The Clean and Green Club

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 Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.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

“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).”

Another Recommended Book—Explosion Green

Explosion Green: One Man’s Journey to Green the World’s Largest Industry, by David Gottfried

Still think one person can’t make a difference? This powerful memoir from the founder of the US and World Green Building Councils will surely change your mind.

Back to the mid-1980s, Gottfried has been influencing the entire construction industry to green its practices. Without him, we would not have the amazing network of Green Building Councils around the world, which have certified hundreds of thousands of committed architects, builders, and product manufacturers as green. We also wouldn’t have the set of LEED standards now used to certify green buildings in 140 countries. The standards his organization developed are now required by numerous local government agencies, and the planet is noticeably greener because of this organization.

In a siloed universe of specialists, each with their own professional organization, Gottfried and his colleagues created the first green building organization that was open to every sector, discipline, and size. It welcomed Fortune 100 companies, and also solo practitioners with small consultancies. It was open to profit-making businesses and nonprofit membership organizations. This strategy allowed agents of change to dialog with executives at companies often attacked by environmentalists, and get them to see the wisdom of a green approach.

GBCs have directly enabled hundreds of thousands of buildings to be built or renovated in more environmentally friendly ways:

As of October 2013, there were 56,000 LEED Commercial and Neighborhood Development projects (totaling just over eleven billion square feet) and another 119,615 residential units using LEED. USGBC [just one of the GBCs worldwide] also had about 190,000 LEED Accredited and Green Associate professionals.

There are now Green Building Councils in approximately one hundred countries with about two dozen green building rating systems. Some 63 percent of global new construction starts are planning green projects for 2105. [p. 230]

And that, in turn, has helped to bring down the prices, so that green advocates can now make a very successful case for going green on economic grounds. Gottfried notes that the price of doing a green commercial building dropped 38 percent from 1995-2003 (p. 131)—and that workers in green buildings tended to be 6 to 16 percent more productive (p. 132). Oh yes, and when these buildings change hands, they fetch about 11 percent higher prices than comparable nongreen buildings (pp. 245-246).

Much of the early LEED construction took place in California, and Gottfried posits that this may be why California was able to hold energy use more-or-less constant for the last 40 years, even as the US as a whole chewed up 50 percent more energy. This is especially remarkable, considering how many power-slurping massive computer installations have been installed to power California companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Hewlett-Packard.

In Chapter 20, Gottfried lays out USGBC’s 9-step success formula:

1. Dream big
2. Create an inclusive, noncompetitive model
3. Exercise leadership
4. Recruit volunteers
5. Demonstrate business savvy
6. Achieve LEED
7. Have a strong sense of purpose
8. Collect data and using it to create change
9. Pay attention to the lessons (from both the successes and the challenges)

Near the end of the book, Gottfried build on Amory Lovins’ concept of negawatts and negabarrels (the energy we save through deep conservation) to discuss “negafootprint,” extending to carbon, energy, water—which he sees as crucial in the coming years, as I do—and waste (p. 270).

And on page 276, he calls for businesses to take advantage of the massive “global business opportunity” in green building—advice that the entire construction industry would do well to heed.

The Clean and Green Club, March 2015

12 Mar, 2015 No Comment

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, March 2015

Your Chance to Gain Great Green Business and Social Change Skills—In a Beautiful Setting, at a Very Affordable Price

Come to Massachusetts in the beautiful spring and immerse yourself in the world of marketing for green and social change businesses. May 22-24, I’m hosting a three-day Green Marketing and Social Change Retreat at my home in the beautiful 18th/19th century ecovillage of Hockanum, in Hadley, MA (I think it’s the oldest solar home in the US). You can get small-group training (12 people, maximum) and learn to:

Identify three distinct audiences for your green/social change products and services, and develop talking points to reach each of them
Harness your core expertise to transform social problems into profitable solutions; make money as you turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war and violence into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance
Sharpen your marketing chops by working together on marketing ideas for a real-world product
Determine media angles for your organization, create a press release, and begin your marketing plan—and benefit from Shel’s post-event feedback when you complete it
Receive media training, captured on video so you can watch and study as often as you need to
Reach out to and partner with the best possible ambassadors: people and organizations who already reach your best prospects
Learn how to fit your own advances in sustainability into our collective power to shape a better world

Early-bird pricing during March is just $795 (a $200 savings), and if you use the coupon code, ShelSubscriber, you can take an extra $50 off. That even includes four home-cooked gourmet vegetarian meals. Visit https://makinggreensexy.com/come-learn-with-shel-3-day-green-marketing-intensive-in-beatuiful.html to learn more (including all the fun activities on the agenda)—and https://shelhorowitz.com/shels-green-products-and-services/#intensive to register. There’s also a three-payment option, and you can even bring a friend for an extra $100 off the combined registrations. Be sure apply the coupon code and set the shipping to “Downloads Only—No Shipping” before you advance to the checkout screen.

Shel and his wife, Dina Friedman, outside the site of the Shel’s May 22-24, 2015 Green Marketing and Social Change Retreat

This Month’s Tip: Co-Solve It! Part 1: When One Solution Addresses Several Problems

Imagine that you’ve developed a product or service that helps to fix poverty or war at the same time it makes a difference on climate change. Imagine that this product is cheap enough to reach the poorest of the poor, yet profitable enough to build a business.

In nature, and in our bodies, many things have more than one purpose, and nothing is wasted. As an example, think about trees. Trees provide a number of “ecoservices”:

Food for people and other animals (fruits, acorns, nuts, leaves, maple or birch syrup)
Oxygen for us to breathe
Shade to make us more comfortable in summer
Light modulation, allowing more light to reach the forest floor at the times of year when it’s most needed
Habitat for a large assortment of birds, bugs, fungi, and mammals
Construction material (wood)
Heat energy (when burned)
Paper
Soil rehabilitation (as leaves drop in the fall or rotten branches fall off and are composted)
Rainwater and groundwater management

That’s ten different functions, and probably there are others. Seven of these happen with no need for human intervention, and with no need to remove the tree.

We can frame co-solving at least two ways:

Bringing DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES TO DEAL WITH A SINGLE ISSUE (discussed below)
Addressing MULTIPLE ISSUES WITH ONE SOLUTION, as the trees do (in Part 2, next month, we’ll share some actual business examples)

In both, we use fewer resources to get more done, more effectively—and we share those resources so they don’t have to be expensively duplicated.

The corporate world talks about “getting people out of their silos” so Marketing, Sales, and Engineering can all brainstorm together. Academics gather in “interdisciplinary teams” to study phenomena that might include astrophysics, biology, and sociology. Nonprofits and government agencies understand “partnerships” such as public-private collaborations and cause-related marketing. Online marketing masters organize “joint ventures (JVs)” for massively successful product launches. Community organizers “build coalitions” with other groups, coming together on the issues where they agree, and separating when they diverge. Just as co-solving itself brings people from different spheres together to solve one set of problems or address one set of issues, these different but overlapping perspectives all teach us something. We can create win-win syntheses of the best of all this thinking, and use that power and synergy to address—and solve—even the most intractable problems.

Next month, we’ll look at the second category—with actual examples of business offerings that confront more than one problem.

Hear & Meet Shel

April 15, 3 p.m. ET/noon PT: “Multiple Streams of Income for Writers.” Janice Campbell of NAIWE interviews Shel.

This is a new program. Here’s the description:

With eight nonfiction books under his belt, including the long-running bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and award-winners Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers and Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, you’d think Shel Horowitz might be one of those people who makes a living selling books.

But actually, book sales are only small pieces of a diversified income, all of it involving the same analytical and communication skills he uses to write his books.
This call will explore several income streams writers can pursue, such as:

Speaking
Consulting on the publishing process
Consulting on your field of expertise (in Shel’s case, profitability and marketing for green/socially conscious businesses as well as authors and publishers—and with companies that want to turn hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change into sufficiency, peace, and planetary balance)
Commercial writing for business: marketing and informational copywriting, correspondence, company histories, executive biographies, speeches, social media feeds, etc.
Commercial writing for individuals (from resumes to thank-you notes to social media profiles)
Foreign and subsidiary rights sales
Product sales other than books
Ads on your website
Teaching and training
Event organizing and facilitation
Article, blog, and newsletter writing
Radio and TV work as on-air personality, pundit, analyst, etc.

