The Clean and Green Club

If you want to communicate clearly, you have to write clearly. If you want to write clearly, you want this book.

While her focus is tilted toward grassroots and nonprofit/not-for-profit community organizations, about 98 percent of her advice is equally applicable to business—especially green, socially conscious, ethical businesses that need to communicate a bigger message than “buy my stuff.”

Massachi has a light touch that turns a could-have-been-deadly subject into an enjoyable read, and the textbook-like format is full of exercises, nice little interjections, personal experience, and such. Which makes it a lot more palatable than the grammar and style textbooks of my youth. I’d even go so far as to say that this is a book that I’d have liked to have written, and certainly one I wish I’d had when I was starting my career as a social-change and environmental action writer.

Still, I wanted to take it a little at a time, so I could absorb it properly. Now that I’ve gotten all the way through, I’m sure I’ll be referring to it when I hit a grammar snag.

Not to say the book is perfect. Some of the later chapters get a bit bogged down in grammatical minutiae, and there are a few places where I would argue with her style choices. Example: call me old-fashioned, but to me, the only time you’d use an apostrophe after a set of initials is as a possessive: “NGO’s” can *only* mean “belonging to an NGO” [Non-Governmental Organization]. But to Dalya, a generation younger than me, using that construction as a plural noun is a valid if unfortunate choice.

Be sure to read the appendices; otherwise, you’ll miss the excellent brief sections on writing for audio and video, as well as a wonderful list of “visionary” trigger words (right after a list of marketing trigger words)—these are the words that tug at our readers’ heartstrings and help us frame the narrative. And that’s something that far too often, progressives have been clumsy with.

A must for the shelf of any serious business or nonprofit writer, and even more so for employees or managers who are not writers but get thrown a writing project (if they don’t want to contact someone like Dalya or me to do it for them). Nicely indexed and crammed with resources, too. https://dfmassachi.net/

In This Issue…

• This Month’s Tip: Market With Video, Part 2
• Hear & Meet Shel
• Friends Who Want to Help
• Another Recommended Book: Predictable Revenue

Market With Video, Part 2

Last month, we looked at the culture of video making, its enormous popularity, and how easy it is to be part of it. This month, we’ll get specific with some quick pointers to keep in mind when making videos, as well as a list of content ideas (only scraping the edge of what’s possible).

Here are the production tips:

• Keep videos short if you want to be accessible to people without broadband, and if you want pass-alongs. One minute up to three minutes or so is a good goal.
• Good lighting is essential.
• Music helps.
• Cool graphics help.
• Humor helps, if it’s done well.
• Many people run videos in the background. So if your use of words is restricted to silent text images, many of your “viewers” will miss the whole point. Have a person actually say the words out loud, preferably with excitement and emotion in the delivery.
• Be sure to end with a call to action, such as an easy-to-type, easy-to-remember website URL that stays on the screen for at least 15 seconds.
• Add all the linking and sharing social media tools to make it easy for people to pass videos on: Facebook Like button, Google +1 button, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc.
• Share the video on your own blog, in your newsletter, on all your social media profiles, and in those of your Internet discussion groups where it makes sense.
• Get written permission from anyone who is visible in the video or whose material you are using (make this permission very inclusive, so you don’t have to go back again to reuse the footage some other way).
• Style can be as bold or sedate as you want, as long as YOU can feel comfortable with it. Some marketers make wild, zany videos filmed driving in a sports car, others are simply one person talking.

Now, a few of the many thematic possibilities; let your imagination run wild to generate more:

• Do a movie-style trailer for your book, or even for some other kind of product.
• Use videos to demonstrate a product’s features and capabilities (I actually had a local inventor client who did this 92-second video to show off his machine that peels industrial quantities of butternut squash).
• Collect video testimonials or endorsements from clients and from famous people (you may have to do some coaching on what makes a good endorsement, but don’t worry if your ordinary users don’t look or sound like models or movie stars–you actually want them to come across as real and authentic, though at least somewhat articulate).
• Film news events or action videos involving your product.
• Use screenshot capture software like Camtasia, Jing, Camstudio, or EasyScreenCapture to provide instructions and technical support.
• Show clips of your appearances on TV (again, make sure you have the producer’s permission).
• Create an action video for your memoir.
• Interview experts on the topic of your nonfiction book.
• Get interviewed on the subject of your expertise, and post it.
• Get interviewed about your writing process, your inspiration, the backstory of your book, etc.
• Make a call to action regarding the wider world, and tie it to your book.
• Participate as a solo speaker or in a panel at a conference, and post the video.
• Have a professional put together clips from your best speeches or author talks, and turn it into a classy speaking demo video to get more speaking gigs.

