The Clean and Green Club

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel). Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.

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

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

Friends Who Want to Help

The Coming Business SHIFT That Could Change Everything

My friend Yanik Silver’s new book Evolved Enterprise impresses me a great deal. In fact, I blurbed an advance copy and got him to let me reprint one whole chapter in my own new book Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

I’m half-way through reading the final version, which I’ll review next month. Meanwhile, he sent this blurb:

It’s time for evolved entrepreneurs, visionary creators, and change makers to rewrite the rules of business for the 21st century.”

Imagine a whole new way for your venture to align purpose and profits, merging head and heart (and maybe even a bit of your inner child).

This is a counterintuitive blueprint to create a “baked-in” impact across your entire company by delivering an exceptional customer experience, creating a culture of fully engaged team alignment, and actually driving your bottom line!

Get Yanik Silver’s new book Evolved Enterprise here – www.EvolvedEnterprise.com

Hear and Meet Shel
I’ve been so busy getting the book done that I haven’t been booking talks lately. But that’s about to change! As the book launch draws closer, I expect to have several engagements. And remember—if you connect me with a paid speaking gig (OR a sponsor who will fund no-pay engagements), you can earn a very nice commission. Please write to me if you would like to help.

Preorder your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Release date is April 19, just in time for Earth Day, and you can now preorder from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies from me). Learn all about this powerful book at https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/

Another Recommended Book: Be Audacious

Be Audacious: Inspiring Your Legacy and Living a Life That Matters, by Michael W. Leach (Graphic Arts Books, 2015)

This may turn out to be a more personal review than my usual—because I’ve been pretty much living a lot of the principles Leach espouses, for decades, and because it’s been many years since I’ve reviewed an inspirational self-help book in this space. I think the last one, many years ago, was Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer’s amazing The Success Principles.

Yes, we arrived in the same place. However, our paths to this epiphany—our experiences and our perspectives—are very different. Leach is a former athlete who faced unimaginable physical problems, including a near-death illness. He had undiagnosed learning disabilities and was slow to discover the power of reading. He’s a Montana native raised in a rural area, and at publication time, he was 35. And he writes to a generation younger than his own; much of the book uses language that resonates with teens and 20-somethings. And he’s someone who—despite his decision to break away from them—seems to expect “haters” who will dump on him for taking the road less taken, and who call him irresponsible for bypassing the traditional 9-to-5. He seems to encounter them constantly.

By contrast, I’m a whole generation older, at 58. Though I’ve lived in the country for 17 years, and in a small college town for the previous 17, I was raised in apartment buildings in the Bronx (a crowded part of crowded New York City). I was an avid reader who got through a tough childhood with the help of books. And I never found a team sport I wanted to play. When forced to play baseball, I was picked last or almost last, and exiled to the outfield where my low abilities wouldn’t do much damage.

I gave up trying to conform to other people’s expectations in my thought patterns by the time I was 13. I do conform on some of the things that don’t really matter, like what I wear and how I keep my hair—but I think the biggest strength I bring is my ability to think differently, to see both the forest and the trees, to see opportunities for my clients that arise out of completely different situations or industries.

And I’ve found that the more I’m in integrity with my life and my message, the more people respect what I’ve done already, what I’m doing, and what I hope to do: use the profit power of business to turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance. (Is that audacious enough for you, Michael Leach?)

Where we have common ground is in our dedication to preserving and improving the environment, growing out of our mutual love of nature. In our desire to think bigger and act bigger so we can have real impact on the world (a lesson it took me much longer to figure out than it did Michael). And in our adoption of the principles he lays out. To name a few:

Embrace Multiple Passions/Use the “Slash” Model
Michael’s book (his second) could be categorized as self-help/inspiration/memoir. He uses his own experience as a teaching tool throughout the book, as well as case studies from the kids he’s coached, the people he’s encountered on his speaking tours, or those he guided through the wilderness.

Michael doesn’t fit neatly into little boxes. He uses lots of slashes to join together his different parts into a “renaissance soul” (a term coined by my late friend Margaret Lobenstine to describe a Ben Franklin/Da Vinci/Oprah/Buckminster Fuller/Thomas Jefferson type who explores numerous interests and passions. He describes his own set of slashes (ranger/naturalist, fishing and wildlife guide, freelance writer, basketball coach, and founder of a nonprofit) several different ways in the book, and even breaks down the nonprofit role into “executive director/programming coordinator/chief fund-raising coordinator” (p. 178).

My set might look like this: speaker/writer/consultant/practical visionary/social change activist/community organizer/marketer. Or I could apply a completely different set of labels (parent/vegetarian foodie/traveler/student of cultures—to name a small slice of the possibilities) that would be just as accurate. But for me, it all boils down to the core mission: I help people understand that doing the right thing is an opportunity, not a sacrifice—and I model the possibility of environmentally and socially conscious life and work.

For both of us, all of these slices of ourselves are based in passion—in “permapassion,” to use a term called by Leach’s friend Scottie B. Black. I love this word’s linguistic combination of permaculture and passion. And those passions have to go beyond pure hedonism. Yes, take joy in what you do. And at the same time, keep sight of your higher purpose; channel your energies toward the passions that can change the world.

“If Your Self-Talk Isn’t Helpful, Change It” (p. 103)
While it certainly isn’t the whole story, the idea popularized in the book/movie, The Secret, that our thoughts control our destinies has some truth. If you hit yourself over the head with all the reasons you can’t do a thing, you’re not likely to get it done. But if you focus on the reasons you can accomplish what you want to, those paths have a way of opening. And if you dream those big, audacious dreams, you have a responsibility not to sabotage yourself.

