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The marketing and advertising companies that track consumer behavior online want to take a crack at regulating themselves—before the government does it for them. New guidelines are slated to be unveiled today from groups representing top companies that track consumers online. The guidelines call for greater transparency—basically, letting people know when they’re being shadowed online—and for giving consumers a way to opt out. Industry groups would monitor the companies to ensure …

Ever wonder how our digital culture is affecting the nation? Well, producers from PBS’s documentary program Frontline will spend the next year investigating the effects. A national broadcast about the topic will air next winter. The Verizon Foundation awarded Frontline a $1 million grant for the project.

We’re bringing style (and grammar) back in this refresher course on seventh-grade English.

Ever heard of social mention? It’s a monitoring tool that differs from Google Alerts, which sends you only the link to an online mention. Social Mention not only sends the link, but also ranks your mention using strength, passion, reach, and sentiment — words not normally associated with metrics. This free service would be a good way to introduce clients or companies to social media monitoring, without the huge price tag. It is also a helpful way to discover your brand’s true fans. &#82…

According to the New York Times Co.’s latest SEC filing, chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.’s compensation for the year climbed to nearly $6 million from the $2.3 million earned last year, reports paidContent.org . President and CEO Janet Robinson pulled in $6.2 million, an increase from $4.7 million the previous year. Related Poynter Online The Times issued a memo to its freelancers Monday reminding them of the paper’s policy on ethical journalism. Poynter Online has that me…

E-mail and social media are a powerful marketing combination. Copyblogger ‘s Brian Clark says the subject line of your e-mail is like a news headline — it must capture the attention of the reader. Clark takes a look back at headline fundamentals, the specifics that apply to subject lines, and the “secret sauce” that makes e-mail your top conversion channel. — Susan Young

APS’s employee newsletter On is filled with crisp writing and compelling headlines.

Two weeks ago, Apple legal representatives reportedly contacted Microsoft to ask that the company stop running its “Laptop Hunter” marketing campaign, which suggests Apple computers are too expensive. Apple told Microsoft it has lowered the cost of it computers. “We’re just going to keep running them and running them and running them,” Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner said. Apple’s PR team had no comment. (Big shocker.)

Forrester Research released a five year forecast of dollars spent on interactive marketing and the outlook is grim for traditional marketers. “Interactive marketing will near $55 billion and represent 21 percent of all marketing spend in 2014 as marketers shift dollars away from traditional media and toward search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing,” Shar VanBoskirk wrote in the study’s executive summary. Related eMarketer Ad spending on …

Need to plan and promote an event? Here are the event industry’s top firms, according Event Marketer ’s “Agency It List.” The common theme among the agencies on this year’s “It List” is a boutique state-of-mind, writes Event Marketer . “An ability to scale up or down, reinvent themselves to better serve their clients and the market and produce more intimate and highly targeted programs that leverage every type of media and technology — both live and o…

When design destroys the message.

Good news for communicators. A story in this morning’s  Wall Street Journal cites a recent study indicating 80 percent of companies believe “reputational risk” is their chief concern. Problem is only 43 percent believe they have a plan to tackle this problem. “The problem is clear: It is easy to identify and measure the impact of the damage wrought to a reputation after a crisis,” writes Elizabeth Lux for The Wall Street Journal . “But it is far more difficult to …

Even the best communicators are capable of making small mistakes … but those small mistakes will cost you readers.