The Clean and Green Club

There were some delivery problems with last month’s issue, so some information is repeated here. the main articles, however, are new, as are several of the items in other sections.

In This Issue…

• Can You Help Me Out (and Get Paid?)
• Special Price On Shel’s Award-Winning Book
• Do You Qualify for a No-Cost Consultation with Shel?
• How to Get Media Coverage From Reporter Query Sites
• Another Recommended Book: Elizabeth & Hazel
• Hear & Meet Shel
• Friends Who Want to Help

(Some of the links in this newsletter are affiliate links-if you want to know about any particular link, please ask.)

Can You Help Me Out (and Get Paid?)

I find myself looking for a few different types of people to work as part-time independent contractors. You can pick up some income, working from the comfort of your own computer and telephone, while helping to spread the message that green and ethical behavior is not only the right thing morally, but also a great way to grow your business.

* Webmaster: Format and post content, administer newsletters, revise content as necessary, research and install/troubleshoot new tools and scripts. Note: most of our sites are now in WordPress, which makes changing appearance or content very easy. But some of our older sites–the ones with the most articles–are in old-fashioned HTML, so some basic familiarity is necessary. This will probably take about five hours a week. USD $10/hour.

* Speech Booker: Commissioned sales: 25% of the speaking fee (my standard rate is $5000 for a 60- to 90-minute speech, plus noncommissionable travel expenses).

* Other Commissioned Sales: Sell my monthly Green And Profitable and Green And Practical columns to corporate and media

clients. Sell my membership program. Sell foreign rights for books and information products. Commissions vary depending on the product.

Contact me to learn more: shel at greenandprofitable.com, or (8 a.m. to 10 p.m. US Eastern) 413-586-2388.

Special Price on Shel’s Award-Winning Book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World

This Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award finalist is a one-stop guide to low-cost, high-ROI marketing methods. Detailed coverage of copywriting, design, marketing online, selling in person, expertise-based marketing, and much more–plus a supplemental e-book that covers social media marketing in detail Please visit https://www.frugalmarketing.com/gm.shtml to see the complete table of contents and index, reader and press reviews, and more. It’s a very solid 306-page 7 x 10 book with lots of examples and visuals. Big, yes–but also easy to read, easy to grasp, and easy to implement. A great way to jump-start your marketing.

List price is $22.95–but right now, you can grab a copy for just $12.00 plus shipping (that’s the same price my publisher charged for a smaller and less comprehensive book I wrote many years earlier, and a savings of better than 47 percent.

And if you want to train your whole team, pay just $10 per book if you three or more, or $8 each if you buy ten or more. What a deal!

To order, visit https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=65&products_id=180 and enter the code for the quantity you want:

single copies at $12 each: GM12

3 to 9 copies at $10 each: GM10

10 or more copies at $8 each: GM8

Do You Qualify for a No-Cost Consultation with Shel?

I am giving away four 15-minute consultations this month on any aspect of marketing, book publishing, or green business. They will go to the first four people to respond with appropriate answers to the brief five-question survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/9R5TYLC

How to Get Media Coverage from Reporter Query Sites

Last month, I showed you six places where reporters go to actively find the perfect sources for stories they’re working on (or producers looking for guests). Now, learn how to get the most value out of the contacts you initiate.

• Respond as instantly as possible (except for Radio GuestList—in most cases, they have an ongoing need, and you’ll stand out more by waiting until the deluge dies down). These queries may draw 200 responses, so the fastest in get the closest consideration. Consider setting up a separate e-mail address to receive and respond to queries, and check that account every hour from 6 a.m. to 6 pm. US Eastern Time (or better yet, turning on audio notification just for that account).
• Stay on topic and relevant—don’t try to make a fit where one doesn’t really exist. That means paying attention to such factors as geographic needs, size of company, or anything else the reporter might specify in the query (yeah, it would be nice if more reporters put the restrictions in the headline).
• Give the reporter something to quote right in your query (I usually do between 2-5 bullet points or one very meaty paragraph).
• Mention your relevant credentials.
• Set up Google and Yahoo Alerts for your name, book title, and perhaps main topic keywords (if not too general), so you can see if you get quoted—reporters won’t always tell you.

Another Recommended Book: Elizabeth and Hazel

Another Recommended Book: Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock, by David Margolick (Yale University Press, forthcoming September, 2011).

Although this is not a business book, it has deep implications for business—and especially for those businesses trying to rehabilitate their image after a history of polluting, unfair labor practices, or other unethical behavior. For every Walmart that successfully pulls itself out of the pit, there are many BPs whose efforts at going clean turn out to be nothing but greenwashing. And managers at those sorts of companies may well want to spend a couple of hours with this book.

Elizabeth and Hazel starts at a very ugly moment in American history: a white girl (Hazel) is captured mid-scream as she curses Elizabeth, the unbowed black girl in front of her, one of nine students chosen to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, on her first day of school, in 1957—when both girls are just 15. The book follows these two women, separately and together, for more than 50 years. And it explores how the photo, and Elizabeth’s miserable year at Central, influenced both their lives, with both good and bad consequences.

Unlike many of her peers, Hazel begins to feel remorse, and within a few years, contacts Elizabeth to apologize. Eventually, they form a friendship, touring together as eyewitnesses and participants in history—but later, the friendship unravels. Reconciliation, it turns out, is a very messy business, especially when one side holds grudges not only against her white tormentors, but against some of her allies whom she saw as manipulating her situation to advance their agenda without regard to her own needs—while the former tormentor has a need to move on but doesn’t grasp the deeper psychology of the trauma she helped create.

It should be required reading for any diplomat or therapist trying to end a long feud, from a family conflict on-up to the centuries-old race and ethnic hatreds that lead to war. For healers looking for a glimpse of how violence can create long-term trauma and destroy brilliant potential in the victim, but also how it can eat away at the perpetrator. And yes, for business owners who want a positive role in the world, whether or not they are typically seen as having already earned it.

