I say this is terribly true today in the universe of electronic communications where, I point out, it is we that don’t give any respect. In our typing and our composition we are lazy, slovenly, careless, thoughtless, nonchalant — in short, downright disrespectful — and we don’t seem give a whatever about it…until we get no respect ourselves. Then we’re upset.

• We misspell names of people and businesses.
• We incorrectly name businesses and organizations.
• We ignore capitalization of proper names and trademark names.
• We misquote people, using incorrect words.
• We type famous quotes, but attribute them to the wrong people.
• We don’t check our sources to see if they are real or a hoax.
• We post and publish incorrect links.

Yeah, yeah, so what? Who cares? You know, you know what I mean.

Businesses can’t be so cavalier. Their success depends on enforceable copyrights, brand name identification, proper use of product names, tag lines, quotes, successful SEO, correct URLs, etc.

To start with, misspelling someone’s name is just plain rude. Our names, our choice of spelling, our inclusion of middle names, initials, nicknames are an integral part of how we present ourselves to the world, and how we see, hold, and validate ourselves. When you misspell or incorrectly capitalize someone’s name you are directly insulting them. In my opinion they have every right to be angry.

A misspelling could mean a reader couldn’t find a volume, and an author doesn’t sell a book. A misspelling could mean an innocent person can be harassed for the financial dealings of some ne’er-do-well.

For bloggers and online authors, misspelling other peoples’ names can alienate those folks, and the important trackbacks, reciprocal links and mutual admiration referrals and recommendations may never materialize for you.

When someone reviews our Business Plan Pro product but calls it, say BizinessPro Writer, we lose customers. It can, and will happen to your product as well. When you refer to a product or company or website, check to be sure you are using the correct name.

Ignoring capitalization of letters in names can cause confusion, and possibly a loss of copyright protection. For instance, we all know that Twitter is the proper name of a social communication network, and twitter is a bird song. The soft drink is spelled Coke, but coke is a narcotic and a coal derivative used in making steel.

As another example, take jello. Jell-O [note the capitalization now, if you haven't before] is the protected trade-name, but it has become a generic word for any type of gelatin-based dessert. Go to the store and you’ll see Knox, Royal, a local private label maybe, but to the customer they are all jello and they don’t care which one they buy. You can be sure that Jell-O cares.

Adobe’s Photoshop is well on its way to becoming an eponymous term. Now anytime someone makes a casual remark about manipulating pictures, they say they photoshoped it, regardless of which digital image editing software program they actually used.

It costs businesses billions annually in marketing branding efforts to keep their brand names visible, unique, known and purchased. But lazy, thoughtless, careless typing works everyday to negate the value of your marketing efforts.

No end of trouble, misinterpretation, bad feelings, feuds, lawsuits, destroyed public images and reputations have come about because of misquoting. Something as small as a single letter or two (could, would, should) can change the entire meaning of your business’ publicly made statement of concern to one of callous indifference, and the survival of your company.

Many quotes from literature and famous people from years past have slipped into our vernacular. They are often misquoted and misattributed. Brush up your Shakespeare by Michael Macrone has an entire chapter on popular phrases which people think came from the Bard, but did not. “The long and the short of it” “Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d” “Fool’s Paradise” are just few.

This problem is certainly not limited to age-old authors. “Play it again, Sam” – was a line never spoken by Ingrid Bergman or Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. “Houston, we have a problem.” This is a misstatement of the actual communication between the Apollo 13 astronauts and Mission Control in Houston. Your credibility suffers when you incorrectly quote, or assign the words to the wrong person.

Recently, the U.K. mainstream media was caught not checking their sources adequately. They printed quotes from an elegy for Michael Jackson, from a Twitter post ostensibly by Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. The tweet was actually by a Twitter impostor, a case of identity theft. A significant lapse in due diligence. It damaged the public position of the Foreign Secretary, and discredited the reputation and trustworthiness of those media.

Posting bad links is sloppy and unnecessary. At best, it irritates readers who get the 404 Errors, or end up on a page that has nothing to do with the original publishing. Worse, a bad link loses customers/visitors/business at the intended link. If the author gets affiliate or click-through revenue, publishing a link without checking its accuracy is like throwing money away.

It is time we electronic digital communicators put some polite respect back into our writings. Use spell checkers, proof read, double check and spell correctly the names of people, businesses and products. Don’t assume you’ve got it right. The power of the Internet is just a click away.

After all, if you expect to be respected, you have to show the same respect to others.