Work like an Onion (p. 177), and work yourself out from the your soul to the wider community.
I might flip this one inside-out. Yes, work from the inside out, but also from the outside in. Keep going deeper and deeper until you find the inner truth.

See Happiness not as Entitlement but as Opportunity (pp. 241-242)
You can start creating happiness in others—and in yourself—by doing little good deeds, as simple as smiling or holding a door open. As you learn to think and act bigger, more exciting changes will arise.

Leach focuses a lot on adversity creating resilience. And he’s experienced a lot of adversity. That’s one path; I’ve found plenty of other ways to build resilience. Again, there are many paths.

I could say much more about this book, but this already is longer than most of my reviews. Go get it and decide for yourself.

The Clean and Green Club, May 2015

13 May, 2015 No Comment

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

Special Invitation: Have Your Viral Marketing Tip Featured In This Newsletter

This is only one part of a series on making a message viral. I’d like to include your stories in the series—with full attribution to you, of course. Your viral message success can be for a product, a company, a service, an organization, or an idea.

Please write to me at shel AT GreenAndProfitable.com with the subject line, Viral Marketing Success Story, and *brief answers* to the following questions:

1. What were you attempting to market?
2. What steps did you take to make it viral?
3. What results did you experience?
4. How you’d like to be identified if I use your story (name, company, URL)

This Month’s Tip: Make It Viral, Part 1

Competing for attention in today’s overstimulated, infinitely segmented world is a huge challenge.

In the old days, if you wanted to become known in a market, you could target a handful of local TV and radio stations and print media. And within a few months, nearly everyone in that market would know who you were and what you offered. Even if you were paying for advertising, you could afford to be known.

But these days, every community offers literally thousands of channels. And those channels are no longer bound by geography. Someone in Singapore can easily watch KQED TV originating in San Francisco. A reader in Queens, New York might enjoy Al Jazeera TV in Qatar. Here in Massachusetts, I sometimes listen to an oldies radio station in Monaco I found on iTunes. So the number of possible ways to get news, information, and entertainment is now infinite—and that means any one channel only reaches a tiny fraction of the market nowadays.

That’s the bad news for marketers. But this triangle also has two good sides. Side 1: if you can motivate people in your own network to spread the message, it’s much easier to reach new audiences, and to do so cheaply (often at no cost).

And side 2: It’s so much easier now to find communities of common interest. If someone has an “oddball” interest, he or she no longer has to move to some giant city to find people with the same leaning; a few clicks of the mouse puts that person in touch with hundreds or thousands of others who share that pursuit, all over the world. And that means you can partner with some of the leading lights in that space, no matter where you—and they—are located.

My own experience taking things viral has been somewhat limited; I’ve had more failures than successes and certainly don’t claim to have the magic formula. But I have had successes. Here are my two favorites:

• The launch of my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, reached an estimated 5,000,000 people—based on an average of just five people each viewing 1,000,000 of the 1,070,000 pages Google found three weeks after the launch in an exact-match search for the book title (figuring that 70,000 were probably junk pages that nobody saw). Thus, the real number of people touched by this campaign might be quite a bit higher. Achieved through partnership outreach with incentives to launch partners, social media, and mainstream media coverage, this success was featured in a Marketing Sherpa case study: https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31895#

• Save the Mountain, the hyperlocal citizen movement I started in my own town (population 5250) and county (population 158,080) that gained thousands of petition signatures, distributed hundreds of lawn signs and bumper stickers, and could routinely bring out 400+ to public hearings. Although the “experts” said there was nothing we could do to stop the massive development project proposed for a mountain abutting a beloved state park, we were able to halt the project—in just 13 months. (I expected to win, but thought it would take five years.) For this one, we had more than 70 mainstream media appearances, but our real secret was direct public outreach: door knocking, tabling, direct mail, use of early-technology Internet communities (as they existed in 1999-2000), phone trees, letters to the editor, networking with existing environmental groups, outreach to town boards and officials, etc.

Hear & Meet Shel

I just pretaped an interview with Green Divas radio, which by now (or within a few days) should be available at https://thegreendivas.com/archived-shows/.

And I’d like to call your attention to two recent interviews. I think my full-length segment on The Bucket List Life might just be the best of the hundreds of interviews I’ve done: https://thebucketlistlife.com/p59 .

There’s also this very short interview on The Price of Business: https://youtu.be/6vBCNYGi5Mg

If you’re attending Book Expo America and want to get together, drop me a private note, subject Meet you at BEA? Please tell me a bit about you, your book, and your goals, right in that first email. (You can do it all in one short paragraph, trust me).

Connect with Shel on Social Media

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of eight books… international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.

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

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

Another Recommended Book—Explosion Green

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Clean and Green Club, April 2015

9 Apr, 2015 No Comment

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

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

Lots of Book News and Your Chance to Save
I’ve just taken the rights back for two of my award-winning books, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green and Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World. In celebration, I’m putting them on sale this month. For the rest of April, you can get either or both of them for just $15 each, plus shipping. Because I’ve taken the rights back, you will not find these sold as new on Amazon or other regular channels. But I have a good inventory of them. And if you want to buy five or more, I’ll cut you an even better deal.

Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green was published originally by Wiley. It was named a Groundbreaking Indie Book by Independent Publisher Magazine, republished in Italy and Turkey, and on the Amazon category bestseller lists at least 33 different months). 236 pages of great information on marketing green businesses, plus a bonus package worth hundreds of dollars. Originally priced at $21.95.
Learn more: guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/
Order: https://shelhorowitz.com/shels-green-products-and-services/
Use the coupon code: GMGG15

Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World was published by Chelsea Green, at $22.95. This large-format paperback has 306 pages of information to help any business or organization market more effectively and spend less money doing so. It includes a bonus two-chapter ebook covering social media and other new developments.
Learn more: guerrillamarketinggoesgreen.com/
Order: https://shelhorowitz.com/shels-green-products-and-services/
Use the coupon code: GM15

And Something Brand New: Green And Profitable is Now a Book
Green And Profitable, my 9th published book, is a compilation of the four years of my Green And Profitable monthly column, which was syndicated in the US, Australia, and Malaysia. It’s designed as an ebook, and I not only put together the whole anthology but also divided into four sections, each of which is available individually as a smaller, less expensive book:

• Book 1: Profitable Green Business Practices
• Book 2: Marketing Strategy/Messages for Green Businesses
• Book 3: Policy and Ethics Issues for Green Businesses
• Book 4: The New Realities of 21st Century Business
• Books 1-4: Compilation (your best value)

It’s available in as an e-book from Nook, iTunes, and Amazon/Kindle. If you want a paper copy, you can order one from CreateSpace.com. The electronic versions are just $2.99 for the sectional books and $9.99 for the whole thing ($5.99 and $12.99 for the paperbacks). And remember that if you’re buying the compilation, you don’t need the smaller books. This is the first time I’m playing in the sandbox of commercial ebook channels.

Order from Nook (Barnes & Noble): https://shelhorowitz.com/go/Gprof-Nook/
Order from Apple iTunes: https://shelhorowitz.com/go/GProf-iTunes/
Order from Amazon/CreateSpace: https://shelhorowitz.com/go/GProf-Amazon/

This Month’s Tip: Co-Solve It! Part 2: When One Solution Addresses Several Problems

How can we emulate nature in co-solving several problems at once? As promised last month, this time, we’ll look at actual examples of business offerings that confront more than one problem.

Many companies and organizations have come up with wonderful ideas, such as:

1. d.light, which markets solar-powered LED lanterns to replace kerosene lanterns in developing countries in Africa and Asia. The lanterns:
a. Eliminate fire risk (benefit: safety)
b. Eliminate toxic fumes (benefit: health)
c. Save money by eliminating the need to keep buying kerosene (benefit: economic)
d. Provide better quality of light (benefits: eye health, comfort, ease of accomplishing tasks
e. Allow children to work longer and more efficiently on school projects (benefits: education, long-term earning power through better grades)
f. Allow adults to do after-hours cottage industry (benefit: economic)

2. Urban Food Projects
a. Turn abandoned or empty spaces such as rooftops, vacant lots, traffic islands, median strips into attractive, living spaces (benefits: quality of life, and eventually attracting economic development)
b. Bring fresh, local food into poor communities (benefits: health, quality of life)
c. Create pollution-absorbing buffer zones, reducing asthma, emphysema, etc. (benefits: environment, health health)
d. Train local urban youth in food production, providing marketable skills, positive experience with collaborative problem solving, and a respect for the land (benefits: economic: job skills training, job creation; quality of life: reduction in vandalism, sense of purpose and of ability to change unhealthy/undesirable situations)
e. Decrease CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions (benefit: environment)

3. Kenguru, maker of a personal transportation vehicle for wheelchair users:
a. Replace heavy, bulky, complex wheelchair vans with light, compact personal vehicles (benefits: environmental: fewer raw materials; economic: longer road durability; maintenance: eliminating hydraulic lifts)
b. Replace gasoline or diesel power with electric (benefits: environmental: reduced pollution, reduced carbon footprint, potentially renewable energy sources; quality of life: reduced noise; health: potentially reduced exposure to contagious diseases from other riders)
c. Provide any-time, anywhere personal mobility (benefits: increased personal freedom, better time management by eliminating the need to wait for a paratransit driver and by shortening the time needed to load a wheelchair user in and out)

4. Israeli/Palestinian cooperative projects, e.g., Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam
a. Expose both cultures to the humanness of their “enemy” and debunk myths/stereotypes (benefit: peace)
b. Share best practices in desert agriculture and architecture (benefit: environment)
c. Increase fluency in the other’s language (benefit: economic: more employable
d. Form a constituency for long-term solution (benefit: peace)
e. Spread the benefits and knowledge through public outreach—speaking, performing, media, etc. (benefit: peace)

5. 3-D printing offers numerous benefits in both speed and cost:
a. Quickly replace a failed machine part without waiting weeks for a new one to be ordered (benefit: economic: work can resume much more rapidly)
b. Service a wide range of equipment without needing an enormous parts inventory (benefits: economic and environmental: money not tied up in inventory, real estate not needed to store the inventory)
c. Develop and test new prototypes at a fraction of the former time and cost (benefit: product development)
d. Customize devices to the user’s needs, affordably (benefit: customer loyalty)
e. Create one-off, individualized solutions to medical problems—or distribute more widely applicable technology quickly and cheaply (benefits: health, economic, more efficient hospital/clinic utilization)
f. Make generic products available in communities that could not afford them in the past (benefits: economic and environmental)

Hear & Meet Shel
Celebrate Earth Day!
Shel will be a guest on Green Divas Radio, talking about being green and profitable AND how business can solve hunger, poverty, war, and climate catastrophe. TheGreenDivas.com, Tuesday, April 21, 3 pm ET/noon PT.

Then, the next day, which actually IS Earth Day, Shel will be talking about different income streams for writers with Janice Campbell of NAIWE. PLEASE NOTE SCHEDULE CHANGE. https://news.naiwe.com/2015/03/10/shel-horowitz-multiple-streams-of-income-for-writers/

“Multiple Streams of Income for Writers.” Janice Campbell of NAIWE interviews Shel.

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

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

But actually, book sales are only small pieces of a diversified income, all of it involving the same analytical and communication skills he uses to write his books.