Pre-order now: https://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300141931

Hear & Meet Shel

July:

• Clamshell Alliance Reunion and Planning Conference, World Fellowship, Conway, NH, July 22-24, https://www.worldfellowship.org/prog2011.shtml#22-Jul . Help plan a clean energy future and shut down the nukes! I have been a strong opponent of nuclear power since 1974, when I researched and wrote a college paper, and discovered how horrible it is. If Fukusjhma didn’t convince you, maybe the Associated Press year-long study on nuclear safety will. Links to three of the four parts of the AP report are on my blog, at https://greenandprofitable.com/latest-ap-nuke-safety-report-population-growth-not-factored-in/ and https://greenandprofitable.com/nuclear-safety-procedures-are-absolutely-unacceptable/.
• Leading a teleseminar, Making Mainstream Media Your Book Launch Partner, on getting free publicity–for D’Vorah Lansky’s Book Launch Formula telesumit (20 speakers). https://3bl.me/n3wgtb Tuesday, July 26, 3 p.m. EDT
• Another teleseminar, on effective and profitable uses of Twitter for National Association of Independent Writer and Editors: “Twitter for Writers: Greatest Thing Ever or Waste of Time?”  Here’s an excerpt from the course description, which you can’t see unless you’re a member:
  Shel usually spends between 5-20 minutes a day on Twitter. Yet he has 4,510 followers (all organically acquired–no cheats or automated software) on Twitter as of 6/30/11, gets retweeted frequently, has Twitter connections with some of the top names in marketing and publishing, has been a featured guest on several high-profile TweetChats–and used Twitter to help propel his most recent book launch to reach an estimated 5 million people. Join Shel as he shows you
  – Four different types of Tweets and how best to use them
  – Three super-effective tools that will vastly increase your efficiency with social media
  – Strategies to stay active, get noticed, and still keep Twitter from taking over your life
  https://3bl.me/petqfa (cost of this program is applied to membership, if you join). Wednesday, July 27, at 3:30 p.m. EDT.

September

• 350.org and climate activist Bill McKibben are organizing a national day of action on climate. I’m sure I’ll participate in some way. https://www.moving-planet.org/

October

• Speaking at Bioneers-By-The-Bay, wonderful conference October 21-23 in New Bedford, MA, https://www.marioninstitute.org/connecting-for-change

Negotiating on several other speaking engagements. Remember–if you set me up an engagement, you could earn a generous commission.

Friends Who Want to Help

Want to create more business on LinkedIn? This series of templates and guides will help you beef up your profile, have a more authoritative presence in discussion forums, and generally make it more likely to actually do business. In fact, while I was reviewing this material, I stopped what I was doing twice–once to change my profile headline, and once to make some changes in the way my Green And Ethical Business group is set up–and I’m not exactly a LinkedIn newbie (in fact, I was member #150225 out of more than 100,000,000). www.InstantLinkedInMarketingTemplates.com/shel

Every day, I take a few moments to review the things I’m grateful for. I think this actually helps create more things to be grateful for. Kim Serafini’s new book i am gr8ful for you is a collection of fun photos, inspirational thoughts and meditations. A great thing to keep in your bathroom, or perhaps right by your bed to look at at the very beginning and end of the day. https://iag4.info/y/22310

We all know someone who’s been burned by work-at-home scams–yet 137 million people worldwide successfully telecommute. Leslie Truex’s new Jobs Online: How to Find and Get Hired to a Work-At-Home Job helps you learn about jobs that match your skills, interests and hobbies–*and* how to separate the genuine offers from the rip-offs. Plus you’ll find hundreds of companies that take applications continuously. https://3bl.me/2kqk4p

In This Issue…

Can You Help Me Out (and Get Paid?)

I find myself looking for a few different types of people to work as part-time independent contractors. You can pick up some income, working from the comfort of your own computer and telephone, while helping to spread the message that green and ethical behavior is not only the right thing morally, but also a great way to grow your business.

Special Price on Shel’s Award-Winning Book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World

This Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award finalist is a one-stop guide to low-cost, high-ROI marketing methods. Detailed coverage of copywriting, design, marketing online, selling in person, expertise-based marketing, and much more–plus a supplemental e-book that covers social media marketing in detail Please visit https://www.frugalmarketing.com/gm.shtml to see the complete table of contents and index, reader and press reviews, and more. It’s a very solid 306-page 7 x 10 book with lots of examples and visuals. Big, yes–but also easy to read, easy to grasp, and easy to implement. A great way to jump-start your marketing.

Do You Qualify for a No-Cost Consultation with Shel?

Six Places Reporters are Looking For You

What’s the very best way to get coverage in traditional media? Pitch reporters who are already looking for sources for their upcoming stories. It’s much easier to find a reporter who needs to talk to, say, an eco-friendly apartment building manager than it is to go out cold-pitching to reporters and say, I’m an eco-friendly apartment building manager, please write about me.”

I’ve used this method to get repeat coverage in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Christian Science Monitor, Woman’s Day, and many other top-level media (as well as dozens of lesser-known media). Oh, and if you’re a consistently good source, some reporters will even start approaching you, before they post their queries. And that is really cool!

In this two-part series, I’ll connect you with six different places to find those reporters this month, five of which cost nothing but your time.

Next month, I’ll give tips on how to respond so you vastly increase your chances of getting covered. Meanwhile, go ahead and get registered (and start following the queries) at:

No-cost
1. HARO (Help A Reporter Out): www.helpareporter.com
2. ReporterConnection.com
3. PitchRate.com
4. RadioGuestList.com

Fee
5. Profnet/PR Leads: professional publicists can subscribe to Profnet for several thousand dollars a year—but individual authors can get a subset of the same leads, targeted to your expertise and interests, for just $99/month through authorized reseller PR Leads: https://www.frugalmarketing.com/dtb/prleads.shtml (yes, I’m an affiliate)

6. Follow these services on Twitter: @helpareporter, @reporterconxn, @pitchrate, @profnet, @prleads, radioguestlist

Next month: how to get the maximum value from these services and turn it into publicity (and credibility).

Another Recommended Book: The Secret of Selling Anything, by Harry Browne

Relate to that goal. Ignore any features and benefits that aren’t relevant to those specific needs and wants. Your prospect has already told you how to sell, and if you follow that blueprint, your success rate will climb. And be honest; if you don’t have the right product, don’t force it.

After providing a five-step formula for this process, the rest of the book gets specific. Three examples:
* Address objections with a cool 3-part method that truly respects the prospect
* Turn gatekeepers into allies
* Identify four different rationales for the “I have to think about it” response, and how to respond to each

That this book is important shows even in the publisher: legendary Internet marketing trainer Ken McCarthy, creator of The System Seminar.

