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Happy New Year! It’s an exciting time to be a green marketer. I hope you had a wonderful holiday.

Let’s Harness the Enormous Resources in Our Waste

In December, I wrote a blog post about harvesting trash heaps, and another one arguing that, number 1, the easiest way to true energy independence is to simply use less, and number 2, that using less is actually pretty easy.

I decided that these two posts were really different slices of the same circle: the idea that we have the resources we need, but we don’t tend to look for them in the right places. As the powers-that-be look at disastrous technologies such as fracking, nuclear power, and polluting/greenhouse gas-emitting coal, we, the people who will be affected by these bad decisions, need to stand up and be counted. Thus, my newsletter this month is modified from those two earlier pieces.

Achieving Sustainability Means Changing Our Thinking About Machines—And Landfills

Can we think about landfills as a solution to resource scarcity, instead of as a trash problem?

This article on GreenBiz by Mikhail Davis of InterfaceFLOR (pioneer in sustainable flooring under the late Ray Anderson) could change a lot of people’s thinking about how to design industrial processes and industrial machinery for sustainability.

Davis argues compellingly that a lot of our difficulties with reducing waste, reducing raw materials, and reducing carbon impact stem from the way we’ve historically designed our machinery. Too often, we’ve assumed (falsely) that raw materials will be not only abundant, but very pure. These 19th and 20th-century machines need a constant stream of very pure raw materials, and that is unsustainable. In fact, Davis cites a contract between a town and a trash-to-energy incinerator that inflicts monetary penalties on the town if it fails to supply enough trash. Can you say “goodbye, recycling!”?

He proposes that as a society, we change our thinking about this: that instead of designing machines that require more and more pure, virgin raw materials, we design to use mixed ingredients (such as those we might find in landfills or plastics recycling stations), even if the mix changes in composition and quantity. This works on several levels:

• To a large degree, we’ve already extracted the easy stuff. Mining and drilling will continue to produce lower-grade, lesser concentrations that need more work and energy, increase carbon footprint, and produce more waste in order to get usable raw materials—getting more and more expensive in both dollar and environmental measurements. Look at the horrible process of extracting oil from tar sands, if you want an example.
• Designing machines that can run on waste streams turns landfills into abundant sources of raw materials. When we start mining landfills, we have lots to feed the machine—as long as the machine can run on a mixed and inconsistent stream of materials. If we can mix together several kinds of plastics even as the specific mix constantly shifts, our landfills become resources, right along with our recycle bins. Our trash problem goes down; the environmental consequences of mining are also much-reduced.
• A logical corollary: instead of designing a machine to make one output from one consistent input, we can design machines that create multiple kinds of materials depending on what sources are being harvested at the moment.

In short, the machines of the next industrial revolution must be, above all, flexible: flexible enough to function with multiple inputs and flexible enough to generate multiple outputs. On the extraction side, our abundant “landfill ore” (or diverted post-consumer products) provides valuable, but mixed materials and cannot be mined efficiently with the old single-input, single-output mining technologies. The most modern recycling factories, like those of MBA Polymers and the best e-waste processors, take in a wide range of mixed waste materials and then produce a diverse range of usable raw materials as output.

InterfaceFLOR is now able to use 97 percent of the messy mix of materials in old vinyl carpet tiles to make new flooring tiles, and the remaining three percent goes into other products. I think that’s pretty cool

And this kind of holistic thinking is how we, as a society, change our demons into delights.

“Solar Isn’t Practical”? HAH!

Recently, I got into a heated discussion with a very conservative neighbor about the potential for clean energy in this country. He doesn’t think it’s practical to power the whole country through solar, wind, small hydro, etc.

I do—but only if we first reduce our energy loads, and I argued that we can easily cut energy use in half or more with today’s technology.

So I appreciated the timing of these two articles on Triple Pundit that crossed my desk the next day.

First, deep conservation can save us 50 percent on existing buildings, 90% if incorporated into the design of new buildings. I know of a solar house built in 1983, long before solar and conservation technology evolved to today’s sophistication, that was pretty darn close to net-zero energy. I also know that several very civilized European countries including England and Denmark use less than half the per-capita energy as the United States. If we’d mandated this in the early 1980s, we wouldn’t be facing the climate crisis we have today. And second, the price of solar continues to fall.

Once we cut our energy use in half (and really, we can do much more than that)—the remaining load really can be satisfied by the clean, renewable technologies. Consider just two among dozens of facts I could list:

1. According to the San Antonio, Texas chapter of the Sierra Club, every 40 minutes, enough solar energy falls on the earth to power the entire world for a year. And that’s without even factoring in wind, hydro, geothermal, magnetic, tidal, and all the rest.

2. Electric cars can actually supply power to the grid—this is already technologically possible.

I live in a house built in 1743, which we solarized. As far as I know, it’s the oldest solar house in the United States. It has both solar hot water and a small PV system—and we hope to tie in to the cow poop-powered methane generator that our farmer neighbors are building for their farm that was established in 1806. My neighbors across the street from the farm put geothermal in their 1747 home and use it for heating, cooling, and hot water.
 

My solarized 1743 Saltbox farmhouse. The three panels at the top are for hot water; the four at the bottom produce 1KW of electricity.

We do this, and we don’t live in Arizona or Hawaii or Louisiana; we live in Massachusetts, a much cloudier and colder place than many other parts of the US, and the world. Similarly, cloudy, cold Germany is a world leader in solar. If we can do it—so can you.

But I will be attending Wendy Lipton-Dibner’s Move People to Action! A four-day training for speakers who want to spread their message and monetize their work, January 24-27, in Stamford, CT. More info: Wendy AT movepeopletoaction.com

And I plan to exhibit at the 4th annual Amherst (MA) Sustainability Festival, Saturday, April 27, 2013, on the Amherst Common.

Of course, I expect to be at Book Expo America, June 4-6, 2013, NYC. I’ve gone every year since 1997.

Seeing Through Maps: Many Ways to See the World, Denis Wood, Ward L. Kaiser, and Bob Abramms (ODT, Inc., 2006)

When you represent a sphere (such as the Earth) in just two dimensions, something has to give. If you draw the shapes accurately using the very common Mercator projection, the sizes are deeply distorted. If you get the continents’ relative sizes right, as in the Peters or Hobo-Dyer projections, the shapes are all messed up. Buckminster Fuller, who I think of as a Da Vinci for the 20th century, managed to keep both sizes and shapes accurate, but threw geography out the window; in his beautiful and very unusual projection, Australia and Antarctica are on opposite ends of a series of polygons centered on the North Pole, and most of the world’s land masses form a long necklace: Africa, Europe, Asia, North America, South America.

Also, in a sphere, there’s no real up or down in directions—only in topography. Just because most maps we’re familiar with have north at the top, or have our own continent at the center, does not mean these are the only world views we can structure.

