The Final Touch

Remem­ber the tra­di­tional way of doing pro­fes­sional net­work­ing? Spend a few hours in the car or plane to meet up with oth­ers in your field or related fields. Make con­tact with a few folks, maybe exchang­ing busi­ness cards — many of which would end up at the bot­tom of a purse or pocket, or in a pile on the desk at home. Hope­fully you’d chance to meet up with a few peo­ple who could really be an asset to you and for whom you could rec­i­p­ro­cate; you would leave sev­eral well-intended offers of “Let’s keep in touch” behind and, once back at your home office, maybe you fol­lowed up — or they did — and… maybe not. Either way, a lot of time and energy (and prob­a­bly money) had been spent for min­i­mal return on your investment.

I would encour­age you to try out LinkedIn, espe­cially if you have need for pro­fes­sional con­nec­tions. A quick way to get to the site is to fol­low this link to my pro­file and surf around from there:  http://​www​.linkedin​.com/​i​n​/​f​i​n​a​l​t​o​u​c​h​p​r​o​o​f​r​e​a​d​i​n​g​e​d​i​ting.

Yes­ter­day I took advan­tage of a webi­nar on Social Net­work­ing offered by Sab­rina Gib­son. She’s the Social Net­work­ing leader I’ve been learn­ing from in online train­ing since Decem­ber. Here’s what another mem­ber of the class had to say about her:

Linda Rus­sell on Sab­rina Gib­son — Social Net­work­ing (YouTube​.com)

Although this was an “intro” webi­nar, I decided to lis­ten in. I fig­ured either it would be good to have what I already knew reit­er­ated and rein­forced or she’d have some new infor­ma­tion to share, or both. Well, it turned out to be “both”!

I pro­moted this to some of you through my email list (If you are inter­ested in know­ing about resources like this, please fill in the brief form at the right of my home­page; I will NOT bom­bard your mail­box, and you can always un-subscribe if you change your mind), but I know some of you had sched­ule con­flicts yes­ter­day. So I am thrilled that Sab­rina has now made the record­ing of her webi­nar available!

Fol­low this link to check out what the webi­nar offers: http://​www​.Social​Max​i​miz​ing​.com/​V​i​deo3. And as a teaser, here are a few excerpts from the info page:

So many net­works, so lit­tle time! Have you put off Social Net­work­ing as just another “waste of time”?
Are you using Social Net­work­ing and not really find­ing any results? Are you con­fused as to what to do, when to do it or how to do it?…

If you are like most busi­ness own­ers you:

• Are smart with where you spend your time and money
• Rec­og­nize mar­ket­ing is a MUST to suc­ceed (espe­cially in this “new economy”)…
• Desire to grow your business
• May not under­stand tech­nol­ogy but rec­og­nize it is vital for success…

What I would like to share with you is a sim­ple step by step strat­egy so you don’t waste your time “tin­ker­ing around” with Social Net­works.  If you are not seri­ous about grow­ing your busi­ness, you can just stop read­ing now!  If you plan to “sur­vive” and even thrive in this new econ­omy, you need to do things differently…

Sab­rina has stated that the link to the webi­nar will only be avail­able for two weeks, so I strongly encour­age you to take advan­tage of it right away! (And while the info page says it’s a 1-hour event, it was actu­ally between 1–1/2 and 2! Can’t beat that for FREE!) Enjoy!

Oh, and please stop back here and leave a com­ment about what you thought of the webi­nar after you’ve viewed it. I’d love to hear!

Whew! After quite a few days of frus­tra­tion, I learned yes­ter­day (through Sab­rina Gib­son, my social-media coach) that Host­Ga­tor was the place to go to work out my Word­Press kinks!

See, though I don’t really under­stand it and prob­a­bly can’t explain it well, Host­Ga­tor is what enables me to have a “self-hosted” blog — to take my domain name (Final­Touch­Proof­readin­gAndEdit­ing) and use Word­Press blog­ging fea­tures with­out hav­ing my name buried inside a Word­Press URL. Don’t worry if you don’t under­stand that; I just fol­lowed Sabrina’s direc­tions for set­ting it up (and if you have a busi­ness you want to blog for, you might find it use­ful to learn more about this — I can put you in touch with the right people).

Until this morn­ing, I’d been tear­ing my hair out. See? It’s a lot shorter now than it used to be! Com­pare this — before the glitch –

Heidi with longish hair (Photo cour­tesy Gabriel Mann, age 5)

to this — after I’d yanked out half of my locks!