This call will explore several income streams writers can pursue, such as:

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

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

Shel will be Katie Curtin’s guest on the Creativity Cafe, Wednesday, May 13, 8 pm ET/5 pm PT. I don’t have the listen link yet, but you can probably find it at www.creativitycafeonline.com–or check my Twitter feed (@ShelHorowitz) that day. Oh, and if you follow me, please send me an @ message telling me you’re a subscriber. I’ll be sure to visit your profile.

Connect with Shel on Social Media

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of eight books… international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.

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

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

Friends who Want to Help

As Promised Last Month—The Shift Network’s Earth Day Summit

On April 22, more than 30 indigenous wisdom-keepers, green pioneers, innovators, activists, scientists, artists and visionaries are coming together to share what we ALL can do to awaken humanity for a healthy, sustainable and thriving planet.

Join Arkan Lushwala, Chief Phil Lane, Jr., Drew Dellinger, Andrew Harvey, Esperide Ananas and others for this free online event – and learn what you can do to foster a sacred connection with the Earth.

You’ll discover:
• How the Earth is alive and how that impacts who we are and our sense of purpose
• How we can look to the natural world for guidance in these challenging times
• The wisdom that indigenous elders have for us at this critical time
• What humanity is evolving into as a planetary species
• How the natural world reveals the secrets to successful and sustainable economic models
• What gives us cause for hope, given the daunting chaos of our time

April 22 – https://shiftnetwork.isrefer.com/go/eds15GP/sah/

Another Recommended Book—Getting A Grip

Getting A Grip, by Frances Moore Lappé

This remarkable little book was autographed to me back in 2007 and sat on my shelf unnoticed until early 2015. Wow!

Part of me wishes I’d read it earlier—but part of me understands that I am much more ready to ACT on its message now than I was seven years ago—it fits in perfectly with the work I’m doing around showing the business community how to profit by developing products and services to address hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change.

For decades, Lappé has worked on both food democracy and grassroots citizen democracy, which she calls “Living Democracy”—something much larger and deeper than the “Thin Democracy” embodied in our electoral process. This book continues the tradition, and really looks at the powerful, empowered, vibrant, fun-to-live-in world we can create.

Yet the book starts very pessimistically, with a Spiral of Powerlessness infographic on the inside front cover. Knowing a bit about Lappé’s thought processes (I’ve been following her since I came across Diet for a Small Planet in the 1970s and have heard her speak at least twice), I immediately flipped to the inside back cover, relieved to find the counterbalancing Spiral of Empowerment infographic I’d expected.

The content of the book, overall, is a lot more empowering than the inside front cover. Democracy, she says, is not something we have, but something we create. Lappé’s focus is actually on creating a world that we can be proud to live in—a world where all of us have found our power and have used it to make important changes; action actually inspires hope. Often, these changes look small at first, but they ripple out society-wide, and the cumulative impact of these often-voluntary steps is vast—even when we can’t see it right away. Not only that, but when we get corporations to make concessions around quality of life and the environment, often their profits go up too. Win-wins are nice, aren’t they?

A lot of this is about decentralizing power. Lappé points out that the decentralized Aztecs were far better able to withstand the invasion of European soldiers (and held them at bay for 200 years), while the hierarchical Maya and Inca societies quickly crumbled before the Spaniards. Similarly, she sees top-down approaches to today’s assorted crises as far less likely to succeed than building democratic movements.

In her view, power and fear have been far too intermingled. Either we’re afraid of people who have power, or we fear taking our own power. Fear too often paralyzes us—but it can just as easily be converted to energize us. And she points out the difference between power over others and power we get working in community to improve our world. Our choice, she says, is not whether to change the world, but how we’ll change it. A movement always starts with just a few people, or even one person, and spreads outward, even if we fail to believe in our own power.

Lappé sets an ambitious agenda where we might engage our democracy, harness our power, and improve the world. A few of her goals:
• Seeing food as a human right (she notes that there is enough to go around)
• Ending the $700 billion in worldwide fossil fuel subsidies
• Ensuring that manufacturers take back their products at the end of their useful life (this concept is often called “cradle-to-cradle”)

And she sees hope all over the place: in the rise of the co-op, fair-trade, and buy-local movements…in resistance to economics that put corporate profits ahead of people’s needs…in a Clean Elections law in Maine that then enabled passage of a cradle-to-cradle law…in the 63 million Americas who now factor social and environmental criteria into their purchasing decisions…in organizers’ ability to take a large scary issue and find an entry point to ignite passions and change minds.

It’s one of the best books on citizen empowerment and deep democracy that I’ve come across (and I’ve read quite a few). Put it on your must list.

The Clean and Green Club, March 2015

12 Mar, 2015 No Comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can frame co-solving at least two ways:

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

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

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

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

Hear & Meet Shel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connect with Shel on Social Media

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

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of eight books… international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.

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

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

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

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

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

Another Recommended Book—Deepening Community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Identity
Place
Spiritual
Intentional
Natural living system

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

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

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

The Clean and Green Club, January 2015

9 Jan, 2015 No Comment celebs

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

January 2015

Happy new year! May your 2015 be blessed, happy, healthy, profitable, and make a contribution to the world. For me, this will be the year that I start putting into practice all the prep work I’ve done for the past year around combining business profitability with ending poverty, war, hunger, and catastrophic climate change.

This is the year where the sustainably-sourced rubber meets the solar-paved road, and I attempt to find the people who will pay for my expertise in this area. I will be offering speaking, writing, consulting, and training on how to create and maintain a thriving, profitable business (or organization) that genuinely helps the world.

And keep in mind that you can earn a generous commission if you match me up with someone who needs some of that expertise.