So what does this have to do with green marketing? Just this: when we look at the world differently, different thoughts have an easier time entering our brains. The familiar Mercator projection was very useful for sailors seeking the shortest passage across the Atlantic in the 16th century—but a Mercator map with Europe or North America at the center and north at the top also conveys a psychological message that can foster the kind of colonialism and imperialism so rampant in the 18th and 19th centuries: when the whole huge continent of Africa seems to be smaller than Greenland, is it easier to justify racism and exploitation? When Asia is split down the middle on North America-focused maps, doesn’t it lose political significance? How does your perspective shift when you look at a south-on-top map with Africa at the center? What can you learn by studying Charles Menard’s map of Napoleon’s invasion of Russian, correlating troop losses and temperatures, and only incidentally including a few geographic references? https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/posters. That web link is to the original French; in the book, it’s been translated. In short, once we can create a visual representation of something, that view of the world becomes more possible.

In fact, the book actually includes a graphic from my most successful green marketing campaign: a fight to save our local mountain range when it was threatened by a large housing development. We prepared a picture of the range as it stands today, and a projection of what it would look like with the roads and houses blighting the landscape, reprinted on page 100.

Our view of the world can change quite a bit if we look at a map with an unusual orientation. One of the maps (page 77) turns a portion of the sphere on an angle, with northwest at the top, to compactly show a pattern of slave trading routes between Africa and the Americas in centuries past—a view that would have been much more difficult to convey along a more conventional axis. Another south-facing map (page 47) shows a sweeping view from Hudson Bay to Mexico, with an emphasis on southern Canada while Mexico fades into a small strip of land between oceans. What kind of perspective do you get when Ontario is the center of your rectangular world? Or when Ontario’s largest city, Toronto, is at the center of a round map showing Hong Kong, Delhi, Nairobi, and Buenos Aires as tantalizingly close (p. 28)? Or when looking at a 2000-year-old city map of Rome (p. 44), pointing southeast? How do we absorb information differently when maps are transformed into modern infographics, allowing us to visualize—among many examples—how American political parties fall along urban/rural lines (p. 86) or how different parts of the world affect global climate change (p. 83).

One point the authors make over and over: there is not a “right” or “wrong” way to view the world, or any subset of it. Maps should be judged as to whether or not they achieve their purpose, and the purposes of different maps are different.

This book, with dozens of cool examples and well-written narrative, should open your mind to all sorts of creative brainstorms. I found it a really good book to keep in my bathroom, looking over just a couple of pages at a time, so that my brain could absorb these new ways of looking at a problem. I think I got a lot more out of it, savoring a bit at a time over several months. The good index helps, too, because it’s easy to find information again later.

Given its not-so-recent copyright date and badly designed front cover, you probably won’t find it at your local bookstore. But it’s easy enough to order directly from the publisher, at https://odtmaps.com/

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Last month, I discussed using surveys to better understand your customers and prospects—and asked you to fill out a brief 8-question survey regarding what you like and don’t like about this newsletter. After all, I’ve been publishing at least one monthly newsletter (up to four) all the way back to 1997, and I need to check in every now and then to make sure it’s still relevant. I confess, I know a whole lot about marketing copywriting and marketing strategy, but have no particular training in market research. So I’m flying by the seat of my pants to begin with, in both designing the survey and evaluating the results.

So take my results with a grain of salt.

Nevertheless, here’s some of the data, and the conclusions I take away.

First of all, I either did not create enough incentive to read the November newsletter in the first place, or to do the survey, or both. I only got a 9.44 open rate on the original newsletter with the subject line, “Are You Asking the Right Questions?” When that original newsletter had produced only 11 responses, I sent out another one, with a subject line tied directly to the benefit you could get: “Reader Survey—Get a Chance for a 15-Minute Consult with Shel”, which got a 9.16 percent open rate (and was mailed later in the month, when you typically don’t hear from me).

I have no way of knowing how many of the same people and how many unique subscribers opened each version—but I do know that the second one, even with a slightly lower open rate, generated more responses to the survey.

An open rate approaching 10 percent is actually not bad as such things go these days; we are all buried under e-mail and the days of 40% open are long gone. However, my newsletters in September and July, with “sexier” subject lines, got much better open rates: 13.81 percent opened “Since When Are Libraries Known for Brilliant Marketing?” (July) and 12.16 percent opened “The Marketing Impact of Michelle Obama’s Convention Speech (September). So one lesson for me is to be sure I have subject lines that hook my readers. Thus, instead of calling this issue “Making Sense of the Results?” I went with an ambiguous yet accurate title that I hope will generate curiosity—and a higher open rate.

If there was zero overlap between those who opened the original and the reminder, about three percent of the people who saw one of those messages took five minutes to do the survey. However, I am guessing there was substantial overlap. I know I have a core group of fans, and a portion would have opened both. If 2/3 of the people opening the second one had seen it before, my success rate was actually below two percent of the unique readers—and 0.5 percent of the total subscriber base. I think I should be able to do better than that. So either my incentives were not good enough to get people over to the survey, or the chance to influence the content of this newsletter did not resonate, or the design of the survey discouraged participation, or…who knows? So another lesson is the reminder that market research is far from an exact science (I’d say even for those who have been trained in it. Judging by seeing many badly designed surveys and strange results reports over the years).

So the survey may have failed on a quantitative level, with too few participants to be meaningful. However, on a qualitative level, the results were very telling. I clearly pulled deeply from that loyal fan base:

• About 40 percent have been reading my newsletter between four and fifteen years
• An astonishing 66 percent prefer the long-form articles and book reviews over the shorter option
• 54 percent have passed my newsletter around to others
• 31 percent have changed your own marketing based on what you’ve read in my newsletter
• Smaller but substantial percentages have bought books/information products I’ve either written or recommended (again, I don’t know if there’s overlap)

So, for now, I will honor those who put so much trust in me and continue to publish the newsletter—even though the ratio of time I put in versus monetization is not satisfactory, and even though most of you aren’t even opening my mail. There are, after all, some definite benefits to me that go beyond revenue—ranging from the ability to do joint ventures because I have a subscriber base to keeping current in my field reading at least one business book each month, in order to review it for you. Still, I’d love to find the secret of getting you, my subscribers, to hire me for speaking, consulting and/or copywriting, or at least to buy my books (which have far more information than the newsletters, of course).

Congratulations to the Winners:

The three 15-minute consultations go to Peter Lukacsi of Hungary, zoldmarketing.hu, MJ Ray of the UK, software.coop, and Eckhart Beatty of the US (https://www.indowwindows.com/).

The two ebooks go to Gautam Chaudhury of India and Robert Stosser of Germany.

Kind of cool to have five countries and three continents represented, don’t you think?

Happy with Your Current Webhost?

In the summer, I switched to a new hosting service after several of my sites had gone haywire and the previous host couldn’t fix the problem. And I have to tell you—I have been thoroughly delighted. Hostgator not only has the most responsive and well-trained tech support of pretty much any company I’ve ever dealt with, and nice features such as the ability to check all my numerous domain-based email addresses from a single page—but it also has prices that compare favorably with any of the several hosting companies I’ve used (starting at $3.96 a month)…45-day money-back guarantee…tools and templates to create a site…and on and on it goes.

https://shelhorowitz.com/go/HostGator/ (affiliate link).

Enjoy your winter holidays and we’ll see you in January. And remember—I offer commissions if you locate me a full-fee speaking gig or a new consulting/copywriting client.

