another, claiming to be the next best thing.
However, one of the easiest, proven, most time-tested ways to attract new business and more traffic to your site is to become a sought after authority and gain expert status in your field. 
One of the biggest secrets that the top marketers don't talk a lot about is the fact that they ALL have built their credibility, visibility, and their lists of gold by writing articles.
In fact, multi-million dollar online entrepreneur Ali Brown says that:

"This is a tried-and-true method that will NEVER stop working, unlike the latest and greatest gimmicks to spoof the search engines.

(Try one of those and see how quickly your traffic halts once the bottom drops out.)

Search engines love real content and will always love real content."
Ali Brown,
http://AliBrown.com

And this is only scratching the surface...

WANT TO LEARN MORE ? CLICK HERE: 

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5 Definitions for Great Marketing Every Business Must Know ~ by Phil Butler

by Phil Butler

Well, supposedly Seth said something like this, but the reality is closer to good marketing “winning” the contest for consumer attention. If you ask 100 people to define marketing, you’ll also get 100 different answers, two for each for discerning what PR is. This is problematic, obviously. How can you expect a business owner to trust you if you cannot accurately define what it is, and how you do something?

To bridge this gap of understanding a bit, we need to turn to Peter Drucker (at left) to simplify what marketing is. Drucker, for those who do not know, created the basic foundations of so-called management by objectives, or participative goal setting, strategic course of actions and the decision making process. If business is about first innovation, and then marketing it, then the latter is as much a “product” as the product or service itself. I believe “integral” fits here as one clearly defined “must” for marketing know how. Here are five fundamental rules for defining yourself as a marketer, just in case.

One: Marketing is about the “win-win”

Like it or not, the best marketers understand longevity and success are all about winning products or services going to customers who win out for having bought them. Value may be a cliche term, but if your product sucks, you won’t be in the game very long. Winning, they say, is everything. The first definition of marketing know how has to be then, knowing there are only two entities in the marketing equation – buyer and seller. Both have to win.

Two: A Marketer Understands People, Most of All

Figuring out what the customer wants. This is a big task, and we are not talking about “convincing” consumers to buy what “we” want them to buy. Anylizing trends, tabulating so-called Big Data, whatever metrics we throw at the problem of consumer wants, the best marketing guru out there realizes first, there’s a human being on the other end of his or her computing. Sometimes, no matter what the “data” says, marketing is also about “gut feelings”; “Would I ever, would my family ever, would anyone really want this product pitched this way?” The human side, this is the Holy Grail of marketing no matter what era you come from. You may have heard someone like Brian Solis (below) talk about the marketing funnel being broken, well the part that’s broken is the understanding of the people in the center of the funnel.

 

Knowing how people see you, your product, how they will react, this human side is all important

 

LEARN & READ MORE:

 

 

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Google Analytics Cementing its Place in Social Media Reporting~By Tuhin Ghosh,

Social Media Reporting on Google Analytics

With Google announcing their social media reporting extension in Google Analytics, social media marketing experts can now see the financial value of their efforts. This is already pushing new trends into existence in 2013 and the face of social media SEO may soon change forever. Mind you, now the reports only apply to a few select social media sites that keep Google happy. So are we really getting a comprehensive picture?

The new Google Analytics social reports

Social media marketing usually piques interest and raises brand awareness, but seldom sells directly. The first new report available from Google Analytics examines conversions through social media. By using the new Google Analytics reporting, you can get a good idea of the effect social media has had on your site. It tells you the conversion value total, the maximum value of social media conversions and any sales resulting from direct social media visits.

Segmentation graphs

Image courtesy of ddpavumba, freeDigitalPhotos.net
 

You can also contrast your social traffic conversions with the rest of your website, through social segment graphs. Examining your visitor referrals and channel grouping all social media sites, is how this reporting works. Segmentation of this type could be obtained before, of course, but only going back by one month. Now you can get an overall idea very quickly, and evaluate how social media is benefiting your financial goals (or not).

Social actions

This shows how well your content strategy works in terms of being shared. Unlike social plugin reports, no further tagging is necessary. Everything has been moved to the new Google Analytics social media reporting. The social actions reports do need tagging for social network buttons so they appear correctly on your site, only – in the case of Google+ – this is already done for you.

Social actions off your website

This one is important. You can now evaluate performance by figuring out which content performs well in which social media. The social networks that form part of Google’s Social Hub program, i.e. Delicious, Blogger, Reddit and Google+, will allow you to follow user discussions about your website, even if they do not click through. Facebook and Twitter are excluded, however, so the reports may not be too accurate with these two major players absent from the equation. No one knows whether Facebook and Twitter will hone their own social analytics reporting to compensate for this or eventually end up taking part in the Google Hub project.