Caveats: This book was written a long time ago, and uses the male pronoun exclusively. Also, inflation makes the numbers cited seem very quaint. Finally, there are a couple of minor places where I find his reasoning fallacious.

Get your copy here.

Hear & Meet Shel

• Tuesday, June 21, 3-4:30 p.m. Eastern/noon-1:30 PT. Featured guest on Profnet Connect Tweetchat To follow the chat, log onto Twitter and follow the hashtag #connectchat. And maybe the coolest thing about this is that the book cover for Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green will be displayed on a huge electronic billboard in New York’s Times Square, promoting the event ahead of time. They’ve promised to send me a picture.
• Saturday, June 25, I expect to participate in a Clamshell Alliance safe energy strategy session to be held at the Wendell Town Hall in Wendell, MA. In the aftermath of the Fukushima disaster, it’s more important than ever that we STOP all new proposed nukes and begin to shut down the 104 ticking time bombs in the US, and the 300 or so in other parts of the world. I just finished writing a new introduction for a Japanese reprint of my old book on nuclear power, and doing this research showed me that nukes have become, if anything, LESS reliable and LESS safe in the past 32 years since I wrote the original book. If you’re in the Massachusetts/Vermont/New Hampshire area, please consider attending. Potluck party and sing 1-8 p.m., strategy session affinity-group structure, 2:30-5:30 p.m. Info: Sharon (978) 544-8822 or Tom (978) 544-3911.

• Sunday, July 3: Radio interview on green marketing on Catching the Brass Ring at 6 PM ET on WBNW AM 1120 in Boston and WESO 970 AM in the Worcester area. Podcast should be posted the following day at https://thebrassring.net.
• Thursday, July 7: Interviewed by Judah Freed on The Global Sense show, pwrnradio.com/global-sense/ (podcast will be permanently archived).
• Sunday, July 10, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Exhibiting at the Common Good Festival, Amherst (MA) Common. This should be a wonderful event, featuring performances by two of my favorite folk groups: Emma’s Revolution and Kim & Reggie Harris.  No charge to attend–designed to raise awareness of the Common Good Bank, a people-centered alternative to “normal” banks.
• Monday, July 11, 10:30 a.m. ET/7:30 a.m. PT. Interview on “Who You Calling Old,” https://www.blogtalkradio.com/who-you-calling-old
• Interview by Mari-Lyn Harris on Blog Talk radio, July 12, 1 pm ET/10 am. I don’t have the link yet, but you can probably find her page on BlogTalkRadio.com
• Sunday, July 17, 12:30 p.m. Speaking at SolarFest, Tinmouth, VT: “Green And Profitable: Harnessing the Marketing Advantages of Going Green”

Friends Who Want to Help

Want to create more business on LinkedIn? This series of templates and guides will help you beef up your profile, have a more authoritative presence in discussion forums, and generally make it more likely to actually do business. In fact, while I was reviewing this material, I stopped what I was doing twice–once to change my profile headline, and once to make some changes in the way my Green And Ethical Business group is set up–and I’m not exactly a LinkedIn newbie (in fact, I was member #150225 out of more than 100.000,000). www.InstantLinkedInMarketingTemplates.com/shel

Every day, I take a few moments to review the things I’m grateful for. I think this actually helps create more things to be grateful for. Kim Serafini’s new book i am gr8ful for you is a collection of fun photos, inspirational thoughts and meditations. A great thing to keep in your bathroom, or perhaps right by your bed to look at at the very beginning and end of the day. https://iag4.info/y/22310

We all know someone who’s been burned by work-at-home scams–yet 137 million people worldwide successfully telecommute. Leslie Truex’s new Jobs Online: How to Find and Get Hired to a Work-At-Home Job helps you learn about jobs that match your skills, interests and hobbies–*and* how to separate the genuine offers from the rip-offs. Plus you’ll find hundreds of companies that take applications continuously. https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1456589180/

Contents

• Help me find a gig–Earn a nice commission!
• This Month’s Tip: Show Every Benefit
• Special Offer: Grassroots Marketing
• Another Recommended Book: The Secret Green Sauce
• Hear & Meet Shel
• Friends Who Want to Help

Help me find a gig–Earn a nice commission!

If you can find me a paying speaking gig for the following locations/dates, I will be happy to pay you a very nice fee. I speak on various aspects of green marketing, green profitability, customer service, living green, and book publishing. Sample topics: https://greenandprofitable.com/have-shel-speak/

To see an entire very brief (9-minute) presentation that didn’t use PowerPoint, click https://shelhorowitz.com/video/Shel%20Horowitz%201.mp4 (Typically, my talks are 25-50 minutes, though I’ve gone as long as 3 hours). Some use slides and some don’t.

• Iceland, August 7-13 (airfare already covered)
• Montreal, October 19-20 (travel expenses already covered)
• Aukland (New Zealand), Sometime Dec. 26-January 12 (dates and trip not confirmed)

This Month’s Tip: Show Every Benefit

If you’re marketing a green product or service, it’s up to you to demonstrate why your offering is superior to the conventional alternatives. That means drilling down and drilling down to identify and brag about the core reasons, and to do so in a way that resonates with your audience.

Let’s say, for instance, that you’re a building manager and you offer the feature I mention in this month’s book review: graywater recycling. How can you turn that feature into benefits, and then drill deeper to get at the core benefits?

Good green marketing usually involves showing the benefits both to the customers themselves and to the world as a whole. In this case, the feature is a system to capture waste water from relatively clean uses like sinks and showers, and use it again to water lawns, flush toilets, etc.

The primary benefits are reduced water use and less water contamination. On the personal benefit side, that means lower water bills. Municipal water is artificially cheap in many developed countries, just as oil used to be, so thats a relatively weak benefit. Can we find any deeper personal benefits? How about this: by recycling the water, there is less need to draw down the water supply, which in turn keeps it available for other uses. OK, so if the aquifer is drawn down more slowly, it can recharge properly—and that keeps the water clean and pure.

Ah ha! Now there are both health and aesthetic benefits! The feature of clean and pure water turns into the benefit of staying healthy, not getting sick—and also the benefit of water that is not only good for you, but tastes good, too. This in turn means the customer doesn’t have to go out and spend money on bottled water, because the tap water is good enough to drink. So now we have two economic benefits (tap water lasts longer and therefore costs less, and eliminating the need to buy water bottles) as well as a health benefit because the water stays pure.