Steve Lange
Palo Alto Software

The case has many facets, including political campaigning, impersonation, possible slander, character assassination via misrepresentation, mainstream media reporting, and the impact on everyone’s use of Twitter through increased legal action and greater government regulation in social media.

The high-profile court action, says Time, “also highlights the increasing dangers of identity misappropriation” on social media sites. A cited example involved Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, when a Twitter impostor posted, “an elegiac tweet on Michael Jackson’s death [which] was widely quoted by credulous media.”

The plaintiff in this lawsuit is also considering a suit against Twitter, because he experienced Twitter’s own procedures slow to respond. Further legal action could force Twitter to reveal account holders’ identities, which would set a precedent for the wider social media environment.

Another legal response to questionable blog and Twitter activities was posted by Tim Berry on his Planning Startups Stories blog in FTC vs. Social Media Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing. This governmental action concerns people who accept payment to post advertisements in the guise of “personal” reviews, recommendations, and conversations.

Social media, which started out as an unfettered, community-gathering-place-of-sorts is becoming as hazardous and risky as any other commercial or political arena. And as regulated and litigation-bound. Be aware, be paranoid, be skeptical of what you read. Be prepared to defend your good name.

Steve Lange
Palo Alto Software

10 Ways to Market When Cash is Tight — Duct Tape Marketing Coaches Ken Burgin and Elizabeth Walker provide their top tips for low-cost marketing.

Business Plans Are Not Just for Startups — The Up and Running blog quotes author Ramon Ray on the forgotten audience for business plans.

It’s Not Just What You Say, It’s How You Say It — When a New Zealand woman was fired for her email stylings, it brought up a good point about polite electronic communication.

Behind the Scenes, a Lot of Activity — Email Center Pro developers have made some improvements which speed up the service and allow them to sleep through the night.

Troubadour takes bad customer service to task. Song #2. — United Airlines broke the wrong guy’s guitar, and the customer service lesson they’re learning is one we should all take heed of.

3 MBA Tricks to Shorten Boring Meetings — Tim Berry shares some secrets he learned in business school to help you deal with long meetings.

What’s Your Free Soup To Go Strategy? — Exceeding expectations is a powerful way to create repeat customers, say Duct Tape Marketing Guru John Jantsch

Why are women becoming a rising force in American entrepreneurship? — Sabrina Parsons weighs in on some of the reasons women are ideally suited to run businesses.

The Single Most Important Thing Your Headline Must Do — An interesting Copyblogger post on how to drive more readers to your blog.

Critics that matter — Seth Godin’s excellent post on paying attention to the right critics and ignoring the ones who don’t really matter.

About Entrepreneurs Who Say They Don’t Plan – Tim Berry takes on a blogger who says writing a business plan is dumb.

The 3/50 Project to save local businesses — Palo Alto Software gets behind a nationwide movement to encourage consumers to ‘buy local.’

Now here’s the question. When you place the call and are connected to voice mail, how often do you tune out the message while waiting for the tone? There’s the point. For many of us, the voice mail’s greeting message is so routine we ignore it completely. And there we show our disrespect for our customers. And in doing so, harm our own businesses.

As an example, not too long ago we received a message on our home voice mail. It was from a lawyer, we’ll call him Mr. A. Turney. Mr. A. Turney was leaving a message for Mr. Cheung about a current legal issue, and needed Mr. Cheung to return his call right away. To me this was an obvious miskeying of the phone number. I figured Mr. A. Turney would call Mr. Cheung the next day when he hadn’t heard from him.

The next day we had another message from Mr. A. Turney, telling Mr. Cheung, in a slightly irritated voice, to return his call right away. Now, this was kind of funny, since at that time, I was in the habit of telling jokes on our outgoing message, and my voice has a rather slight Pacific Northwest accent, with minor hints of my Upper Midwest Scandinavian background. And to tell the truth, I doubt very much that Mr. Cheung would be telling jokes on his business phone voice mail.

The third day came, and to my surprise Mr. A. Turney left us another message. He was getting quite exasperated. I can just see him, sitting at his desk, pressing redial on his phone, and busily multi-tasking, writing his torts and retorts, while cluelessly ignoring my joke for the third time. Now, I was getting a little irritated myself. So that evening I called Mr. A. Turney’s office and told HIS voice mail that he’d been leaving messages for Mr. Cheung at the wrong phone number all week. Then I changed our outgoing message to tell a somewhat unflattering lawyer joke. Unfortunately, I didn’t have Mr. Cheung’s number, or I would have called him to let him know that his lawyer was severely lacking in attention to detail.

