When entertainer Bob Hope was 95 years old, it was announced that he had died. It happened on June 5, 1998 when the Associated Press published an obituary for Hope on its wire service. The story was picked up by a staffer to then House majority leader, Dick Armey. Armey gave the news to Representative Bob Stump from Arizona. Stump was a friend of Hope and had pushed for legislation to name him an honorary veteran for his work with the USO and entertaining the troops over the years. Stump took to the floor of the House to announce, "…Bob Hope has died, we’re all going to miss him.” A Reuters reporter picked up Stump’s comments and reported that the king of the one-liners had passed away.

Bob Hope was eating breakfast with his daughter when he got the news of his own passing! No, he was not dead. In fact, for 95, he was very much alive. He planned to hit a few golf balls that day. When this was found out, you can imagine there were a lot of back-tracking and red-faced apologies. How did this happen? It is the practice of large news agencies to pre-write obituaries for famous people who are getting along in years. They keep these on file so they can quickly report them when the person’s eventual death comes about. However, on June 5, 1998, instead of saving the file, someone posted it to the AP web site. This piece of misinformation quickly made its way to Congress and to media sources worldwide! In fact, Bob Hope lived for another five years until he was 100 years old.

In our electronic communications age, one little piece of misinformation can cause a lot of problems. You do not need to be a famous entertainer for this to happen. Here are a few tips to make sure you are communicating what you want to say and it is not being misinterpreted.

Proofread before you hit the send button. Honestly, there is so much that is communicated these days. We value real-time communication, but take the time to reread your message before you hit send. It never hurts to have someone else take a look at very important messages, especially if you are sending written communications via an electronic format. I am not a big fan of auto correction software. It tends to turn my words into something I did not intend and it also makes me a spelling slug. Take a look at this line:

"Go ahead with the order, send to to me.”

Did my fingers get ahead of me when I typed "to to” or did I mean "send two to me?” Taking the time to read this before sending would clear up your true intentions.

However, there is another important reason to be careful before you hit send. Electronic written communication can come across as very insensitive and even rude. If you are responsible for your company’s social media, you know that a lot of emotion can be expressed in posts, and very little of it is happy. When people are leaving complaints on your site, be it legitimate or not, you have to be tactful in the way you respond. One little piece of misinformation can truly blow up on you and that misinformation is often tied to emotion you never intended. I have a friend that works in customer service for his company. He accidentally hit his caps lock on his keyboard when he was writing an email response to a client’s complaint. A day later, his boss called him into his office to ask why he was so angry with the customer. THEY HAD READ ANGER IN HIS ALL CAPS MESSAGE. A little thing like hitting the wrong key and not re-reading his email before he sent it almost cost his company a customer. The information was written in a very manner-of-fact way, but the format suggested emotions he did not intend to convey.

Here is another tip: verify your facts. In the old days, journalism students were taught to verify facts with two or three sources before anything was published. That sort of thinking has been tossed out the window in our trending news feeds of today. How many times does breaking news tend to scramble the facts in the name of getting information out now? Most corporate communications is not that pressing, so take the extra step of making sure what you are saying is not only proofread for spelling and grammar, but also is saying what the people in charge want it to say. I may be old fashioned, but we have used a sign off system for years that asks the people in charge of making these decisions to sign their name when they have approved us to move forward with any form of communications. It forces them to do more than a glance over when their name is attached to the information that was approved for publication.

Be sensitive to the information you are sending to your customers. Misinformation can cause all kinds of problems. Untangling such problems always takes much longer than being careful to begin with would have.

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Happy Bob Hope Laughs Off Reports Of His Death, by Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post, June 6, 1998