So here’s the good news: you can be a writer and make a living, even if the obvious ways aren’t working for you. Shel started his writing and consulting business back in 1981 as a typing service, “to hold me over until my freelance magazine and newspaper career took off.” The business kept evolving and is now an international copywriting, consulting, and speaking enterprise with clients on five continents. (He hasn’t typed a term paper in 25 years, and hasn’t had an outside employer since 1981.)

May 22-24: 3-Day Green/Social Change Business Intensive in Hadley, MA: Learn lots of cool stuff about marketing, product development, and profitability for green, socially conscious enterprises and have a lot of fun in a beautiful place. See description and link at the beginning of this newsletter. Again, the registration link is https://shelhorowitz.com/shels-green-products-and-services/#intensive (Note: expect prices to be substantially higher for future Intensives).

Some of the neighbors’ cows at the site of the May 22-24, 2015 Green Marketing and Social Change Retreat led by Shel Horowitz

Connect with Shel on Social Media

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).

“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).”

Friends who Want to Help
Save the Date: Earth Day, April 22, and a Great Program from Shift Network

The Spring of Sustainability’s Earth Day event on April 22: Earth Day Summit & Initiation: Radical Times Call for Radical Transformation.

During this important 1-day virtual event, experts will share the most cutting-edge information about what is REALLY happening in the world of sustainability and what we can do to become part of the change we want to see. Next month’s newsletter will have the no-cost registration link.

Another Recommended Book—Deepening Community

Deepening Community, by Paul Born (Berrett-Koehler, 2014)

I don’t know if the author would call this a business book, but I’d call it one. To me, understanding community is key to understanding things like:

• buyer behavior—individually and in groups
• transmission of ideas (and products) through the culture
• changing behavior patterns

As an example of the business utility of communities, it was a local librarian who first showed me a Google search, in 1998 (the same year Google was incorporated). Google’s status as our go-to search engine came about because it spread through communities, just as the librarian showed it to me. Better results, delivered faster, and through a much cleaner interface—what’s not to like? So people who had discovered this amazing creature shared it with their friends, neighbors, colleagues, and other networks—with their communities; within a year or two, it pretty much owned the search market.

But let’s put this in perspective; the business use of community is a small fraction of the whole. While many companies have attempted to build communities among their product users, and a fair number have succeeded wildly, from Apple to Harley-Davidson, true community is not about creating shared shopping experiences. It’s about people helping their neighbors, breaking down barriers, caring.

I was particularly moved by Born’s story of first living in a neighborhood where nobody interacted, then discovering what it was like to live in a neighborhood that had created a vibrant and genuine community, to moving back to another hollow neighborhood and taking the initiative to build that sense of community. It turned out to be a lot easier than you might think, and the results were awesome. So another lesson to take away here is that each of us has the power to build community where we live, where we work, and where we interact with others. We don’t have to wait for someone else to do it.

But why make the effort? Because “collective altruism” has positive benefits for those who participate. People feel motivated and rewarded in doing good things for others, and it’s an extra bonus that they experience direct benefits too. Thus, we see communities built around bringing food to an ill neighbor or rebuilding a fire-damaged building.

In other words, you might say, altruism is in our self-interest.

Born identifies three different types of community: shallow, fear-based, and deep (not so different from the three kinds of buyers for green products and services that I discuss in my “Making Green Sexy” talks). Of course, his focus is on achieving deep community. He recognizes that communities may be geographic, but also may be focused on common interests. Some of the others are less-than-healthy, such as fear-based communities organized around keeping out those seen as different. He responds with good suggestions about how to transcend evil by working to do good together. And he points out that this actually goes back at least as far as Charles Darwin, who in his later years modified his ideas about survival of the fittest to determine that cooperative communities of organisms (animal, plant, even bacterial) are “fit” and appropriate in his worldview. Born even uses the phrase, “survival of the kindest.”

Within the framework of deep community, Born highlights five different purposes of successful communities (with a chapter on each)—as:

Identity
Place
Spiritual
Intentional
Natural living system

He reminds us that each of us have a role to play, as communities develop. He recommends starting any meeting by letting people answer this question: “Why is it important that I am here today?” And one of the things I love is his axiom that community is not about engaging with people who are like us, but with those who are engaged by the same things that engage us.

But even as he cites a successful example of a teen who created deep community via Facebook, he regards nongeographic communities (and particularly online communities) with a certain wary skepticism. And that’s one of the places where I disagree with him. Over and over again, I’ve seen deep communities from online, and I’ve also seen the ability of an online community to provide very firm support to offline communities. Two examples of the latter: the two online discussion groups that gave strength to a community organizing campaign I founded, and the Facebook group serving members of my high school class year—which not only helped us organize our 40th reunion but keeps us actively in touch between events, providing some lubrication to the very rusty in-person relationships.

Ultimately, he says, community is about permanently creating joy—which he defines as “the deep satisfaction that we are living a life of purpose and meaning with and for others…showing and receiving compulsion and kindness.”

The Clean and Green Club, February 2015

13 Feb, 2015 No Comment

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, February 2015

This Month’s Tip: These Kinds of Questions Can Shape Your Business and Your Life

I got asked two questions in discussion groups, recently. The first was “What makes you a stand out in what YOU do?” This was my response:

As a profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter, I think I do offer something unique: my combination of ability to:

see both the forest and the trees;
bring in perspectives across many industries and situations that may have been overlooked;
see opportunities/possible partnerships for others, and open up new markets as a result;
understand the implications for the individual, the organization, and the wider organism (the planet);
look at the intersections of business success, greening the planet, and improving the world;
deliver a very clear message, both as a writer and speaker (and particularly my emphasis on effective but non-hypey copywriting);
be friendly and helpful, even with those I disagree with;
anchor my actions in a detailed vision of a world free of hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change, because of the actions of profit-motivated business people.

And the second was to sum up my life in 25 words:

Passionate about business fixing hunger/poverty/war/climate change, blessed with wonderful family/living situation, optimist, lover of life/travel/arts/food, skilled writer/speaker.

I took the time to answer these questions because I believe, strongly, that self-examination is a critical part of moving forward. And because as a writer who is sometimes long-winded, I like the challenge of being pithy. I could write a 200-page memoir, easily. Distilling that down to 25 words is not an easy thing. But it helped me focus on what’s important tome, right now, as we begin to roll through 2015.

Now let me put the challenge to you. If you’re reading this via email, click the link at the top to read on the Web. If you’re already on the Web version, just scroll down. Underneath, you’ll see a comment box. Please post your answers to one or both of these questions, or something else that you feel sums up your personal or business challenges for the remaining 10 months of 2015.

Special Offer Only for World Changers/Better World Dreamers

—> If you have a project that materially advances a cause such as sufficiency for those at the bottom, peace (global, national, or even neighborhood), or planetary healing, and you could benefit from expert guidance in marketing, profitability, or product development, I will do two things for you:

Instead of my usual 15-minute no-charge exploratory consultation, I will expand that to a full 30 minutes. In half an hour, you’ll normally receive quite a few concrete, implementable ideas from me.
I will also knock $50 off my normal $195 per hour consulting rate for the first hour beyond the freebie session, so the first hour is only $145—OR take $50 off the price of any fixed-fee copywriting such as a story-behind-the-story get-attention press release or book cover text—OR take a full $1000 off the price of in-person speaking or on-site training (all prices in US dollars).

Why? As a reader of my monthly Clean and Green Club newsletter, or as a member of the Business For a Better World website, you already know that I’m on a mission to show the business world how to make a profit while turning hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.

I’ve been laying the groundwork to build my career around this. And I feel that at age 57 when I started (58 now), I finally know what I want to do when I grow up.

However, my client portfolio hasn’t moved as quickly into this new direction. I’ve certainly had a lot of really cool green businesses in my portfolio, but not enough that are really about turning those planetary wrongs into rights as their core DNA. Rectifying that seems like a logical next step on this exciting journey.

So…if you have a business that’s wired to do this, or you’ve written a book or created any infoproduct that moves the world in a much more positive direction, you qualify to take advantage of this offer. Just send me a quick note (shel AT greenandprofitable.com) with a few lines about what you’re doing and what kind of help you seek. Please use the subject line, “Subscriber: 30 Minute Consultation?” If you qualify, I’ll send you a few questions and we’ll set a time for your half-hour consult. If your project isn’t within the parameters, I’ll still give you 15 minutes on the phone, no charge (if you haven’t had one before).

Connect with Shel on Social Media

HarperCollins Atlas Omits Israel—So Idiotic, I Thought It Was a Joke

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).

“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).”