Heidi with short hair (Photo cour­tesy Gabriel Mann, age 5)

(Of course, it was a wel­come change for summer.)

Any­way… my point is that Host­Ga­tor turned out to be the place I needed to go for answers! What’s more, they are so strong in the customer-service realm that the three issues I brought to the Live Chat tech­ni­cian (and one more that I added in along the way) are now all resolved, so I am out of panic mode and back into lov­ing my blog!!

So, you should see more of me in the near future! (And I just may become a Host­Ga­tor affil­i­ate, but for now, FYI, I make no “com­mis­sion” off of pro­mot­ing them here, other than the fun of pass­ing along a great tip and resource to my friends!)

Oh, and the change in the look of the blog is “col­lat­eral dam­age” from all the tech prob­lems. I may end up chang­ing it back, or chang­ing to some­thing a bit fancier, but for now, I’m just glad to be here, back with you!

I love the tips offered by “Gram­mar Girl” Mignon Fog­a­rty on her web­site and pod­casts, and in her email newslet­ters and books. The fol­low­ing is copied from her email newslet­ter which I received today. Very interesting!

What Is a Janus Word?

Bob wrote, “How about weigh­ing in on the word ‘sanc­tion.’ I am con­tin­u­ally con­fused by see­ing the word used in con­texts in which it appears to mean approved by an author­ity, and oth­er­wise condemned.”

“Sanc­tion” is some­thing called a Janus word–a word with two oppo­site mean­ings. Such words are named after the Roman god Janus who has two faces that look in oppo­site direc­tions. Other Janus words are “cleave” (which can mean to cling to or to sep­a­rate), “screen” (which can mean to review or dis­play or to hide or shield from view), and “trim” (which can mean to remove things or add things).

Can you think of other Janus words? Please share in a com­ment here!

“Punc­tu­a­tion is a means, and its end is: help­ing the reader to hear, to follow.”

–Thomas McCor­mack, as quoted in Eats, Shoots and Leaves* by Lynne Truss

McCor­mack says, fur­ther, that the pur­pose of punc­tu­a­tion is “to tango the reader into the pauses, inflec­tions, con­ti­nu­ities and con­nec­tions that the spo­ken line would convey.”

To tango the reader into…! Isn’t that lan­guage just gor­geous?!

(By the way, you’ll notice McCormack’s and Truss’s British style of punc­tu­a­tion. If you won­der why there’s a colon where I wouldn’t nor­mally place one, and why there is no “ser­ial comma” used, it’s because of the dif­fer­ences between Amer­i­can and British writ­ing styles. Inter­est­ingly, I just learned last week­end at the AWESOME “Copy­edit­ing Boot­camp” work­shop I attended that, more and more, for copy­edit­ing pur­poses, the pre­ferred style of spelling and punc­tu­a­tion — even among British pub­lish­ers — is the Amer­i­can style. You learn some­thing new every day!)

* http://​cmp​.ly/5

I was so proud of my sixth-grader-to-be the other day when he read a post­card giv­ing direc­tions to camp and noted a mis­spelling. “They mis­spelled ‘through,’” he said after barely a glance at the card. “What,” I inquired, “did they spell it t-h-r-u?” But as I was about to explain that infor­mal spelling to him, he said, “No, they used the wrong form: t-h-r-e-w.” Sure enough, there it was: some­thing to the effect of going “threw” some lit­tle town to get to the camp.

This is the sort of error busi­nesses and orga­ni­za­tions who com­mu­ni­cate with the pub­lic really want to avoid in order to retain cred­i­bil­ity and pro­fes­sion­al­ism in the eyes of their clients. It’s a mis­take that might come of sim­ply not know­ing the dif­fer­ence between “through” and “threw” or because, as can hap­pen to any of us, as you’re typ­ing the mes­sage, three other things are going on in the office at the same time — maybe one of which is your coworker telling how her son threw a great pitch at tee-ball, and your mind picked up on that use of the word and it got dropped into your mes­sage. It hap­pens to the best of us!

Look for a good proof­reader and pass every ounce of pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tion past him or her before it goes pub­lic. A brief post­card would take a proofer 15 min­utes or less — and you’d pay a small fee for a great return!

By the way, “threw” is the past tense of “throw”; “through” (infor­mally “thru”) is the prepo­si­tion for going into and then out of some­thing.