Let’s turn to the social goods. More water is available for other uses—and fewer oil-based plastic bottles are needed. If we accept Bill Roth’s statement (see book review) that 5000 kids die every day from lack of good water, we now see a clear benefit to conserving through recycling the graywater: we stop kids from dying. Add that to the benefit of protecting the water supply for our own kids and grandkids in the generations to come, and not squandering that resource the way we’ve squandered oil for so many years, and it should be pretty easy to write some powerful marketing copy.

Special Limited-Time Offer: Grassroots Marketing at Almost Half Off

Looking for GREAT information on how to

• Write get-noticed press releases that stand out in a crowd
• Create marketing copy that gets inside the prospect’s head and unleashes “buy-juice”
• Use winning strategies to get business at trade shows, over the phone, and in sales presentations
• Market successfully online (9 whole chapters)
• And much more

It’s all in the pages of my award-winning fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World. Normally, $22.95. But since May is officially Business Image Improvement Month (according to Chase’s Annual Events), I decided to help  you build your business image more affordably by saving money on this 306-page roadmap to better, more affordable marketing.

This month only: pick yours up for only $12 plus shipping (paperback) or $10 with no shipping cost (e-book).

Preview: https://frugalmarketing.com/gm.shtml

Order: https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=75&products_id=235

Extra Value: Add a copy of either Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green or Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers for only $15 more.

Another Recommended Book: The Secret Green Sauce

The Secret Green Sauce: Best Practices being used by actual green entrepreneurs and businesses to grow sustainable revenues and profits, by Bill Roth (self-published, 2009)

Like my own Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, Roth demonstrates that going green is very good for business. Not only is it the right thing to do, it’s also highly profitable. (He cites one sustainable coffee certification that grew at an astounding 106% per year.)

And sometimes, the right thing to do is long overdue. Roth is deeply troubled that we flush our toilets and water our lawns with clean water, while around the world, 5000  babies die every day for lack of clean water. (Editor’s note: There are technologies, like graywater recycling, which has been around for at least three decades, that could drastically reduce our water waste. There are also easy steps we as consumers can take, like turning the water off while we brush our teeth or wash something, except for the few seconds when we’re wetting our toothbrush or sponge.) But ultimately, business not only needs to help us get there, but it is showing leadership; many companies, for instance, have pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020. We could debate about whether this is fast enough, but it’s a huge turnaround from the attitude of a decade ago that it didn’t matter.

How do you know when your green program is successful? 1, it actually works, and 2, it’s sustainable. And in order to achieve that, Roth recommends being both green and a price-leader. This is in keeping with my own observation that the best green programs appeal to both personal self-interest and planetary good.

What Roth calls the “awareness consumer” is a huge and growing segment, which had already reached $10 trillion per year (85% of that controlled by women) by the time he went to press. He offers many strategies to monetize that segment. And he notes that workers in green teams at their workplace start being change agents at home and in their neighborhoods. Also, workers in green buildings are demonstrably more productive, and green companies also boast typically higher stock valuations. Cool!

Yet making dollar savings the only criterion for starting green initiatives is short-sighted, in Roth’s opinion. Many great green initiatives take longer to pay back than the two years CFOs typically look for, and they get left on the table, along with the revenue they would have brought in. “Siloization” is another enemy of greening the corporate world, and too many initiatives fall victim to turf battles or simple death-by-bureaucracy.

In short, this brief book has a lot to offer. It would have had even more to offer if Roth had worked with a good book shepherd. The editing is poor, there’s no index, and the interior design reminds me entirely too much of a book I typeset myself in a word processor in 1985, before I knew anything about publishing. We book shepherds can make a big difference.

Hear & Meet Shel

May

• May 18, from 1 to probably around 2:30 pm ET (10-11:30 PT), master copywriter Ray Edwards and I will have a conversation about ethical, green marketing and the relationship of religion and ethics. This winter, I made a huge purge of many of the e-newsletters I’d been reading–and Ray’s was one I kept, because I found enormous value in it. Ray is a devout Christian, and lately his newsletters mixed about equal amounts of marketing advice and insights into his relationship with Christ. I am a non-Christian and not-very-religious Jew who does believe in spiritual guidance. It should be a very interesting conversation. Click here to get the call information: https://frugalmarketing.com/rayedwards Register even if you can’t make the call, and you’ll get a link to the recording afterward, at no charge. Ray and I will be selling the interview later, so here’s your chance to get it without paying.
• Once again, I’ll be attending Book Expo America, May 24-26 in New York City

July

• Interview on “Who You Calling Old,” Monday, July 11, 10:30 a.m. ET/7:30 a.m. PT, https://www.blogtalkradio.com/who-you-calling-old
• Interview by Mari-Lyn Harris on Blog Talk radio, July 12, 1 pm ET/10 am. I don’t have the link yet, but you can probably find her page on BlogTalkRadio.com
• Speaking at SolarFest, Tinmouth, VT, Sunday, July 17, 12:30 p.m.: “Green And Profitable: Harnessing the Marketing Advantages of Going Green”

Friends Who Want to Help

(Some of these are affiliate links–if you want to know about any particular link, please ask)

• Whether you’re an author, entrepreneur, business person or a stay at home mom with an inspired idea – New York Times Bestselling author Peggy McColl has the tried and true formula to propel YOUR message like a rocket through the virtual world. https://peggys99things.com/ Judy O’Beirn, President of Hasmark Services, and Peggy McColl, NYTimes Bestselling author, collaborated on this book.  What that means for you is that you’re getting a ‘behind the curtain’ peak inside two of the brightest minds in online marketing today.
• The always-brilliant Marcia Yudkin has been on a mission to prove that you can be an introvert and still be a highly successful marketer. Visit https://shelhorowitz.com/go/introvertmarketing/ to view her inexpensive new program, Marketing in Tune With Your Personality. I’ve known Marcia since the late 1980s. She was impressive then, and she’s impressive now.
• My friend Jim Donovan told me that when I went to JV Alert a few months ago, I must look up his friends Julie Booz and Rick Toone. Not only did I meet them, they did a TV interview with me–and with a whole bunch of other folks attending (some of the best and brightest in the Internet marketing world). Watch a trailer for it at https://bit.ly/jo1e1E (I’m the second person shows, right after Cori Padgett). You might recognize Warren Whitlock, Willie Crawford, and other luminaries in the footage.
• “How to Use Twitter in Just 15 Minutes a Day” – 13 Book Marketing and Social Media Experts Share Tips, Tools and Shortcuts to Getting the Most Out of Your Time on Twitter. No-cost report from Shelley Hitz includes a contribution from me. Download at https://www.self-publishing-coach.com/support-files/social-media-tips-from-the-experts.pdf (no squeeze page, automatic instant download)
• Another freebie (this one does require a name and e-mail): Mickie Kennedy of E-Releases offers a Beginner’s Guide to Writing Powerful Press Releases. I haven’t looked at the book, but I have had very good luck with putting a press release on his service.  https://shelhorowitz.com/go/pressrelease/

