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His most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet.

Shel also helps authors/publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

He was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.

Shel began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).

“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions–because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”

A key principle: Twitter is about building relationships over time.

That means if all you do is shout sales messages, you’re wasting most of Twitter’s potential. Yes, if you have a popular brand or retail store, your customers do want information about bargains. But they also want to feel like a human being is talking — and listening.

Personally, I strive for a ratio that is no more than 10 percent blatant self-promotion. The other 90% is a mix of passing on links to interesting information (often by retweeting someone else, with acknowledgment), responding to requests for — or asking for — advice, commenting on news or trends, engaging directly with people (responding or passing on a tweet, saying thank-you to people who have retweeted me, mentioned me as someone to follow, or mentioned my latest book (Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green), or just bringing a smile with a quote or a cool picture.

However, if other people say nice things about me or my offerings, I will retweet and/or thank them, and I don’t count that toward the 10 percent.

I guess it must be working, as I get 20 to 50 new followers in a typical week, all of them earned organically, without any game-the-system crap.

Last month’s Twitter, Part 1 newsletter brought this comment from Sherry Lowry in Austin, TX (@sherrylowry on Twitter):

“I really love Twitter (or actually the Twitter-related tools) and was expecting when reading your March news to either

– see clips from your Twitter stream

– a chance to click right into or follow you

Ask and ye shall receive, at least this time. To follow me on Twitter, visit @ShelHorowitz or https://www.twitter.com/shelhorowitz

And here are five of my Tweets (all posted April 1). You’ll notice they illustrate several of the types above.

RT @TalkAboutIssues
Fact: President Ronald Reagan, an icon to most conservatives, supported increases in the debt limit 12 times over his two terms.#Obama2012 [Retweet]

Blog: How Southwest Airlines is Greening Their Planes https://greenandprofitable.com/how-southwest-airlines-is-greening-their-planes/ [passing on interesting links–in this case, an automatic post to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn from my blog]

Fabulous! Beethoven’s 9 10,000 in the chorus, Japan https://www.youtube.com/embed/paH0V6JLxSI[passing on an interesting link that I found elsewhere]

@maddow I’m hoping for 39 x 3 more years of your speaking truth to power. Very happy birthday. [engaging directly, in this case with TV commentator Rachel Maddow]

RT @SW_Coalition: Denise Hamler of @GreenAmerica will be hosting@ShelHorowitz for a talk on green business at (cont) https://tl.gd/goltff [Retweet of someone else’s tweet that promotes me]

I’m a pretty active Tweeter, so you can see lots more at https://twitter.com/shelhorowitz

June 19, 7 pm ET/4 p.m. PT

I’m a long-time fan of joint ventures (JVs), because they let you go to new markets and audiences on the arm of someone they already know and trust I used JVs to reach 5 million people for the launch of my most recent book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green — versus the roughly 25,000 I can reach on my own.

Robert, a JV expert, approached me recently about doing a program for you. I listened to one of his earlier programs and thought you would benefit by having me bring him in, You’ll learn:

• How to set up Joint Ventures to make fast cash — sometimes in just a few hours using your phone book
• Secret method for mailing 10,000 sales letters per month…at no cost…not even postage
• An amazing strategy for telling 200 million people about your business for FREE
• How to dominate your local market as a JV Dealmaker
• How to use publicity to get potential joint venture partners to call you
• Sneaky way to get $5000 a month in free radio promotions
• From O to $1.5 MM using joint venture strategies

Robert Smith is president of Champion Media Worldwide, a public relations and marketing firm in Loves Park, IL. He has mastered the art of joint venture deals and teaches others how to spot hidden opportunities to help their businesses.

Not one, but three major telesummits on environmental themes in April (Earth Day is that month, after all). Read on for details.

MONDAY, 4/16 I’m on the first day’s program for the Green Business Entrepreneurs Success Summit: How You Can Unite Purpose and Profit for a Sustainable Planet, organized by Lorna Li as an “alternative green MBA.” https://shelhorowitz.com/go/GreenBusinessEntrepreneurs/ My topic: Making Green Sexy: Guerrilla Marketing Tactics for Small Green Businesses, and I’m on at 5 pm ET/2 pm PT. Other presenters include Alisa Gravitz, Executive Director of Green America; Steven Hoffman, co-founder of LOHAS Journal and LOHAS Forum; Jacqui Ottman, author of The New Rules of Green Marketing, Elena Christopoulos, Interim President of the Green Chamber of Commerce (among others). No charge for this series!