Hear and Meet Shel

• Susan Rich interviews me once again Monday, Jan. 30, 11 a.m. ET/8 a.m. PT, this time on book marketing. Listen at w4wn.com
• It’s looking like I might actually be speaking in Bangladesh at a conference in Dakka March 8-10. I should have the details ready in time for next month’s newsletter. Meanwhile, if you can get me a paying gig that I can piggyback on in India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh, you could earn a generous commission.
• Also confirmed for the Gulf Coast Green conference in Houston, May 1, and trying to also set up at least one more event while I’m out there. https://gulfcoastgreen.org/pages/default.asp

Friends Who Want to Help You

Gift for You: Publicity Planner

If you work in publicity or marketing, Paul Krupin’s annual Publicity Planner is a must-have—and it’s a gift to you with no strings attached, no registration required. It’s a monthly calendar with events you can peg news stories around, very nicely laid out, too. Get yours at https://www.directcontactpr.com/files/files/PublicityCalendar2012.pdf

Gift for You: Ethical Business Manifesto

The Internet marketing world (and the business world in general) contains far too many people who seem to have forgotten basic ethics somewhere a long the way. I get so tired of people hearing abut my books on business ethics as a success strategy and telling me, “Business ethics? That’s an oxymoron.”

No, it’s not. It’s actually a key to long-term surviving and thriving. And that’s one of the reasons I’ve always been willing to partner with Marcia Yudkin, one of the most ethical people I know, and a very successful marketer. Marcia has a new gift for you: Get yours, again, with no strings attached and no registration required, at “The No-Harm Marketing Manifesto.” https://shelhorowitz.com/go/noharmmarketing/

Book Award to Enter

One of the best ways to market a book is to be able to list yourself as an award-winning author. Dan Poynter, author of The Self-Publishing Manual and numerous other books for authors and publishers, has put together a new Global E-Book Award program. Knowing Dan, it’s likely to be known as a prestigious honor in the fairly near future. Enter by March 12 at https://globalebookawards.com

Books with Bonus Packages

Shocking betrayals at home and work. Confrontations with cancer, and corrupt businessmen. Building a business worth millions. Paul Streitz has experienced it all, triumphed, and documented everything in his new book, Blue Collar Buddha, with powerful life lessons for the reader. Check out this new book along with the big bonus package (a lot of stuff about healthy relationships and healthy families, as well as my own Painless Green e-book) at https://bit.ly/bcb1412

Are you ready to make 2012 your best year ever? Take charge of your business and your life with this easily digested book—a distillation of business wisdom from Napoleon Hill through Dan Kennedy as expressed in one entrepreneur’s life. Maybe you’ve thought about leaving the rat race and being an entrepreneur. Maybe you’ve already made the jump. Discover the power of 1 focused hour a day with Henry Evans, The Hour A Day Entrepreneur. I am very proud and excited to be a part of the launch of this new book because it is only with YOU – the entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur – that we will overcome these current economic times. Join in and make 2012 YOUR best year ever!  https://bit.ly/1hrbook  Bonuses include a bunch of video training, among other things, and the book itself contains links to numerous resources.

Want to shift to a new career? A new relationship? A new path in your life? Want to simply find peace of mind? Make Your SHIFT: The Five Most Powerful Moves You Can Make to Get Where YOU Want to Go is the newest book by Beverly Flaxington, who has spent over two decades working with individuals and groups as a hypnotherapist, career coach, corporate consultant, behavioral expert, and change management leader. Now for the first time, she has focused her phenomenal depth of experience and knowledge to create a groundbreaking book to help you make the SHIFT. Bev’s trademarked SHIFT Model is taught in colleges and used by corporations. Now this book gives you the tools you need to make your shift. Visit https://shiftmodel.com/ for more information and over $1,500.00 in FREE bonus offers! Includes a free offer from the author.