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter, April 2011

Contents:

• This Month’s Tip: Create Your Energy Legacy
• Recording Now Available: Social Media for Terrified Authors
• Another Recommended Book
• Hear & Meet Shel
• Friends Who Want to Help

This Month’s Tip: Create Your Energy Legacy

How would you like to:

• Slash your operating costs by anywhere from hundreds to millions of dollars every year?
• Reduce greenhouse gases and thus help the world reach the carbon targets necessary to stave off catastrophic climate change
• Push global social policy from a suicidal/homicidal course toward true sustainability?

Then it’s time to become an activist AND a role model on climate change, water and energy conservation, and sustainability. And to remember that successful activism involves marketing.

Some of you have been reading my marketing column all the way back to 1997. Some of you have read one or more of my books, which lay out marketing tactics and strategies simply and clearly and thoroughly. It time for you to take that knowledge and use it to help both yourself and the world.

A rapid shift away from fossil, nuclear, and biofuel and into safe, renewable efficient energy policy has to happen now, and it has to be pushed by the private sector. At least in the United States, where I live, it is painfully clear that the government isn’t going to be much help. Want to know why? Read this blog post I wrote: https://greenandprofitable.com/the-climate-crisis-why-global-warming-matters/ (And if you want a little taste of why nuclear is not the answer read this post: https://greenandprofitable.com/nuke-problems-in-japan-make-it-clear-no-more-nukes-elsewhere/)

You, as a business owner, will benefit hugely from your efforts. You, as a leader of environmentally friendly business, can capitalize enormously on your activism, because your business will be seen far more positively. This translates to opportunities under every rock and tree—to build partnerships and referrals, to gain media coverage, to get passed around on social media, and more (I wrote a whole book about how to do this: Guerilla Marketing Goes Green).

And as a resident of Planet Earth, you will also gain the operational advantages of reduced costs…the health advantages of a sustainable climate based on nonpolluting, nongreenhosue gas emitting, nonradioactive technologies…and the deep satisfaction of knowing you did your part to ensure the health of the planet for your children’s children’s children.

Whole books have been written on how to achieve this—but let me give you a few specific ideas:

• Look for savings you can grab by increasing efficiency and conservation; many businesses can save 50 to 80 percent of their energy and water by taking relatively simple measures. TIP: I am giving away my $9.95 e-book, Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life—With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle, during the month of April (in honor of Earth Day). About 80 of those tips cost little or nothing to implement; this is the “low-hanging fruit.” Implement a tip or two every day, and in a couple of months, you’ll have a much Greener profile and be saving energy and water. Visit https://painlessgreenbook.com/earthday and use the code EARTHDAY.
• Remember to factor in transmission losses, and thus look for power sources as close to the place of use as possible. For example, it’s generally more efficient to put a solar array in your own yard or on the roof than to send it across wires from some remote site in the desert, because a big chunk of that desert electricity will be lost as the electricity moves across vast distances.
• Think about how to be more green in the ongoing maintenance and replacement you’re doing anyway. If you’re replacing a laser printer, get one that prints on both sides (and train your staff to use it whenever it makes sense). When you need a new roof, consider a planted (“green roof”), superinsulated, or photovoltaic roofing material. When your vehicle fleet needs an upgrade, think about electric, hybrid, or high-MPG vehicles (or, for some purposes, bicycles!)
• Think about training yourself to do the really easy lifestyle changes. Keep a ceramic coffee cup in your office and say good-bye to disposable cups. Use reusable cloth towels, rags, and sponges instead of throw-away paper products. Bring cloth tote bags to the supermarket (keep them in your car).

This, of course, is just the beginning. The e-book will give you plenty of other ideas, and there are many more resources beyond that. Do your part!

Recording Now Available: Social Media for Terrified Authors

Social Media for Terrified Authors: How to Turn Scary Into Success, with Shel Horowitz and book coach/social media maven Judy Cullins.

• Have an impact on the three major social media networks in just minutes a day: control social media and keep it from controlling you
• Understand how to spread your content around the Internet with just a couple of clicks: more ROI for less work
• Turn social media connections into website traffic, book sales, and client gigs without spending any money to do it.
• Increase your credibility as a savvy expert.
• Define and find your book’s target audience on the big 3 social media marketing sites–and market directly to the exact people who can benefit from your book.
• Get your website or blog pages highly ranked on Google and other search engines.

Just $19.95, and includes several valuable bonuses.

https://www.frugalmarketing.com/cart/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=67&products_id=234

Another Recommended Book

The Truth About Trust in Business: How to Enrich the Bottom Line, Improve Retention, and Build Valuable Relationships for Success, by Vanessa Hall (with help from Mandy Holloway, James Adonis, Fiona Pearman, David Penglase, and Iven Frangi) (Austin: Emerald Book Co, 2009)

Reviewed by Shel Horowitz, GreenAndProfitable.com

When reviewing a book about trust in business, the first question is how does it stack up against Stephen M.R. Covey’s wonderful The Speed of Trust. And the answer is that they’re quite different. I’d recommend reading Covey first; he gives a thorough grounding in the basics, and lots of examples.

But also read Hall’s book. Hall and her friends explore some deeper parts of the landscape, with fresh perspectives, and some visual aids that may make the whole thing more understandable to visual learners.

Hall’s first lesson in the fragility of trust was delivered by her then-nine-year-old son, who accused her of breaking “we might” statements that he saw as “we would”—in other words, promises.

