Business Up Front - September 2001

Business Up Front

Top Ten Mistakes in Business E-mail

John Zipperer of the Commercial Investment Real Estate Journal provides the following words to the wise regarding e-mail mistakes:

1. Sending a Novel — Don’t send long e-mail unless you have a previous agreement with the recipient. Your contacts will thank you for keeping messages short and sweet, and you will have a better chance of them reading your mail and replying.

2. Improper Subject Headings — Succinctly summarize what the message is about and try to avoid ambiguous headings such as, "Hello there" or "Some info for you."

3. Misleading Subject Headings — If there’s one thing that makes e-mail recipients irate, it’s receiving junk mail. If you’re sending a business-related message, don’t use a subject line such as, "Great Money-Making Opportunity" or, "You Can’t Pass This Up!" If it looks like junk mail, it will go straight into the trash, and you’ve wasted your time.

4. Abusing Automatic Reply Functions — You can set your computer to send automatic messages back to anyone who e-mails you, perhaps with a message announcing a sale or promoting your company. These indiscriminate messages, which go out regardless of who is sending the e-mail, can become annoying and should be used sparingly.

5. Not Including Sender’s Contact Information — You wouldn’t send a regular letter without including your name, address and phone. The same rules apply to e-mail. Most e-mail programs allow you to preprogram your contact information as an "automatic signature."

6. Not Referencing Original Message in a Reply — Don’t reply to messages without referencing the previous message, especially if you have been sending regular correspondence back and forth. Getting a reply saying, "Yes," does no good if the recipient doesn’t know what the original question was.

7. Sending Out Unverified Alerts — Virus alerts from "knowledgeable" people unknown to you are usually junk, and passing them along to everyone in your address book doesn’t help anyone.

8. Lacking "Netiquette" — Remember, your e-mail can be passed along to others, and you never know where it may end up, so think before you criticize someone, send an inappropriate joke, spread gossip or reveal confidential information.

9. Too Attached to Attachments — Don’t send attachments over broadcast e-mail lists. They can slow down servers and some recipients won’t be able to open them. It’s smarter to summarize the information and let people contact you for the attachment if they are interested. Also, be sure to send any attachments through a virus scanner before sending them out.

10. Ignoring the In Box — Check your mailbox at least once a day. There may not be anything urgent, but it’s a matter of courtesy to the senders.

Fun Film Facts From Nevada

The Nevada Film Office, a branch of the Commission on Economic Development, provides the following "Fun Facts" in its 2001 Nevada Production Directory:

John Wayne’s final performance was in The Shootist, filmed in Carson City and released in 1976.

The Mars landscape in Total Recall was actually the stunning vistas found in the Valley of Fire.

Pyramid Lake doubled for the Sea of Galilee in The Greatest Story Ever Told.

Wayne Newton’s home, featured in Chevy Chase’s Vegas Vacation movie, was his actual Las Vegas residence.

Frank Sinatra once owned the Cal-Neva at Lake Tahoe’s Crystal Bay. David Mamet’s Things Change and Ron Shelton’s Cabb shot scenes there.

Nevada tribal lands have been used in such projects as Misery, The Greatest Story Ever Told and Trail of Tears.

Meeting Professionals Hold a Meeting of Their Own

Meeting Professionals International (MPI) held its largest-ever annual conference in Las Vegas in July, bringing over 3,500 members together to discuss the meeting and convention industry. According to MPI, its 19,000 members worldwide account for more than 772,000 meetings annually, with the collective membership spending approximately $8.5 billion on meetings per year. On average, an MPI meeting professional conducts 84 meetings per year and has an average annual budget of more than $1 million. Other facts from MPI’s Web site, mpiweb.org:

The total number of meetings held worldwide in 1999, including corporate, association and conventions, was 1,021,500.

Meeting industry expenditures in 1999 totaled $40.2 billion.

The total number of meeting attendees in 1999 was 78.9 million.

The average lead time for planning meetings with more than 5,000 attendees is more than two years.

Corporate planners spent the majority of their budgets (58 percent) on hotels and food for meetings.

The average salary for independent meeting planners in 2000 was $60,230.

Surprise Announcement: Americans Distrust Government

According to a nationwide survey by Decision Analyst, Inc., an opinion and marketing research firm, many Americans totally lack trust in government agencies. The firm surveyed 3,200 adults in April, before the FBI admitted it had not disclosed all its information related to the Oklahoma City bombing. While 13.6 percent of respondents said they had no trust at all in the federal government, only 6.6 percent said they had "a lot of trust." State and city governments showed comparable numbers.

Garry Upton, senior vice president of Decision Analyst, said, "As professional analysts, we know that respondents who strongly approve or disapprove of a product or group often are led to do something about their beliefs. …This data helps explain the difficult time government officials have in enlisting constituent support to move in any direction that would expand our success as a nation. The data also helps explain why a tragedy of such immense proportions as the Oklahoma City bombing happened, and could happen again."