Image courtesy of jscreationzs, FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Unknown territory

2013 will show what the new Google Analytics reporting uncovers. Perhaps we will simply find out that not many people are bothered or affected by social media (at least to the extent that they click on links to buy things). People may or may not buy the same stuff as other people on their social media networking sites. It is always a possibility that their purchases are simply guided by what they personally want or need!

So what might 2013 bring?

Social media marketing will probably begin to look at subtler patterns in 2013, although in the process, it may well come up against user privacy issues. One thing is for sure though: 2013 will be a VERY interesting year for gathering information about the value of social media marketing!

READ MORE:

Customer Service Is More Than Just Being Nice~By Flavio Martins

Many organizations tackle the issue of customer service by just telling their employees to smile.

Be polite. Never lose your cool. But isn’t that a little like closing the barn door after the horses have gotten out?
Good customer service should be about a good customer experience with your product. This begins with the relationship your company cultivates with a customer.

This relationship will be tested by the entire process of the buyer seller relationship.

1. The images and promises of the marketing campaign

People begin to form opinions of your company and products from the messages they receive before they even purchase your product. Often, they receive these images before they have even thought of buying. Will your images match the experience?

2. The ease of ordering/purchasing the product

Once someone has decided to purchase your products or services, how easy do you make it for them to do so. Is there someone to answer the phones or will they get a voice mail message? Actually, many companies lose sales in this way. Some people, who want to act now, will simply hang up and go on to the next company that will answer their call.
Also, many leads are not followed up A message is left but no one gets back. When the buyer does reach you, are your systems in place to make the purchasing process as simple as possible? Buyers want to feel that they’ve made the right decision in choosing your product. By creating an easy process for ordering, you help them feel confident in their decision.

3. How well does the product live up to the expectations of the marketing?

Your customer now has your product in his possession. Will it live up to any hype used in the marketing campaign? Or will there be a letdown when the actual product does not match the expectations? Marketing is a powerful force. It will create expectations that must be fulfilled by the product. When it doesn’t, it can create customer satisfaction problems. Make sure your product matches expectations.

4. How well will the product live up to the expectations of the customer?

In addition to the marketing message, a customer usually forms his own expectations based on past experiences with similar products, observations and conversations with others. Will this add to the experience or create a letdown? Product must match expectations or exceed them. Anything less will create a potential customer service problem.

5. When something goes wrong, how is it fixed?

Do you acknowledge that problems can happen? Have you decided how to satisfy customers? Have you looked at the financial ramifications of your solutions? Better yet, look at the product itself. If you find many customers with similar products, perhaps it is most appropriate to address weaknesses in the product itself.

6. What are the procedures?

Even with the best of products, problems can occur. It’s best to address these issues beforehand. Decide what processes will be used to satisfy your customers. Think about replacement and its cost, discounts, etc. If you are going to replace a product, how quickly can you get it to someone? As a replacement, it must take precedence over new orders.
Jo Ann Kirby, President of KRG Communications Group, has 20 years experience in sales, cusotmer service, telephone sales, management with an extensive background in training and development. Her background also includes extensive B2B telesales management experience. Jo Ann has been published in The Toastmaster, NAPPS Network and Commerce magazines. Jo Ann says:
Customers will tell more people when they’ve had a bad experience then when they’ve had a good experience. Solving customer problems not only affects that specific customer but many other people as well.
-Jo Ann Kirby, President of KRG Communications Group http://www.krgcommunications.com

7. Can your organization be easily reached or is the process frustration to most?

Everyone has frustrating stories to tell about voice prompts that go nowhere. They don’t cover your problem and they continually loop back into the system without a way to speak to a live operator. Make it easy for people to speak with someone. Test your systems thoroughly. Automation can be a great help and a cost saver for organizations but it must be used judiciously.

8. Can the customer service rep actually help?

Customer services reps must be empowered to solve problems. They must be able to do more than empathize and smile. Nothing is more frustration than a nice customer service rep that is unable to resolve your problem. Give your staff the appropriate information and training. Let them have responsibility and accountability for their actions. Employees tend to rise to the level that is expected of them.

Good customer service requires an ongoing examination of methods.

Making these suggestions part of your daily customer experience management routine will start the thought process necessary to truly deliver world class service. 