Another Recommended Book—Thriving Beyond Sustainability

Thriving Beyond Sustainability: Pathways to a Resilient Society, by Andrés R. Edwards (New Society Publishers)

While the book is full of great examples of companies and communities thriving by doing the right thing, Edwards saves the best for last. The eighth and final chapter, “A Thriveable Future,” states that big changes can result from small steps. It begins with three quotes. I especially like the third one, from techno-pioneer and futurist Alan Kay, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

In fact, I liked this quote so much, I did a whole blog post: https://www.business-for-a-better-world.com/inventing-future-desire/

The chapter goes on to introduce the SPIRALS framework: Scalable, Place-Making, Intergenerational, Resilient, Life-affirming, Self-care. While this had to be forced a bit to come up with a workable acronym, it’s a pretty good framework for examining the transition from sustainability to “thrivability”—something I’ve become ever-more-convinced over the past few years that we very much need to do.

Sustainability, by definition, is creating systems that maintain the status quo. But thriving goes beyond that, to regeneration, to leaving the world BETTER than we found it. So that means, for instance, buildings and vehicles that are net-energy-positive (producing more than they use) and net-waste-negative (generating more inputs for other systems than things that need to be thrown away).

Among the examples Edwards cites:

A Native American tribal timber project in Michigan that has been restoring and regenerating the forest ecosystem for more than 150 years, growing the forest by more than 30 percent even while harvesting 30 million board-feed per year (p. 156)
A program in Berkeley, California (and replicated elsewhere) that allows ownership of solar systems without the huge capital outlay; this is, from the homeowner viewpoint, a big improvement over leaseback programs that had been the only way to get a solar system without plunking down thousands of dollars (p. 160)
An initiative that lets residents of Sonoma County, California monitor—and thus control—their waste generation (p. 161)

Edwards ends with a beautifully optimistic call for replacing the scarcity mentality with abundance consciousness (something I’ve been saying for years), so that, for example, we can turn a declining ecosystem into a place “that teems with diverse wildlife and is integrated with flourishing human settlements…We can meet the challenges ahead with a vision in which creativity trumps knowledge and imagination is recognized as one of our most powerful assets. These timeless attributes will light our path toward a thriveable future for generations to come.” (pp. 164-165)

While not reaching the heights of the final chapter, there’s plenty of merit in the rest of the book, too. Edwards’ emphasis on accounting for true lifecycle costs make clear that renewables are actually cost-competitive with fossil fuels; he puts the indirect costs of a gallon of gasoline at $12. (p. 69). This is one of several key organizing principles he highlights. Others range from “glocalization” to biomimicry to preserving biolinguistic diversity to putting a dollar value on the environmental services that our ecosystems perform for us.

I’m particularly glad about the many wonderful examples of communities and businesses thriving by doing the right thing. I’ll list a few among the many examples. Projects that:

Turn confiscated illegal liquor into biofuels, in Sweden (p. 39)
Use closed-loop systems to recapture all byproducts, so that a Danish industrial plant heats 3000 homes with its surplus steam while a fish farm’s water treatment waste fertilizes agriculture (pp. 53-54)
Provide a mechanism for recovery and recycling of any computer sold in Texas (p. 55)
Created 142,000 new jobs in the German wind industry, though tax policies that favor renewable energy (p. 69)
Allowed an entire Kansas town to rebuild as a green community after being wiped out by a tornado (p. 86)

And just what is possible? Consider this: On average, a resident of the United States generates 20 metric tons of carbon per year, while a resident of the European Union produces half that amount (10 metric tons). But when the green community of Vaxjo, Sweden—a place that obviously needs to create a lot of heat in the winter—turned its attention to reducing carbon, its per-capita output plummeted all the way down to 3.5 metric tons per person per year. That’s one-third of the rest of Europe, and one-sixth of the US. (p. 88).

In other words, we already know how to do much, much better. Let’s do it!

The Clean and Green Club, January 2015

9 Jan, 2015 No Comment celebs

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

January 2015

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.

This Month’s Tip: Get Celebs to Notice You

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.

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.

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:

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.”

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.

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.

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/

Passenger Rail, Si! Nuclear Power, No!“

My First Political Act, as a 3-Year-Old: Nonsmokers’ Rights

Getting Along with your Opponents

Why I DON’T Support “Draft Warren”

Yes, We Fight the Same Battle Once Again—But I Have Hope

If you like what you read there, please subscribe to get an email every time I post something.

Another Recommended Book—The Beautiful Tree

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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).

“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).”

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.

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

The Clean and Green Club, December 2014

15 Dec, 2014 No Comment

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

December 2014

This Month’s Tip: How to Get Famous People to Help You

Last month, I talked about some of the well-known people who have helped me with one thing or another: a book endorsement, an interview, a joint venture…

Some of these folks are famous in their own community…and some, like authors Jack Canfield (Chicken Soup for the Soul series), Jay Conrad Levinson (Guerrilla Marketing series) and Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle in Time), musicians Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Arlo Guthrie are international superstars known widely beyond their own circles.

How have I been able to get so many celebrities to help me? Sometimes, they help you out of simple generosity, or because they feel your passion and believe in what you’re doing. But usually, it boils down to one thing: offer them something they want or need.

What do you have that a celebrity wants or needs? Here are a few possibilities:

Publicity
Credibility
Help for a cause he or she supports
A visit to an exotic location
A chance to meet others he or she admires
Ability to grow his her own community
Income streams

Now, here’s the key: once you know which hot button to use, make the approach in ways that immediately build a connection around that hot button.

Publicity
Do you have access to an audience the celeb would like to get in front of? That could be a major newspaper or magazine–but it also could be a small newspaper in a community where that celeb is doing a live event soon and needs an audience. It could be your blog, a telesummit or conference you’re organizing, or even a large number of active followers on social media.

Help for a cause he or she supports
Appeal to their higher purpose. Do some research before you approach them and find out what jazzes them. Approach the celebs whose higher purpose is aligned with yours, and show them how their participation will help that purpose. Hint: find the cause first, and then dig around to see who supports it.

Credibility
Can you increase the celeb’s star power? I did this for “Mr. Guerrilla Marketing,” Jay Conrad Levinson. I’d read enough of his books and articles to know that he was sympathetic to environmental and social justice issues, but not active or particularly well-known in those worlds. He was what I call a “lazy green” in my “Making Green Sexy” talks. I was able to show him that partnering with me (a subject-matter expert in the green business world) would give him some “chops” in the green world. That was something he valued–and I got the benefit of being part of the biggest marketing brand in history.

A visit to an exotic location
If you’re organizing an event in a place people like to go (Hawaii, the south of France, Bali…) and can cover travel expenses, celebs may make time in their busy schedules to participate. My first trip to Turkey was because I was flown over and paid to give a talk; I liked it so much that my wife and I spent two weeks there last year.

A chance to meet others he or she admires
If you’ve already got some famous folks on the program, others will more easily sign up. Just like the rest of us, they like chances to network with their peers. In the marketing, publishing, and green business conferences I’ve attended, I’ve noticed that the speakers generally like hanging out with the other speakers, even with those who aren’t as well known; you can often find them talking shop–or just having fun–in the breaks or after-hours. The smart and nice ones also make themselves accessible to non-presenter participants.

Ability to grow his her own community
For both joint venture promotions and events, a celeb expects to cross-pollinate with the other presenters. If you bring together 10 people who each have lists of 10,000 non-overlapping names for a telesummit or live event, that means each featured guest gets to be in front of 90,000 new people. If they wow the audience, they’ll add many people to their databases–and their marketing funnels.

Income streams
As shown above, it’s not all about the money. But it is partly about the money. If your celeb is setting aside precious real estate in followers’ minds to promote you, you’ll want to make sure there’s something in it for them. They can only go back to the well so many times. If, for instance, they do a solo mailing for you, that might mean they have to say no to someone else. So if earning some dinero is part of the agenda, they’ll want to make sure you follow through. Your e-blasts should be tested and perform well, your offers should be compelling, and it really help if your track record is solid.

This three-part series concludes next month with some ways you can more easily get noticed by that celeb in the first place. While it may seem that I have the order backward, I’m doing it this way so that when you do get through to a celebrity, you know what to say.

Another Recommended Book—The New Sustainability Advantage

Connect with Shel on Social Media

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).

“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).”

The New Sustainability Advantage, by Bob Willard

Bob Willard originally published The Sustainability Advantage: Seven Business Case Benefits of a Triple Bottom Line back in 2002. In 2012, his publisher, New Society Press, brought out an updated 10th Anniversary edition, and changed the title to The New Sustainability Advantage.

