On Words and Business

Check out these predictions for 2015.

My favorites:

• Filtering the noise, and remembering that noise is lack of relevance and is relative.
• Quality, to attract the right sets of eyeballs.
• International customization, as it is not all about the U.S. market.

Check out this great infographic on emailing–how we use it and how to make an impact with email messages you send.

Can five million messages (the number analyzed to create this graphic) be wrong?

Government agencies create content all the time.

Though the purpose may not be to sell anything, content created for a government website must still engage readers and earn their trust.

Check out this post of mine at Content Marketing Institute analyzing the good, the bad, and the ugly of government content .

In business writing, it’s okay to occasionally break the rules. This type of writing usually is supposed to be more formal that other kinds, but that doesn’t mean you can’t mix it up a little bit.

• And start a sentence with a conjunction, for example.
• Or end with a preposition–the kind your English teacher told you never to end a sentence with.
• Or to deliberately split an infinitive.
• Or let the passive voice take over for a few sentences.
• Or just go crazy. With. Punctuation. And sentence structure!

Within reason, of course. The line not to cross is probably a little farther than you usually go, but not as far as some of those horrible examples we all have in our heads. Have fun with it.

A very smart man just told me about his belief in successive approximation. He was talking about manufacturing, but the concept holds true for a lot of things, like some aspects of marketing and communications.

You do or create something based on the knowledge you have at the time. It might not be perfect, but that’s okay. Later, you gain more knowledge, so you are able to create something better. It might not be perfect either, but that’s okay.

The point is that you do what you can, you create the content you can, with the knowledge you have at the time. Don’t worry if the idea or concept isn’t perfect (the spelling and grammar should be, though!). You can fix it later if it needs fixing or replace it with something else.