Global Sense by Judah Freed (Hoku House, 2012)

Noting the turning of both the 5000-year Mayan calendar and the 365-day modern calendar used in much of the world, I’m going to take a three-month break from the nitty-gritty in-the-trenches marketing and ethics books I usually review in this space.

We start, this month, with a very personal book on social transformation, combining big-picture thinking around a prescription to save the world with the author’s own deeply personal journey. Next month, a fascinating look at how visual maps of the world influence our thinking, and then in February, community organizer and former White House staffer Van Jones’ book on green activism in urban low-income communities. I’m a huge fan of Jones, have heard him speak several times, and think he’s one of the best marketing strategists in the green world. So I’m very much looking forward to reading his book.

Meanwhile, let’s get started with Judah Freed’s Global Sense.

In only 256 pages, Freed has managed something quite remarkable: a sweeping, ambitious, and holistic approach to replacing what’s wrong with the world with what’s right. Most authors would have demanded 800 or 1000 pages to attempt even a quarter of what Freed sets out to do. Despite the large scope and the small canvas, Freed does surprisingly well at tacking these very big questions. I think the reason he succeeds is because he frames each of these big-picture issues in the context of his life, his personal story. Each chapter begins with a personal narrative, and then expands out to examine the larger world.

Freed has had a very wide range of experiences: successful entrepreneur, failed entrepreneur, spiritual seeker, respected journalist, teacher, abuse survivor, self-healer, scholar of spiritual enlightenment and social change, event planner, community organizer, cult follower, and homeless person (among many others). Paying deliberate homage to 18th-century pamphleteer Thomas Paine (Common Sense, Rights of Man, Age of Reason, etc.), he’s been able to channel this breadth into a great deal of insight into human relationships, power structures, personal growth, and social change. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s gotten such a diverse range of endorsements: Rabbi Michael Lerner, Pete Seeger, Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva, and even Joanne Greenberg (author of I Never Promised You a Rose Garden). Democracy writer and radio host Thom Hartmann is also on the list—which makes a lot of sense given Hartmann’s own status as a modern-day Paine.

I’ve read hundreds of books that cover some aspect of what Global Sense covers; I can’t remember another one that covers all the aspects Freed touches on. Charles Hayes’ Beyond the American Dream looks similarly at materialism and the need for liberal thought. E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia look at the green/local economy. Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer’s The Success Principles combine the spiritual underpinning with business and life success tools. Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone and others make the feminist case. Gene Sharp, George Lakey, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. make the case for nonviolent social change, and John Stuart Mill and other Libertarian thinkers showed us that self-rule is better than heavy-handed government. But this is the first book I can remember that synthesizes so many worlds into a coherent whole.

Some of the many insights I took away:

• Society develops from our wants and needs–but government develops from our failures; we should strive toward “enlightened self-rule,” both as individuals and as a culture
• Darwin’s “fittest” survived not because they dominated, but because they were the best at adapting to change
• Adam Smith, 18th-century author of The Wealth of Nations and creator of the “invisible hand” theory often used to justify capitalism, opposed monopoly capitalism and favored government regulation
• As Ben Franklin pointed out more than 200 years ago, it is not wise to sacrifice liberty for security—but this persists because each successive generation believes itself incapable of self-rule
• We give governments and institutions permission to govern us, and we can withdraw that permission at any time (as we’ve seen in the past year in both the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement)
• Quiet social change too often fails; Gandhi and King were not quiet—yet, in order to get from the current mess to a better place, positive vision and personal transformation are key ingredients, even more than the critique of what needs to change: “our redemption redeems the world” (p. 87)
• Justice is satisfying when it focuses on restitution rather than revenge
• Finding solutions means dwelling on—and expanding—the possible, not putting up barriers of supposed impossibility (I have experienced this in my own social change work, and it’s very powerful)—and sometimes there are multiple right answers
• With every purchase, we vote for the kind of world we want—so let’s “vote” wisely
• When building movements or personal relationships, look first at the easy points of agreement, then build out
• We can’t control others—but we CAN control our emotional responses to their behavior
• When we create high expectations, people/organizations/governments are more likely to live up to them

Chapter 19 is the best mini-crash course on organizing I’ve seen in a long time; that could be spun out into an an entire book.

Be warned: this book is a lot more “wu-wu” than the books I typically review here. There’s a strong spiritual component, and a lot on listening to your inner voice/the divine through many techniques, some of which may be unfamiliar to you. If this is new territory, I’d say it’s worth the struggle–but you may want to go and read a few of the numerous books he recommends, and then revisit Global Sense once you have that broader perspective. There’s some attention to cutting edge psychology, neuroscience and particle physics (I did say it was a holistic book). And there’s a heavy dose of political correctness, including a tendency to see most of the world’s problems as symptoms of “alpha male rule” and “authority addiction. Having lived in some superfeminist communities, I speak from experience when I say that alpha female rule can be just as oppressive. And despite his fondness for enlightened self-rule, Freed supports world government. I’m more of a bioregionalist; I think solutions will be found in networks of small communities cooperating with each other, and see many places where a central world government could go awry.

The book is also marred by a few structural flaws. It needed a good proofread, an index, and a centralized list of all the wonderful resources scattered throughout the book (fortunately, the last of those is posted on Freed’s website, GlobalSense.com).

Still, on the whole, it accomplishes quite a bit of its ambitious agenda, provides lots of food for thought AND action, and may be just the thing you need to get started in the second 5000-year epoch of the Mayan calendar/the Age of Aquarius/what Barbara Marx Hubbard calls the time of humanity’s rebirth.

Full disclosure: Freed is a friend and colleague.

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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).”

That can take the form of numbers  — so for a newsletter, how many/what percentage opened the newsletter, spent at least so many seconds,clicked a link, or forwarded it. This is objective, fact-based information: *quantitative feedback*  — and it’s quite useful.

But it’s not enough. You also need *qualitative feedback*: information that looks at how people interact with your products or services. Qualitative feedback looks at much more subjective factors: people’s likes and dislikes, their willingness to take action, and so forth.numbers

Right now, I have a need to examine this newsletter’s usefulness to you and to me, and to think about whether I want to switch to a different delivery mechanism or shut it down.

So I’ve put together a very simple eight-question survey, using Survey Monkey.com — where surveys up to ten questions cost nothing: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DNR9Z6W

And I decided to make the survey itself the subject of my column. Notice how some of the questions determine what you find useful — and others probe the benefit to me, such as whether you’ve ever bought a book or attended a call I told you about. Notice that the questions are a mix of multiple-choice with any number of answers, multiple choice with only one answer allowed, and open-ended.

And notice that most questions allow a comment. That’s because I want it to feel personal. In the question about article length, this lead article and the book review demonstrate the new, shorter articles I’m thinking of switching to. They’re about 1/3 the length of my typical articles.

Notice also that I’m using incentives: I will give away three 15-minute marketing or publishing consultations to people who give me the best reasons, and I’ll also give away two of my marketing e-books to random participants. (You’re eligible if you haven’t won something from me in the past year, and if at least 20 people complete the survey). What can you learn from this process and incorporate into your own marketing?

Book Expo America, June 4-6, 2013, NYC.