Basically, Willard takes apart every conceivable factor in business economics and shows how greening the company (when done right) yields vast financial benefits for businesses large and small. In other words, the entire book is a validation of something I’ve been saying for years: business can profit strongly by going green.

The book covers obvious and non-obvious savings and income possibilities in many areas, with entire chapters on revenue/market share, energy, waste, materials and water, employee productivity, HR expenses, and risk reduction; these are the seven benefits in the subtitle. The risk reduction chapter is particularly detailed—covering reputation damage (with five subcategories), cost spirals (six subcategories), compliance, and other areas.

What’s a non-obvious saving? One example would be the cost of water embodied in the production of paper; it turns out to be an astonishing 60 liters per ream (page 88). I certainly didn’t know that!

Willard uses a mixture of real-world examples and two hypothetical companies, one quite large and the other much smaller—and uses very conservative projections for both. For the smaller company, with $1 mm annual revenue, the profit boost tips the scale at 51 percent. 51 percent growth in profit—that is, income minus costs—is not too shabby. But the large company, with revenues of $500 mm per year, showed a truly astonishing 81% net increase.

Once again, Willard is using extremely conservative assumptions, bending over backward to avoid sensationalizing the results.

Still, I would have preferred two real case studies of companies that have taken these steps, with real numbers. Fortunately, he does cite many real-world examples to illustrate specific categories of savings and revenue. To name a few of them:

GE’s Ecomagination line of earth-friendly products brought in $18 bn in 2009, up from $10.1 bn in 2005. This was roughly 10 percent of total revenue, and was expected to grow at twice GE’s overall rate in the following five years (page 42).
IBM turned a $1.5 mm cost into a $1.5 mm revenue stream by selling something it used to throw away, adding $3 mm to profit each year; the US Postal Service turned a $9.1 mm annual disposal cost into $13 mm annual income, or $20 mm in profit (page 72).
The UK department store Marks and Spencer’s internationally recognized Plan A sustainability initiative was adding £50 mm (approximately $80 mm) per year to the bottom line through its original 100 sustainability commitments; this was part of the incentive to up the number of metrics to 180 (page 159).

He also cites statistics that show overall growth in consumer awareness and shifts in purchasing habits. Examples include findings that 77 percent of consumers describe themselves as green and/or health-conscious; 57 percent had made a green purchase in the previous six months; 40 percent chose particular products or services because of the values the company espoused (page 43). 92 percent of young professionals want to work at an environmentally friendly company (page 120), while at least 57 percent up to 83 percent of employers acknowledge that their corporate responsibility policies influence employee retention and loyalty (page 125).

While the book is definitely tilted toward larger entities, even small companies with just a few employees will probably find some ideas to implement that produce substantial savings and generate new revenue. For example, trash reduction can help even very small businesses lower costs. Here’s a link to a trash consultant who works strictly on a percentage of what he saves you, https://greenandprofitable.com/slash-your-solid-wastetrash-bill-50-or-more-at-no-cost/, so that would be an easy “low-hanging fruit” place to start.

The Clean and Green Club, November 2014

14 Nov, 2014 No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

November 2014

This Month’s Tip: Do You Pay Attention When Key Contacts Drop Into Your Lap?

You know by now that my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, was published by John Wiley & Sons, a major business publisher. But you probably don’t know how that came about.

It started ten years ago, when I got an order for my ebook on having fun cheaply from someone I recognized as an Internet marketing superstar.

So I seized the moment. Along with his ebook, I sent a note saying that I admired his work and offering him, as a gift, a copy of Principled Profit, my original self-published book on business ethics and green practices as success principles. Luckily, I didn’t know that he was living in New Zealand at the time, or I might never have made the offer.

He responded enthusiastically, I sent the book, and (as I’d suspected) he loved it. He wrote me a blurb, and we began collaborating on a few projects. I blurbed his next book, and then he asked me if I’d write an essay for it. I did, and invited him to be a guest on the business radio show I hosted at the time. We corresponded on various ideas about marketing and social change for several years.

And then one day, out of the blue, I got a note from him asking if I’d like the contact information for his editor at Wiley. It took me about eight nanoseconds to say yes, thank you. By that time, his editor had actually been promoted to Publisher. So I had a personal introduction to the head of a major New York publishing house from one of its best-selling authors, all because I had made a gift when serendipity dropped him into my inbox. Remember, he did not originally contact me for anything to do with marketing or social change. He wanted my book on having fun cheaply. (Years later, I found out he had bought it as a gift for his then-wife.) And so I pitched Wiley on an updated, expanded edition of Principled Profit.

While Wiley was considering my book proposal, I got a brainwave: if Wiley said no, I’d approach Jay Conrad Levinson, founder of the iconic Guerrilla Marketing brand, to be my co-author. If Jay said yes—and I thought he probably would based on some of his writing that showed sympathy to the green cause—it would be easy to find a publisher. When Wiley finally said yes, I realized, duh, I could still ask Jay. So after getting my Wiley editor’s approval (“oh, you mean we get TWO marketing geniuses? Yes, we like it.”), I approached Jay, using an ancient AOL address I had from interviewing him about 12 years earlier. Amazingly, it still worked. Not so amazingly, he was eager to participate.

I’ve reached out over the years to many people who have considerably more fame than I do. Some have responded, including former US President Jimmy Carter (who declined to endorse Principled Profit but added me to his holiday card list–and his beautiful cards always include a his own art on the cover), Jack Canfield, co-creator of the Chicken Soup series (who DID endorse that book), celebrity musicians including Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Paul Winter, and Arlo Guthrie (all of whom I’ve interviewed for local newspapers), leaders in both the green and marketing worlds including BNI founder Ivan Misner, comedian Swami Beyondananda, green economist Hazel Henderson, and green business leader Joel Makower, all of whom I’ve interviewed for either my teleseminar or my former radio show, and Stephen M.R. Covey, the best-selling author who generously agreed to write the forward for Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.

With the exception of Swami, for whom I’d organized a live event when he mentioned in his newsletter that he was looking for a gig in New England, I approached these folks cold, through public channels.

There are other ways, too. I’ve also approached well-known authors at conferences, and usually gotten their contact information (sometimes some quick informal no-charge consulting, too)—and occasionally an ongoing relationship. Another way is to comment (appropriately, please–absolutely do not spam them) on your chosen celebs’ articles, blog posts, videos, and social media presence. I’ve cultivated these types of relationships with many movers and shakers, sometimes maintaining the correspondence for years before I ever ask for anything. Just last month, I saw a Facebook post from an author I’d read decades ago, commenting on a mutual friend’s post. I immediately friended and corresponded with her, and she’s likely to become a client!

Some have not written back. I asked both the Dalai Lama and the late Nelson Mandela if I could interview them for a book project I was thinking about, and never heard from either one. But what did I have to lose by trying? Only a few minutes of my time. What if they would have said yes if only I’d asked, as those others did?

Next month: how to approach celebrities so they say yes.

Friends/Colleagues who Want to Help

Reminder: Business For a Better World Telesummit is Replaying NOW

You got a mailing on this on Monday, November 3—still seven more calls to listen to at no charge, starting today:

Nov. 17 Allen Rathey: Healthy Green Homes/Green Biz in Conservative Places

Nov. 18 Christophe Poizat and Tsufit: Building Successful Internet Communities

Nov. 19 Ivan Misner: The Ultimate Face-to-Face Marketing System

Nov. 20 Harry McAlister: Animations with A Message

Nov. 21 Ana Weber: Loving Mondays, Finding Passion, Shifting Hats

Ongoing Shel Horowitz: Business For a Better World (interviewed by Tom Antion)

Ongoing Shel Horowitz: Overview: telesummit +8 bonus calls

Listen to each call on its appointed day, no charge.

And of course, you can get unlimited access to the entire series of 17 calls, plus eight bonus calls not available any other way, for just $49.95. You’ll get to here from world-class marketers, including:

Jay Conrad Levinson, who created Guerrilla Marketing, the most successful marketing brand in history (and my co-author for Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green)
Michelle Shaeffer, who went from a stay-at-home teen mother to a celebrity blogger diva in the work-at-home-mom and homeschooling niches
Ivan Misner, founder of BNI, a networking organization whose members pass each other $6 billion in referrals every year
Marcia Yudkin, one of the world’s leading experts on marketing to and for introverts (and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met)–her insights on the size and power of this market will shock you

As well as top luminaries in the green business world, such as:

Joel Makower, founder and chief reporter/conference organizer for GreenBiz.com, a man with an in at every major company in the world
Hazel Henderson, who evolved from a children’s health and safety activist to one of the foremost experts on ethical business vs. traditional economics (I’ve been following her work since she published Creating Alternative Futures in the 1970s—what an honor to interview her for an hour)
Dean Cycon, the very creative CEO of a coffee company that is so successful, it can afford to give 50% of profits to village-led community development projects in the coffeelands

$49.95 gets you all these and quite a few more.

