SEO and social media is a fast-moving industry. Techniques that were once best practice can quickly become obsolete. Websites that once performed well on search engines can plummet down the rankings if they are not optimised and kept up-to-date with the latest developments.

At Podium, we stay on top of those developments so our clients don’t have to. It’s one of the main reasons our key performance data across all clients – web traffic, SEO rankings, organic search results, social media engagement – all increase, month after month, year after year.

This also means that we’re accustomed to evolving our approach to stay ahead of the game. Learning new things every day, and applying them to ensure we get the best results for our clients, is one of our key collective skills.

If something challenges our methods or beliefs, we’re comfortable with that. We’ll assess the evidence, work out what’s best, learn what needs to be learned, and move on.

Think you know everything?

So you can imagine our shock this week when we discovered we had all been wrong about something, pretty much our entire lives.

Worse, finding out the truth shook us to our cores. Account director Steve Maybury had to go home early, he was that upset.

You’ve heard the phrase ‘you’ve got another thing coming’, right? You’ve used it, you’ve heard other people use it, you’ve seen it written down.

Well, you’ve got another thing coming, because the correct phrase is actually ‘you’ve got another think coming.’

Really.

The Guardian Style Guide is a huge glossary for content writers, and Podium’s preferred reference guide to ensure we have a consistent written style.

A colleague was casually browsing the GSG – it’s what passes for fun if you’re a content geek – and stumbled across the entry for ‘another thing coming’:

another-think-coming

Wait…  what?

A quick google reveals the uncomfortable truth. The correct saying really is is ‘you’ve got another think coming.’ Here’s the evidence (admittedly on Wiki, but there are many sources on this).

First, we were like this:

And then this:

And then finally, as we realised the truth, like this:

It seems the confusion has, in part been caused by a song by metal band Judas Priest, the title of which has, for some reason, become ingrained in our collective psyche (caution: the lead singer says a rude word very loudly at the start of this clip):

So there you have it. We consider ourselves open-minded and willing to learn, but this has really rocked us. Some of us have decided we can never use the phrase again – thing or think – because it just feels tainted now.

So, let’s open it up to the floor. What word or phrase have you been getting wrong for years and years, leaving you shocked when you learned the truth? Let us know on Twitter via @on_the_podium

 

Back