How to Deal with All the Negativity

By now, we all know that one of the prices you pay for opening up a real dialogue with your audience is that the feedback you get isn’t always going to be positive – or even nice. It’s everywhere you go in social media – from blog comments to Facebook Walls to Twitter.

How to – and even whether to – respond to the negative criticism can be tricky, if not frustrating. That’s why Mashable put together a “how to” specifically geared at responding the right way to the comments you need to respond to – and ignoring the ones you don’t. The key is staying positive, and it starts with separating the legitimate beefs from the trolling spammers. In other words, step 1: take a deep breath.

In the end, the open dialogue can be one of the most beneficial aspects of social media, empowering your audience to take control of the conversation.

Testing, testing...

Even when you think you know it all about what tactics perform the best in email marketing, it’s always good to take a step back from time to time and test it.

Pinpointe, an email marketing company, just released the results of its study Email Marketing 101, which tests a lot of the basics from subject line length to sender information to email personalization. The results, while not too shocking, help establish some key best practices in email communications:

1. Keep subject lines short.
2. Send messages from a real person, rather than sending from an organization.
3. Personalizing the messages increases response.

Take a look at the full results here – download the PDF or watch the webinar.