International journalist Judah Freed has launched his new book, GLOBAL SENSE: The 2012 Edition: A spiritual handbook on the nature of society and how to change the world by changing ourselves. Global Sense encourages an evolutionary shift of consciousness into seeing our global interdependence. This awareness of our connectivity empowers us to change the world by changing ourselves. Filled with concrete strategies and tools, this amazingly practical book brings our highest ideals down to earth where we can use them.

Disclosures: 1. I haven’t read this version, but I read and favorably reviewed the original edition several years ago. 2. Also, he cites my book Grassroots Marketing on page 228.

Judah’s not doing a bonus promotion, but if you visit his site, https://globalsense.com, he’ll give you the introduction and first two chapters. He’s a brilliant thinker and I think you’ll like this one.

Buy at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0972890580

Learn more: https://globalsense.com

Another Recommended Book: Predictable Revenue

Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com, by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler (Pebblestorm Press, 2011)

In today’s world, old-fashioned pushy selling doesn’t work any more (there’s some doubt in my mind about whether it ever did). Smart businesspeople realize there has to be a new model for selling, expressed in “heresies” like these:

• Sales works best when you and your customer are not adversaries but are working toward common, shared goals
• Pushy traditional sales approaches like “always be closing” don’t work—instead, once you make sure there’s a fit, the customer moves inexorably toward the sale, with your skilled guidance and knowledge of their situation
• Automation and systemization prevents leads from falling through the cracks; the best leads get immediate service while they’re HOT and ready to move
• Revenue not only becomes predictable—it can multiply by as much as 300%

How?

For starters, salespeople should spend their time selling; let other team members do the prospecting/lead generation and qualification, and post-sale service. For another, the whole process is one of active engagement, solving problems and advancing goals for the customer, and in the process, doing well for the sales team.

Then bring in systemization. If you only pay for leads and contacts that have been properly entered into your sales automation system, if senior execs from the CEO down adopt and publicly use the system, and if you build training and work-role customization into the migration, everyone will be using the sales automation system. This in turn helps you understand when you have a real prospect, and when you just have a tire-kicker…what leads need what kind of follow-up, and at what points in the process…and what to do with the data you’ve extracted as you manage your team.

In addition to giving you the “cold calling 2.0” process (which is actually a way of making sure that your leads are nice and warmed up before a sales person ever gets involved), Predictable Revenue is also full of great checklists and info graphics. Examples include the top 6 prospecting mistakes, questions to ask a prospect before scheduling a demo, 5 types of prospects (and three techniques), and 9 principles to “build a sales machine.”

Predictable Revenue has a ton of wisdom–such as some really great questions to ask a prospect (example: “if you were me, how would you approach this organization?”), and a whole lot on when to step back and let the prospect lead him/herself to the sale, instead of trying to force it. Individual sales and marketing people could learn a lot here, and there’s also a big section on how to manage a sales and prospecting force.

Interestingly, in that section, Ross and Tyler recommend a mix of salary and commission rather than a 100% commission model, and they also recommend that employees (as a group) be involved in designing their own compensation package, with full transparency so everyone knows what all the other members of the lead gen and sales team is making, and why. Add in some powerful cross-fertilization techniques to build skills of your internal teams and even your channel partners, and things are going to start bubbling.

Note: you can get an excerpt at no charge by visiting https://predictablerevenue.com/

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter, February 2011

Lessons from the Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco

Ritz-Carlton has a reputation for blow-your-socks-off customer service, including the widely reported mantra that any employee is empowered to do anything to make a customer happy, as long as implementation will cost less than $200. I’ve even heard a story about a Ritz restaurant employee overhearing a mother telling her non-dairy-eating daughter that there was no soy ice cream on the menu—and going to a nearby store to purchase some.

This was the first time I got to check it out first-hand.

The gleaming white Ritz-Carlton San Francisco sits on a hilltop overlooking the confluence of Chinatown, Nob Hill, and the financial district. Looking like a 1930s-era Washington DC government administrative edifice, with its pillared entrance and huge windows in massive wooden frames, the building exterior is nicely decorated with green bas-relief. It was originally built in 1909 for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and was later Cogswell College (this information conveniently printed on the room key packet). Because of the hill, the lobby entrance is actually on the fourth floor, which is confusing if you don’t realize it. Bellmen in top hats handle the pull-through driveway, but I arrived on foot.