This Month’s Tip: Get Celebs to Notice You

In this final part of the three-part series on working with celebrities, we’ll discuss how to get past the gatekeepers and get noticed. The higher you go on the “celebrity food chain,” the harder it is to get their attention. Superstars are usually extremely isolated from everyday people. They have gatekeepers for their gatekeepers. Even lesser-known celebs can be pretty well shielded from the hoi polloi. So how does an ordinary Joe or Jane get their attention?

Here are some ways to make it easier: Ideally, you’ll be doing some of these things, and building a relationship, long before you ask for anything—so when you finally do ask, you go right to the top of the pile.

1. First of all, in every approach, be honest and authentic, and treat this person like a person. They are surrounded by idol-worshipers and groupies and self-aggrandizing hustlers, and they will appreciate being treated like a human being.

2. Spread their content around. Share their links and retweet their posts on social media, link to their material in your newsletter, mention them in your books and articles. Make it clear you value what they do and want to bring it to a wider audience.

3. Interact with them online. Comment on their blog posts, send fan mail or polite disagreements about articles they post, or links to non-self-promotional things you’ve discovered that you think they’ll like. Follow them on social media and respond when a post of theirs catches your interest.

4. Introduce yourself to them at live events, but not in a pushy way. Offer to buy them coffee or a meal or a drink, or just take a walk together, and have a laid-back, no-pressure conversation.

5. Better yet, make a point of introducing them to others who are working for common goals and who can help them.

6. Get an introduction from someone they already trust (perhaps a lower-level celeb in the same genre).

7. Offer something that will be directly useful to them or advance their agenda. (We covered this in detail last month: https://thecleanandgreenclub.com/?p=3044 )

8. Understand some of the constraints they face. Every word, action, and gesture they create is micro-analyzed by hungry sharks in the media, and one poorly-thought-out move could topple a carefully assembled career.

9. Respect their time. Be focused, understand that they have many pressures and are giving you a gift by choosing to spend time with them. Make things easy for them. As an example, if you’re requesting an endorsement, offer to draft something for their approval.

Hear and Meet Shel

No speaking appearances scheduled at the moment, but you might enjoy listening to these two interviews with me—both rather different from some of my usual ones:

The Boomer Business Owner, with Charlie Poznek: https://theboomerbusinessowner.com/2014/12/tbbo-275-shel-horowitz-use-green-marketing-increase-profits/
or on iTunes at https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/boomer-business-owner-charlie/id807801358?mt=2Charlie sums up the takeaways thusly:

How to use climate change and other green movements to expand your reach and profitability
How green marketing provides your business with an operational advantage
An ironic revelation about Al Gore and George W. Bush
Profit-based ideas for green-ifying your business and business practices
“Do the right thing not just because it’s the right thing, but because you’ll make a bigger profit.”

And then another interview with Sylvia Henderson of Idea Success:
https://www.blogtalkradio.com/sylviahenderson/2015/01/05/change-the-world-through-the-power-of-profit–shel-horowitz

This one went deep. It covered the dynamics of shopping or not shopping at particular companies because of their values…the three events when I was 12 that got me started changing the world…how nuclear power is NOT a green or carbon-friendly power source, no matter what they say…a bit on how to tell when a company is “greenwashing,” and much more.

I do plan to attend Book Expo America, as usual, and I’m sure I’ll work in a few conferences in the green world. But I expect that more of my gigs this year will be for private audiences, such as in-house training for corporations and associations.

Some Recent Posts on My Blog
I’ve been blogging for more than 10 years now, and it’s been a long time since I’ve told you anything about what I do over there.Here are my posts since the December newsletter, all available at https://greenandprofitable.com/shels-blog/

Passenger Rail, Si! Nuclear Power, No!“

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

Getting Along with your Opponents

Why I DON’T Support “Draft Warren”

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

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

Another Recommended Book—The Beautiful Tree

Connect with Shel on Social Media

Follow on TwitterFacebook ProfileLinkedIn Blog Green & Ethical Marketing Facebook Google+

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of eight books… international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).

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

The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, by James Tooley (Cato Institute, 2009)

Let me say this right from the beginning: I am a supporter of public education; Tooley and his publisher (a well-known conservative think-tank) are not. My recommendation that you read this book should not be taken as an endorsement of his educational philosophy.But I do recognize that public schools fail to meet the needs of some students. And I see many, many lessons for the business community in the stories he tells of tiny private schools serving the poorest of the poor in places like India, China, Ghana, and Kenya.

In those places—and presumably, in many other developing countries—Tooley finds the public schools sorely wanting. They may have beautiful new buildings with spiffy playgrounds, but very little learning is going on. Teachers are absent, asleep, or reading the newspaper; class sizes are 60 or more; accountability is entirely absent. In some rural areas, the schools are an hour’s perilous journey (or more) over treacherous mountain passes or flooded areas from the villages they supposedly serve. And I see no reason to doubt the observations of his research teams.

Development experts and government officials that Tooley talks to almost universally see no viable alternative to these terrible schools. Private schools, they say, only serve the upper classes, and sacrifice education for profit.But in every district in every country he investigates—even those where officials say hey know of no private schools serving the poor—Tooley finds hundreds of tiny private schools serving the poor and middle class, where teachers show up and teach, kids learn (and consistently test better than public school students), class sizes are typically around 20 or less—and both teachers and administrators/owners are accountable to fee-paying parents. The buildings and playgrounds are often substandard, and the learning methods uncomfortably rote-based, even for Tooley—but hundreds of thousands of kids are getting an education they could not get in the corrupt public school systems of these countries.