4/21, Amherst, MA Exhibiting at the third annual Amherst Sustainability Fair, on the common, 10-4. https://www.amherstma.gov/index.aspx?NID=683  1200 exhibitors, live music…and fun.

4/26, Interview with Wendy Meyeroff — to listen, 347-884-8365; to ask questions before the show wendy@piggybankpromotions.com

4/29 Goodall and I are also among the presenters for the Better World Forum, another remarkable telesummit on the last two weekends in April — along with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Deepak Chopra and others. Again, I feel very honored to be included. You can bring down the already-low cost ($49 another $10, to just $39 — if you use my link: https://shelhorowitz.com/go/BetterWorldForum/. I’ll be airing Sunday, April 29, 1-2 pm ET/10-11 am PT

5/1, Houston, TX Speaking at the Gulf Coast Green conference in Houston, May 1: “Making Green Sexy.” https://gulfcoastgreen.org/pages/default.asp

Also remember, if you set me up an engagement, you could earn a generous commission.

I’ve listened to several calls from ShiftNetwork’s latest telesummit, Spring of Sustainability, and they are amazing. I’m so proud to be one of the presenters, along with such planet-changers as Jane Goodall (legendary for her work in Africa with chimpanzees), Bill McKibben (climate activist and founder of 350.org), Vandana Shiva (Indian activist who took on Coca-Cola), Van Jones (former White House Green Jobs czar and funder of Color of Change), John Robbins (visionary who puts the Baskin-Robbins fortune to good use), Hazel Henderson (author of Ethical markets and many other key works), Frances Moore Lappé (Diet for a Small Planet and other books, decades of food and democracy activism) John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hitman), Thom Hartmann (progressive radio host and author), Aqeela Sherrills (campaigner against gang violence and government violence), Julia Butterfly Hill (she lived in a tree for months to save it from being cut down), Vicki Robin (Your Money or Your Life), Hunter Lovins (energy pioneer and co-author of Natural Capitalism), Joel Makower (founder of GreenBiz.com), John Trudell (American Indian and earth activist)…WOW! Many of the interviews will be aired between now and June 22; for those you’ve missed (including mine), you can unlimited access to the replays for a very reasonable price of about $2 per session ($147 altogether). https://shelhorowitz.com/go/SpringOfSustanability/

A cram-packed two day opportunity to further your publishing plans withaccess to experts and ample time for networking at a bargain price.https://www.ipne.org

Become an Award Winning Company: 7 Steps to Unlock The Million Dollar Secret Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know, by Matt Shoup (Shoup Consulting, 2012)

It sounds like a thin premise for a marketing book: go out and win some awards. After all, I cover the subject in just a few pages in some of my own books on marketing. In one of my books, winning awards shares a chapter on credibility building with getting endorsements and reviews.

But breaking a process down step by step is often a worthy endeavor, and in this case Shoup provides good food for thought.

The bulk of the book is devoted to the good things that can happen to an award-winning company that understands how to leverage and market those awards (including a bunch of interviews with CEOs of award-winning companies about the specific ways their achievement helped their business). A smallish section at the end goes through the how-to of actually winning awards. I might have reversed both placement and proportion, but maybe that’s because I do have a very clear understanding of the benefits already (and have won quite a few awards over the years).

Shoup himself sums up the case for winning awards nicely and succinctly on page 171: “As an award-winning company, you are going to be able to go out and attain massive success, exposure, credibility, free PR, and more business.” And a lot of the book shows how he and the CEOs he profiles have done just that.

More than the specifics, where this book really shines is in three consistent approaches to the success mindset:

1.To win awards, you must achieve excellence: base your company in high integrity, wow your customers, and establish a culture that drives the best people to join your staff and succeed with you.

2.This excellence allows you to thrive in economic downturns (he has a great rant on this) and to set and achieve goals a lot more easily.

3.Success doesn’t just happen to you; you go out and make it happen, and that means when you do win awards, it’s up to you to extract the maximum possible benefit from them in your marketing.

That last is important. Used properly, awards let you de-commoditize your business, get away from the tire-kickers and bargain hunters, and establish the value of working with an excellent company and being wiling to pay for it.

One thing that puzzles me: Shoup apparently gave no thought to becoming an award-winning *author.* The cover and interior design are amateurish, and the book would have benefited from one more edit (with someone who understands when a phrase like “award winning” should or should not take a hyphen). It would have been easy enough to spend a few hundred bucks more on a better production and then enter some good awards for the book, especially if he wants to build up the coaching and speaking parts of his own business (his primary line of work is running a house painting company).