Staff was universally courteous and informative, yet not obsequious—and totally willing to engage as one human being to another. Maybe because this was relaxed and mellow San Francisco; I found them a lot less reserved than many other corporate hotel employees of my experience—more like what you’d expect to find at a single-location boutique hotel or bed-and-breakfast. (I was told by another guest that the staff here is in fact a lot friendlier than staff she’s experienced at other Ritz locations.)

The lobby is pleasant but not enchanting, with rather fewer plush chairs than many upscale hotels, and those mostly scattered around the periphery. The front desk was surprisingly small. I think every time I passed by, there were only one (usually) or two clerks on duty, but I never saw a line build up. The interior public spaces are well-decorated: curio cabinets at the ends of hallways featuring tasteful Asian pottery and the like, and the halls lined with paintings and photographs of San Francisco street scenes and landmarks.

My room was refreshingly uncorporate. The furnishings are simple but not sparse; my guess is that they’re relatively new but designed to look old and comfortable. (I did see a reference to a recent $12 million renovation.) The décor is anchored by round mirrors with sun’s-rays frames above each bed (too high to be usable as a mirror, but quite effective in anchoring the eye and setting the tone). The feeling, once again, was not of a corporate chain but a small and homey hotel. And since I personally relate much better to cozy than to cold or edgy, I was pleased. A classical radio station was playing softly as a walked in—nice touch.

In fact, “nice touch” was something I found myself thinking a lot. When I opened my room key packet, I didn’t notice it at first, but there was a business card saying

The Ritz-Carlton

Shel Horowitz

In Residence

with the hotel’s full contact information. Very classy, and something I don’t think I’ve ever experienced at any other hotel. I actually brought it back with me at the end of my trip.

At home, I answer my work phone line (if I don’t recognize the caller ID info) “How may I make your day special?” That business card made me feel special.

Another nice touch was the choice of both dark and milk chocolates on the room tray.

The next morning, my conference started, and here was the nicest touch of all: two concierges assigned to the conference, available for any type of assistance. Roy and Lauren were extremely facilitative. Unasked, Lauren brought my box of books to the exhibit table, and at the end of the conference, Roy took it away to reseal and ship back to me—so their suits got sweaty instead of mine. They rang the chimes at the end of every break to signal time to regather, and were there to handle any logistics issues not just for the organizers but also for all of us attenders. Their presence (for the most part, one of them at a time, but sometimes both were on duty) was beyond the expected staff who brought and removed food and beverages, etc., and made it easy to establish a personal connection between the conference and the hotel. Roy, in particular, also seemed quite interested in the subject of the conference (sustainable foods).

That evening, I called the front desk with a question about the iron, which used icons instead of labels for the controls. I’m a word guy, and I found the interface unintuitive. Rather than trying to explain over the phone, the desk clerk said he’d send someone up from housekeeping to show me—very cool. However, after 20 or 30 minutes when the staffer hadn’t arrived, and as I was fading out for the night, I figured it out on my own and canceled the staffer.

Housekeeping redeemed itself on my final morning, I reported a problem with the toilet and a staffer was at my door in less than three minutes. That’s even better than my experience at a Disney hotel a few years back.

Catering was quite good, with a lot of locally grown fresh vegetables and well-prepared desserts. Another nice touch was having the staff bring the dessert carts from our lunch spot in the courtyard tent (nice and sunny after a morning in the basement conference room) down to the exhibit area so we could continue to feast as the sessions restarted.

One thing that does need to be modernized, however, is the electricity. In this era of multiple devices each with its own charger, there was only one open outlet in my room, and it was nowhere near the desk. In order to type this on my laptop while plugged in, I’m sitting in an armchair and balancing the laptop on a tiny nightstand.

Outlets were also in short supply in our conference room, although there were a decent number along the back wall of the exhibit and food area just outside. Inside, there were none along the side walls, a few (in high demand) at the back and front.

And the elevators had minds of their own. Whether they chose to bring you to your floor without first going in the opposite direction and either opening and closing the doors or just hanging on the wrong floor for a moment with the doors closed seemed quite arbitrary.  At least twice a day, I was taken up when I wanted down, or vice versa, without anyone waiting to board at the opposite location.