Visit https://www.business-for-a-better-world.com/telesummit/ to register for the freebie calls, listen to the two unlimited-access calls, and buy your recording package.

Connect with Shel on Social Media

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).

“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).”

Another Recommended Book—Recommend This!

Recommend This! Delivering Digital Experiences That People Want to Share, by Jason Thibeault and Kirby Wadsworth (Wiley, 2014)

Here’s the perfect follow-up to last month’s review of Story Based Selling. Recommend This! incorporates the idea of the story, but wraps it around the lens of ongoing relationships. Whether in person at a retail store or digitally through top-quality content, you build relationships that move people along from prospect to customer to loyal fan to ambassador. Thibeault and Wadsworth don’t talk much about turning your customers into ambassadors (your unpaid sales force, as I call them in one of my own books)—but they do talk about building a relationship that could last decades.

And in the relationship economy—they coin the term “relawatts” to measure it—the true currency is attention.

Yet, it’s challenging to grab attention when we have access to—and use—a nearly infinite number of channels, and have limitless numbers of contacts. In the old days, people researching a major purchase might have consulted an issue of Consumer Reports; now, they go on the Web and read product reviews, talk to their friends on social media, pass through Google a bunch of times, and probably finish with a trip to the company’s own site (or Facebook page)—and they could be doing this from any mix of desktop and laptop computers, tablets, and phones, sometimes simultaneously. It’s a nonlinear pattern that looks random. And you have to engage people on these outside sites—but the goal of your interactions on social media should be to bring the visitor over to your own website, where you can control the process and mine the data.

Meanwhile, the old Dunbar rule about people managing about 150 connections is totally out the window. We might have thousands of people we’re connected to, but those connections are far shallower than in the past.

And they point out that a relationship has to be two-way, if the prospect or customer wants that. Which means customers and prospects have to have ways to interact with you, even if they’re just visiting a website or downloading a white paper. However, not every prospect wants to be interacted with, and smart businesses allow users to stay anonymous. Google, for instance, is based on a pure (non-monetary) transaction. The visitor is “just looking”; Google provides the desired information, which the visitor clicks on. Google does build more of a relationship with its real customers, such as its advertisers—but not necessarily with the causal visitor seeking information.

Thibeault and Wadsworth suggest that the way to solve all of this is by becoming a thought-leader, and they see four key mindset shifts that marketers must make: from firing messages at prospects to talking to (I’d say with) them; from transaction to engagement; from sales-oriented to helping-oriented, and from just-another-vendor to highly credible, trusted information source.

Forget about push-style selling, sales funnels, and such. Become an expert curator. Provide information, solve problems, and yes, tell stories—not so much about the brand, but about how its customers solved their problems by using the brand (a crucial distinction).

And let customers and prospects talk not just to the marketing staff, but to the product experts–including other customers. They see that two-way communication as conveying a major advantage to the digital world. When active users comment on your product, or even on your white paper, they become part of the curator world, and have elevated themselves beyond mere transactional interaction; they feel invested in your stuff.

But companies can go farther, and harness available technology to provide a first-class user experience. Thibeault and Wadsworth believe in websites that respond differently not just in adjusting to and optimizing for the users platform (what browser, what device), but in the content of the responses to visitor queries. Taking it even further, companies can start and nurture their own online communities. A well-run community, Thibeault and Wadsworth say, can be a powerful competitive advantage.

The Clean and Green Club, August 2014

12 Aug, 2014 No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

August 2014

This Month’s Tip: Speak at a TED Event and Do It Right

This spring, I got to do a TED talk “Impossible Is a Dare: Business For a Better World.”

You can see it at https://www.ted.com/tedx/events/11809.

I’ve written often about public speaking as an outreach, brand building, and marketing tool. There is perhaps no better training ground for speakers than TED. If you’re not familiar, TED—an acronym for Technology, Education, Design—is a prestigious (and very expensive) conference featuring short talks by very bright minds. No TED talk is supposed to go longer than 18 minutes, though I’ve seen a few that snuck in a bit extra.

Presenters have included Bill Gates, Isabel Allende, Seth Godin, James Cameron, Viktor Frankl, Gabby Giffords, Malcolm Gladwell, Bill and Hillary Clinton (separately), Stephen Hawking, and hundreds of others at the top of their game. The world is a richer place for this body of elegantly delivered wisdom, and the TED.com website is extremely popular. Many superstars of the speaking world were virtually unknown until their TED talks went viral.

The smartest thing TED has done is to video-record every presentation, and put them up on a public website, freely accessible to all. And the second-smartest thing TED has done, under the management of Wired Magazine founder and bestselling author Chris Anderson, is franchise the TED concept. Hundreds of cities now post TEDx talks, as official satellites of the main TED event.

To put a coherent message together in as little as five or as much as 18 minutes is no easy task. Even for experienced speakers, it’s a challenge. For many years, I’ve watched lots of TED talks—both to gain knowledge and insight about the world around me, and to study presentation techniques from these excellent speakers.

And for many years, too, I’d wanted to present a TED talk. I answered speaker calls for several TEDx events, reached out to people I knew who had presented at TED, and tried to be patient. I even volunteered to coach a TEDx presenter over Google Hangouts. (It’s quite fascinating to help shape someone else’s TED talk.)

Then, on April 10 of this year, the same organizer for whom I’d coached a speaker chose me to do a TEDx Salon event on May 8 in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, just 35 miles from my house. Instead of a day in a big auditorium with lots of speakers, I would be the only speaker in an intimate evening in a very small room (it was crowded with 15 people), and I would also choose two related TED talks to show. But it would still get posted on TED.com, and that was good enough for me.

I had less than a month to prepare. Most TED speakers have a lot more notice. Yes, I felt the pressure. I wanted thousands of people to watch my video, and I wanted it to leverage change in the way business is done.

This organizer wants all her speakers to have a rehearsal/coaching session, usually in person (I don’t know if that’s standard TED procedure, or just hers). After creating a whole new talk and slide show, I was on the third major draft (plus numerous minor edits) by the time I drove up to the venue for the dry run. Having been a speaker for decades, I was feeling pretty confident (and a little resentful of giving up an extra evening). But my volunteer coaches showed me I still had room for lots of improvement. Fortunately, I still had ten days to get it right. I simplified and clarified the messaging and slides, reworked certain awkward points in my narrative—and successfully delivered Version 4.0 in front of my packed and enthusiastic audience of 15. I ended up being quite grateful for the coaching session.

Fairly late in the process—the day before the rehearsal—I decided to build my talk around this quote: “Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare.” In my talk, I attributed it to an author named Elna Baker; I later found out that she took it from Muhammad Ali. The complete quote is “Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

And that gave me a structure. I brought up several examples of things we used to think were impossible and now accept as fact: from human beings traveling at 17,500 miles per hour (aboard the International Space Station)…to the invention of the lightbulb and the iPod…to ending apartheid without vengeance…to saving a mountain in my own neighborhood. Then I took it global, challenging the business world to “turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.” I pointed out the profit potential in doing this work, and cited companies already profiting with their social enterprises.

If you watch my TED talk (once again, the URL is https://www.ted.com/tedx/events/11809 ), I’d be grateful if you send me a comment that I can put on a web page. If you can spare 15 minutes to listen, please take another minute or two and share your reaction. If you can forward to people you think would like to see it and link to it on social media, you’ll have my gratitude.

Friends/Colleagues who Want to Help

Jay Levinson Memorial Conference is On Hold

My wife was the one who noticed that the Guerrilla Marketing conference I mentioned last month had been scheduled for Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar. When I brought this to the attention of the organizers, they immediately cancelled the conference (to their credit). At press time, they haven’t set a new date.

Starting a new website? Or tired of your existing hosting company? Have I got something for you: Hostgator, the hosting company I’ve been happily using for the past few years, is allowing me to give you a whole month of hosting—for a penny. Such a deal! All you have to do is go to https://www.hostgator.com/shared and when the time comes to give your coupon code, use my full name, all capital letters: SHELHOROWITZ (1 L, 2 Os).