Despite popular images of paternal whites setting up schools to lift the savage natives out of illiteracy, Tooley includes a fascinating chapter on educational models in India during the early 19th century. According to his research, the British destroyed a well-established private educational system that emphasized peer learning, even while exporting its most successful aspects into England and Scotland. Gandhi himself accused the British of uprooting this “beautiful tree” (and called for a return to the old private schooling network); the book takes its title from that quote).

Tooley can be patronizing at times, and rubs our noses in the same dirt over and over. Still, there’s a lot of wisdom here, and many good lessons for change agents working in the business community. He shows, among other things:

How private enterprise can meet the needs of extremely poor population sectors and still make a profit
How the poor are actively interested in taking charge of bettering their children’s lives, willing to make sacrifices to do so, and able to find the resources
What really matters in education, and what’s just window dressing
That education and schooling are not necessarily the same thing, though they overlap
How an entire economic sector can fly under the radar yet make a huge difference in people’s lives every day
Not to take assumptions for granted, particularly when the person making the assumptions has an agenda

The Clean and Green Club, October 2014

11 Oct, 2014 No Comment

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

October 2014

Hear & Meet Shel

October 30, 6 pm, Holyoke, MA: I’ll be exhibiting Business For a Better World (and selling my books) at Pioneer Valley Innovation Nights, at the Massachusetts Green High-Performance Computing Center, 100 Bigelow St, Holyoke, MA 01040—(a terrific facility—if you haven’t seen it, this is a great chance. It probably houses more computing power in one building than the entire world had when I was a teenager—and it’s powered largely with clean local hydropower.) Since it’s the night before Halloween, you get to dress as your favorite innovator (optional). No cost, but RSVPs requested. https://pioneervalley.innovationnights.com/content/pioneervalley-innovation-nights-pinsmass02

And *whether you attend or not,* please vote for my entry! Click on the products tab, go down to my blurb, and click the red “love this” button. (Note: this was not implemented as I go to press. Hopefully it’s working now.)

This is my first time exhibiting a concept as opposed to products and services—the idea that not only should we and can we solve hunger, poverty, war, and climate change, but business can make a good profit in the process. I feel like a 6th grader doing a science fair! If you live in Western Massachusetts, I’d very much appreciate it if you came by and said hi.

This Month’s Tip: Do You “We, We, We All the Way Home”?

Remember that old nursery rhyme, “This Little Piggy Went to Market”? Remember the last line, “And this little piggy went wee, wee, wee all the way home”?

Well, it might work for telling nursery rhymes to a toddler, but too many marketers try to adopt this line in their marketing. Instead of “wee, wee, wee,” they “we, we, we all the way home.”

You’ve seen it. You open up some brochure or webpage, and you read, “At ________ (insert company name), we think ___________ (insert platitude).

There are several problems with this, not the least of which is the way it shuts down creativity. It’s very hard to fill in that second blank with anything that’s actually interesting.

But the biggest problem is about perspective. This is all about THE COMPANY. But the Reader, the Website Visitor, the Prospect, or the Customer—I’m deliberately capitalizing this time, because I want you to perceive these people as people—doesn’t care about the company. That person, who you’d like to convince to buy from you, cares about his or her own issues. All your prospects have a need or desire to fill, a problem to solve, a goal to achieve—and they want to read copy that’s talking directly to them—helping them solve that problem or accomplish that goal. And blather like “At Acme, we care about our customers” isn’t going to cut it.

So when you “we, we, we all the way home,” instead of establishing yourself as the trusted expert, you actually turn that person away. Your prospect is left thinking, “all they want to do is brag. They’re not going to solve my problem. They’re not going to advance my goal.” And in today’s world, where attention and time are super-precious, they’re gone with a click, never to return. Next!

There is one big exception, though. If you can create copy that has the reader feeling that he or she is a part of your tribe, that you’re both in this together, the “we” is very appropriate—because THAT kind of we is inclusive. It draws in that reader—makes him or her feel special, valued, maybe even loved—and speaks directly to the problem or aspiration. Here’s an example:

“As one green business owner to another, we’ve all experienced the problem of trying to convince someone who just doesn’t get it about climate change. Maybe it’s time we tried a different approach.”

That example is rather general. More specific targeting would be much more powerful—for instance, rallying organic farmers against allowing the organic label on GMO foods (a real proposal, unfortunately) or getting renewable energy companies involved in preserving the energy credits that make their businesses much more viable.

And if you want help crafting powerful messages that speak directly to your prospect’s hopes, fears, and dreams, drop me a line or give me a call. It’s what I do for a living and if there’s a good fit, I’ll be happy to help. shel AT greenandprofitable.com, shel AT principledprofit.com, or 413-586-2388 (8 a.m. to 10 p.m. US Eastern Time)

Friends/Colleagues who Want to Help

Global Oneness Day 2014, Friday, October 24, will be an amazing program with respected global leaders including: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Marianne Williamson, Michael Bernard Beckwith, Dr. Larry Dossey, don Miguel Ruiz, Ken Wilber, Jean Houston, Ervin Laszlo, Neale Donald Walsch, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Lynne McTaggart, Dr. Deborah Rozman, James O’Dea, Rinaldo Brutoco, Steve McIntosh, Humanity’s Team and AGNT leaders on the front line and many others.

I’ve personally learned enormous wisdom from Houston and Hubbard, in particular, and have benefited from several of the others. I feel so good about bringing this to your attention that I’ll be sending a solo mailer on that, closer to the time.

Come join Global Oneness Day and hear thought provoking discussion about our common bond, our Oneness with the Divine and all of life, and visions for how we will organize in the emerging new world. Join us and be part of the new consciousness that is transforming our planet and the way we live.

Register Now for Global Oneness Day
https://shelhorowitz.com/go/GlobalOneness14/

Connect with Shel on Social Media

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of eight books… international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.