And another thing that would be easy to rectify is the signage. One elevator bank doesn’t go to the rooms, but to a large and unnavigable staff work area. It took me fifteen minutes to undo the confusion and get back to my room. It would have been easy to put up a small sign saying, “If you wish to go to the guest rooms, please use the elevators on the opposite side of the building.”

These, however, are minor quibbles. In all, I found my first experience of a Ritz-Carlton quite charming, and am better prepared to believe the legends. It certainly rates as my most positive experience in a large corporate hotel chain.

So…what lessons can marketers and customer service people take away from this experience?

Lessons From Things the Ritz Did Right:

• Exceed your customer’s expectations for the experience
• Provide ongoing and consistent human points of contact (Roy and Lauren) who are not only very helpful but also genuinely interested in the customer and the agenda
• Make customers feel special with several “nice touch” flourishes
• Create a superbly pleasant ambience, including high quality fresh, interesting, and well-prepared food along with excellent service

Lessons From Things the Ritz Could Have Done Better

• Never promise more than you deliver; after thrilling me by promising to send someone up to demonstrate the iron, the no-show from housekeeping (with no call explaining the delay) was a definite downer
• Make sure the basics work. Infrastructure issues like bad signage, elevators overriding human instruction, and inadequate electrical outlets need to be addressed, because they can form the core of a customer’s experience, and undermine a lot of the good stuff if the customer chooses to focuses on them (I didn’t—but I certainly noticed).

Shel Horowitz’s latest book is Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. He also writes the monthly columns, Green And Profitable and Green And Practical.

Pepsi: $20 MM to Community, Instead of Super Bowl Ad

It’s pretty rare that I shine the Clean and Green Spotlight on a huge corporation that’s a household name around the world. It’s a nervous-making proposition, especially since the only time I had to rescind the honor was a company in that category (BP).

However…I have learned that if I bestow the honor for a particular achievement or stance, I’m less likely to smear egg all over my face. And I like to “catch companies doing something right” and highlight them. After all, even Walmart  (a company I don’t do business with) was named, because of its amazing reaction to the Katrina flooding of 2005, and may get named again down the road because of its powerful sustainability initiatives at every level and every stakeholder interaction. Yes, I could criticize Walmart for many things—but the company earns my respect in those two areas.

This month, it’s another corporate giant: Pepsi. I am not endorsing Pepsi’s products, many of which are nutritionally dubious or worse. But I do wholeheartedly endorse the company’s decision to stay out of Super Bowl advertising this year, and instead donate the $20 million  it would have spent—an obscene amount to spend on an ad—on community fundraisng projects.

Here are a few lines from the New York Times story about the campaign:

More than $20 million in grants, ranging from $5,000 to $250,000, has been distributed to about 400 winners so far, including $25,000 for new uniforms for the Cedar Park High School band in Cedar Park, Tex., which took its campaign to win votes to Friday night football games. In Las Vegas, a new playground opened last week with a $25,000 grant won in September.

The idea is nicely interactive, involving a lot of voting mechanisms, including heavy use of social media—and spreading the wealth around many projects that could benefit from mid-range grants. It’s a cool bit of community building that also does an excellent job of brand building. And I love win-wins like that.

(My thanks to Chris MacDonald, @ethicsblogger on Twitter, for steering me to this story.)

Another Recommended Book: Bye-Bye Boring Bio by Nancy Juetten

What’s the kiss of death at a party? It’s answering the “what do you do” question the wrong way–some deadly response like “I sell life insurance.” While people will be stampeding away for anyone who answers like that, they’ll flock to someone who does the same thing, but knows how to express it creatively. To keep the same example, wouldn’t you be willing to spend a few minutes finding out about the person who responds, “I help your hard-earned money pass to your children without stopping to drop half of it at the tax offices.”

Many websites and marketing materials make the same kind of mistake. You’ve seen “about us” pages that just blah blah blah about the boring facts, or drown their unique focus in “corporatese.”

If your marketing materials suffer for that disease, Nancy Juetten has the cure. I’ve been an admirer of hers for quite some time, and have incorporated some of her thinking into the work I do with my own marketing clients.