REMEMBER: If you get me a paid speaking gig, you earn a commission. 25% on my standard rate of $5000.

experience and insight on the transformational power of words. With one word each day of the year, you can change your world. So, every day of every year, you can tune into a word that will infuse your life with new creative energy. Goodies include what looks like a really fun one-month membership in her Take 5 and Cook Club, a copy of my own Painless Green e-book with 111 tips on saving water and energy, and more.

Mission, Inc.: The Practitioner’s Guide to Social Enterprise

“The next time someone asks whether your mission is more important than your margin, tell her…that you started your business because you had a yearning to change the way the world operates…that the most effective institution impacting the world today is business, and that you are going to use that power for good… Tell him that you run a social enterprise–where mission and margin are *not* an either-or.” (pp. 37-38)

An interesting collaboration between a former addict who came to socially responsible business for all the wrong reasons and an ordained minster who took the helm of a large, socially conscious bakery–with stories from many other social enterprises, too.

Social enterprises, say Lynch and Walls, see their role as adding value to the entire community, not just to stockholders. Their mission and business operations are completely intertwined. And they succeed when they incorporate both business and humanistic principles into all phases: creating a climate where blame is supplanted by responsibility to improve…where there’s no room for mediocrity but plenty of room for anyone, from line employee to CEO, to admit mistakes and extract the lessons from them…and where good planning creates sustained growth in both the social mission and the financial metrics.

The authors talk a lot about the need to scale up. In their view, successful social enterprises must become big players. Thus, Walls’ Greyston Bakery, founded to create jobs for disadvantaged workers and selling to customers like Ben & Jerry’s, has staked out a position as the only “nationally branded premium brownie” (p. 151). Here, I disagree. I think there’s plenty of room for small, local companies to have big impact; a great example would be organic fair-trade coffee roaster Dean’s Beans, in Orange, Massachusetts, which has pushed the entire coffee industry toward sustainability. And I am working, through my books, my syndicated Green And Profitable column, and my speaking, to have big impact while staying small.

However, beyond that small disagreement, I find much good advice for CEOs and managers looking to start, grow, and successfully run companies whose social mission is just as integral as their bottom line.

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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).”

Chris has a weekly newsletter and I recommend you sign up for it: humanbusinessworks.com/newsletter

Learning The Art of Digital Touch

By Chris Brogan

Puudutage, Shel, is “touch” in Estonian.

In my case, I’m talking about touch as the interaction between yourself and someone else. If I were talking about Disney’s Moment of Truth (“any time a guest comes in contact with any aspect of our service and receives an impression, good or bad”), it would be similar enough to what I mean when I say touch.

An example of a moment where there’s touch in your business might be in your billing process. I was recently invoiced by a small business owner. He put the due date of the invoice to be immediate. When I logged in seven hours after receiving the invoice, it was the next calendar day. This led my invoice to have a big fat red “LATE” stamped across it in digital ink.

What do you think I felt? I felt guilt, embarrassment, and I also felt a little moment of negativity. “Wow, I’m a pretty good and repeat customer, but if you’re going to ‘shame me’ with this mark of ‘late,’ then maybe I should go elsewhere.”

Think about that. This all came from a built-in part of invoicing software and the choice to make an invoice come up as an instantly-payable bill. That one touch might cost someone thousands of dollars in business (in this case, it won’t, but that’s not my point).

DIGITAL TOUCH OPPORTUNITIES ARE EVERYWHERE

I write this newsletter to you in 14 point font. Did you ever wonder why? It’s because the lion’s share of my readers are older than 35 and that means their eyes are naturally growing a bit more tired as time goes by. Those of you who are under 35 are also more likely to spend more time in front of a screen than the average person. Thus, it’s a choice of mine to make this “touch” in a font size that’s comfortable to read.

Another simple touch in this newsletter? I use the bare minimum of HTML formatting. This is about as plain text as you can get without actually forcing your email client to offer bare plain text. Why? Because I want the newsletter to feel as personal as I intend it to be. Do you see how that might impact how you and I interact?

Where are all those other elements of touch? Hint: go to your website right now and look at it like a customer might. Can you find what you want? Is it really easy? Are you helping me solve a problem and fulfill a need/want, or are you trying to sell? I bet you could list six or seven parts of your website experience that could be improved by thinking about your touch.

THIS IS NOT “USER EXPERIENCE.”

Words matter. What we’re trying to do here is facilitate a positive feeling on your behalf from afar. Everything is up for grabs in this quest to improve your touch. Avatars, for instance.

Look at my Twitter avatar. You see a human face. You can infer some things from that face. Now look at my friend Guy Kawasaki’s avatar. His face is hidden by the butterfly that is on the cover of his book, Enchantment. You can see his smiling eyes, but then he’s using his avatar to make the connection to his book. (Again, Guy is a friend. I’m not saying he’s doing it wrong.)

Neither is right or wrong. Both are better than a logo (though Guy’s is almost a logo). But both are a choice and a choice that impresses a touch. It’s a simple detail, and yet, it leaves you with an impression.

Feelings. We are here for feelings, not user experience. Touch is about feelings. And touch and feelings and this soft gooey stuff is part of human business, and part of how you can improve your efforts on the digital channel.

SELLING IS ABOUT TOUCH, TOO

My friend Anthony Iannarino talks about sales being a lot about providing a great deal of value before you extract any. That’s a touch-based choice, too. Anthony (and I) like to create lots and lots of useful free information and give it to you without any hooks. We both love to give away 90% and more of what we do for free, because we believe that these touches will lead towards many great outcomes, some of these sales.

When I sell Blog Topics: The Master Class, one tactic that I use is to be funny about the fact I’m selling it, or at least HOW I sell it. I also do it by subtly adding it into newsletters like I just did there. That’s a choice of a touch. It’s a very soft sell. If you’re interested in learning more, you need only click the link. If not? You just move on. Soft… soft selly sell sell.

Touch is something to practice, to think about, to obsess over. It’s part of service craftsmanship, which is part of the Human Business Way.

What’s that? Oh, something you’ll learn a lot more about in the coming weeks/months/years.

Have you had good or bad experiences with digital touch? What stands out? Where do you wish you could improve your own abilities with it? Do you even see the benefit, or have I lost you in the “wow, this is way too soft” zone?

People ask me all the time why I don’t have SHARING or WEBSITE buttons in this newsletter. Answer: I have one goal. If you like this a lot and find it useful, I want you to push the forward button and send it to a friend or two (or five) [Note from Shel: I feel differently; you are welcome to share my stuff on social networks]. My goal is hand-selected growth of this community, and I’ve chosen YOU to help me grow it. It’s too easy to hit share, like, +1. It requires you to really want to hit it. And if not? I’m glad YOU are here. 🙂

—Chris…

Thursday, October 18, noon ET/9 a.m. PT,

Thursday, October 18, 8:30 p.m. ET/5:30 p.m. PT: I interview Marilyn Jenett in a call just for you, because you read this newsletter. *I have seen a number of good things in my life since I started working with Marilyn.* Please see Friends/Colleagues Who Want to Help section for more about Marilyn and her work.

