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

So take my results with a grain of salt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Congratulations to the Winners:

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

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

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

Happy with Your Current Webhost?

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

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

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

Global Sense by Judah Freed (Hoku House, 2012)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some of the many insights I took away:

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

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

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

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

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

Full disclosure: Freed is a friend and colleague.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learning The Art of Digital Touch

By Chris Brogan

Puudutage, Shel, is “touch” in Estonian.

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

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

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

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

DIGITAL TOUCH OPPORTUNITIES ARE EVERYWHERE

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

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

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

THIS IS NOT “USER EXPERIENCE.”

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

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

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

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

SELLING IS ABOUT TOUCH, TOO

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Chris…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Planning Waaay Ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sustainability Funder Looking for Companies to Fund

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• Without ever calling the Republicans out, she made a clear distinction not only in the candidates’ values, but also in their origins; Mitt Romney constantly struggles to connect with people less fortunate than he, while Michelle Obama gripped the audience with the unforgettable images of Barack picking her up in a car so old and rusty she could see through the floor to the pavement…of his proudest possession back then, a table he fished out of a dumpster.
• She reminded us over and over again of the hope and promise of the 2008 campaign, and connected this year’s campaign to that same hope, even while the youth who were so inspired four years ago are disappointed in what Barack Obama has accomplished. Her message to youth was clear: we are not done yet, and we are still here for you—but you need to get out there and vote (italics are taken directly from Michelle Obama’s speech):

And if so many brave men and women could wear our country’s uniform and sacrifice their lives for our most fundamental rights—then surely we can do our part as citizens of this great democracy to exercise those rights. Surely, we can get to the polls and make our voices heard on Election Day. If farmers and blacksmiths could win independence from an empire. If immigrants could leave behind everything they knew for a better life on our shores. If women could be dragged to jail for seeking the vote. If a generation could defeat a depression, and define greatness for all time. If a young preacher could lift us to the mountaintop with his righteous dream. And if proud Americans can be who they are and boldly stand at the altar with who they love—then surely, surely we can give everyone in this country a fair chance at that great American Dream.Because in the end, more than anything else, that is the story of this country — the story of unwavering hope grounded in unyielding struggle.

• As my wife, D. Dina Friedman, pointed out immediately afterward, she positioned some of Barack’s liabilities, such as his insistence on building consensus with Republicans who not only won’t reach consensus but who are actively sabotaging his efforts, as strengths:

I love that for Barack, there is no such thing as “us” and “them” — he doesn’t care whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, or none of the above. He knows that we all love our country. And he’s always ready to listen to good ideas. He’s always looking for the very best in everyone he meets.

• She reached out to many constituencies: veterans, teachers, firefighters, poor people working class people, those with disabilities, single moms, grandparents, dads, people facing serious illness, those in the struggle for women’s reproductive rights, recent grads under pressure of student loans or other crippling debt, those who remember the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, gays and lesbians and those who stand with them in the struggle for marriage equality. And time after time, she reached out to moms and identified as a mom.

• Above all, her delivery was from the heart. She connected to her audience as a person, a mom, and as an advocate for the best of American values. She was both sincere and enormously likable. Even her little hint of a stammer came across as endearing. She didn’t need props or PowerPoint. My guess is she didn’t even need the teleprompter that no doubt was in her view.

I generally advise my clients to get out from behind the lectern. When I speak, I stand to the side of the lectern, so there’s no barrier between me and my audience, yet I can still see my notes. However, she was able to overcome that distance and connect personally and viscerally with the live audience and those watching from afar (and it’s been explained to me that the needs of cameras and bodyguards did not give her a choice). If Barack Obama does win a second term, I think Michelle Obama’s convention speech (and Bill Clinton’s, for that matter) will deserve some of the credit.

Saturday, September 15, noon ET/9 a.m. PT, Kate Barton interviews me on Green marketing for PUNCH! Media & Marketing Made Easy: https://www.threegirlsmedia.com/punchradio/upcoming-shows/

Thursday, October 18, noon ET/9 a.m. PT, Mark Reinert interviews me on The Marketing CXafe: https://authenticbusinessgrowth.com/business-success-green/

Thursday, October 18, 8:30 p.m. ET/5:30 p.m. PT: I interview Marilyn Jenett in a call just for you, because you read this newsletter. Please see the Friends/Colleagues Who Want to Help section for more about Marilyn and her work.

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

Planning Waaay Ahead

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

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

The Universe on Speed Dial!

