Social media allows you to improve your brand by engaging with others. Staying connected with clients or reaching out to a new audience may mean writing newsletters, articles, brief posts, or profile summaries on sites. Even if your team commits a passionate effort into the finding the right words, forgetting to proofread risks damaging your marketing efforts.

Bad grammar risks destroying credibility and reputation.

Spotting too many mistakes, especially breaking simple rules like capitalizing the wrong letters, becomes distracting. The reader may believe the persons working for the brand do not care enough to write well and conclude they don’t care about quality or their clients. Imagine a Facebook post claiming quality services containing basic grammar errors, and the post refers potential clients to an overview page on the web where grammar mistakes abound. Poor grammar risks losing sales.

In the post, “Writing for Social Media: When Bad Grammar Happens to Good People” at GrammarChic.com the author states, “bad grammar not only hinders your social media marketing efforts, it has the ability to crush any credibility or authority you may have in your respective field” and simply, “no one wants to look like an idiot.”

Brad Hoover in “Good Grammar Should be Everyone’s Business” on Harvard Business Review writes about an informal study by his company, Grammarly, of LinkedIn profiles finding a correlation between good grammar and success.

Also on Harvard Business Review in “I Won’t Hire People Who Use Poor Grammar. Here’s Why.” Kyle Wiens, CEO of iFixit, asserts that “good grammar is credibility, especially on the internet.” People judge others by their writing. Wiens’s observation is that people who make fewer mistakes in writing also make fewer mistakes in other work. Supporting his hiring practice he states, “programmers who pay attention to how they construct written language also tend to pay a lot more attention to how they code.” Also notice in the post Wiens mentions the basics like mistaking “to” for “too” or incorrectly using “it’s.”

Your post doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to show that you care.

When it comes to informal writing, readers are forgiving. A mistake in a brief post will likely go unnoticed. Forgiveness diminishes when errors outnumber sentences, or the message becomes difficult to understand. Proofreading a short newsletter may only take a minute. You know writing basics and how to find help. Your clients know this, too.

You are passionate about your brand. Show your passion by proofreading.

In my 2010 post, “Get Off Your Butt,” I addressed the problem of working at a desk for long hours increasing risk of heart problems, obesity, and general fatigue. After four years at a desk job, I had realized that commuting to work on a bicycle was not enough to compensate for eight or more hours sitting at a desk.

Only 28 percent of Americans are getting the minimal amount of recommended exercise.

After two years of using a standing desk (a drafting table), I now realize how detrimental to my health hours of sitting had been the previous four years. Standing for part of the work day has helped recover much of my health. I’ve also noticed that when I’m trying to solve difficult problems, my brain prefers it when I stand. Humans think better on their feet. Of course standing in one place for too long isn’t good, either, so I upgraded my office with a GeekDesk.

Thanks to pre-built software, password cracking keeps getting easier, and many users still don’t care. Even if you have nothing worth stealing, using strong passwords prevents attackers from social engineering to get something that is worth taking. Attackers can glean parts of secret information from different sites, or hints from your Facebook profile, to get something valuable. Sophisticated tools also make it easier to use the simple passwords to crack other passwords. See “Why passwords have never been weaker—and crackers have never been stronger” at Ars Technica and take a look at some of the worst passwords in “10 of the worst passwords exposed by LinkedIn hack.”

Password dumping—public display of encrypted (and later possibly cracked) lists—has become more common allowing both security professionals and thieves learn more about password habits. Thieves may automate re-using your name-password login on other sites. A short list of recent dumps from Ars:

• "More passwords dumped, this time from alleged billabong.com hack"
• "eHarmony confirmed its members' passwords were posted online, too"
• "8 million passwords leaked connected to LinkedIn, dating website"
• "Sony hacked yet again, plain text passwords, emails, DOB posted"

What these dumps reveal is that many users still choose simple passwords, a real word usually with a capital letter at the beginning and ending in a number. Cracking software try this pattern first starting with the most popular. Slightly tougher passwords use a real word with two or more capitals somewhere in the middle broken by a number or two. Better, play the license plate game to make a memorable password.

Tips

• length should be at least 8 characters
• use one or more capital letters in the middle
• use numbers, but not just at the end
• use at least one symbol if site allows
• use a password generator
• never use same password twice

Passwords are easier to remember if you type them every time instead letting your browser remember for you. Also, you may try a secure password organizer to store passwords (and other info) like 1Password available for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

One annoying feature of Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim by Bethesda Softworks is the scenery popping into place—which is to say the high resolution textures replacing the low resolution textures—worst of all the appearance of frozen waterfalls. Sometimes it seems one has to get awfully close to the waterfall before the gorgeous animated water appears. The fish leap up the ugly block of water without a care. Setting distance sliders to maximum doesn’t help the waterfalls. If the artists had created nicer looking low-resolution waterfalls, this might not be as much a bother.

I’m not the only one concerned. Players found a solution within weeks of Skyrim’s release. Read the details on this post, “uGridsToLoad Skyrim.ini Comparisons and Explanation,” at Bethesda Softworks Forums _. The short answer is to set three keys in the skyrim.ini file under [General]:

uExterior Cell Buffer=64
 
uGridsToLoad=7
 
iPreloadSizeLimit=51380224

The forum post author came up with a formula given a uGridsToLoad value to calculate the other two, however the author admits uncertainty about what iPreloadSizeLimit actually does. Others claim uGridsToLoad isn’t related to the other two.

Trade-offs include a performance hit for higher values of x, increase in memory usage, events possibly triggering earlier than some game mechanics may expect, and unsafe to load games saved at higher x-values than playing due to corruption. So, experiment and keep x before playing or continuing a real game. If using memory-consuming mods, or high-resolution texture mods, then higher uGrids will compound stability problems due to restricted memory. If you desire the most stable game then do not alter uGrids.

As noted by Mark Coker on the Smashwords blog, “PayPal Revises Policies to Allow Legal Fiction,” PayPal has worked with the ebook community to adjust their terms covering sales of erotica content.

This is about distributing legal fiction, and always has been. As stated in my previous post, it’s about money and the law. The difference between obscene and literary value sometimes becomes debatable, but it should be the responsibility of the retailers and community to determine.

I don’t blame credit card companies for trying protect themselves, or increase their revenue by taking advantage of sales of questionably obscene material, but it’s in everyone’s best interest to find a fair way for everyone to continue business. Ebook retailers risk may increase, but I believe most of them already take responsibility and work with the community like Smashwords has shown.