October 25-26, Association for Business Communication 77th Annual International Convention, Honolulu, Hawaii. I’m deeply honored to share the opening plenary panel with with someone from the United Nations PRME initiative, widely published CSR author Nick Tolhurst, and sustainability professor Jim Harris of Hawaii.

I’ve also been asked to do a full session the next day. My wife, Dina Friedman, and I will be attending the conference on Thursday and Friday. To register online.

And—just added—that Sunday I’ll be doing a green marketing workshop and book marketing brainstorm on Kauai (https://globalsense.com/hokuhouse/shel-horowitz-seminar-green-marketing/). $20 in advance or (space-permitting) $25 at the door. If you’re on-island, or know anyone who is, please contact Judah Freed, judahfreed@gmail.com

I’ve been doing a lot of interviews the past few years about green business profitability, green marketing, and going deeply green. Here are a couple I really like: https://www.business.com/blog/expert-advice-on-being-green-and-profitable/ (print)

https://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/shel-horowitz-green-and-profitable (audio—maybe the best interview I’ve ever done, although the sound quality is poor—turn it up!)

https://theselfemployed.com/podcasts/podcast-green-marketing/ (audio)

Planning Waaay Ahead

4th annual Amherst Sustainability Festival will be held on Saturday, April 27, 2013.

Book Expo America, June 4-6, 2013, NYC.

We’re going “out of the box” because we’re not starting on the hour. But that’s only the beginning

Can you really manifest unexpected income, unexpected business, and unexpected solutions to your most pressing problems-in just two weeks or less?

This is Marilyn’s promise. Thousands of people have applied her simple, fast and practical techniques to gently create a new dominant thought in the subconscious mind, create a “pipeline” to their universal source of supply, and manifest striking results. (I recognize the names of several of her success stories.)

Marilyn overcame her own “lack” consciousness to create her former business of 20 years that attracted the world’s largest corporate clients-and major media publicity-solely through applying the prosperity laws that she now teaches in her Feel Free to Prosper program.

Marilyn will take the mystery out of these esoteric laws and share:

• Why trying to create success will never get you there.
• Why your business, job, clients, or investments are not your source of income.
• The words that you are habitually using that prevent your success.
• The single most immediate thing you can do—right now—to increase your income.

I’ve just begun to apply Marilyn’s lessons, and I can point to four different shifts in my income mentality/status during that time—closing a very large project that had been dangling for months, an idea for a whole new market for my column, and letting go of one project and one mental boat-anchor that had been weighing me down.

Working with her is certainly a factor in opening myself up to more abundance. It’s no coincidence if you do the right things to move your goals forward, and working with Marilyn has certainly inspired me to do so.

Marilyn’s entrepreneurial memoir, written online, has attracted over 38,000 views, literary agents and publishing offers and her books will soon be published.

Another Wonderful Program from The Shift Network: Global Oneness Day on Wednesday, October 24th (and on recordings forever). A full day of free programs with renowned leaders such as: Jack Canfield, Ken Wilber, Paul Ray, Michael Beckwith, Neale Donald Walsch, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Ervin Laszlo, Lynne Twist, Don Miguel Ruiz, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, and many more. Yoko Ono and Desmond Tutu have also created special videos just for this program.

See this year’s site for a full list of speakers:  https://shiftnetwork.infusionsoft.com/go/godGP/sah/ Close to 20,000 people registered for last year’s event and this year will be far larger (over 50,000 registrations expected).

Shift Network’s goal is to make Global Oneness Day the EarthDay of Oneness! Currently only 2% of people in the world understand and live in alignment with the principle of Oneness. Just as EarthDay propelled the concept of Sustainability into the global consciousness we intend to share the concept of Oneness with tens of millions of people as this event continues to grow.

Registrants for Global Oneness Day will be able to participate gratis in as many of the live discussions as they like, as well as receive no-cost lifetime access to the full library of online recordings afterwards.

Sustainability Funder Looking for Companies to Fund

I’m passing on this notice from the William James Foundation (WJF)—and I don’t know any more than this:

The 10th Annual WJF Sustainable Business Plan Competition. For new or growing companies seeking high-level feedback on their ideas. Our competition averages 20 pages of feedback per plan to companies, and has more than $100,000 worth of services and cash prizes to divide among the top teams. We can work with both companies that still being planned and companies that have been around for a few years that are planning for investment and/or growth. Applicants must submit a two-page summary to competition@williamjamesfoundation.org by November 5th.

The WJF Green Grab Seed Stage Investment Events. For companies looking for seed-stage funding. A live event in the Washington, DC region where investors can make seed stage investments on spot. First event in November 12th: https://wjf.wufoo.com/forms/greengrab_entrepreneurs/. Learn more at: www.williamjamesfoundation.org/greengrabs

The 3 Power Values: How Commitment, Integrity, and Transparency Clear the Roadblocks to Performance,

So it’s a shock that Gebler begins with a different J&J case study: a quality engineer’s boss threatens his job if he doesn’t allow a defective shipment of aspirin to go through. Gebler cites several other quality issues at J&J, though none so blatant as this—and notes that publicity around these issues was a likely culprit in market share for cough and cold remedies plunging from 17 percent all the way down to 2.83 (p.4)

What happened? Gebler believes it was a change in corporate culture during the 2000s: away from the Customer First credo that successfully guided the company through the Tylenol incident and helped it to regain profitability very quickly, and toward the high-pressure, cost-conscious attitude so typical of  many corporations today, where doing the right thing—throwing out the bad batch of aspirin, in this case—is considered too expensive. Of course, the market share numbers show the foolishness of that approach. In a world where nothing stays secret very long, cost-cutting at the expense of quality is a path to disaster—and sometimes, a bunch of very expensive litigation or government-ordered penalties.

I’ve reviewed many books on business ethics in this column, but I don’t remember one that focuses so heavily on the impact of a corporate culture. It’s always mentioned, but in this book, it’s the core principle. Gebler focuses his argument on improving corporate ethics as well as productivity by focusing on the three values in the subtitle.

In his view, engaged employees who feel listened to and empowered—and who see at least some of their ideas and concerns implemented into the culture—are much more likely to be more productive, and much less likely to fall down the slippery slopes of corner-cutting or cheating.

The reverse is also true: when employees feel disempowered, unlistened to, and pressured to meet performance goals without regard to quality or ethics, companies become micromanaged fiefdoms mired in quicksand BECAUSE employees fall into dangerous patterns of individual and/or group “self-deception, rationalization of inappropriate behavior, and disengagement.” Individual creativity and motivation dry up if managers don’t nurture them by hearing and ACTING ON their employees contributions—and by creating a culture where profit and success are not seen as direct goals, but as results of a positive outlook that empowers and rewards employees to do the right thing.

But when employees CAN live their values and feel good about the work they do and the company they do it for, amazing things can happen. Often, that involves getting employees whose job descriptions put them at cross purposes out of their silos and building relationships in person—or at least taking the time to understand the other’s job, the pressures they face, and the tension between a salesperson’s promises to a customer and a quality manager or parts supplier’s need to ensure quality and legality.

