How to Cope With a Terrible Review – Businessweek

Critics’ latest frosted-tipped punching bag: celebrity chef and television host Guy Fieri.

Sure, the New York Times suggested that “everything at Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar is inedible,” but Fieri is by no means alone. This year, for example, Eddie Murphy’s A Thousand Words (“a tired, formulaic comedy,” as one reviewer called it) scored 0 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and Rolling Stone denounced Lana Del Rey as “just another aspiring singer who wasn’t ready to make an album yet” (and that’s nicer than some critiques on Twitter following her flawed performance on Saturday Night Live).

Might today’s reflexive culture—which thrives on reviewing, liking, commenting, and sharing, often anonymously—have made critics more hostile? What superhuman public figure hasn’t at some point, however brief, been the object of scorn recently (besides Ryan Gosling)?

The bright side is that making a comeback, while tough, is not impossible—consider how far Ben Affleck (receiving critical acclaim for directing Argo and The Town) has progressed since his turn in the cringe-inducing Gigli. Sometimes there’s nowhere to go but up. Here are some tips on how to deal with a bad review.

via How to Cope With a Terrible Review – Businessweek.

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Will Dean’s Ideas Factory: How does a robotic copy editor cope with Ulysses? – Features – Gadgets & Tech – The Independent

As the newspaper industry works out how to tackle the threat from free online news and other structural problems, some journalists can at least take heart that, no matter, what the medium – newsprint, the web, or electronic paper – a good copy editor is an essential role. As it is in publishing and advertising/copy-writing, too. When the robots are making our coffee and vacuuming our floors, at least they won’t be criticising us for our use of cliches… Oh. Hang on a minute…

Pro Writing Aid is the creation of Chris Banks, a London-based programmer. It allows writers to insert their copy and uses algorithms to pick out redundancies, cliches, overused words, unvaried sentence lengths and other errors which relate to neither spelling or grammar.

I put the technology to the test by entering a feature I wrote for these pages last week on 3D printing. The analysis came back with a plethora of suggestions, including four “overused words”, a couple of redundancies (“component parts”, tssk) and a massive 16 issues of “vague or abstract words”. Alright, Sir Harry Evans-robot, I get it. Though some of the points were fair enough, others still need a bit of human nuance. One of my red-marked phrases was “kind of” which might be weak for a novel but was part of a vital quote from one of the people I spoke to.

via Will Dean’s Ideas Factory: How does a robotic copy editor cope with Ulysses? – Features – Gadgets & Tech – The Independent.

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Angry with an airline? Don’t phone, tweet

Not so long ago, a man on a plane was served a sandwich he didn’t like. He used Twitter – the real-time personal news feed, if you didn’t know – to alert the world to his displeasure. An airline employee on the ground saw the tweet, relayed the message to a flight attendant who minutes later asked the man what could be done to assuage his disappointment.

Welcome to travel 2012 style, if you’re doing it right.

Once seemingly impenetrable behemoths, airlines have become remarkably accessible thanks to social media, especially in the real-time world of Twitter. Most, if not all, airlines have Twitter feeds that allow customers to converse and, more important, solve problems in real time, whether for a large issue (stranded in an airport) or small (a lousy sandwich).

Stuart Greif, vice president of global travel for J.D. Power and Associates, said the sandwich story, which he said he discussed with an executive of the airline involved, shows social media’s benefits for the travelers who are savvy enough to use them.

“If a customer has a problem, the fastest way to address it has become social media,” Greif said. “Younger generations might never call into a call center. They might always go online and address these things in real time.”

Another platform could one day overtake Twitter, but for now it is the primary tool for real-time reaction from an industry that triggers anxiety and frustration like few others. Go to any of the major airlines’ Twitter feeds, and you will see (often entertaining) exchanges with frustrated passengers.

“We consider Twitter the canary in the coal mine,” said Morgan Johnston, JetBlue‘s social media strategist. “It’s not always fun to be called out publicly, but if there’s something really wrong with our operation, it shows up a lot faster, and we’re able to fix it.”Among the most aggressive Twitter users has been American Airlines, which has sent more messages than any of its competitors and which recently expanded its Twitter coverage from 6am to midnight, up from 7 am to 8pm. The ultimate goal is staffing 24 hours a day, as several other airlines already do.