As she explored the territory her son’s accusation had opened up, she began a career in corporate compliance, and that in turn led to looking at how to go from fixing problems to making things right in the first place.

Hall and her co-authors explore some interesting territory, such as the difference between customer expectations around implicit versus explicit promises (and how the former can often trip up even a caring business), and four distinctly different types of trust.

Building trust has numerous advantages for businesses. Rebuilding trust that’s been shattered—a huge challenge—can have especially large rewards. The authors cite a furniture manufacturer almost doubled production, cut work hours without reducing pay, slashed delivery time and changed a company experiencing 60 percent turnover all he way down to 1 precedent with a four-year waiting list to work there. How’s that for a convincing bottom-line argument in favor of building trust?

A few more high points:

• When listening, aim to understand, rather than to respond in kind
• Maintain your values; if they go, so will your passion
• Follow the ten-point checklist for customer expectations (pp. 206-07)—which includes being told the truth
• Ask questions of your prospects that facilitate, rather than obstruct, the sales process
• Every interaction with your business is a chance for the customer or prospect to discover your organization’s true character
• Organizations that have not built trust are “brittle”: rigid and easily damaged—while those that have are not only flexible but “magnetic”—they attract new business easily
• Perhaps the best insight of all: customers have a vested interest in your success, because it makes you easier for them to deal with—and thus, you can turn to them for guidance and they will be wiling participants in improving your business and building their trust

Note: The book lacks a desperately-needed index (WHY do publishers do this?), so take good notes while you read, and jot down page numbers.

Hear & Meet Shel

April

• Thursday, April 21st, 2011 Speaking at the CRM Summit in Istanbul, Turkey (which means I will NOT exhibit this year at Amherst Sustainability Festival, after all)
• Wednesday, April 27, noon ET/9 a.m. PT: Sales guru Mike Krause interviews me on green marketing: https://www.blogtalkradio.com/salessense/2011/04/27/sales-sense-reality-talk-show-hosted-by-mike-krause-with-guest-shel-horowitz
• Thursday, April 28, 1 pm ET/10 a.m. PT: Becky Cortino interviews me on Green Marketing for Biz Buzz: https://www.blogtalkradio.com/bizbuzz Becky is a master networker who has reached out consistently over time, and I’ll bet she does a terrific interview.

May

• May 18, from 1 to probably around 2:30 pm ET (10-11:30 PT), master copywriter Ray Edwards and I will have a conversation about ethical, green marketing and the relationship of religion and ethics. This winter, I made a huge purge of many of the e-newsletters I’d been reading–and Ray’s was one I kept, because I found enormous value in it.  Ray is a devout Christian, and lately his newsletters have turned away from marketing advice and toward his relationship with Christ. I am a non-Christian and not-very-religious Jew who does believe in spiritual guidance. It should be a  very interesting conversation. Click here to get the call information. Register even if you can’t make the call, and you’ll get a link to the recording afterward, at no charge. Ray and I will be selling the interview later, so here’s your chance to get it without paying.
• Once again, I’ll be attending Book Expo America, May 24-26 in New York City, and possibly IBPA University May 22- 23

Friends Who Want to Help

LEARN HOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL JV BROKER

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know I’m a huge believer in partnerships and alliances. They are the best way I know to build credibility AND sales by going into a market “on the arm” of someone already known and trusted there—someone whose endorsement opens doors and lets you benefit.

My long-time friend Willie Crawford has teamed up with my new friend Sohail Khan (who I met at JV Alert and liked enough that I gave him some very specific advice on how to partner with a certain very prominent marketer on a book project) to offer a really good looking training program on how to be a JV broker: the person who brings JV partners together and takes away a very healthy commission (I’m working with a JV broker right now on a project, and I can tell you, it’s a lucrative and fun way to make a living). Willie knows this space very well; he’s brokered JV deals for many years. He’s also a really nice guy with a strong commitment to doing things the right way.

Check it out for yourself: https://shelhorowitz.com/go/WillieJVTraining

SKILL HIGHWAY: A FABULOUS RESOURCE

Dan Page is starting a marvelous entrepreneur portal called Skill Highway, with a ton of information for entrepreneurs, including one article from me so far, and more to follow. Here is a link to a short video Dan gave produced where he describes a strategy he uses to create new customers and revenue.  He explains how he used it last year to generate $1.7 Million in new business for a start-up with no customers and zero marketing budget. (I’ve used this strategy often, for myself and for many of my clients.)

To watch the video, please visit https://shelhorowitz.com/go/SkillHwy.  And be sure to join Skill Highway!

Oh, and Dan being such a nice guy, he has a special offer just for you: Join as a Premium member and he’ll throw in a copy of his $189 e-book, “Positioning For Profits.”  It outlines 16 strategies and tactics he’s used over the last 34 years to generate millions for himself and his clients.

ACTIVISTS AND BUSINESSES CAN BOTH BENEFIT FROM THIS

In her forthcoming (May, 2010) book, Collective Visioning: How Groups Can Work Together for a Just and Sustainable World, long-time social justice activist Linda Stout details a practical process that enables everyone to work together, showing in practical terms how to build trust, ensure that each and every voice is heard, create a positive vision, and develop an action plan that leverages everyone’s abilities. This process creates hope for change, even among those who’ve stopped believing that change is possible. I met Linda years ago and was quite impressed with her, but then we lost touch. This weekend, I went to a workshop she was co-leading at the National Conference on Media Reform, and it was the best part of the whole weekend. I got an advance copy in PDF form and I was just as impressed with the book. Learn more and preorder now at https://lindastout.org/

In this Issue…

• This Month’s Tip: Five More Reasons to Do Social Media
• Another Recommended Book: The New Rules of Green Marketing
• Hear & Meet
• Friends Who Want to Help

Don’t Forget!

Social Media for Terrified Authors: How to Turn Scary Into Success: Wednesday, March 30 (good for non-authors, too). Two social media experts (I’m one of them) will give some great training, just $19.95. Details and link in the Hear And Meet section.

PS–Remember that I pay commissions if you find me new corporate/organizational (non-media) markets for my columns, a full-price speaking gig, or a marketing or publishing consulting client. Write for details: (click here to contact Shel via email)

This Month’s Tip: Five More Reasons to Do Social Media

I’ve talked in this space before about some of the more typical reasons to do social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the many smaller networks)—things like zero cost, links from high-traffic and well-regarded sites, and the ability to reach people of great influence.

