A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about how an email from the Web Marketing Association included far too many hideous misspellings.

Here’s another similar situation that crossed my screen recently.

GoogleLady.com seems to be a pretty good site. You’re likely to wind up there sooner or later if you’re Googling for AdWords tips, because GoogleLady has posted a free e-book: The AdWords Quality Guide. It’s suitable for beginners and it’s packed with tips on how to get the most out of AdWords.

Here’s the thing: How can anyone trust GoogleLady’s tips for writing ads when GoogleLady can barely spell? The contents page spells beginners with two g’s and one n. The question asked on the contents page lacks a question mark. Sentences seem like they got chewed up by Babel Fish: “31 Killer Writing AdWords Ads Tips.” (By the way, that’s the one place on the contents page where “AdWords” was written correctly, i.e. with the capital W. The other 12 places on the page, it’s written “Adwords.”

There’s probably a lot of good information in this 47-page guide, but the sloppiness undercuts any authority it would otherwise have.

What’s really troubling is that a lot of people probably don’t care. When basic standards of consistency, spelling and style don’t matter, though, what’s next to slide?

Takeaway for marketers: Don’t head down that slippery slope. Spelling counts. Good writing is just one component to making you look professional, but bad writing alone can make you look foolish.

“Conversational, not corporate” is a mantra I invoke often when talking about the best way to connect with customers and potential customers. That means dropping the buzzwords and communicating like a real person, whether it’s on a Web site, in an ad or in email.

Yesterday, I received a remarkable example of a conversational email. Quick preface: This is not a political blog, so this should not be taken as an endorsement of one point of view over another. I am on more lists than I can count. I get email from both the Obama and McCain campaigns.

With that caveat out of the way, here’s one of the most conversational emails you’ll see this year, presented in its entirety without any editing. I’m guessing it got the job done and then some.

Dear MoveOn member,

Can you volunteer for Obama this weekend?

Hint: the answer is “Yes.”

Have plans? Cancel them. Can’t cancel? Postpone. If you got sick, you’d find some way to reschedule your other stuff. And this is way more important than illness. This is the, uh, FUTURE OF THE WORLD—and it could come down to 25 people in Ambler.

You know how to click a mouse, right? Sure! You clicked on this email. Perfect. So all you have to do is click this link:

http://pol.moveon.org/obama/volunteer/?office_id=310&id=14567-4616795-kkTJXWx&t=1

Seriously, this is game time. This race could be much, much tighter than people realize. The Obama campaign is telling its staff to work like they’re 20 points behind. If you sit this one out because you think it’s a lock, and then we lose . . . um, wow.

So . . . why haven’t you clicked yet? Does the idea of volunteering make your stomach clench into a knot? No problem. Take a deep breath. What we’re talking about here is walking around on a Saturday morning in Ambler, holding a clipboard. There are about 100,000 things that are more scary than that. And if McCain wins, a lot of those things will happen.

Maybe it’s the going-outside part that makes you nervous. Idea: Call your two best friends and ask them to go with you. They can defend you if you’re, I don’t know, attacked by squirrels. See, now there’s nothing to be afraid of! Click the link. It’s right there. Just click it. Click, click, click.

http://pol.moveon.org/obama/volunteer/?office_id=310&id=14567-4616795-kkTJXWx&t=2

Hey, did you just click that link? No? Oops! You must have kept reading instead of clicking it. Maybe you missed it. Here it is again, twice:

http://pol.moveon.org/obama/volunteer/?office_id=310&id=14567-4616795-kkTJXWx&t=3

http://pol.moveon.org/obama/volunteer/?office_id=310&id=14567-4616795-kkTJXWx&t=4

Listen. I promise: On the other side of that link is just a sign-up form for volunteering. No viruses, nothing to fear. It’s the safest, happiest web page you’ll ever visit. Also, it’s the page where you can sign up to rescue the country and the planet. How awesome will it be to visit a page like that?!1

Okay. You’re ready. You’re going to click. I can feel it. Yeah! Click!

http://pol.moveon.org/obama/volunteer/?office_id=310&id=14567-4616795-kkTJXWx&t=5

And again!

http://pol.moveon.org/obama/volunteer/?office_id=310&id=14567-4616795-kkTJXWx&t=6

That was great. Thanks! Thanks for all you do.2

–Adam

1.ǝɯosǝʍɐ ɹǝdns ǝq p1noʍ ʇɐɥʇ :ɹǝʍsuɐ

2If you’re reading this, you might not have caught the link to the volunteer signup page. No worries! Here it is: http://pol.moveon.org/obama/volunteer/?office_id=310&id=14567-4616795-kkTJXWx&t=7

Want to support our work? We’re entirely funded by our 4.2 million members—no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. Chip in here.

