Sutter Communications

We’re wild about words!

Keeping your emails off the front page

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Don't write emails you'd regret seeing in a newspaper.
Don’t write an email you’d regret seeing in a newspaper.

In the aftermath of Election Day, a lot of random thoughts are colliding in my brain.  A big one has to do with email.

“Never put anything into an email that you don’t want to see on the front page of the newspaper.”

I don’t think Hillary Clinton’s colleagues ever heard that and they certainly didn’t abide by it. I don’t think her email fiascos (notice the plural) are the main reason she lost to Donald Trump, but they didn’t help.

That timeless advice about emails was given to me by Margaret Buchanan, then publisher of the Star-Gazette newspaper in Elmira, N.Y., when she was my boss and I was the executive editor. This was around 1998, and email was just starting to become a standard form of communication.

I have never forgotten what she told me, and I think I’ve done a pretty good job over the years abiding by it. But just think of all the people who make the news, who get caught doing criminal or immoral acts, who now regret those emails.

Three prominent email cases

  • Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to resign her post as head of the Democratic Party after emails revealed the party plotted against Bernie Sanders in favor of Hillary Clinton.
  • Two of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s staff were convicted of all charges in a bizarre political scheme that resulted in huge traffic tie-ups. Emails were key to that case.
  • Then there’s Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, whose emails were released by WikiLeaks. Those emails showed the inner workings of the campaign and its dealings with the controversy over Clinton’s private email server while she was secretary of state.

Election loss due to emails?

I don’t think Clinton lost to Trump solely on her email issues but it certainly cast doubt in people’s minds as to whether Clinton committed a crime, what with the FBI investigation and all.

Still, anyone who writes an email should heed that advice: “Never put anything into an email that you don’t want to see on the front page of a newspaper.”

I know I will continue to do so!

What rules do you follow with regard to email?

5 must-read articles to grow your blogging audience

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Some of my Internet research on ways to grow your audience for your blog.
Some of my Internet research on ways to grow your audience for your blog.

Are you spending hours blogging but the response is crickets? I’m going to help Rochester area bloggers with that dilemma in my class Blogging 201 at Writers and Books on Nov. 1.

I’ve been looking for best practices and tips to share with my students, which has meant digging through the Internet (or the “black hole” as I’ve been calling it).

So I thought I’d share links to five articles I’ve found that I consider must-reads for bloggers.

Here they are:

How to write headlines that drive traffic shares and search results by Nathan Ellering. Ellering wrote this for the CoSchedule Blog. He writes about CoSchedule’s amazing headline analyzer, in which you can paste in your blog headline to see how it scores. The analyzer looks at word balance, length of headline and headline type and Ellerby explains what each part means and gives tips on writing better headlines. I am definitely going to start using this tool for all my blog headlines.

Blogging gone bad: 7 mistakes you don’t want to make by Michael Hyatt. Hyatt is my guru on so many topics related to business, blogging and leadership. In this post, he offers ways to fix common mistakes of bloggers including creating posts that aren’t scannable and being inconsistent in your blogging schedule. I always recommend Hyatt as resource to my Blogging 101 students.

3 free tools to help you understand your online audience by Larry Kim. In this blog post for Social Media Today, Kim writes about how so many businesses don’t understand their target audience. That goes for bloggers, too. He gives brief summaries of Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Manager, and Twitter Audience Insights.

How to market with email newsletters posted on the SCORE website. A great way to gather a following to your blog is to collect email addresses, and then send out an email newsletter on a regular basis, which includes links to your blog postings. This posting walks you through how to get started, including explaining how to comply with the the CAN-SPAM Act. The post also includes a link to download a guide. I’m a volunteer mentor with Greater Rochester Chapter of SCORE and the national website of SCORE is a treasure trove of helpful information and webinars.

Facebook Page or Group: The Definitive Answer by Andrea Vahl. I stumbled upon Vahl in one of my “black hole” searches on the Internet, and I’m glad I did. She works with small businesses on their social media. Her posting confirms what I’ve grown to realize: A Facebook Group can be a great way to interact with people of similar interests. Sounds perfect for bloggers, while a Facebook Page is better for branding your business.

If you’re interested in taking Blogging 201, call Writers and Books at (585)-473-2590. Only a few spots were available as of today but I’ll teach the course again in 2017.

Nice people finish first, research shows

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My dad, Joe Sutter, behind the pharmacy counter at Sutter Drug circa 1960s.
My dad, Joe Sutter, was known for being nice. Here he is behind the pharmacy counter at Sutter Drug circa 1960s.

Are you as tired as I am of all the nastiness going on in the world? I’m not just talking about the U.S. presidential race — although that’s depressing enough — but about the me-first attitude that seems to permeate our world.

If you adhere to the feeling that “nice guys finish last,” I’m pleased to report that a column in the Wall Street Journal shows otherwise. Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, writes that if you think it looks like the worst behavior is being publicly rewarded and that the world now belongs to jerks, you are wrong. (Read the column here.)

“Nice people, rejoice: Notwithstanding the prominent examples today in political and popular culture, the best available research still clearly shows that in everyday life the nice people, not the creeps, do the best at work, in love and happiness,” Brooks writes.

Follow the Golden Rule

I’m glad to hear that. When I was 28 and became the editor of the features department at the Bradenton Herald in Florida, I got some good advice from a former boss. This was my first management job, and I was green enough that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But one thing I did know: I wanted to be respected by my new staff (most of whom were older than me) but I also wanted them to like their jobs and excel at them. So the advice that I got from a former boss when I told her about my challenges in helping certain staffers improve their performance: “Be a human being” in working with your staff. “Follow the Golden Rule: Treat others as you want to be treated.”

I know I didn’t always succeed at that as a young manager or even as I got more experienced. But I think I achieved a good balance: expecting high quality work while understanding a person’s challenges of getting there.

So back to that Wall Street Journal column. Here are a few research findings:

  • A 2015 study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology showed that nice employees were seen as being natural leaders and they got significantly higher marks on performance reviews.
  • A 2010 study published in the Journal of Social Psychology showed “that kind acts, systematically deployed, raised the participants’ self-judged happiness,” according to the WSJ column.

Mr. Nice Guy

My dad, Joe Sutter, was known for being a nice guy. When I wrote my family memoir, Sutter’s Sodas Satisfy: A Memoir of 90 Years of Sutter Drug Co., I heard from many former employees who liked working for my dad, a pharmacist who ran the business when my grandfather grew old. And when my dad passed away in 2013, one of my mother’s sisters wrote in a card to me: “I don’t know anyone who didn’t like your Dad.”

My dad was quiet and unassuming, but he certainly had high standards and expected us kids to live up to them. I like to think we have.

Whom do you admire for being nice?