Today, let’s go a little deeper:

Stay on Top of the Conversation
Do you know what people are saying about you? In today’s world, messages can spiral out of control very quickly. And a lot of companies haven’t figured out that their reputations are at risk if they’re not paying attention.

I was impressed a couple of weeks ago when I posted something negative about FedEx, and within an hour, got Tweeted back by @FedExLina, with some helpful suggestions. Here is a company that is paying attention. Too often, a negative message goes out into cyberspace, gets retweeted, shared on Facebook, maybe even blogged about, and the company continues to ignore it. Not a smart strategy. But the time the mainstream media get hold of it, a lot of damage may be done.

Keep Informed…And Informing
Where did I first hear about last week’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan? On Facebook. Where did I first learn about the peril those events caused at several nuclear power generation reactors on Japan’s northern coast? On Twitter. Following people who regularly share news events gives you a quick capsule summary, which you can click through to learn more. Nuclear safety has been a concern of mine for a long time. I actually wrote two articles about earthquake risks to nuclear plants in 1979.

Grab Short-Lived Opportunities
Things move fast in Cyberspace. Opportunities flit by, and if you’re paying attention, you can benefit. I’ve gotten tons of media exposure, speaking gigs (including my first-ever international speech), conference exhibit opportunities, and more by following social media and reacting quickly.

Amplify Your Reach
In social media, one post can reach many audiences. You can easily set up your WordPress and your Facebook Fan Page blog to post headlines and links to your status updates on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Plaxo, and the entire post to Facebook Notes. You can use a number of tools including MarketMeSuite, HootSuite, TweetDeck, Tobri, or Ping to post a status update to multiple networks. I often get more comments on the Facebook version of my blog than my actual blog page. Caution: Make sure you DON’T set up an endless loop where, for instance, Twitter posts to Facebook which then posts to Twitter. That would make you very unpopular, very quickly.

This may sound overwhelming, but it’s really not. Judy Cullins and I will demystify it for you on March 30.

I’m also available for individual consulting and training on social media, or even to do your social media for you.
 

Another Recommended Book: The New Rules of Green Marketing

Another Recommended Book: The New Rules of Green Marketing: Strategies, Tools, and Inspiration for Sustainable Branding, by Jacquelyn A. Ottman (Berrett-Koehler, 2011)

With its many big-corporation examples, extensive use of research-based statistics, and numerous charts, graphs, bullet points, and checklists, this is a green marketing book that could be widely adopted by green MBA programs. And true to its title, there are lots of rules—as well as big strategic questions starting right from the beginning (the first group is on page 21). But even if you’re not an MBA student, and your business is much smaller-scale, there’s a lot of wisdom here.

It’s also one of the most holistic green marketing books I’ve seen, considering whole-lifecycle processes such as energy and water used in manufacture and transportation, and questions of end-of-life disposal in determining whether a particular path is actually green. This depth of insight plays out especially well in her section on holistic product design, and in her examination of various tradeoffs in greenness. But always, she rightly insists, green products have to deliver the same quality and value; the market won’t put up anymore with the shoddy design of some ’70s and ’80s-era green products, and they don’t have to, because today’s green products are as good as their “brown” competitors, if not better.

As a consultant to many large companies, Ottman has learned a thing or two about the complexities of moving society down a greener path, one business initiative at a time. And she points out that brands themselves have to position themselves as green, because if there are no certification labels, a brand’s reputation determines whether it finds favor with green consumers. She concludes the book with profiles of two such brands, Starbucks (not the greenest coffee company by a long shot, but the one that buys the most organic and fair-trade coffee) and Timberland.

Those green consumers, she points out, are segmented in many different ways: from shade of green to age group (each of which responds best to its own particular marketing hot buttons). Oddly, she examines boomers, and Gens X, Y, and Z—but not elders. In my experience, elders (born before or during World War II) include a strong cohort of environmentally concerned and actively involved citizens, drawn to green buying because of both health and environmental concerns, and bringing a long-term perspective—they remember life before our instant/plastic/packaged current reality, and in many cases, they have quite a bit of disposable income. She also fails to differentiate urban, suburban and rural audiences, and—having lived in both megacities and small villages—I can tell you there are huge differences in the way you want to market to these different demographics.

But these are a minor quibbles. It’s a book well worth reading (and taking notes from), and an excellent companion to my own Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.

Hear & Meet

March

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

• April 8-10 I plan to attend the National Conference on Media Reform, in Boston. I’ve attended two previous conferences and am always blown away. If you’re interested in the impact of corporate media on our culture, progressive politics, or exploring the diversified world of D-I-Y (do-it-yourself) independent media—everything from setting up a blog to running your own TV station), this is a must. And if you happen to be in the Amherst/Northampton, MA area, let’s talk about carpooling. I’m thrilled to attend one that won’t require getting on a plane!
• Saturday, April 23rd, 2011 10 AM-4 PM, my wife D. Dina Friedman and I will exhibit again at Amherst Sustainability Festival in downtown Amherst, MA
• Wednesday, April 27, noon ET/9 a.m. PT: Sales guru Mike Krause interviews me on green marketing: https://www.blogtalkradio.com/salessense/2011/04/27/sales-sense-reality-talk-show-hosted-by-mike-krause-with-guest-shel-horowitz
• Thursday, April 28, 1 pm ET/10 a.m. PT: Becky Cortino interviews me on Green Marketing for Biz Buzz: https://www.blogtalkradio.com/bizbuzz Becky is a master networker who has reached out consistently over time, and I’ll bet she does a terrific interview.

• May 18, from 1-3 pm ET (10-noon PT), master copywriter Ray Edwards and I will take turns interviewing each other. This winter, I made a huge purge of many of the e-newsletters I’d been reading–and Ray’s was one I kept, because I find enormous value in it. I’ll be interviewing him about ethics in Internet marketing, and he’ll be asking me about the green side of marketing. I don’t know yet if we’ll be broadcasting live or (more likely, I suspect) breaking it up into two calls to be shared later. But you may want to keep that date clear, in case we are live.
• Once again, I’ll be attending Book Expo America, May 24-26 in New York City, and probably IBPA University May 22- 23

June

• TENTATIVE, LIVE IN WESTERN MASS: I think I’m hosting a training with Bob “The Teacher” Jenkins, a very smart guy who I’ve shared a stage with in Florida and enjoyed hanging out with on a couple of conferences. We’re thinking about Thursday, June 16. More details next month.