This Call with Prosperity Teacher Marilyn Jenett Could Change Your Life–in Just Two Weeks 

Mark your calendar for Thursday, October 18, 8:30 pm. ET/5:30 pm. PT. Click here to sign-up for call-in information.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve just begun to apply Marilyn’s lessons, and I can point to two different shifts in my income mentality/status during that time—closing a very large project that had been dangling for months. And an idea for a whole new market for my column.

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

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

UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging.

Scott Stratten just put out a revised edition of his social media classic, UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging—and I realize I’d never reviewed the original. It’s one of the better books on marketing by building relationships: a mix of wise theory, concrete practice, and enough snark to make the whole thing enjoyable (be sure to read the footnotes, where most of the snark lives).

Stratten spends a lot of time laughing at the old, ineffective ways of marketing—but then he turns it on his head and shows exactly how the firm could do better. And he’s a particular master of convincing prospects—both in-person and online—that it’s in their best interest to turn over their contact information. Of course, it’s up to the company to use that information effectively once you have it, and Stratten has lots of good advice on that too.

Right at the beginning, on the second page of the introduction, Stratten declares that marketing is not a task, a department, or a job; “marketing happens every time you engage (or not) with your past,present, and potential customers…[and] any time anyone talks about your company.” And to Stratten, that means a few key principles:

• Seize every chance to  engage with customers and prospects
• Do this in ways that build your credibility and your likability; avoid alienating your customers and prospects (e.g., by jamming “buy me” messages down their throats—or by ignoring them)
• And that means being authentic, being truly you, showing (not bragging about) how you’re different
• Build both trust and genuine engagement; it’s better to have a small list that really engages with you than to have a huge list that ignores you
• Have systems in place to scale up effectively and rapidly

I’ve been an advocate for this viewpoint for many years,and it amazes me how many companies are still completely blind about these concepts. Yet, Stratten cites numerous cases where a company took itself out of the running for some major pieces of business by being rude or indifferent in a retail environment, a trade show, or online. In once case, he was asked to recommend a six-figure software package, and the only company on his list was the single company whose reps took him seriously as he’d walked a trade show with a student registration badge, some months earlier.

I really like Stratten’s practical advice on maximizing results: whether at trade shows, in the store (read his case study of how he built engagement at a frame shop), or even on Youtube—where a simple tweak to the way people viewed his videos led to a 38% subscription conversion rate. He’s even got a three-page chapter on how to organize a successful charity fundraiser via Twitter.

Do I agree with all of his advice? No. I think, for instance, that it is still totally possible to be authentic if you prewrite some tweets and schedule them ahead. But I agree with him that it isn’t smart to puff an event you’re leading and then not be around to answer questions about it because you’ve prescheduled the tweets and are off on a no-Internet vacation.

Overall, I’d put my agreement at somewhere north of 90 percent. It’s a useful and enjoyable read, and I’d be surprised if you don’t come away with at least five or ten ideas you can implement right away in your own business.

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I really enjoyed this article on traditional, marketer-driven outbound (“push”) marketing versus consumer-driven inbound (“pull”) marketing—and it had a really good insight I want to share with you:

Whereas outbound marketing often provided consumers with fantasies (think of Budweiser commercials or luxury car ads), inbound marketing provides consumers with facts. People aren’t researching and gathering information on what fantasy a company is trying to sell them on; they are researching the efficacy of their products, and (with ever-growing regularity) the social and environmental policies of specific brands.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that I’m a huge believer in pull marketing, in putting the consumer in the driver’s seat to actively seek out solutions and find you. All the way back in 1985, when I published my first marketing book, I talked about effective Yellow Pages presence. Yellow Pages was the web browser of its time, a way to seek out and compare all the providers of a service and make a decision based on who could serve you best. By the time I did my most recent (sixth) marketing book, the award-winning and category-best-selling Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, I devoted significant space to inbound/pull strategies, from social media to Internet discussion groups. This kind of marketing is not at all intrusive; in fact, prospects actually welcome it.

But the insight that the reason it works so well is that it’s based in fact rather than fantasy is something I’d never articulated.

Conventional marketing wisdom tells us that emotions do the selling, and intellect serves only to justify the purchase to others.

That may or may not be true for outbound marketing. I’ve always been quite skeptical of that claim; I have said for years that the best selling uses both emotion and rationality, complementing each other. To put it another way, selling is much easier when the buyer has both the need and the desire. Either one by itself is rarely enough to close a purchase.

But it’s certainly not true of inbound marketing. When a prospect comes to you, he or she is presold on the purchase, or at least seriously considering and actively researching how to solve the problem or meet the goal. But the prospect may not be sold on which vendor to use.