Nancy’s the author of a wonderful book, Bye-Bye Boring Bio, that shows you how to turn on the excitement in everything from Twitter profiles to books, and then convert that excitement into monetization. Highly recommended for speakers, authors, entrepreneurs, and nonprofits–anyone, in short, who wants to convince anyone else that their product, service, or idea is exactly what the prospect needs. Your choice of e-book or spiral-bound.

https://www.byebyeboringbio.com

Hear & Meet Shel

• I’ve really enjoyed Ryan Eliason’s Social Entrepreneurship teleseminar series. In fact, I’ve really made a point of listening to the replays on the calls I couldn’t attend live, and have listened to far more than I do of most series.  Speakers include tree activist Julia Butterfly Hill, former Obama green jobs czar Van Jones, brain researcher/philosopher Dr. Bruce Lipton, the writer Marianne Williamson, Green America head Alisa Gravitz, Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons, and my eco-biz friends George Kao and Tad Hargrave. My session with Ryan airs tomorrow, February 16, 2011, 1 pm ET/10 am PST.
  –>If you want to gain access to the replays, visit https://shelhorowitz.com/go/RyanEliason to register for the no-cost live calls. Once you’ve signed up, you’ll get the information about how to buy the entire set of this excellent series.
• Yes, it’s short notice. I did mention it last month, though–I’ll be a panelist (not the same thing as a speaker, in this case) at Ken McArthur’s next JV Alert, Orlando, February 18-20. I’ve heard amazing things about these conferences, including some legendary and very profitable deals and partnerships. I’m eager to experience it.  If you’d like to go too, click here for the very impressive speaker lineup and registration link https://shelhorowitz.com/go/JVAlert

• Social Media for Terrified Authors: How to Turn Scary Into Success: Wednesday, March 30, 2 pm ET/11 a.m. PT, with Shel Horowitz and book coach/social media maven Judy Cullins.
  * Have an impact on the three major social media networks in just minutes a day: control social media and keep it from controlling you
  * Understand how to spread your content around the Internet with just a couple of clicks: more ROI for less work
  * Turn social media connections into website traffic, book sales, and client gigs without spending any money to do it.
  *Increase your credibility as a savvy expert.
  *Define and find your book’s target audience on the big 3 social media marketing sites–and market directly to the exact people who can benefit from your book.
  * Get your website or blog pages highly ranked on Google and other search engines.
  Just $19.95, and includes several valuable bonuses. Click https://www.bookcoaching.com/shel-judy-teleseminar.php to get all the details (this is not an affiliate link, but I do benefit financially from your registration).

• April 8-10 I plan to attend the National Conference on Media Reform, in Boston. I’ve attended two previous conferences and am always blown away. If you’re interested in the impact of corporate media on our culture, progressive politics, or exploring the diversified world of D-I-Y (do-it-yourself) independent media—everything from setting up a blog to running your own TV station), this is a must. And if you happen to be in the Amherst/Northampton, MA area, let’s talk about carpooling. I’m thrilled to attend one that won’t require getting on a plane!
• Saturday, April 23rd, 2011 10 AM-4 PM, my wife D. Dina Friedman and I will exhibit again at Amherst Sustainability Festival in downtown Amherst, MA
• Thursday, April 28, 1 pm ET/10 a.m. PT: Becky Cortino interviews me on Green Marketing for Biz Buzz: https://www.blogtalkradio.com/bizbuzz Becky is a master networker who has reached out consistently over time, and I’ll bet she does a terrific interview.

• Once again, I’ll be attending Book Expo America, May 24-26 in New York City, and probably IBPA University May 22- 23

Friends Who Want to Help

Good For Business: The Rise of the Conscious Corporation, by Andrew Benett, Cavas Gobhai, Ann O’Reilly, and Greg Welch (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

Reviewed by Shel Horowitz, primary author, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green

If you ever doubted that corporate social and environmental responsibility play a role in business success, consider some of these stats:

• In a survey of consumers across the U.S., France, and U.K., 74 percent of consumers believe businesses bear as much responsibility as governments for driving positive social change
• 76 percent  take responsibility for avoiding products from unethical companies, and 63 percent have made purchase decisions based on company conduct
• An astonishing 85 percent believe that companies need to stand for more than just profitability

All of these are taken from the appendix of Good For Business: The Rise of the Conscious Corporation, which ends with 11 pages of juicy stats. And there are plenty of important stats in the main text, too: such as:

• The market for organic foods in the U.S. grew by nearly an order of magnitude in just eleven years, mushrooming from $3.6 billion in 1997 to $33 billion in 2008
• Just the compact fluorescent light bulbs sold at Walmart kept 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere—the same result as removing 700,000 cars from use
• Reputation accounts for 75 percent of the difference between book value and market capitalization; in other words, good behavior translates into real dollars when a company is sold
• On the aggregate, companies listed on the 100 Best Places to Work returned 14 percent a year on investment, compared with just 6 percent for the overall corporate economy
• Tesco, the U.K. supermarket giant, built a store in 2008 that uses just 30% of the energy of a store built just two years earlier

Plenty more to this book than statistics, of course. Much of the text draws from four cornerstone concepts—corporations need to:

1. Be about more than profit.

2. Treat both employees and customers well

3. Champion sustainability

4. Respect the power of consumers

Case-study companies, including well-known examples like Marks & Spencer, Ben & Jerry’s, Nike, GE, Whole Foods—and many less-frequently cited examples, including not only companies but also nonprofits—are examined in light of these four criteria, with many specifics.

There is a long digression on mission statements, which the authors reinvent as a living, changing document they call a USOD (Useful Statement Of Direction). Were it up to me, I’d have edited that part down. But this one small negative is more than compensated by pearls of wisdom such as the way a Conscious Corporation turns transparency into advantage, even as old-style companies see it as a recipe for paranoia. (p. 186)

Growing America: The Story of a Grassroots Activist, A Call for Renewed Civic Action, by David A. Kidd, “The Tree Man”

If you think one person can’t make a difference in the world read this book. David A. Kidd is personally responsible for reforesting his Ohio county; he organized a massive community effort that planted three million trees over a ten-year period, involving thousands of people in the process.

Kidd is an unlikely activist: a very ordinary guy with mainstream tastes and interests who served in Vietnam and had a spiritual transformation there. Kidd’s decision to renounce violence in all forms and devote his life to a higher purpose began there with a conversion to vegetarianism. Over his next several decades, he first brought an Eastern spiritual movement to his Ohio community. Later, he started the county-wide tree movement, then was hired to oversee Ohio’s state reforestation program. Eventually, he moved to animal rights activism, putting his own body on the line to stop a particularly brutal hunting event, several years in a row.

Because he doesn’t come out of an activist background, Kidd’s organizing methods are creative and unorthodox; he gets the tree project moving through schools, churches, and especially Rotary clubs, and understands intuitively how to get buy-in from all the key players so the projects are adopted and followed through, and how to successfully motivate both aid and volunteer helpers. His formal study of organizing came later, after he was already up and running with the tree project.

Essentially, he has created a blueprint for organizing around any issue where there’s pretty much a community-wide consensus supporting the project goals.

It would never have occurred to me to do a community organizing project through Rotary, so perhaps my biggest takeaway is to think about different audiences and how to reach them. Environmental work crosses many demographics, as I learned with my own most successful organizing project, Save The Mountain–the only time I’ve ever been involved in a movement with a near-complete community consensus.

This is a timely book for me to read, as I contemplate creating the<a href=”https://earthconsciousmarketers.com/”>International Association of Earth-Conscious Marketers</a>. an international trade association for Green marketers

Available directly from the publisher, Lantern Books, at <a href=”https://lanternbooks.com/detail.html?id=1590560302″>https://lanternbooks.com/detail.html?id=1590560302</a>. Not showing up on Amazon (and his davidakidd.org website seems to be gone), but well worth tracking down.

Go Green, Live Rich: 50 Simple Ways to Save the Earth (and Get Rich Trying) by David Bach with Hillary Rosner

Okay so there are a gazillion books, e-books, and pamphlets with tips on going Green, including my own Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life—With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle—so why buy this one?

A few things make this one stand out. First of all, it’s written by a retirement-planning guru: David Bach, author of such books as Start Late, Finish Rich and The Automatic Millionaire (with help from Hillary Rosner, who worked on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth). It’s very refreshing to have a celebrity personal finance author take on the topic of personal environmental responsibility.

