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| Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,
January 2015
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Happy new year! May your 2015 be blessed, happy, healthy, profitable, and make a contribution to the world. For me, this will be the year that I start putting into practice all the prep work I’ve done for the past year around combining business profitability with ending poverty, war, hunger, and catastrophic climate change.
This is the year where the sustainably-sourced rubber meets the solar-paved road, and I attempt to find the people who will pay for my expertise in this area. I will be offering speaking, writing, consulting, and training on how to create and maintain a thriving, profitable business (or organization) that genuinely helps the world.
And keep in mind that you can earn a generous commission if you match me up with someone who needs some of that expertise. |
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| This Month’s Tip: Get Celebs to Notice You |
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In this final part of the three-part series on working with celebrities, we’ll discuss how to get past the gatekeepers and get noticed. The higher you go on the “celebrity food chain,” the harder it is to get their attention. Superstars are usually extremely isolated from everyday people. They have gatekeepers for their gatekeepers. Even lesser-known celebs can be pretty well shielded from the hoi polloi. So how does an ordinary Joe or Jane get their attention?
Here are some ways to make it easier: Ideally, you’ll be doing some of these things, and building a relationship, long before you ask for anything—so when you finally do ask, you go right to the top of the pile.
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1. First of all, in every approach, be honest and authentic, and treat this person like a person. They are surrounded by idol-worshipers and groupies and self-aggrandizing hustlers, and they will appreciate being treated like a human being.
2. Spread their content around. Share their links and retweet their posts on social media, link to their material in your newsletter, mention them in your books and articles. Make it clear you value what they do and want to bring it to a wider audience.
3. Interact with them online. Comment on their blog posts, send fan mail or polite disagreements about articles they post, or links to non-self-promotional things you’ve discovered that you think they’ll like. Follow them on social media and respond when a post of theirs catches your interest.
4. Introduce yourself to them at live events, but not in a pushy way. Offer to buy them coffee or a meal or a drink, or just take a walk together, and have a laid-back, no-pressure conversation.
5. Better yet, make a point of introducing them to others who are working for common goals and who can help them.
6. Get an introduction from someone they already trust (perhaps a lower-level celeb in the same genre).
7. Offer something that will be directly useful to them or advance their agenda. (We covered this in detail last month: https://thecleanandgreenclub.com/?p=3044 )
8. Understand some of the constraints they face. Every word, action, and gesture they create is micro-analyzed by hungry sharks in the media, and one poorly-thought-out move could topple a carefully assembled career.
9. Respect their time. Be focused, understand that they have many pressures and are giving you a gift by choosing to spend time with them. Make things easy for them. As an example, if you’re requesting an endorsement, offer to draft something for their approval.
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| Hear and Meet Shel
No speaking appearances scheduled at the moment, but you might enjoy listening to these two interviews with me—both rather different from some of my usual ones:
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The Boomer Business Owner, with Charlie Poznek: https://theboomerbusinessowner.com/2014/12/tbbo-275-shel-horowitz-use-green-marketing-increase-profits/
or on iTunes at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/boomer-business-owner-charlie/id807801358?mt=2Charlie sums up the takeaways thusly:
- How to use climate change and other green movements to expand your reach and profitability
- How green marketing provides your business with an operational advantage
- An ironic revelation about Al Gore and George W. Bush
- Profit-based ideas for green-ifying your business and business practices
- “Do the right thing not just because it’s the right thing, but because you’ll make a bigger profit.”
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And then another interview with Sylvia Henderson of Idea Success:
https://www.blogtalkradio.com/sylviahenderson/2015/01/05/change-the-world-through-the-power-of-profit–shel-horowitz
This one went deep. It covered the dynamics of shopping or not shopping at particular companies because of their values…the three events when I was 12 that got me started changing the world…how nuclear power is NOT a green or carbon-friendly power source, no matter what they say…a bit on how to tell when a company is “greenwashing,” and much more. |
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I do plan to attend Book Expo America, as usual, and I’m sure I’ll work in a few conferences in the green world. But I expect that more of my gigs this year will be for private audiences, such as in-house training for corporations and associations. |
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Some Recent Posts on My Blog
I’ve been blogging for more than 10 years now, and it’s been a long time since I’ve told you anything about what I do over there.Here are my posts since the December newsletter, all available at https://greenandprofitable.com/shels-blog/
If you like what you read there, please subscribe to get an email every time I post something.
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| Another Recommended Book—The Beautiful Tree |
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Connect with Shel on Social Media |
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| About Shel & This Newsletter
As a green business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of eight books… international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. 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.Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.He 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).
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| “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).” |
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The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, by James Tooley (Cato Institute, 2009)
Let me say this right from the beginning: I am a supporter of public education; Tooley and his publisher (a well-known conservative think-tank) are not. My recommendation that you read this book should not be taken as an endorsement of his educational philosophy.But I do recognize that public schools fail to meet the needs of some students. And I see many, many lessons for the business community in the stories he tells of tiny private schools serving the poorest of the poor in places like India, China, Ghana, and Kenya.
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| In those places—and presumably, in many other developing countries—Tooley finds the public schools sorely wanting. They may have beautiful new buildings with spiffy playgrounds, but very little learning is going on. Teachers are absent, asleep, or reading the newspaper; class sizes are 60 or more; accountability is entirely absent. In some rural areas, the schools are an hour’s perilous journey (or more) over treacherous mountain passes or flooded areas from the villages they supposedly serve. And I see no reason to doubt the observations of his research teams.
Development experts and government officials that Tooley talks to almost universally see no viable alternative to these terrible schools. Private schools, they say, only serve the upper classes, and sacrifice education for profit.But in every district in every country he investigates—even those where officials say hey know of no private schools serving the poor—Tooley finds hundreds of tiny private schools serving the poor and middle class, where teachers show up and teach, kids learn (and consistently test better than public school students), class sizes are typically around 20 or less—and both teachers and administrators/owners are accountable to fee-paying parents. The buildings and playgrounds are often substandard, and the learning methods uncomfortably rote-based, even for Tooley—but hundreds of thousands of kids are getting an education they could not get in the corrupt public school systems of these countries.
Despite popular images of paternal whites setting up schools to lift the savage natives out of illiteracy, Tooley includes a fascinating chapter on educational models in India during the early 19th century. According to his research, the British destroyed a well-established private educational system that emphasized peer learning, even while exporting its most successful aspects into England and Scotland. Gandhi himself accused the British of uprooting this “beautiful tree” (and called for a return to the old private schooling network); the book takes its title from that quote).
Tooley can be patronizing at times, and rubs our noses in the same dirt over and over. Still, there’s a lot of wisdom here, and many good lessons for change agents working in the business community. He shows, among other things:
- How private enterprise can meet the needs of extremely poor population sectors and still make a profit
- How the poor are actively interested in taking charge of bettering their children’s lives, willing to make sacrifices to do so, and able to find the resources
- What really matters in education, and what’s just window dressing
- That education and schooling are not necessarily the same thing, though they overlap
- How an entire economic sector can fly under the radar yet make a huge difference in people’s lives every day
- Not to take assumptions for granted, particularly when the person making the assumptions has an agenda
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