A lot of this happens when employees feel the culture is fair. Arbitrary rewards and punishments create a fragmented and resentful culture straight out of Dilbert. But when employees feel the same rules apply to everyone, and when bosses are involved and not isolated, the company is seen as a great place to work, and people work hard to give their best: “Every employee must be able to answer the same question: Can I align my principles with the organization’s standards of behavior?” (p. 152)

The transparency issue is a bit different from commitment and integrity, in that it’s much more externally focused: in a world of massive social media connections and instant communication, there are no secrets. Sooner or later, the word gets out, and if you’re lying or cheating, you will face consequences.

These arguments will not come as a surprise if you’ve read either of my two books on ethics and green principles as success strategies, or if you’ve been following this book review column for a while—but phrasing it in terms of the impact of corporate culture is a bit of a departure.

Gebler’s case studies include a mix of companies that were very much in the public eye, like Johnson & Johnson and Boeing, both of which had to turn around big, public problems, and Timberland, whose built-in culture of ethics led to an immediate and public reexamination of its leather sourcing after Greenpeace questioned it—as well as some of his corporate clients facing ethics and motivation issues, with names disguised. The book is unnecessarily repetitive, but makes a lot of good points.

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In ju-jitsu (a/k/a jiu-jitsu), like many martial arts, you use the strength of your opponent, rather than your own strength, and deflect it back on him or her. You get to still be nonviolent and righteous, while your opponent is lying in a heap on the floor.

Similarly, in marketing ju-jitsu (a term that may have been coined by Max Lenderman in 2001), you can overcome an opponent with far greater resources who can afford to hire wildly talent advertising agencies and saturate the airwaves with the result.

In the business world, the classic examples are car rental giant Avis’s “we’re only #2 so we try harder” campaign, Volkswagen’s Small Wonder ads from the 1960s, and of course, the legendary Smash Big Brother ad that debuted the Apple Macintosh in 1984.

In the anti-business world, the day in 1967 Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies threw dollar bills on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange comes to mind, as do many of the Adbusters campaigns, such as Buy Nothing Day.

So what does this kind of guerrilla marketing have to do with libraries? Librarians are thought of as a quiet bunch who rarely make any kind of public stink (though this is actually not true—just ask progressive author and filmmaker Michael Moore, whose book Stupid White Men was saved by a national campaign by librarians).

Well, here’s a video (less than three minutes long) outlining a particularly intense use of marketing ju-jitsu: threatened by a Tea Party campaign to defund the library, supporters created a fake campaign in favor of book burning, even saying the event would include live music and refreshments generating massive backlash.

They then revealed their true agenda: to raise consciousness that “closing a library is like burning books.” This in turn resulted in a massive outpouring of library supporters on Election Day that easily defeated the defunding initiative. And both the book burning announcement and the later clarification got lots of social media buzz and the attention of the press nationally.

Go watch it now. I’ll wait.
Back? Good.

I’d love you to share the takeaways you got in the comments. Here are some of mine:

• Memes have a lot of power. Revulsion against book burning is a deep-seated response to centuries of oppression. Whether in 15th-century Spain, 18th-century America, Nazi-era Germany, or the late Ray Bradbury’s fictional dystopia Fahrenheit 451, book burning is seen as an attempt to suppress and control thought.
• Reductio ad absurdum arguments—taking a line of thinking past its logical conclusion into the realm of the ridiculous—still work.
• Even without funding, an organized populace can defeat injustice, especially when we make it a mom-and-apple-pie issue. (This was the approach we used when we saved our local mountain.)
• Please share yours in the comments.

Monday, August 6, 11:30 a.m. ET/8:30 a.m. PT and indefinite replay, Marsha Dean Walker interviews me on Minding Your Own Business radio https://www.blogtalkradio.com/lwl-radio.

Thursday, September 6, 1 pm ET/10 a.m. PT, Barbara Saunders interviews me on Solo Pro Radio https://www.iasecp.com/solo-pro-radio

October 24-27, Association for Business Communication 77th Annual International Convention, Honolulu, Hawaii. I’m deeply honored to share the opening plenary panel with Jonas Haertle, head of the United Nations PRME initiative, widely published CSR author Nick Tolhurst, and a sustainability official from the Hawaiian government official. My wife, Dina Friedman, and I will be attending the entire conference. To register online: https://abchawaii2012.wordpress.com/registrationto-register-online-to-register-by-mail-or-scan-form-to-send-as-email-attachment-2012-annual-convention-registration-form-word-2012-annual-convention-registration-form-pdf/

Earn a Commission: Get Me a Speech in Hawaii in October

If your lead gets me a speech at my standard $5000 rate, you’d earn $1250 in commission. Drop me a note: shel ATprincipledprofit.com, subject line Hawaii Speech Possibility. NOTE: You can also earn commissions for getting me speaking other times and places–but for Hawaii, you can offer a big savings in airfare, since I’ll already be there. Email me at the same address, subject line Have Shel Speak. If your subject line is something like “Hi,” I’ll probably dump it unopened because I will think it’s spam. Processing hundreds of emails per day, I have to be kind of ruthless.

Planning Waaay Ahead

4th annual Amherst Sustainability Festival will be held on Saturday, April 27, 2013.

Book Expo America, June 4-6, 2013, NYC.

Thursday, August 2, 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT

Click for details on call-in information 

Reminder: if you registered before July 15 (for the original June date), the computers ate it. Please take a moment to register again.

I had a good chat with Robert over the phone, and I think this no-charge call will be well-worth your while.

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

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

• How to set up Joint Ventures to make fast revenue-sometimes in just a few hours using your phone book 

• Secret method for mailing 10,000 sales letters per month…at no cost…not even postage 

• An amazing strategy for telling 200 million people about your business for FREE 

• How to dominate your local market as a JV Dealmaker 

• How to use publicity to get potential joint venture partners to call you 

• Sneaky way to get $5000 a month in free radio promotions 

• From zero to $1.5 MM using joint venture strategies

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

Up close and personal with my celebrated co-author, Jay Conrad Levinson, Father of Guerrilla Marketing

Jay is offering his famous intimate 21-hour intensives at his lovely Florida home, July 23rd-25th and again August 20-23rd.. Only 10 people will be allowed in. https://3bl.me/ysqdva . Jay describes it as “a three-day face-to-face training personally conducted by me in our home here on a lake just northeast of Orlando, Florida. It’s intense because it’s from noon till 7 pm three days in a row – 21 hours with lots of hands-on, devoted to making you a true guerrilla marketer.”

Marketing Without Advertising: Eight Ways to Build a Business Your Customers Will Love & Recommend, by Michael Phillips and Salli Raspberry (Nolo Press, 2008)

This book offers some very good out-of-the-box thinking related to two central concepts:

1. Every aspect of the way you operate your business is part of your marketing. I’ve been saying for years that your brand has a lot more to do with customers’ and prospects’ perceptions of dealing with your company than with your slogan, logo, colors, etc., and this book is very much rooted in that idea.

2. If you take steps to grow your business, first make sure you can handle the growth. If your sales outpace your ability to provide service, your growth plan will backfire badly, and your business will be deeply hurt—maybe even fatally wounded.

But before I go farther, I have to point out two deep and disturbing flaws.

First, the title is misleading, and I have a big problem with that. Really, the book should be titled “Marketing Without Intrusive Advertising.” The big difference is that the authors have irrationally chosen to exclude all listings from their definition. Thus, they don’t consider such purchases as Yellow Pages ads, paid directory listings, or Internet search engine keywords as advertising.

