‘Oops’ Isn’t a Suitable Apology for Spelling Errors
“I don’t care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.”
P.T. Barnum, the great American showman, was right on both counts. Publicity is great, any kind of publicity – good, bad or other. But the most important consideration in publicity is that your name is spelled correctly.
That sage advice also applies to us who use social media to tell the world about ourselves, our NGOs, and our products and services.
Misspellings are the bane of writers. We all try to avoid them by writing carefully, proofreading, using automated spellcheckers and perhaps rereading. But despite our vigilance and best efforts, errors still manage to creep into our writing, tweets and posts, even when we write simple, common names.
I’ve personally experienced it. I’ve been called “Igor,” which I never was, and I was once renamed in an email “Iwhore.” The writer did not rectify this gross blunder so I had to write and correct it much to the chagrin of the very red-faced perpetrator. So, one bit of advice when you misspell someone’s name, especially that important someone who you are soliciting for a sponsorship, donation, membership or support, apologize and correct the name in a new email as soon as possible.
Don’t miss a second. Just fix it.
“Whether you’ve misspelled a word, ignored a complaint, said something silly, given horrible advice or over-used hashtags, social media blunders can turn off your audience, almost forever. Unfortunately, making typos is one of the most ignored blunders in social media networking these days. Most of us ignore and a lot of us form an impression,” writes social media adviser Sunita Biddu.
As small as they might be, spelling errors can really hurt your credibility and by association your organization’s and business’ credibility and integrity. You may excuse yourself that a typo here and there may be okay, but many of typos are not and how many in one email, tweet or post is many in the eye of the beholder.
Typos indicate to your audience that you are not serious and consequently that you, your organization or business, and message may not be serious as well.
“The moment a consumer sees misspellings or other general errors, they begin to question the credibility of not only the product but also the website and company,” warns social media consultant Marianne Chrisos.
Chrisos pointed out that there is a direct correlation between your typos and a decline in your prestige.
Citing a study published by the BBC, Chrisos noted that a single spelling mistake on a website can cut a company’s online sales in half. That means the business could have potentially had 1,000 sales (as opposed to the 500 that it really received) if you had fixed that spelling error of “staplar” to “stapler.”
Conversely, flawless writing, even in Twitter’s 140 characters, will go far in telling your readers a great deal about how professional you are, how serious you are about your messages, NGO or business, and you much you respect your audience.
If you notice a typo in your tweet or post, update and correct it immediately after you post it. You can use the edit function or you can delete it and repost a corrected version before people start liking, commenting on and sharing it.
Spelling errors are going to happen even to the best of us, but try to keep them to a minimum. Review your writing before you press send. An extra comma here and a misspelled word there may not seem like a big deal, but it does make you look sloppy. Also, it is wise to keep posts, tweets and emails as grammatically sound as possible, just like your letters were in the old days.
You risk a great deal by leaving grammatical or typographical errors that may look small but nonetheless will raise questions about your credibility in the back of your reader’s mind.
Just because you can type quickly and post comments and messages almost instantly doesn’t mean you should neglect grammar. You may legitimately feel you have to post a comment hastily but that doesn’t give you the right to overlook grammar, language and spelling. Haste has driven me to zealously post an interesting discovery in order to share it with followers and to attract new ones. However, if you don’t take a moment to give your post a second look before sending it, you are showing you were in such a rush that you failed to take into consideration your readers’ interests.
Your rushed work may also deliver confusing and detrimental messages. Simple errors such using “to, two, or too” interchangeably or replacing “there” with “they’re” or “their” will change the meaning and damage the effectiveness of your message. These minor mistakes distract your potential readers, prospects and customers from the real message and this could be harmful to your organization or business.
And don’t fool yourself. People take great pleasure in noticing typos and mentioning them to the culprit, supporters and competitors across cyberspace. The Germans have a word for it: “Schadenfreude.” At the time this can be very annoying and you just wish they’d go about their business without bothering you. But actually typos always matter, and those who inform the authors and editors of this are undertaking a great service.
“Another reason that fixing typos always matters is that by allowing them to fester away on websites or social networks, and in emails or text messages, we, as a species, are dumbing down. We’re letting mistakes stand, refusing to fix them even when we’re told they exist. This fosters the idea in the collective minds of the mainstream that typos are harmless,” observed Dave Parrack, the tech news and entertainment editor of MakeUseOf. “Once typos are accepted as an inevitable part of our everyday lives it’s a slippery slope down the dumb scale until we’re gruffly grunting at each other in the same way our evolutionary forebears once did.”
Finally, we, laptop, social media writers, have been trained like Pavlovian dogs to accept automated word replacements of spell check programs. The short answer is, don’t trust automation. Oftentimes I have caught in the nick of time an automated substitution that made no sense. Deactivating that function may prove helpful.
The long and the short of it is simply be careful not to leave typos in your wake and you’ll boost your outreach. Otherwise, you may be caught is this unpleasant situation:
A man received message from his neighbor.
Sorry sir I am using your wife. I am using day and night. I am using when u r not present at home. In fact I am using more than U R using. I confess this because now I feel very much guilt. Hope U will accept my sincere apologies.
Man went home and had a big fight with his wife.
Few minutes later he received another massage.
Sorry Sir spelling / auto correct mistake ... it's not wife but WIFI.
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