In our region, Qantas leads the way with 17,000 tweets published, though its social media strategy has occasionally backfired.

via Angry with an airline? Don’t phone, tweet.

Strange Random Anger Quote:

“Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret.” ― Ambrose Bierce

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Grammar, a Victim in the Office – WSJ.com

When Caren Berg told colleagues at a recent staff meeting, “There’s new people you should meet,” her boss Don Silver broke in, says Ms. Berg, a senior vice president at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., marketing and crisis-communications company.

“I cringe every time I hear people misuse “is” for “are,” Mr. Silver says. The company’s chief operations officer, Mr. Silver also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences with “like.” For years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for each offense. “I am losing the battle,” he says.

Managers are fighting an epidemic of grammar gaffes in the workplace. Many of them attribute slipping skills to the informality of email, texting and Twitter where slang and shortcuts are common. Such looseness with language can create bad impressions with clients, ruin marketing materials and cause communications errors, many managers say.

There’s no easy fix. Some bosses and co-workers step in to correct mistakes, while others consult business-grammar guides for help. In a survey conducted earlier this year, about 45% of 430 employers said they were increasing employee-training programs to improve employees’ grammar and other skills, according to the Society for Human Resource Management and AARP.

“I’m shocked at the rampant illiteracy” on Twitter, says Bryan A. Garner, author of “Garner’s Modern American Usage” and president of LawProse, a Dallas training and consulting firm. He has compiled a list of 30 examples of “uneducated English,” such as saying “I could care less,” instead of “I couldn’t care less,” or, “He expected Helen and I to help him,” instead of “Helen and me.”

Leslie Ferrier says she was aghast at letters employees were sending to customers at a Jersey City, N.J., hair- and skin-product marketer when she joined the firm in 2009. The letters included grammar and style mistakes and were written “as if they were speaking to a friend,” says Ms. Ferrier, a human-resources executive. She had employees use templates to eliminate mistakes and started training programs in business writing.

via Grammar, a Victim in the Office – WSJ.com.

Strange Random Grammar Quotes:

“Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.” ― C.S. Lewis, Letters to Children

“Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears…”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

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• Take the Grammartarian Grammar Test at WSJ (reason.com)
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‘Likejacking’: Spammers Hit Social Media – Businessweek

Michelle Espinoza thought a single photo was going to ruin her business. It was an image of one of the pearl cuff bracelets she designs that showed up on Pinterest, a site where users create virtual bulletin boards, grouping images in categories—whether it be chocolate desserts or bohemian jewelry. For 10 days in April, anybody who clicked on the photo ended up watching pornography or unwittingly downloading a virus. “I can’t gauge how many customers I lost,” says Espinoza, a resident of Santa Rosa Beach, Fla. “But I did have people messaging me asking, ‘Are you linked to spam?’ I was just distraught.”

When Pinterest debuted two years ago, e-mail was the format of choice for spam peddling diets, sexual enhancement, and get-rich scams. Better filters have since banished many of the unwanted missives from in-boxes. Instead, scammers are turning to social media sites that are often poorly equipped to deal with the influx. “Social spam can be a lot more effective than e-mail spam,” says Mark Risher, chief executive officer of Impermium, which sells anti-spam software. “The bad guys are taking to this with great abandon.”

Spammers create as many as 40 percent of the accounts on social-media sites, according to Risher. About 8 percent of messages sent via social pages are spam, approximately twice the volume of six months ago, he says. Spammers use the sharing features on social sites to spread their messages. Click on a spammer’s link on Facebook FB, and it may ask you to “like” or “share” a page, or to allow an app to gain access to your profile.

via ‘Likejacking’: Spammers Hit Social Media – Businessweek.

Strange Random Spam Quote:

No one bill will cure the problem of spam. It will take a combined effort of legislation, litigation, enforcement, customer education, and technology solutions. – David Baker

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