Sorry, but by my definition and in the eyes of most people, if you’re paying to be included in a book or website, you’re advertising. You’ve chosen a “pull” medium, where people who are actively looking for you discover and contact you, rather than the more common (and less effectual) “push” style, where you jam your message in front of people and hope they are annoyed enough to notice you and buy, but not so annoyed that they refuse to do business with you. I agree with the authors that push advertising is usually a poor strategy, but I emphatically disagree with the idea that paid pull listings are not advertising.

The promise in the title is that you will be able to bring in customers without buying ads. And while many of the recommended marketing approaches do meet that standard, plenty do not. The book breaks its own brand promise, in other words. In a book that’s all about building a consistently high-quality customer experience, and which uses words like “honesty” and “integrity” dozens of times, this is unforgivable.

And second, despite its 2008 copyright (still the most recent version on Amazon), the book really seems stuck around 1998. I don’t know what kind of update they did for this 6th edition, but they missed an awful lot. Whether telling people a fax machine is essential…feeling a need to define and explain what a website is…ignoring the potential to connect with known resources on LinkedIn and similar sites…or listing website creation tools such as Microsoft Expression and Adobe Contribute, but not WordPress (except as a blogging vehicle), Joomla, or Drupal, the information frequently feels old and stale.

Yet there’s much of value here, if you can get past those two inexcusables. And therefore, I do recommend this book. Here’s why:

It starts with great examples of major companies that have succeeded without traditional advertising, noting, for instance, that Costco (a company I’ve respected for many years) outperformed Walmart (a company with which I have many issues) even though it spends nothing on advertising while Walmart advertises hugely, and that the well-respected Anchor brewery (one of the first to return to the idea of craft beer) does quite well without advertising.

Later in the book, you’ll find numerous creative examples of ways to get in front of prospects and make a positive impression, as well as ways to increase customer/prospect awareness and desire both within your own business and through complementary firms—like the department store where purchases result in a same-day 20% off coupon good at a specified different department, or the Japanese restaurant that gives out cards with 5-yen coins redeemable for free saki on a future visit. Since it’s always far cheaper to bring back an existing customer than to recruit a new one from scratch, these types of marketing can be quite effective.

To get those new customers—recognize that people come to you not only from different fields, but at different levels of expertise; websites are great tools to steer people to the content they need at their own level, and this can be automated easily—and the same triage that annoys the heck out of people in a voicemail tree actually creates a positive user experience on the web.

On the web, you’re competing in a global marketplace, and your points of differentiation (Unique Selling Propositions) must be clear enough to establish your value compared to an underpriced competitor on the other side of the world.

And another important piece is ensuring customer happiness, including follow-up even when it’s not expected. Chapter after chapter reinforces the idea that every point of interaction is a potential windfall or nightmare of publicity, depending on how the customer feels about it. Whether it’s store/shop appearance, quality of service, ease of interaction (especially when there’s a complaint), or a hundred other factors, these are all areas that a business owner can strongly influence. You may not be able to control the interaction entirely, but you can assure, for instance, that:

• If customers come to your location, every employee can give directions over the phone
• People feel they get more value in their purchase than they paid for
• Your interactions focus on creating educated consumers who understand why doing business with you serves their needs (which may lead to such marketing activities as teaching continuing education classes)
• You are right there after the purchase, making sure everything is OK, and earning the chance to fix anything that isn’t (this turns disgruntled customers into loyal evangelists for you)

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Irish crafter at work

During my trip last month to Ireland and Northern Ireland, I was pleasantly shocked to see evidence that this was a culture that cared about working conditions for both humans and animals.

Yes, of course, I could find fairly traded products in the health food stores and even in supermarkets. But it was astounding to me that every roadside convenience store had them as well. Little places in the middle of nowhere, just bathroom stops on the motorways, uniformly offered a pretty good selection of fair-trade chocolate and coffee, among other products. Such items are much harder to find in those types of stores in the United States, where I live.

Furthermore, the Insomnia coffee chain, which seems to be Ireland’s largest, has also gone fair-trade over there. When I encountered that brand in Canada about seven months ago, I saw no fair-trade markings.

Supermarket shopping was actually fun. I got a fantastic house-brand fair-trade chocolate bar at Sainsbury’s, which is comparable to Giant Food or A&P. If I remember right, the cocoa content was around 82 percent, and the quality was terrific. I also noticed that Hellman’s mayonnaise is made with free-range eggs over there; if that’s true in the US, it hasn’t said so on the label, last time I checked.

As a percentage, the number of “conscious” products in these stores is still quite small. But if roadside convenience stores are carrying fair-trade products, that means enough people who shop in those stores have requested those products that the store chains have decided to carry them. And I find that remarkable, especially considering that as a culture (and particularly outside of Cork, Galway, and Dublin, which all seem to have higher food awareness), Ireland is not particularly focused on eating well. It’s very meat-centric, vegetables are routinely overcooked, and the food generally is bland and heavy. Dairy is very good, however.

Those three cities seem to have a well-established local/organic culture. We found vegetarian restaurants in Dublin and Cork, a terrific Saturday farmers market including not only organic produce but also artisan foods and crafts in Galway, just outside an amazing artisan cheese shop. A health food store in Dublin offered an amazing selection of raw chocolates, and one raw chocolatier had a booth at the Galway market.

Asian noodle bar, Drogheda

One other trend that surprised me: the infiltration of ethnic restaurants (particularly South Asian and Far Asian) into just about every corner of the island. So if you’d rather not have beef and cabbage stew with potatoes, you’ll find options like Afghani kebab shops, Chinese or Korean restaurants, or Pakistani takeaways in even relatively small towns.

This is a slice of globalization that actually leads toward greater sustainability—not only because it’s easier to find healthy food choices, but also because I believe monocultures are not sustainable, whether you’re talking about growing a single crop or a single human culture. Cultural diversity allows for cross-pollinating the best practices that other societies have come up with, recognizing that some may not be appropriate for a different climate. Here are a few other random observations from my trip:

• Wind power plays a significant role. It’s common to see large wind turbines (as in much of the rest of Europe), though for the most part in small clusters of one to five, rather than in the vast wind farms of say, Spain—and also to see older, smaller  private installations on individual farms, of the sort that were common on US farms in the late 1970s.
• Solar’s role is minimal. I have seen only a handful of rooftop solar hot water installations, and most of the  photovoltaic have been on self-powered electronic highway signs. Of course, it’s not the sunniest place in the world; an Italian immigrant told us, “in Ireland, they call this a beautiful day. In Italy, we would call it a disaster.”  But there must be more than is obvious, because we passed quite a number of solar businesses, even in some pretty rural areas.
• Big cities have some limited public recycling in the major commercial and tourist areas. I imagine there are recycling programs for households, too.
• On the campus of the technical college we visited, environmental awareness was quite high. This school is also about to launch a degree program in sustainability and one in agriculture, yet they haven’t explored the obvious linkages between those two program offerings—in part because they’re slotted for different campus, 50 miles apart.