Second, the book is crammed with hundreds of websites and resources (including Read the rest of this entry »

Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson (Hyperion, 2009)
Reviewed by Shel Horowitz

The influential author of The Long Tail has once again broken new ground. He argues persuasively that the price of anything that can be digitized, and the price of even many things that are based in physical space inexorably gravitates toward zero–and then, even though it might be counterintuitive, demonstrates a seemingly infinite number of ways to monetize your free offerings.
Read the rest of this entry »

Dealing with the Tough Stuff: Practical Wisdom for Running a Values-Driven Business, by Margot Fraser and Lisa Lorimer (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2009)

Every business faces challenge like revenue crunches, supplier issues, personnel problems, and of coure, stress. For socially conscious businesses, the challenges re multiplied by the need to address these problems in ways consistent with the company’s social and environmental commitment, even if that’s not the easiest path.

In this latest entry in B-K’s excellent Social Ventue Network series, Fraser and Lorimer, past CEOs of Birkenstock USA and Vermont Bread Company, resectively (with substantial help from Carol Berry of Putney Pasta, Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Yogurt, Joe O’Connell of Creative Machines, Marie Wilson of the Ms. Foundation and White House Project, and Tom Raffio of Northeast Delta Dental) show solutions that worked, and solutions that failed.

The book will be very useful to companies with at least a few employees and revenues in the seven to nine figures, and particularly those facing rapid changes in their market or corporate identity (from products going out of fashion to challenges in getting financing without onerous strings attached, to dealing with rapid growth). One section that will apply just as clearly to much smaller and perhaps larger companies is the last chapter, on how to exit from the business while still maintaining not only the viability of the company but also its core values. Even social entrepreneurship pioneer Ben & Jerry’s got burned on that one.

Learning from Ben & Jerry’s mistakes, Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg describes how he held out for the right buyer, one who would take the ownership burden while leaving him with decision-making power. It was a long search, but he did find his buyer. Birkenstock’s Fraser was not as fortunate; transfer of ownership to her employees was a disaster, and the company had to be regrouped and sold off to its German parent, even as the German company was gong through management transition of its own.

Some advice comes though consistently in chapter after chapter:

• Understand the numbers and what they mean
• Use a board of outside advisors (including ten great tips on how to set up and work with your board)
• Heart, head, and gut all play important roles—but you also need a reality check
• Don’t undersell yourself, don’t overcommit yourself, and yet don’t be afraid to take on big challenges
• Avoid getting trapped by your own “socially responsible mindset arrogance” (as Lorimer puts it)—but don’t let the nay-sayers stop you from bringing those values into every aspect of your business; as Fraser says, you don’t have to give your vision away to make quotas
• Hire people who know more than you—but don’t let them push you into decisions you’ll regret

While the book spends a fair bit of time on the grim realities, it also offers hope that companies who maintain their high standards of ethics and social/environmental responsibilities are often well-placed to survive the challenges of the corporate world and the marketplace, and come out stronger as a result.

Another Recommended Book: Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith

Of the dozen or so books I’ve read on Internet-based communities (and their application for marketing), Trust Agents stands head-and-shoulders above the rest. Normally when I review a book, I take a page of notes, maybe two. In the smallest handwriting I can still read, I had more than half a page by the time I got to the end of Chapter 1! By the time I was done, I had four full pages.

A generation younger than me and a generation older than those who grew up with computers from the womb on, Brogan and Smith bring insights from Read the rest of this entry »

Another Recommended Book: Appreciation Marketing: How to Achieve Greatness Through Gratitude, By Tommy Wyatt and Curtis Lewsey (BFG Group Publishing, Westport, CT)

As Wyatt and Lewsey point out, your customer can leave you for ever in just two clicks: the first to Google or another search tool, and from there to a competitor. This is one among many reasons why I’m a big believer in marketing by building real relationships (something I spend quite a bit of time on in my own award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First).

And one of the best ways to build relationships is to say thank you. A lot. To say thank you without any obvious self-interest motive on your part, such as enclosing your business card and asking for a referral along with the thank-you. It shows up your thanks as insincere. In Wyatt and Lewsey’s vivid metaphor, it’s “chocolate frosted dog crap.”

The authors spend a fair amount of time describing that kind of person, and several others you want to avoid turning into. Fortunately, they also provide plenty of examples of sincere thanks expressed well. Start your thanking program by appreciating the blessings in your own life, and with that grounding, thank others every chance you get. This is their strategy to achieve “TOMATO: Top of Mind Awareness…Through Others.” Once you have that, your marketing will almost take care of itself.