Hear & Meet Shel

Thursday, September 11, 6 pm ET/3 pm PT: Webinar, “Selling Your Self-Published Book to a Bigger Publisher,” Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. Details & Register Here https://tinyurl.com/onlz3hw

HOLYOKE, MA: Saturday, September 13, 9:30-10:30 a.m., Making Sustainability Sexy: Marketing Secrets for Green/Local Businesses/Organizations, Co-op Power’s Sustainability Summit, Holyoke Heritage State Park, 221 Appleton Street, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

September 26-28, Dover, Vermont: Scaling Change for Social Good is a fascinating “un-conference” with a keynote by Ami Dar, founder of Idealist.org, and an emphasis on getting your deep social change story sharp enough to present on video. This is a skill set that every marketer *and* every social change agent or environmental activist needs. I’ll be there as an advising mentor—but what happens there is really about the group, about a new way to collaborate for change. https://www.scalingchange.org/

I am participating because 1) I love the theme of achieving deep social change; it’s very much aligned with the direction I expect to be going for the next 15 years or so, and 2) I’m betting that this could be the start of something very big—kind of like being able to say you were at the first TED conference

Largest rally on climate change in US history, Sunday, September 21, NYC. I am going to be in the city Saturday as well, and could squeeze in a couple of meetings. Even, if someone wants to organize one, a public event. Please respond to me (shel at principledprofit.com) with the subject line Meet in NYC or Speak in NYC

Monday, October 6, 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT: It’s been a while since I’ve done the Making Green Sexy talk as a webinar. I’m doing it once again for Green America—a much-improved version compared to the last time I presented it online. No charge.

Remember: You can earn a generous commission if you book Shel into a paid speaking engagement.

Connect with Shel on Social Media

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a marketing consultant and copywriter… award-winning author of eight books… international speaker, blogger, syndicated columnist — Shel Horowitz shows how green and ethical businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green 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.

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

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 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).”

Two Recommended Books—Talk Like TED, How to Deliver a TED Talk

Talk Like TED by Carmine Gallo (St. Martin’s Press, 2014), How to Deliver a TED Talk by Jeremy Donovan (McGraw Hill, 2014)

Whether or not you ever hope to give a TED talk of your own, if you do any public speaking at all (and that includes teleseminars and webinars), you can learn a lot by studying the best TED talks. There are quite a few books on the subject. I found these two quite helpful.

Yes, it’s unusual for me to cover two books in one review; I think I’ve only done that once before in 11 years of writing a monthly book review. It’s also unusual for me to review books when I haven’t taken several pages of notes while I was reading.

But these two books are two windows on the same need, and they complement each other nicely. Both books cite dozens of examples of successful TED talks, complete with the URLs to watch them. Their lists of talks overlap—both, for instance, cite Sir Ken Robinson’s talk on the need for creativity in education and Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor’s fascinating talk on how she, a neuroscientist, deconstructed her own experience of having a stroke. But they also each cite numerous examples that the other does not, and they provide different frameworks for constructing your talk.

Talk Like TED: The 9 Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds, by Carmine Gallo (St. Martin’s, 2014) was recommended to me by my friend Jim Bowes, who used it in preparing his own TEDx presentation.

I read this during those few weeks I had to prepare, and I found that often, I’d get up from the book to watch one of the examples he refers to. And almost as often, I’d go from reading the book or watching one of the referenced TED talks to the edit window in PowerPoint, and immediately make changes based on what I was learning.

A few weeks after my TED talk, I met Jeremy Donovan at Book Expo America, and he gave me a copy of his new book, How to Deliver a TED Talk: Secrets of the World’s Most Inspiring Presentations (McGraw Hill, 2014).

And even though my TED talk was over, I started reading it. First, because I do plenty of speaking beyond TED, and second, because I might do other TED talks (Malcolm Gladwell has done at least three).

Some of my takeaways (or reinforcements of my existing ideas) from Gallo:

Talk to the amygdala: to the part of the brain that reacts viscerally, emotively
Use strong sound bites
Incorporate humor, abundance, and optimism
Group concepts in threes (in my case, I had three social problems for the business community to solve, and three examples of how people worked backward to reach an “impossible” goal—but I’ve been speaking and writing in threes long before I read this book)

And from Donovan:

You can organize a talk either through inductive or deductive logic
If seeking to move people to accept a controversial idea, bridge from a non-controversial idea
Know what persona you’re going to adapt, and to what purpose; will you be a magician? A creative genius? A teacher of science? A lover of nature? A catalyst for change?
Understand the components of your talk (for example, you might alternate between stating premises and proving them)—he deconstructs numerous talks
Use the full complement of tools at your disposal: body language, tone of voice, visuals, humor, etc.
Provide the person who introduces you with a script that reinforces both your message AND your delivery style (great advice for ANY speech).

The Clean and Green Club, July 2014

11 Jul, 2014 No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

July 2014

This Month’s Tip: Grab Unexpected, Out-of-Genre Media Opportunities

I wrote to Dear Abby this month—not to solve a problem, but to grab publicity.So why does a marketing and publishing consultant and copywriter specializing in green business think he can benefit from writing to Dear Abby?

Because Abby handed me an opportunity on a silver platter.

Someone identifying herself as “Reader in the Southwest” complained that a friend’s self-published book was so badly done and full of typos that she couldn’t even finish it, but the friend was eager to get her to post a rave review on Amazon.com. And Abby told her, among other things, “Find SOMETHING you liked about the book and mention that on the Amazon page. You could call it a ‘page turner’ because you had to turn from Page 1 to Page 2, didn’t you?” (Read the full question and Abby’s response—as well as 358 reader comments as of five days after publication—at https://www.uexpress.com/dearabby/2014/7/5/0/friend-has-hard-time-finding-a#disqus_thread)

I still make a fair piece of my living as a book shepherd/publishing consultant, and when I saw this response in my morning paper, I immediately put down the paper and dashed off this letter, which I submitted through the Dear Abby website and posted as a comment on that day’s column:

Dear Abby,

Your advice to “Reader in the Southwest” was 30 years out of date. These days, most self-published books are printed only to fill orders; the author of the badly done book is not sitting on inventory. You ask Reader to lie and call it a page-turner—which does harm to the author (misleading), the reviewer (trashing his/her reputation), and anyone who buys the book (misleading into a purchase). It would be far better to say, “I love that you’ve gotten your book done. But I have to tell you, it could reach a much wider audience if you went back and fixed all the grammar errors. It’s always hard to proofread your own work, and you might not realize what a negative impression it makes right now.”

Abby, I’m a book shepherd who helps writers become published authors, and I’ve had similar conversation with many of my clients. They’re always glad they took my advice once their beautiful books are out in the world.

—Shel Horowitz in Hadley, Mass.

At best, this will run in hundreds of newspapers around the country and the world—at no cost to me. At worst, it will only be seen by those who go to the website and scroll to the second comment page (it did generate one positve response there)—and perhaps by those who are searching Dear Abby or Google for advice on dealing with a friend’s terrible book. I felt that my letter might be blocked if I put in a web link—but by including my real name and city, I’ve made it possible for any prospective clients to find me.

It took me only about fifteen minutes to write this letter. I frequently spend that much time on a HARO (HelpAReporter.com) media pitch. Again, you don’t know if you’ll actually get media, but if you do, the results can be spectacular. Over the years, I’ve been quoted multiple times each in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur magazine, and even Woman’s Day (among many others). This kind of national publicity has been a major credibility builder for me, and was even instrumental in keeping my Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shel_Horowitz) when it was challenged as too promotional.

Friends/Colleagues who Want to Help

Freebie Session with My Own Business Coach
My business coach, Oshana Himot, writes:“I am offering complementary business coaching sessions for entrepreneurs and others who desire to expand their business. Sharing, as you know many people in a growth phase who can benefit from mentoring.”

I have found working with her quite transformative in my own
business. Contact: oshanaben@yahoo.com

Disclaimer: I do not earn a commission or benefit financially from
this. Doing it because I’m thrilled with what we’ve accomplished
together and would like to share that good karma.

The two new brands around Business For a Better World and Making Green Sexy would not have happened without her.