Since it’s part of Europe, I wasn’t surprised that attention to conservation is more prevalent. Toilets with low/high settings, tiny cars, and composting projects all seem fairly common. Yet, to my shock, the small conference center we stayed at in rural Donegal was still using energy-hogging incandescent light bulbs.

Thursday, August 2, 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT

Click for details on call-in information 

We had a glitch in our registration form, which means if you signed up for this call, we never received your registration. The form should be working now, with a confirmation sent to your inbox. If you did register already, please take 30 seconds and do it again. I apologize for that.

I had a good chat with Robert over the phone, and I think this no-charge call will be well-worth your while.

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

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

• How to set up Joint Ventures to make fast revenue-sometimes in just a few hours using your phone book 

• Secret method for mailing 10,000 sales letters per month…at no cost…not even postage 

• An amazing strategy for telling 200 million people about your business for FREE 

• How to dominate your local market as a JV Dealmaker 

• How to use publicity to get potential joint venture partners to call you 

• Sneaky way to get $5000 a month in free radio promotions 

• From zero to $1.5 MM using joint venture strategies

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

Thursday, July 12, 10:30 a.m. ET/7:30 a.m. PT and indefinite replay, Michelle Vandepas interviews me on Talking Purpose radio

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/talkingpurpose/2012/07/12/shel-horowitz-interview–ethics-green-and-frugal-business.

Monday, August 6, 11:30 a.m. ET/8:30 a.m. PT and indefinite replay, Marsha Dean Walker interviews me on Minding Your Own Business radio https://www.blogtalkradio.com/lwl-radio.

Thursday, September 6, 1 pm ET/10 a.m. PT, Barbara Saunders interviews me on Solo Pro Radio https://www.iasecp.com/solo-pro-radio

October 24-27, Association for Business Communication 77th Annual International Convention, Honolulu, Hawaii. I’m deeply honored to share the opening plenary panel with Jonas Haertle, head of the United Nations PRME initiative, widely published CSR author Nick Tolhurst, and a sustainability official from the Hawaiian government official. My wife, Dina Friedman, and I will be attending the entire conference. https://abchawaii2012.wordpress.com/

Earn a Commission: Get Me a Speech in Hawaii in October

If your lead gets me a speech at my standard $5000 rate, you’d earn $1250 in commission. Drop me a note: shel ATprincipledprofit.com, subject line Hawaii Speech Possibility. NOTE: You can also earn commissions for getting me speaking other times and places–but for Hawaii, you can offer a big savings in airfare, since I’ll already be there. Email me at the same address, subject line Have Shel Speak. If your subject line is something like “Hi,” I’ll probably dump it unopened because I will think it’s spam. Processing hundreds of emails per day, I have to be kind of ruthless.

Planning Waaay Ahead

4th annual Amherst Sustainability Festival will be held on Saturday, April 27, 2013.

Book Expo America, June 4-6, 2013, NYC.

The Underdog Edge: How Ordinary People Change the Minds of the Powerful…and Live to Tell About It

A Theory of Social Change to Make Sense of this Book
One of my long-held theories of social change is that it’s easier to influence the power structure, and accomplish change within it, if you’re seen as the rational and reasonable negotiating partner. And in order to be perceived as a good negotiating partner, there has to be someone more extreme, who can be dismissed as the lunatic fringe, but who actually makes space for your demands to seem like a compromise.

Examples:

• Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement were able to make more progress because Malcolm X and the Black Panthers existed (very publicly).
• George W. Bush was forced to endorse same-sex civil unions even though the idea was anathema to his Fundamentalist “base”—because the alternative was same-sex marriage (this example also shows how society can evolve very quickly sometimes—we’ve moved way past civil unions now).
• Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a radical restructuring of capitalism, was more palatable to the business/financial world because massive unrest made Communism (the destruction of capitalism) somewhat likely.
• My own outsider candidacy for my local City Council, many years ago, gave space for a more moderate progressive to win in a four-way race, and then go on to serve four terms as Mayor.

A Book for More Moderate Activists
Through this lens, I view Amy Showalter’s book, The Underdog Edge: How Ordinary People Change the Minds of the Powerful…and Live to Tell About It. Showalter targets those who want to be seen as the reasonable and rational alternative. Those who want to meet with powerful politicians and heads of corporations, and get them to change their actions.

And thus, her message about dialing down the passion makes sense. Big dogs try not to negotiate with (or concede points to) those they find threatening. But I believe that seeing the threat out there in the distance makes them more willing to come to the table with those who are more persistent than passionate, those who’ve done their homework, and those who can articulate a change program that leaves the top dog feeling he or she did the right thing.

Without that lens, the book would leave me confused, because I can point to hundreds of examples throughout history where loud, passionate, angry people made big, sweeping changes. But in many of those cases, it was a symbiosis between the loud and angry in public view and the quiet, warm and friendly, but very persistent negotiators in the background; each needed the other to succeed.

However, reasonable doesn’t mean passive. The more vivid you make your case, the more likely you are to succeed, Showalter says. And this is true whether your cause is liberal, conservative, or nonideological.

While charisma makes the struggle easier, Showalter says a much more essential quality is grit: determination, doggedness—not going away. Proximity, which she sees as the key element of vividness, is a big part of winning, because you’re much harder to ignore if you’re right there.

From “Underdog” to “Sled Dog”
But it’s not enough if you’re so ego-involved that you make it all about you. Showalter has examples that take the “dog” metaphor from underdog to sled dog. Success, she says, depends on the pack leader being collaborative and encouraging of the entire group.

Not surprisingly, those underdogs who succeed in persuading their big dogs have often built relationships with them years before they ever tried to sway them or gain a favor. Not that it’s impossible to do it cold, but it’s much, much easier if you have an existing relationship based in mutual respect.

And it is helped, as she points out, if you can win over sincere and influential converts who can be seen by your opponents as one of their own, and pave the way for a change of heart by documenting their own impetus to change.

Social change theory also says that if you start to experience heavy repression, it means the power structure is scared of you and thinks you need to be crushed. If you can hang on through the crackdown, you succeed…eventually. As Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Can Social Media Spark Social Change
Gandhi, like most successful revolutionaries throughout history, did not have access to Twitter and Facebook. Showalter is highly skeptical of the role of social media in fostering change, pointing out that even Egypt’s much-celebrated revolution was primarily offline—in the streets. She notes that only a quarter of Egypt’s population even has Internet access.

I believe social media—like TV during the civil rights and Vietnam struggles, and like printed publications of an earlier era—is crucial for bringing awareness of the struggle into the public eye.

The election protests in Iran are an obvious case, even though they failed to bring about regime change. Revolution is not always quick; Gandhi’s revolution in India took decades, Ireland’s, centuries.

However, as she points out, that awareness must be accompanied by action—and action is a lot more than signing a petition or posting a status update.

And where am I on the continuum? I’ve been all over it. I’ve risked arrest several times for what I believe in, and was actually arrested once. I’ve been the militant marcher shaking my fist into the TV camera—but I’ve also negotiated privately with a developer to create a compromise that allowed him to build after failing to gain a yes vote three times, once he agreed to protect a bunch of farmland and granted other concessions to the activist community. Both approaches are effective, in their time.