This is your opportunity with inbound marketing: to show how your company is the right solution for the already motivated prospect. And here, intellect is often going to trump emotion. That doesn’t mean you eliminate all the emotional appeals—but you make sure they are rooted in an informational approach, and assume that the prospect already knows why he or she wants what you sell.

In last month’s newsletter, I reviewed a book right now that says businesses don’t need to advertise—but it makes a huge exception for directory listings (including Yellow Pages and search engine ads). I was having trouble with that differentiation, until I read this article. Now I finally understand what the authors are getting at: outbound advertising = fantasy, while listings (inbound advertising and marketing) = fact.

I’m not sure I agree, but at least now I see where they’re coming from.

What do you think—and feel—about this? Please share in the Comments below

Recent Replays of my interviews by…

• Marsha Dean Walker and Jim Walker on the Marketing Made Easy show (I come on 30 minutes into the show). https://www.blogtalkradio.com/lwl-radio/2012/08/06/how-to-mind-your-own-business
• Patrick Walters and Elaine Chase on the Triangle Variety Radio show https://www.blogtalkradio.com/trianglevariety/2012/07/05/procast-with-shel-horowitz
• Michelle Vandepas on Talking Purpose radio https://www.blogtalkradio.com/talkingpurpose/2012/07/12/shel-horowitz-interview–ethics-green-and-frugal-business

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

Saturday, September 15 noon ET/9 a.m. PT, Kate Barton interviews me on Green marketing for PUNCH! Media & Marketing Made Easy

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

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

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

Planning Waaay Ahead

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

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

Green America is one of my favorite green business organizations. I’ve done a live event and a couple of teleseminars with them, and also chose them as the charity partner for the launch of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.

Full-time, based in Washington DC, 60-85K.

If you know someone with very good administrative and management skills, plus a commitment to green principles, here’s the link: https://www.greenamerica.org/about/employment/jobs/executivedirector.cfm

Deadline: 9/7/12.

Up close and personal with my celebrated co-author, Jay Conrad Levinson, Father of Guerrilla Marketing
Jay is offering his famous intimate 21-hour intensive at his lovely Florida home, August 20-22nd. Only 10 people will be allowed in. https://3bl.me/ysqdva . Jay describes it as “a three-day face-to-face training personally conducted by me in our home here on a lake just northeast of Orlando, Florida. It’s intense because it’s from noon till 7 pm three days in a row—21 hours with lots of hands-on, devoted to making you a true guerrilla marketer.”
Oh—and this is new—students can get a discount!

Green Entrepreneurs in DC, SF, and LA: $5K Ford Foundation Grants
This is something I learned about via Green America, incidentally. Deadlines: 7/7, DC; 10/19, SF; 10/26, LA: https://greenbusinessnetwork.org/news/announcements/item/614-apply-for-the-$5000-ford-community-green-grant-in-dc-la-and-sf.html

Authors: This Show Wants to Interview You
I was recently a featured guest on the Triangle Variety Radio show, with excellent hosts Patrick Walters and Elaine Chase want to interview authors. You can listen to my segment at https://www.blogtalkradio.com/trianglevariety/2012/07/05/procast-with-shel-horowitz
Contact: Janneth Carson, carsonjanneth at gmail.com
You are welcome to say as the first line or subject line:
I read in Shel Horowitz’s newsletter that you’re looking for more authors to interview.

Robert Smith totally rocked the house on the call we did together August 2. Wow!
Here’s a guy with the guts to walk up to companies like FedEx or even government offices and say “I want to joint venture with you.” And they say yes! Because he frames it in such a way that their self-interest is obvious.
We learned how to:

• Approach super-famous and super-busy people with propositions that they listen to and accept
• Get other companies to not just subsidize your postal direct-mail campaign but let you make a profit before the first envelope is mailed
• Build credibility way up with a clever strategy for buying and using remnant ad space for pennies on the dollar
• Identify the best JV partners—by flipping through the phone book!

And so much more!
And I got to chime in with a few good stories—like how my very first business JV, in 1982, saved me thousands of dollars over 30 years—and the backstory of how I got to partner with Jay Conrad Levinson and become a Guerrilla Marketing author with Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.

Plus Robert, and Marilyn Jenett, who was on the call as a participant, gave ME some great advice for marketing my monthly Green And Profitable column to people who will pay for it—which has been a stuck place for me.

If you were on the call, here’s your chance to listen again. If you couldn’t make it, you will definitely want to catch the replay. Yes, you will hear a dog barking, as there was a technical issue that prevented me from muting the call–but the open call also enabled a lot of stuff to come up for public discussion that we would have otherwise missed, so it turned out to be a good thing.