Save the Dates: October 3-5
Jay Conrad Levinson, the original Guerrilla Marketing man and my coauthor for Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, passed away last October. His widow, Jeannie Levinson, daughter Amy Levinson, and another of his many co-authors, Loral Langemeier (Guerrilla Wealth) are marking the year since his death with a fantastic conference featuring many of the superstars with whom Jay collaborated in his life. This will be a very affordable event (the figure of $199 has been tossed around, though it’s not firm) that will be the catalyst for relaunching the brand in the post-Jay era. I am hoping to speak.

Hear & Meet Shel

THIS Saturday, July 19th, 2014, 1:30 to 2:30 pm, Workshop Tent #2, “Making Green Sexy,” SolarFest, Tinmouth, VT, USA, July 18-20: www.solarfest.org.

Webinar for Green America’s Green Business Network DETAILS TK

Thursday, September 11, 6 pm ET/3 pm PT: Webinar, “Selling Your Self-Published Book to a Bigger Publisher,” Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. Details & Register Here https://tinyurl.com/onlz3hw

Remember: You can earn a generous commission if you book Shel into a paid speaking engagement.

Connect with Shel on Social Media

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a marketing consultant and copywriter… award-winning author of eight books… international speaker, blogger, syndicated columnist — Shel Horowitz shows how green and ethical businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green 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.

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

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 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).”

Another Recommended Book—The Trader Joe’s Adventure

The Trader Joe’s Adventure: Turning a Unique Approach to Business into a Retail and Cultural Phenomenon, by Len Lewis (Dearborn, 2005)

As a subscriber to my newsletter, you’re well aware that I advocate consumer-centric, ethical business practices as a business success strategy: it’s not just the right thing to do, it’s also very good for business.

Trader Joe’s, the very popular supermarket chain emphasizing its own private-label gourmet and natural products, eliminated GMO foods in its own brands all the way back in 2001—over a decade before Whole Foods agreed to label GMO products on its shelves. It was an early endorser of Fair Trade products (though to this day, there are plenty of non-Fair Trade products right next to some of the Fair Trade ones, particularly in chocolate, where the Fair Trade label probably makes the most difference). In 2003, it was one of the first 30 companies to win an award from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). The following year, Rainforest Action Network saluted the company for changing its bag purchasing to avoid paper made by a company known for cutting old-growth forests. It sells 100%-recycled paper products at very attractive price points.

So Trader Joe’s scores pretty well on social screens.

But that’s only part of its success formula. As of a decade ago, when this book was written, it was doing twice the typical supermarket sales per square foot, and was expecting to raise that as it started entering into and expanding in affluent, educated urban markets like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Boston.

Some of the other major keys to its success include:

A workforce that’s well-treated, collaborative, and among the best-compensated in the entire supermarket industry—and whose managers are not only willing to get down and dirty and pitch in wherever needed—sweeping floors, running registers, etc.—but also genuinely welcome input from line employees. New hires are actually told, “If you’re not having fun within 30 days, quit.”
Workers who are trained to be customer-centric, have lots of information on the products, and happily interact with customers (gently upselling when it feels appropriate).
A unique and constantly changing product mix. For many items, there simply is no other place to buy them. As of when this book was written, the store was introducing about 25 new products per week, and removing about as many. So shopping becomes, in Lewis’s words, “a treasure hunt.”
Near-zero use of traditional advertising, relying instead on word-of-mouth and a magalog-style catalog distributed by direct mail (to shoppers who request it) and in stores.
A contrarian approach to most industry practices: Unlike most supermarkets, he company favors small-footprint stores with limited selection, often in second- or third-tier locations with inadequate parking. It does not try to be a one-stop shop but instead a boutique destination experience. Unlike most gourmet shops, Trader Joe’s focuses on multiple niches: ready-to-eat frozen foods, gourmet, organic and natural, wine and cheese. And the store gets by with fewer workers per square foot, but pays them better and treats them better. It doesn’t do “loyalty programs” (encouraging frequent shopping, e.g., buy 10, get one free, rebates, airline points).

Many years ago, I actually wrote to Trader Joe’s and mentioned that the Whole Foods in my own town was doing really well, and it might be a good site for a new store. I didn’t get a response, but a few years later, TJ’s arrived (and was instantly successful). The store’s location is across the street from the mall that contains the Whole Foods, and many shoppers combine trips to both of these destination stores. It turns out I’m not the only one. Lewis cites actual organized campaigns by residents to bring the company into various cities—something I doubt any other supermarket chain experiences, ever.

On the very last page of the main text, Lewis shares eight research findings from the Organic Consumers Association about the impact of social responsibility on shopping patterns. No matter what kind of business you run, take heed that you are not only socially responsible, but that your customers and prospects know it. Among the highlights:

92 percent felt more positively toward companies that back social causes
91 percent are prepared to switch if their current vendor is not a good corporate citizen
85 percent would tell their family and friends
87 percent are more likely to remember companies when they learn about their social responsibility initiatives

While the book is very repetitive and somewhat dated, it still carries important lessons for business owners in today’s world. So far, Trader Joe’s has managed to stay true to its roots while expanding rapidly, and being enormously profitable.

The Clean and Green Club, June 2014

9 Jun, 2014 1 Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

June 2014

Learn with Shel from the Comfort of Your Own Phone:
“Virtual Intensive” on Green Marketing and Creating a Better World
Six group calls with Shel—at a very affordable price.

If you are seriously interested in this training, I want to make sure to design something you’ll be happy with. Please take the short survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9Y538SN and be part of the process. It should take you between 2 and 5 minutes.

Nominate a Business-Change-the-World Project at Business for a Better World
Do you have a favorite cause around turning hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war and poverty into peace, or climate catastrophe into planetary balance? I’m starting a directory of social change projects that businesses can get involved with, at https://www.business-for-a-better-world.com/ (you’ll see a link labeled Nominate, near the top of the home page.) This is your chance to be among the first to put up a project, and be more likely to attract attention. Let’s get some GREAT projects up there! No cost to list—but the submissions are moderated, so don’t bother spamming it.

This Month’s Profile:

Hawthorne Valley Farm

Here’s a community that combines top organic and Biodynamic farming practices, education, social action, and the arts: Hawthorne Valley Farm, in New York State’s Hudson Valley.

I heard Martin Ping, Hawthorne Valley’s Executive Director, at the Slow Living Summit in Brattleboro, Vermont last week, and decided to share some of his story with you.

Founded in 1972, the 900-acre farm uses Biodynamic agriculture: a vigorous standard developed by the visionary educator Rudolph Steiner, who also created the Waldorf Education movement–that goes far beyond organic into a much deeper relationship with the land.

Hawthorne raises vegetables, grains, chickens, goats, sheep, cows, and pigs. Its store sells raw milk, homemade cheeses, live lacto-fermented sauerkraut and veggies, and home-baked breads made from its own grain. It also distributes its wares through one local and three New York City-based CSA (community supported agriculture) networks, as well as through three of New York City’s farmers markets, including the massive thrice-weekly market at Union Square.

And it packages and wholesales yogurt and quark: a spreadable creme fraiche cheese.

Ping calls these packaged dairy products “our secret weapon. We make yogurt–and people in Atlanta read the container and say, ‘ooh, they’ve got a summer camp.’

Hawthorne Valley’s social action and education/farm apprenticeship programs are fully integrated into the farming operation, as are Waldorf teacher training and numerous visual and performing arts programs. The farm regularly brings in 600 children and teens a year, many of whom inner-city children with no previous exposure to nature.

“We find nine years old is the sweet spot for education. You pull out a carrot and they say, ‘whoa, food comes out of the ground!’ They’re just beginning to see the warts on their parents and teachers, you get them mucking out a stall, taking care of another sentient being–a chicken, a goat, a cow–for the first time in their lives. Kids are not standardized. They’re individual and spiritual,” just like farms.

“They get a sense of the relationships, that it doesn’t magically appear. They make all the food, all the accouterments, they understand. There are 100 pounds of milk in 10 pounds of cheese. Kids get a lesson in economics, in food miles, in the relationships of the whole food system.”

Hawthorne Valley also reaches out to prisoners, immigrant farmers, and veterans, even developing theater works for inmates to perform.

A convergence of factors led to the farm’s founding. As Ping puts it, “At that time, a bunch of farmers and Waldorf teachers were meeting. Farms were being told, get big or get out. Agriculture was being pushed out by agribusiness, the culture was getting lost. And teachers were saying kids had less and less opportunity to interact with the natural world. They mooshed the two themes together.

“They said, let’s buy a farm and decommodify the land. And children will be welcome. ‘We are founding the seed of a living organization: agricultural, artistic, educational. The goal is to become full human beings.’ I get to go to work each day at a place where the goal is to become full human beings!”