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

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

Another Recommended Book—Story Based Selling: Create, Connect, and Close

Story Based Selling: Create, Connect, and Close, by Jeff Bloomfield (Select Books, 2014)

This is a basic book about selling to the right side—the emotional side—of the brain, similar to many books I’ve read over the years, starting with Strategic Selling: The Unique Sales System Proven Successful by America’s Best Companies by Robert B. Miller, Stephen E. Heiman and Tad Tuleja—which I read in 1988!

But Bloomfield’s advice is still worth paying attention to, because I’m still encountering salespeople every day who don’t have a clue and are still trying to sell with methods we knew about in, say, 1958. And because, unlike other human-centered sales books I’ve read, he bases his research in neuroscience, yet presents it very accessibly.

Borrowing from a minister named Nathan Hurst, he lists 18 characteristics of a great communicator. Some of these are left-brain obvious, like content, credibility, and preparedness. Others are decidedly right-brain: passion, intensity, and self-revelation. And others are just plain surprising: the ability to speak without notes, and to incorporate humor, and movement for instance. Storytelling makes the list, of course. And so do brevity, pauses, and asking the audience for some sort of personal decision to change something.

Right from the beginning, Bloomfield grabs the reader’s attention by saying “a character will always deliver a greater impact than a pie chart.” That’s an appeal to emotion, to the right-brain. He follows up a few pages later, presenting essentially the same conclusion but framing it in intellectualized, left-brain language: “We train people incorrectly…to sell features, facts, and statistics. These all appeal to logic and are interpreted by a part of the brain that drives skepticism.” He points out that great communicators “all speak to dreams and aspirations, not fear or anger.”

In a sales context, this means that you choose stories that will establish trust with your listener—and you’ll need to choose those stories individually, as a natural part of the conversation. You can’t just trot out the same canned stories in every sales encounter.

—> And this means you have to be a really good listener. Jamming inappropriate stories into your sales narrative not only feels inauthentic, it will repel your prospect. (The importance of listening well is made in every sales book I’ve ever liked.)

His basic point is that we hunger much more for connection than for transactional encounters, and telling stories is a great way to do that—particularly when you include personal illustrations, metaphors, analogies or similes, and visual aids or props. He also identifies five elements of a story: purpose, connection, barrier, “aha factor,” and of course, resolution.

But all is not Kumbaya. Bloomfield says the brain actually needs a certain level of conflict, and will reject anything that seems too perfect. In the sales process, this means listening not only for the spoken objections, but the unspoken ones. You can’t address them until you can draw those objections up to the surface, and you won’t make the sale while the prospect has legitimate objections. Showing your own vulnerability is one way to build that trust, to break down the prospect’s feeling of isolation.

Bloomfield concludes with the stirring advice to be willing to go off-script, to embrace imagination as an ally. He challenges his readers, “Do not check your right brain at the door when your workday starts.”

The Clean and Green Club, September 2014

11 Sep, 2014 No Comment

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, September 2014

This Month’s Tip: The Green Marketing Buffet

For several months, my business coach has been working with me to expand my service line, to allow people to find ways of hiring me that are in perfect alignment with whatever they need at the moment, and lead easily down a path to hire me longer-term.

We’ve looked at a lot of different models, but hadn’t come up with one that seemed to make sense. Then, a few weeks ago, I came up with an “umbrella” that it all fits under, and since then, our work together took a quantum leap.

The umbrella is the image of a buffet, where people can pick and choose from a wide assortment. For now I’m calling it “the Green/Conscious Business Marketing Buffet.” I’m hoping this term encompasses the work I want to do in helping business profitably address not just the environment, but also evils like hunger, poverty, and war. This larger work is what I’m feeling called to do.

—> If you have an idea for me about this, I’d love to hear it! Drop me a line at shel AT greenandprofitable.com (and tell me whether I have your permission to acknowledge you by name).

Meanwhile—both to give a demonstration of product development and, quite frankly, because YOU might need some of these services—let me tell you about some of the new services we’ve come up with. This is a partial list; a more complete version is at https://greenandprofitable.com/introducing-shel-horowitzs-greenconscious-business-marketing-buffet/

Low-End Entry Points (zero to $525)
30 no-charge minutes on the phone with me, but only after submitting a questionnaire that allows me to qualify the serious prospects. (I’ve been doing 30-minute consults on and off for a few years, but hadn’t formalized the qualification process).

Subscriptions to my monthly Green And Profitable column, which is syndicated internationally. This is the lowest-cost item of any of my paid offerings, at $10 or less per insertion, in one-year or two-year packages. On my end, I’m already doing the work, so additional markets increases revenue but not cost or time beyond some very minor recordkeeping.

One-hour marketing assessment, in depth, on a single marketing piece or aspect of your marketing ($195).

Doing a small first assignment like writing a get-noticed story-behind-the-story press release ($525) or book jacket (single panel, $425; 3-panel, $525). This has been very successful for me over many years in demonstrating opportunities to the client that lead to more work for me.

Marketing tune-up: once or twice a year, a quick review of up to five pieces/campaigns, and a few quick suggestions to tweak them ($350).

Mid-Range ($550 to $5000; most of these are open-ended and thus priced individually)
Full-fledged marketing assessment of your entire operation (this would typically take 8 to 10 hours or more, depending on how many methods and media are in use, and how deep the client wants to go).

Training a client’s in-house staff, interns, and/or freelancers in specific areas, such as social media, audience-specific message points, joint venture partnerships, or press releases. This could include review/critique of the trainees’ work.

A combination of training and copywriting, where a client can purchase a custom package that includes a certain amount of each.

Social change consulting, where the client brings me in to look for ways to harness a company’s core skills and best assets to create a business model for profiting while doing good in the world (i.e., addressing one of those big global challenges).