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Author: Flavio Martins Flavio Martins on the Web Flavio Martins on Facebook Flavio Martins on Twitter Flavio Martins on LinkedIn Flavio Martins on Google Plus Flavio Martins RSS Feed

Flavio Martins is the VP of Customer Support at DigiCert, Inc., and leader of an award winning global customer service team. As a customer service blogger, and customer service fanatic, he's on a mission to show that excellent service can be consistent, simple, and easy. Blog: Win the Customer!... View full profile

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mea maxima culpa marketing....

By Chris Abraham.

Something’s always going to go wrong. Murphy’s law demands it. It is your mandatory tithe into the Universe. This is true about everything. I guess character is what shows when things go wrong. And it’s what you do when things don’t go right that defines you. And it’s never the end of the world. In fact, sometimes really messing up can initiate a valuable interaction that wouldn’t have ever happened were the mistake avoided. You’ll always be remembered more for how you handle something than for what you did in the first place. This is what I call “Mea Culpa Marketing.” How to handle something going terribly wrong with as much honestly, aplomb, and grace as you can muster while you’re petty convinced that the end is nigh. And when things go even worse than that, I call it “Mea Maxima Culpa Marketing.”
The truth about mea culpa marketing is that you can’t — or shouldn’t — do it intentionally — though maybe by the end of this blog post you may want to give it a go, just as a test. Don’t. It’s way too high-risk; however, always be prepared to turn lemons into lemonade when they do go south.
When things go sideways, make the most of it; when you’re thrown to the wolves or tarred and feathered or put in stocks or publicly mocked, your next steps, words, responses, reactions, and behavior is what will both define you and how you will be remembered.
Here’s a very fresh and recent example I’d like to share with you. Last week I sent out an announcement email to thousands of my tightest friends as well as thousands more to very weak connections indeed, who are, at best, acquaintances. I move around a lot so the role of the email was to let everyone know that I was starting with my new agency, Unison, and that I would surely love to chat about it. Here it is in full:

Subject: Following up on my previous email

Hi {first name}

I just wanted to let you know that I accepted a position with Unison as the director of social media. It’s right up my alley because they work with brand communication, creative and tech marketing PR/advertising; creative direction and design; and even app dev for web/mobile. There’s plenty room for collaboration.

I’d love to catch up with you. How are you doing anyway?

Cheers,

Chris

I surely don’t mean to be glib with this post. If you ask anyone, I was beside myself when I saw that my email merge not only didn’t work but went out to people who’s opinions I care about with the {first name} variable embedded in there. You can ask my email guy: I was a mess. But I have experience and these things do happen and no matter how quickly you want to grab your tanto and end it all like your samurai bushido honor code dictates. Don’t do it. Embrace it. It really is OK and I, too, have survived shame and public floggings — you just need to take your impulse for harakiri and turn it into something much more positive.
In many cases, the sort of tarring and feathering response you receive in reaction to something gone wrong is a better and more complete engagement than when things go flawlessly right.
Here’s my story. I had sent an email to the same list of strong friends and weak connections a couple months ago so it was an update and a follow-up. It had gone off without a hitch as I was assured by my mail guy that the above email, above all he had ever sent, had easily made it into every single email Inbox that we sent it to.
Unfortunately, I quickly realized that a bunch of first responders were ribbing me because they received their email not with “Hi James” or “Hi Mark” but with “Hi {first name}.” I reached out to my email guy and he told me that there were only 30 in this boat — but it surely felt like a hell of a lot more. In fact, it felt to me like the most prized and important of all of my industry contacts received these.
How did I behave? Contrite-as-hell! I happily threw myself on my sword and begged forgiveness — and not in a way that in any way diminished the import of the error. To me, it is always serious, worthy of Seppuku. As serious as a heart attack. It is never for me to say things like “it happens” or “no big deal.” It is only the recipient who is allowed to play, to mock, to judge, or to forgive. It is my job to only be grateful, ashamed, and passionately beet-faced and full of regret.
Why is why one cannot — and should not — build Mea Maxima Culpa Marketing into their social media marketing plan: if it isn’t authentic, if it becomes too regular, or if the tone of contrition seems hollow or false, you’ll probably just make it worse, much worse.
Heaven forbid if you’re brazen or defensive or if you fight back! Heaven forbid if you’re the one who says things like, “it happens to everyone” or “whoops, look what happened” or if you don’t take the situation or misstep completely seriously. If you struggle, fight, or allow your ego to not handle the embarrassment, you will not only not be forgiven or laughed off as a glitch or the price of doing business, you’ll probably rather end up on The Bad Pitch Blog or the subject of a case study of what not to do in Communications or with Email.
No matter what, you’ve done something inexcusable, for reals, and it’s only by the grace of the recipient do you live to see another day. However, if you’re able to fully accept responsibility, throw yourself down at the mercy of every single one of the people you’ve wronged, show honest contrition, appropriate seriousness, and then have enough humor and grace to be joshed with, you might actually grow in the esteem of those people around you.
I am no method actor so I can’t ever fake this, so I don’t — but it really works.
In a world where everyone wears such shiny, shiny public armor, it’s always hard to get a bead on someone’s character; this is especially so in a virtual world where many of us never meet in person. We never have the opportunity to get drunk, fight bulls, climb mountains, or sail boats together — experiencing each other under stress and duress. The kind of experience that really allows you to know each other well past the well-quaffed public mask, cultivated and intentional. Just like the New Yorker said years ago: “On the Internet, nobody knows you ’re a dog.”
Unfortunately, online, there are very few tried-and-true ways of stress-testing who you are and what you’re about.
When things hit the fan, people are very curious to see what happens next. They say, about the news, “if it bleeds it leads” — scandal and sensationalism is what people are drawn to and the way you handle any particular situation is how you’ll be remembered rather than the situation you got into in the first place.
I go into this a little bit in last week’s post Build some social media marketing backbone you big wuss:

“It doesn’t matter that 1%-10% of everyone online grouses at just about anything and everything. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. And it’s not nearly that scary or dangerous, my friends. A lot of it is more about stress-testing you to see what kind of person you are. A little bit of hazing to see if you can take a punch or if you ’re just going to log-off immédiatement! Tout de suite!

Are you tough? Do you spook easily?

So much of the time they’re just testing your mettle and you ’re bolting in tears, afraid of blow-back, with your tail between your legs (even now, I am baiting you and just plain curious to see if you can take a joke, Peter Johnston, you minx) and pull all your resources out of social media because “it’s not worth the risk,” or so say your managers and counsel. Oh for heaven’s sake.”

And that’s what happens when everything’s going well if not perfectly. When things turn ugly and venture into crisis, how tough will you be then?
Dealing well, publicly, with adversity is what separates a seasoned Communications professional from a neophyte.
How did it go for me?
As I am sure you’ll expect, quite few of the folks who received the {first name} emails were concerned for me and quickly let me know. Another bunch gave me zingers and goosed me by responding with:

Dear Chris,

Please remove me from your list. Congrats on the new position. I wish you well.

Love,

{first name}

Some of them responded with pity, others said to me “it happens” or “happens to the best of us.” And it’s just fine and dandy that they say it, but contrition — a full mea maxima — does not allow that you ever agree with them. No! At most I will ever say, “thank you, that’s very generous of you to say.” And I mean it, too. The part that I can’t fake is that I was lucky enough to grow up Roman Catholic so a come from a pretty strong base line of guilt anyway — like background radiation. So, I am always pretty close to actually rending my sackcloth. In fact, my dentist knows how much I gnash my teeth so he sold me a guard long ago.
If you’re shameless and fearless, get someone else to be your crisis-response, mea maxima culpa marketing professional.
A few of those folks who responded to my email tweeted their glee and indignation that I would send such an email in bulk and that I was trying to fool them into believing it was in earnest and only to them, a fair statement and I was terribly sorry about that — for real.
I deserved it — what I did was patently inexcusable.
At the end of the day, I was able to use humor, contrition, a thick skin, my ability and willingness to be sorry and appalled, and the fact that I responded quickly and personally to every single response into well over a thousand personal email replies, many of which were not botched, many of which I could better read as simply teasing and playful and not the end of the world once the storm lifted (these experiences are emotional, even when you’re being your best professional self, you still are allowed to have feelings).
And this big mistake might very well end up being the best thing to ever happen to this particular communication. For two reasons:

1. Many more people responded because of my failure — and I was able to engage with all of them even if not all outcomes were positive
2. Because I as fighting for my life over this gaff, I spent extra time and attention and gave more of myself and didn’t just call it in, as I might have done had the email gone off flawless.

I would love to continue the conversation about this in the comments. Feel free to ask me anything you want. This post wasn’t easy at all for me to write, as I am sure you might guess.
And to you who received an email from me and didn’t enjoy it, I want you to know that I really do feel quite badly about it. I will try harder next time, I promise.

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