The farm’s mission is nothing less than “renewal of society and culture through education, agriculture, arts. It’s a food shed, a watershed. We think of the whole farm as a living organism. Inputs and outputs should stay on the farm.

“Farmers grow soil [through manure and compost]; soil grows plants. We’ve been ‘making good shit since 1972.’ I hear people talking about hedge funds. We plant hedges and watch them grow: bird and insect habitat.

“Our disconnection is at the root of every crisis we face. We’re not displaced, we’re DEplaced. This is what we’re doing at Hawthorne Valley: that healing, that connection, that sense of higher purpose.”

The farm also has a Center for Social Research, which explores Rudolph Steiner’s ideas on how society can be organized, and another research arm studying eco-friendly farmscapes. It supports a microlending program and a two-year Waldorf teacher training program that “looks at art in relation to social life and to money, to supporting it freely and decommodifying it.”

And this has far-reaching implications, both in and beyond Hawthorne Valley’s own bioregion: “We’re starting to see Columbia County as a farming organism, not just to our own borders. We’re growing farmers. 65 new farms in Columbia County, they did profiles, put pictures in every library. One of our farmers got those 65 new farmers and some others together for a one-day charette. We had 75 and had to turn some away. They look at practical things, like how to share equipment.

Despite his zeal, Pink is remarkably nonjudgmental. “Even the multinationals are filled with good people, and we need to help them help us. People at Johnson & Johnson [makers of hand sanitizers, among many other products] understand what we’ve lost in the rush to sanitize everything.”

Where else to Hear & Meet Shel
(beyond the Virtual Intensive)

“Making Green Sexy,” SolarFest, Tinmouth, VT, USA, July 18-20:
Saturday, July 19th, 2014, 1:30 to 2:30 PM, Workshop Tent #2

Discussions in process about several other possible talks. Remember: You can earn a generous commission if you book Shel into a paid speaking engagement.

Connect with Shel on Social Media

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a marketing consultant and copywriter… award-winning author of eight books… international speaker, blogger, syndicated columnist — Shel Horowitz shows how green and ethical businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green 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.

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

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 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).”

Another Recommended Book—The Business Solution to Poverty

The Business Solution to Poverty: Designing Products and Services for Three Billion New Customers by Paul Polak and Mal Warwick (Berrett-Koehler, 2013)

Several years ago, I reviewed The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, a remarkable book about improving people’s lives at the very bottom while monetizing that improvement in the form of business profit. The Business Solution to Poverty picks up where “Fortune” left off.

Based not on academic theory but on real-world hands-on experience starting such companies in places like Bangladesh, Polak and Warwick say there’s a great deal of money to be made serving the world’s very poorest inhabitants: 2.7 billion people living on $2 per day or less.

However, it’s not a mater of just walking in and rolling up your sleeves. Succeeding in these markets–plural, because conditions and cultures vary widely in different parts of the world, or even different parts of a single country–requires extensive research, following key design and economic principles, and DEEP understanding of the local cultures.

Products must be items that people with almost no discretionary income will pay for and use, because these will better their lives, directly and rapidly. They must be durable…extremely cheap to manufacture…designed so a non-literate population can use AND maintain them…and systematically deliverable to places with no roads, no infrastructure, and no tradition of buying from the outside. And they have to both fit well enough into the existing culture and be disruptive enough to dramatically improve people’s lives.

Examples?

Treadle pumps that can be installed for $25 including the cost of drilling a well
Ceramic water filters
An ultra-low-cost warmer for premature babies
Artificial knees that cost $75 instead of many thousands.

The authors cite numerous failures, many at the hands of governments or NGOs who, in the authors’ view, don’t scale up enough to make a big difference because they lack the profit motive and thus have less need to make sure their projects actually WORK on the ground. Private businesses, including those run by the authors, have had their failures too–but their batting averages tend to be higher, especially if they do plan for scale. Polak and Warwick say successful businesses will talk to at least 100 customers before going forward–and this research may lead to creative marketing strategies such as theatrical presentations, in situations where traditional Global North media won’t work. If people can’t read, the newspaper will not tell them about you. If they have no electricity, then marketing on radio, TV, or online won’t work very well. Aware of the marketing challenges, Polak and Warwick list “aspirational branding” as a crucial ingredient.

The chances of success are highest, the authors say, when the ventures address basic core needs: energy, water, health care, and jobs (oddly, food is not on their list)–and when there’s accountability. They are critical of many microloan programs, for instance, because they often see the money diverted away from seeding a business (a long-term approach that lifts people out of poverty) and into basic survival–and then the money is gone and there is no business to funnel in capital.

I agree with almost all their numerous success principles in these challenging markets. However, they make–and I question–the assertion that successful businesses must be able to scale up within the first decade to 100 million units and $10 billion in revenues per year in order to be worthwhile. While I recognize that a systematized, replicable infrastructure capable of those numbers is a good thing, I also do believe there is a place for the smaller venture that might be working in just one or two communities, yet still makes a real difference in people’s lives. And a place for the entrepreneur who still wants to make a difference but wants to stay small.

To make this whole thing concrete, Polak is starting or consulting to four specific businesses that meet the authors’ criteria:

A bicycle-delivered safe drinking water company
A low-carbon biofuel made from agricultural waste that in the past had been burned without capturing the energy
Solar-powered LED lanterns that are safer, cheaper, and more effective than kerosene lamps–and pay for themselves in the savings of a few months’ supply of kerosene
Door-to-door health education and sales of franchised high-impact health products that protect against malaria, diarrhea, and worms

The Clean and Green Club, May 2014

12 May, 2014 No Comment

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

May 2014

This Month’s Tip:

Even Experts Need Coaching

When I walked into the rehearsal/coaching session nine days before my TEDx talk, “Business For a Better World,” I was feeling pretty confident. After all, I’ve made hundreds of public presentations, know my material very well, get great feedback on my talks, and make a portion of my living as a paid speaker. Plus, I’d already gone over the material a whole lot. In fact, I was on my third complete draft, not to mention numerous tweaks and revisions.

TED prides itself on presenting ideas that change the world, and doing so in ways that capture attention. They tell their speakers, “don’t trot out your usual shtick.” And they limit presentations to a very short time—in my case, 18 minutes or less.

The challenge of fitting material into TED’s format was something I’d never faced, and I knew this could be the most important speech I’ve ever given, because it would be displayed world-wide on the enormously popular TED.com website, forever. I’d also had the experience of being one of this organizer’s coaches for another speaker last year, and I saw the value it had for the featured speaker.

So I was grateful that the organizer asked me to come up to the venue for a live-audience rehearsal and critique—even though it meant an extra 70 miles of driving.

And boy, was I ever glad I did!

People liked the material, and liked my familiarity with it—but they had lots and lots of good advice for me. There were specific slides that were much too confusing, specific tones of voice that felt wrong to the listeners (for example, sounding accusatory in places I didn’t mean to). And they gave me overall feedback on the talk that was invaluable in terms of what should and shouldn’t be included, how it was being perceived, and what I could do to increase my impact.

It was, in short, incredibly useful. It also left me with a lot of work to do: three days rescripting Version 4.0, and five more rehearsing and tweaking, rehearsing and tweaking. Even as late as the morning of my talk, I added a new element as the very first thing.

But it meant my talk is much more likely to reach more people, and to have more impact. And that, after all is why I did my talk.

Hear & Meet Shel
After doing four completely different talks within just a few weeks, I’m kind of glad to report a very light schedule.

I’ll be walking the floor at Book Expo America, May 29-31 in New York City, and a guest on Ana Weber’s radio show June 9 at 11:30 a.m. ET/8:30 PT.

I’ll be visiting Israel in late June—if you live there, drop me a line.

I might be at SolarFest in Vermont the week of July 18, but I’m not on program and I’m not sure if I’m going.

You can watch my recent interview on The A-List with Alex Cequea at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvfQI4taV-w&list=UUx_T7l1Ft-iIwsK-L5CsQUg

Nominate a Business-Change-the-World Project at Business For a Better World

Do you have a favorite cause around turning hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war and poverty into peace, or climate catastrophe into planetary balance? I’m starting a directory of social change projects that businesses can get involved with, at https://www.business-for-a-better-world.com/ (you’ll see a link labeled Nominate, near the top of the home page.) This is your chance to be among the first to put up a project, and be more likely to attract attention. Let’s get some GREAT projects up there! No cost to list—but the submissions are moderated, so don’t bother spamming it.

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