Some kind of group or community involving both ongoing training from me and the chance to network with and learn from other participants

High-End (above $3000)
Speaking, or a combination of speaking and training.

Having me on retainer for four, six, or 12 months, with a custom set of services and fee depending on each client’s needs.

Bulk-purchasing my services in advance, at a discount.

Which of these models can you adapt to your business?

Friends/Colleagues who Want to Help

Ryan Eliason is one of the true visionaries in the heart-centered business community, and one of the best people to learn from in creating a business that’s both socially/environmentally conscious and quite profitable. I’ve known him online for quite a few years, and I’m always impressed.

Ryan has two great (time-limited) gifts for you right now: 1. His wonderful report, “The 5 Best Heart-Centered Online Marketing Strategies: How to Heal the Planet, Grow Your List, Attract Clients, and Enjoy a Bigger Income.” An easy-to-read 26 pages crammed with useful principles and action steps. https://ow.ly/BnPCE

And 2. “Conscious Marketing for Visionary Changemakers,” a series of four no-charge webinars: #1 – Ten Vital Steps to Explode Your Positive Impact; #2 – The 11 Most Damaging Business and Marketing Myths; #3 – The Six Essential Pillars of Mastery; #4 – Visionary Business Mastery, https://ow.ly/BnQhs

Hear & Meet Shel

Largest rally on climate change in US history, Sunday, September 21, NYC. I am going to be in the city Saturday as well, and still have some time that afternoon for a couple more meetings. Please respond to me (shel at principledprofit.com) with the subject line Meet in NYC

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

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

This just in as we go to press. The organizer adds,

Exciting news! John Raatz, partner with Jim Carrey and Eckart Tolle in GATE Transformational Entertainment, will participate in our Scaling Change event.

Here’s the press release: https://bit.ly/1pgB54t
And here is our website: https://www.scalingchange.org/

Monday, October 6, 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT: It’s been a while since I’ve done the Making Green Sexy talk as a webinar. I’m doing it once again for Green America—a much-improved version compared to the last time I presented it online. No charge. Details not set yet; please contact me for the signup link.

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

Connect with Shel on Social Media

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a marketing consultant and copywriter… award-winning author of eight books… international speaker, blogger, syndicated columnist — Shel Horowitz shows how green and ethical businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green competitors. His most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

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

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company

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

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

Another Recommended Book—80/20 Sales and Marketing

80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More, by Perry Marshall (Entrepreneur Press, 2013)

Wow! Rarely have I encountered a marketing book that packaged so many key insights into business success, or one that was so applicable to the environmental justice/social change lens that you and I bring to our businesses.

Right from the start, Richard Koch’s foreword reveals the biggest insight (which Marshall states on page 37 and explores in more depth throughout the book): the fabled 80/20 rule, a/k/a the Pareto Principle, is fractal. In plain English: If 20 % of your clientele spend at or above the average (and the rest are probably not even worth your time), then 20% of the first 20%—4% of your total customer base—will account for 16 times the average sale. Marshall represents this graphically in the “power curve,” which looks quite different from the typical bell curve that identifies medians and averages. He includes numerous examples of power curves, which crawl along the bottom left before escalating steeply—exponentially.

Now, turn this into strategy. After you identify the top-performing 20 % to focus on, rinse and repeat: take the top 20% of that 20%, and run it up several iterations. By the end, you’ll have identified a core group of buyers willing to spend thousands of times more with you than the average buyer. Then craft offerings for them. Sports teams understand this, and make half their revenue from the handful of wealthy fans willing to spring for season skyboxes and other very expensive perks.

—> Go read those two paragraphs just above one more time. They’re that important.

But don’t stop there. Read the rest of the book.

On page 87, I found out exactly why my attempts at affiliate marketing have been so poorly received—and how to fix it if I want to try again. On page 50, there’s a copywriting formula that I can’t wait to try, revolving around simple, elegant, and complete solutions to pain points. Page 89 offers a process of continuous tweaks that can multiply results by orders of magnitude, again and again. And then there’s the incredibly powerful lesson in split testing that fills Chapter 9; the chapter title, “It’s not Failure. It’s Testing,” takes my own insights about persisting with “impossible” goals to its enormously profitable mathematical/logical conclusion. Pages 93-100 explain why your most expensive offering should always be at least 100 times as expensive as your entry-level offering. And then there’s Marshall’s double-80/20 saddle curve (p. 155), which goes a long way toward explaining the polarization of politics (among many other things)—and the market opportunity (pp. 158-162) that may be waiting for you on both sides of that polarization.

The Clean and Green Club, August 2014

12 Aug, 2014 No Comment

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

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

August 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friends/Colleagues who Want to Help

Jay Levinson Memorial Conference is On Hold

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

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

Hear & Meet Shel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connect with Shel on Social Media

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a marketing consultant and copywriter… award-winning author of eight books… international speaker, blogger, syndicated columnist — Shel Horowitz shows how green and ethical businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green competitors. His most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

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

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And from Donovan:

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

The Clean and Green Club, June 2014

9 Jun, 2014 1 Comment

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

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

June 2014

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

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

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

This Month’s Profile:

Hawthorne Valley Farm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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About Shel & This Newsletter

As a marketing consultant and copywriter… award-winning author of eight books… international speaker, blogger, syndicated columnist — Shel Horowitz shows how green and ethical businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green competitors. His most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

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

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company

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

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

Another Recommended Book—The Business Solution to Poverty

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

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

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

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

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

Examples?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Clean and Green Club, May 2014

12 May, 2014 No Comment

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,

May 2014

This Month’s Tip:

Even Experts Need Coaching

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

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

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

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

And boy, was I ever glad I did!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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