Thursday night we returned home, and sure enough Mr. A. Turney had left yet another message for Mr. Cheung. Obviously he didn’t listen to our message with the ribald lawyer joke, or at least he didn’t deign to mention it, nor had he listened to his OWN voice mail messages, telling him he was barking up the wrong telephone pole. But wouldn’t you have thought he’d have figured out that something was wrong after almost a week of unreturned calls about a pending legal issue?

Here are a few things to consider in your Customer Service contacts with VoiceMail:

• If you are a business, use a business-like outgoing greeting on your voice mail, including your business name.
• When you, a Customer Care Team member, call someone and you get sent to voice mail, listen to the message. Don’t dismiss the message content out of hand. There is good information there. You might find that the person you want is out of the office for a week. Or that they have moved or left the company. You might find a different number to call. Or you might discover you are calling the wrong number.
• If you promised you would return a call to a customer, follow through on that promise. Your customer is waiting for your call. Leave the pertinent information on their voice mail, and if possible, call them back, later, to confirm that they got your message.
• If the voice mail greeting you encounter is a non sequitur, it should be a clear hint that perhaps you have miskeyed the number, or perhaps been given an incorrect number by your customer. In that case you should put in a little extra effort to contact them by email, or look them up in the phone book.
• If you persist in leaving messages on an incorrect voice mail you disserve your current customer, and you’re almost certain to alienate a potential new customer. I know that I won’t be going to Mr. A. Turney for my legal work. He didn’t listen to me before when he thought I was his client…why would I believe he’d listen to me if I truly was?

Show your customers that you respect them, and value your communications with them. Listen to what they have to say.

p.s. I’ve not received a voice mail from Mr. A. Turney recently. Probably Mr. Cheung hired a new lawyer since Mr. A. Turney was obviously ignoring his legal needs because Mr. A. Turney never called him back.

Today the many faces of the Internet, individual publishing, and social media have made the good better and the bad horrendous. Websites called companyxxxstinks.com proliferate, and social media word-of-mouth dissing now reaches multi-millions of people through keyword searches, RSS feeds, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, et al.

Unfortunately, many businesses haven’t woken up to this fact, and behave as if bad customer service doesn’t affect them. Or perhaps they feel they are so big they don’t have to care. That’s a big mistake.

Here is a recent example of one man’s clever, entertaining, word-of-mouth condemnation of customer disservice, in this case by United Airlines. I first saw this on 8 July 2009 when my co-editor Sara sent me the link to an online posting on Huffington Post’s Business section. It had already attained a Most Popular listing on YouTube’s front page where it was originally published on 6 July 2009.

Here we see the power of viral marketing, where the message is passed along from person to person, usually farther than the original sender could reach. In this case, the message is coming back around to harm the company. When an unhappy customer says they are going to tell everyone about their horrible customer disservice experience, that translates to telling half the world! For a company like UAL, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, giving bad customer service and pretending no one will hear about it, or that it won’t matter is dangerous, risky business.

Don’t let this happen to you. Focus your attention on providing good customer service or risk being trashed to millions of people every day.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software

P.S. As I’m publishing this post I’m seeing that this story has already been picked up by U.S. and Canadian mainstream media, and had elicited an official statement from UAL by 8 July.

“This has struck has a chord with us. We are in conversations with one another to make what happened right, and while we mutually agree that this should have been fixed much sooner, Dave Carroll’s excellent video provides United with a unique learning opportunity that we would like to use for training purposes to ensure all customers receive better service from us,” the statement said.

Wouldn’t this have been better for everyone if it had been handled by good customer care in the first place?

The good news is that we really don’t have to keep all those records forever. Yes, some we do need to keep forever. Some we keep only until the IRS has had their way with us. And some we need only keep for a few years.

Telling which record needs to be kept, for how long, is a little harder. And properly disposing of temporary records is not as simple as just tossing the papers into the recycle bin.

Here is where the Records Retention Schedule comes into play. This document lists the types of records your business produces (financial, personnel, contracts, operations, etc.); identifies any legal requirements for how long the record must be kept and the requiring authority, such as the IRS or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act; will note how long the record is generally actively used in business operations; and may contain other information as well, such as noting that the records contain sensitive personal identifying data; and if microfilm or digitally scanned copies are acceptable legal alternatives to the paper document.