The replay link: https://shelhorowitz.com/robert-smiths-amazing-advice-on-jvs/
The password: marketingsuccess (all one word, lower case)

You have 48 hours to listen at no charge. After that, I plan to start charging for access and will change the password. So I suggest you listen to the call right away, and start putting these amazing ideas into practice before the rush.

As always, some of these earn me a commission. This particular batch, only the Guerrilla one.

Small Town Rules: How Big Brands and Small Businesses Can Prosper in a Connected Economy, by Barry J. Moltz and Becky McCray (Que, 2012)

Not so very long ago, many small companies from small towns tried to look big and urban. These days, big brands often try to look small and rural, and emphasize old-fashioned values like friendliness, quality, and integrity (perhaps the trend started with the “Pepperidge Farm remembers” commercials, which go at least as far back as 1981). Walk into a Cracker Barrel restaurant or look at 1990s-era print ads for Saturn (a General Motors brand) if you want examples.

Small Town Rules explains why: the convergence of a tough economy, online technology, and a public that expects to have input at every level have made small town business styles relevant again.

I grew up in the dense pressure cooker of New York City; for the last 14 years, I’ve lived in a village of about 200 where most families go back many generations (part of a town of 5,000), and before that, 17 years in a college town of 30,000 (next door to my current town). And for the past 17 years, the majority of my livelihood has been nonlocal, most of it coming over the Internet. My wife and I joke that we’re “bicultural,” because we can function both in megacities and tiny rural communities.

Moltz and McCray identify seven rules that provide a roadmap to function in this new and very different business environment (giving a chapter to each):

1. Plan for zero: just because you’ve had certain sources of income doesn’t mean they will continue. Outside factors from weather to fuel prices to technology will impact your business, and you must be prepared. In my own business, I’ve twice moved away from what had been my primary income stream, and both times, within a couple of years, those areas were pretty much dead—so I certainly recognize the truth of Rule 1.

2. Spend brainpower before dollars: in other words, be frugal, and use your creativity rather than your financial capital to accomplish tasks in cost-effective ways. This applies to financing, equipment, workforce, and more. In 1990, when laser printers were $5,000 and up, I organized a co-op to buy a remaindered one. I and three other entrepreneurs all kicked in $700, and because it was my idea, it lived at my office. This enabled a lot of growth in my business including a whole new profit center. I couldn’t have done it if I just went out and bought that very expensive piece of equipment.

3. Multiple lines of income to diversify your risk—but grow your business one opportunity at a time. We hear a lot about the first part of this rule—but the second is equally important. Don’t get too big too fast. Manage your growth so you control it and not the other way around.

4. Work anywhere, anywhen. Technology empowers you. I’ve had multiple clients as far away as Japan. I have a virtual assistant in Alaska, four timezones away from me. In seconds, I can research information that two decades ago required a trip to the library and a couple of hours work. Tools like Skype, e-mail, Google, and even Twitter make this possible—at least if you have access to broadband Internet (still in issue in many rural communities).

5. Treat customers like community. This may be the most important of the seven rules, because in a world where more than 11 million people will watch a video called “United [Airlines] Breaks Guitars,” your grip on customer loyalty depends on your own responsiveness.

6. Be proud of being small: smallness makes you nimble and agile, and gives you a human face. While the big dogs are having committee meetings and complicated approval processes before they even put in a bid, you get the job, do the work, and establish a relationship with your delighted customer.

7. Build your local connections. Can we say that global is the new local? For many of us small entrepreneurs, we are still very much based in community marketing; it’s just that our community might be defined by the 5,000 members of an Internet discussion group from around the world, rather than the 5,000 people who live in our town or neighborhood. This chapter explores the intersections of local and online marketing (look at the way the online business Groupon’s primary focus is exposing customers to local businesses in its area, or consider the way people use sites like Yelp on a mobile phone to pick out a restaurant as they’re walking around). This section also has some great information on working with and strengthening a truly local real-world economy.

While exploring these rules, Moltz and McCray go into some very interesting tangents, such as how to tell when brand extension is or isn’t a good idea, how to handle crises, and how big companies can incorporate the best of small-business management into their operations (example: Gore, maker of Goretex, caps its work teams at 150 people.)

While I did occasionally get frustrated with repetition and a bit of disorganization, I also took three pages of notes and starred an unusually high percentage. I’d say this book has relevance for green entrepreneurs, online entrepreneurs, and urban businesses who can gain a leg up by using small-town approaches—and is essential reading for anyone trying to run a business in a small town, especially if they are from a more urban culture.