Takeaway for marketers: Be conversational. Every fiber of your business being may be telling you otherwise, but fight the inclination to pepper your copy with too many buzzwords and too much formality.

I received an email the other day from the Web Marketing Association with the subject line, “WebAward Judges pick Obama over McCain.”

Given yesterday’s post about AdAge choosing Barack Obama as Marketer of the Year, I was interested to see what the WMA said about the Obama and McCain Web sites.

Here’s the first paragraph of the email (bold emphasis mine):

In April, the Web Marketing Association had our WebAward judges review both Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s Website in a head to head challange. Senitor Obama’s Website won the challange and he went on to win the Democratic nomination (I’m not saying it was because of us, but you have to wonder…)

Oh, and here’s a sentence from the second paragraph:

This month we asked the WebAward Judges to compaire Senitor John McCain’s Website with that of Senitor Obama’s.

Egads. The average piece of spam I receive has fewer misspellings and grammatical errors.

According to the WMA Web site, the organization was founded “to help set a high standard for Internet marketing and web development. Staffed by volunteers, this organization is made up of marketing, advertising, public relations and web design professionals from around the world who share a passion for improving the quality of advertising, marketing and web site development on the Internet today and in the future.”

One of the categories in which the Obama and McCain sites were judged was copywriting. According to the WMA email, “Neither Websites have any of the editing issues some large organizations can experience.”

Too bad the same can’t be said about the WMA.

Takeaway for marketers: If your marketing communications are written in a such a way that they’d be lucky to receive a C- from a middle school English teacher, don’t expect them to do anything more than make your business or organization look stupid.

Like many Web marketers, I’m on a ton of mailing lists. While I’m not too fond of receiving 10 or 12 emails a day for pet nail trimmers and I have all the ink and toner I need, thank you, I like to see what email marketers are up to.

Every once in a while, though, I try and unsubscribe from an email list. Sometimes it’s because the list owner is just relentless and others it’s to see how smoothly the unsubscribe process goes. The last couple of times I did this, I wound up with error pages like the one you see above.

Which means one of two things. Either the list owners are terribly bad at maintaining those Web pages that help manage their lists or they’ve stumbled onto the great secret of email list deniability.

Think about it: You never have to take anyone off your email list because the unsubscribe function doesn’t work. (But hey: The unsubscribe link is there in the email, so at least it’s CAN-SPAM compliant.) Then if anyone manages to go through the effort of actually identifying who you are and complains? Oops! The page broke — don’t worry, we’ll fix it.

Meanwhile, your list never shrinks.

Sounds far-fetched? Maybe. But given the relative popularity of black hat SEO tactics, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that a significant number of people handle their lists this way.

Takeaway for marketers: If your unsubscribe page is broken, fix it. If you’re playing games, stop it.

Maybe. Maybe not. Mahalo poohbah Jason Calacanis says to do exactly that in this Silicon Alley Insider article (thanks to Wil Reynolds over at Seer Interactive for the heads up on this one).

I agree with a lot of what Jason says in the piece … up to a point. Of course, part of his PR strategy is to be provocative, so to say “fire your PR agency” makes sense for him … but probably not for most companies.

There aren’t many execs out there like Jason, meaning there aren’t many execs out there who are able to speak to the media with infectious enthusiasm while thinking on their feet.

That’s where a good PR company comes in — and I hasten to add (having done a lot of PR work over the years) that PR is a subset of marketing, not something that acts apart from the rest of the company’s marketing efforts.

PR gets a bad rap, mainly because most people misunderstand what it is. “Public relations” would be better termed “media relations” to reflect the fact that PR is that component of the overall marketing communications effort to express the company’s DNA to business and the public online, in print, on the radio and on television in ways other than pure advertising.

I have seen and heard about a lot of situations over the past two years or so in which companies dump a lot of dollars down a black hole because they want to go with a big PR firm that will land them the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Wrong! Here’s a corollary to Jason’s point #10 in his article:

Embrace the small boutique PR firms — they’re the ones who will absorb the DNA of your company and be able to communicate it to the outside world. The big firms? Not that there aren’t good ones out there, but more often than not you’re a small fish in a big pond, they write up a few standard releases, send something out over BusinessWire and they’re done with it.

That’s not PR, that’s not media relations, that’s not marketing communications … that’s just feeding the workflow and covering their overhead.

Takeaway for marketers: Any PR/media relations professional worth your dollars will (1) marinate themselves in what your company does, (2) look at your company as a genuine partner, not a client, (3) look at themselves as an extension of your company, not a disconnected agency, (4) help shape the stories and the news that will achieve maximum exposure in the media and (5) tell those stories — and enable your company spokesmen to tell those stories — with passion and humor and expertise that stands apart from the pack.