Search the Internet and you will find plenty of information about Records Retention Schedules and samples, such as this one kindly offered by Millennium Records Management. Remember, however, that a sample schedule is just a generalized representation of what one looks like. Your Records Retention Schedule will be tailored to your type of business, where you are located, in what state(s) and/or countries you do business, whether you are privately owned or trade shares on the stock market, are a public institution, hold government contracts, and a myriad other factors.

You will want to work with your accountant, legal counsel, and/or a professional records management company to develop and establish yours.

You implement the Records Retention Schedule officially so everyone in your company knows about it. This helps ensure that your vital records are actually kept in the first place. Later, say you have several file cabinets of Accounts Payable invoices. Your Retention Schedule says you need to keep these for 6 years, but experience shows you really only get into them for 3 years. Knowing this, you can free up your business/office floor space by transferring these records to secure off-site storage or an alternative storage media.

Once you have records that reach the end of their retention period you can dispose of them. But, as I said, you can’t simply toss them into the recycling can. You need to have an established process for their disposal. Yes, you have to create more documentation to get rid of old documents.

You will want to have the people who generated the records sign off that they no longer need the records. You should note that the records have reached the end of their retention period according to your established Records Retention Schedule, and check that their retention period has not been extended due to audits, litigation, etc.

You will want to certify when, how, and by whom, the documents were destroyed. This is easier today, than in the past, when I spent many hours hauling boxes down to a loading dock and feeding paper into a shredder next to a dumpster. In recent years mobile shredding companies have proliferated. They will drive their big truck-mounted confetti shredders to your business, haul your boxes to the truck, let you witness their destruction and give you a certificate of destruction.

Establishing, implementing, and following a Records Retention Schedule will go a long way to ensuring that your company keeps and maintains the vital records you need to continue in business. And, in a worst case scenario, should you be caught up in litigation or the like, prove that your records are kept and destroyed in a regularly occuring, established, approved, documented process, and not in a midnight burn out behind the barn in an amateurish attempt to avoid culpability and responsibility, or obstruct the legal process.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software

Incorporating or forming an LLC is a fast, affordable and easy process. It benefits the business owner by protecting personal and family assets from the risks and debts of the business. Here are eight easy things business owners can do to make incorporating a breeze.

1.    Select Your Company Name

Your company name can identify the type of products/services your business provides, or it can simply tout the name of the founder. The two main requirements for a company name are: no other entity in the same state may have the same or similar name; the name must include an ending like company, incorporated, corporation, association, foundation, institute, fund, society, union, syndicate, or limited. Words like “bank”, “trust” or “education” may not be used without approval from the appropriate state agency.

2.    Select Your Business Structure

A general corporation, also known as a “C” corporation, is the most common corporate structure. It may have an unlimited number of stockholders. A “close” corporation is appropriate only for the individual starting a company alone or with a small number of people. An LLC is not a corporation, but it offers many of the same advantages, combining the limited liability protection of a corporation with the “pass through”" taxation of a sole proprietorship or partnership.

3.    Select Your State

Many business owners incorporate or form an LLC in the state where they are planning to operate because it is often least complicated and most cost effective. However, Delaware still holds appeal for new companies because of its low incorporation fees, low annual franchise taxes, and lack of state income tax for corporations operating outside of Delaware. Likewise, Nevada has become increasingly business-friendly with its advantageous tax advantages.

4.    Select Your Management Team

Naming initial directors for your corporation is straightforward. Directors are typically the key players or owners in the business. In most states, only one director is required and you may simply name yourself. In an LLC, managers or members are selected.

5.    Select Your Number of Stock Shares and Par Value

Stock represents ownership in a corporation. Par value is the minimum selling price for each share of stock. Many states allow you to elect a $0 par value, to give you the most flexibility. LLCs do not issue stock, so LLC ownership is like a partnership.

6.    Choose a Corporate Kit

A Corporate Kit will help you organize and save your important company documents. They often include a corporate seal, stock certificates, stock transfer ledger, and sample forms for bylaws and minutes.

7.    Designate a Registered Agent

The Registered Agent serves a critical purpose and is an important part of protecting your corporate status. Select a highly reliable company to serve in this role. Look for a company that maintains a nationwide network of offices and serves as a full time Registered Agent in all 50 states plus District of Columbia, so that they can service your company’s needs as you grow.

8.    Worry Not!

Your decisions about company formation may be changed after your company is formed, simply by filing an amendment. Broad flexibility is available to you as your company grows and its needs change.

John Meyer from The Company Corporation will be our guest at this month’s Back to the Fundamentals webinar, April 14th.

Make sure you register for this event soon. Space is limited.