Friends Who Want to Help

No-Cost Webinar with Lev Natan: Access the Mythic Power of Your Business

Lev just did a very thoughtful interview with me for another project. As someone who is discovering and enhancing the mythic power of my own business, I found out about this webinar he’s doing, and wanted to share it with you:

Our times are calling us to live in the mythic dimension and become the heroes that we so often seek outside ourselves. To do this, we must weave together our desire for meaning and purpose with our practical work in the world.  In this webinar, learn about the direct connection between your stress levels and your sense of purpose; how your mythic sense makes you distinct in your market place; the power to recharge and sustain your energy; and how to create goals that are truly in alignment with your heart’s purpose. During the webinar, he’s going to bring you through a transformational process where you will take the first step towards integrating your mythic Self into you business. Visit www.thesocialentrepreneursquest.com to sign up.

Living the Life of My Dreams: Essays & Interviews with 30 Ordinary People Living EXTRAordinary Lives will become a bestseller, according to Caryn FitzGerald, who put the project together. I’m amazed at how many friends and colleagues of mine have chapters in this book, among them Lillian and Dave Brummet, Stacey Kannenberg, Angela Lussier, and Sally Shileds. 35 cool bonuses, but you may not see them, as the official bonus period is over. However, Caryn assures me that any purchaser will have access for a few more days (they include such things as The New Rules of Success, networking 101, Oceanic Mind Deep Meditation, even a Personal Sleep Quiz: Living the Life of Your Dreams

Bouncing Back From Loss: How to Learn From Your Past, Build The Present, and Transform Your Future Donna Marie Thompson will give you a blueprint to learn from life’s lessons. She herself lost her mother, her man, her money and then her health. Some people would give up… but Donna chose a path that will inspire you.

Huge bonus package: 217 gifts including one from me. But Warren Whitlock, who is organizing the campaign, says, “The greater value will come in the lessons you learn and blueprint Donna shares.” https://BestSellerAuthors.com/bounce

Big Wave Surfing: Extreme Technology Development, Management, Marketing & Investing by Kenneth J. Thurber Ph.D. explains why so many of our greatest companies got started *in a recession.* Big Wave Surfing presents the issues of our innovation-based, technology driven economy in an understandable form through the exciting analogy of big wave surfing. It’s written for entrepreneurs, investors, managers, or anybody who wants to glide into the flow of abundance just like riding a big wave.

Learn More: https://www.bigwavesurfingbook.com/promo/

As usual, some of the links in this newsletter will earn me a small commission if you choose to purchase. And once again, they are not listed here because of the money they could make me, but as a way of providing value to you by sharing things that I think will benefit you.

Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter, February 2011

Lessons from the Ritz-Carlton, San Francisco

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ritz-Carlton

Shel Horowitz

In Residence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons From Things the Ritz Did Right:

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

Lessons From Things the Ritz Could Have Done Better

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://www.byebyeboringbio.com

Hear & Meet Shel

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

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

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

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

Friends Who Want to Help

By Shel Horowitz, painlessgreenbook.com (666 words)

In the year 2050, I predict that there won’t be an oil crisis anymore. The world will have largely moved away from fossil and biomass fuels, in favor of sustainable, renewable, and clean energy solutions such as solar, wind, hydro, and geothermal.

But if we don’t shift our behavior, what our grandchildren will be facing could be far, far worse: a water crisis.

As a society, we don’t just waste water—we squander it. Billions of gallons of good fresh water go tumbling down our pipes and sewers, gone forever. And when our children’s children struggle to find enough clean water to live, they will be pretty angry at our generation for letting it get so bad.

See, unlike fossil fuels, which can easily be replaced by safer, cleaner, sustainable alternatives, there is no substitute for water. We can protect our water supplies by keeping them clean, we can make them last longer by using less. But we need water to live. When we’re born, our bodies are 78 percent water. As adults, 55 to 60 percent of our bodies is water, and some of the most important parts of us use even more: 70 percent of our brains, 83 percent of our blood, and nearly 90 percent of our lungs.[1]

And while much water use goes to agricultural and industrial processes over which we as individuals have no control, the good news is that there are many easy free or cheap steps we can take to drastically reduce our home water waste and conserve this vital resource for future generations.

In fact, for many people, it’s probably easier to reduce water use in and around the home than any other resource—because so few people have even thought about it. A typical household can easily reduce water consumption by 50 to 80 percent, just by thinking differently.

Here are four easy no-cost steps among many every household can take:

Reduce Toothbrushing Water Waste by 90 Percent or More: Wet the toothbrush with a small trickle of water, and then turn the water off! Turn it back on to rinse the toothpaste off the brush at the end. A family of four could save hundreds of gallons every month just from this simple trick.

Switch from Bottled Water to Filtered Tap Water, if you live in a place where the tap water is good enough to drink (which it is in many parts of the world). Too often, bottled water is an environmental disaster! Bottling consumes petroleum and typically wastes or contaminates several times as much water as goes in the bottle—and bottling plants can draw down the local water supply, causing problems for agriculture and for local residents. Plus, the carbon footprint of transporting the water around the world is significant. For comparable flavor and health, use a simple, inexpensive home water filtering system, which will lower your costs and produce far less waste. For times you need a water bottle because you’re out and about, fill a reusable bottle or cup from your water filter—or invest in a reusable bottle with a built-in filter so you can fill up from unfiltered taps and fountains without worry.

Stop Temperature-Related Water Waste: Don’t let the water run until it gets cold enough. Fill a bottle and refrigerate it so you always have cold water with no waste.

Recapture and Reuse: When you have old water in your tea kettle, cooking pot, or reusable water bottle, use it to water plants, presoak dishes, etc., instead of dumping it down the drain.

These four simple tips are only the beginning. We can all save tens of thousands of gallons of water in our lifetimes by looking for ways to let the water run less often, and with less force.  You’ll find 28 different water-saving tips in my <a href=” https://painlessgreenbook.com”>e-book, Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life-With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle</a>.

Shel Horowitz, shel at greenandprofitable.com, shows you how to “reach green, socially conscious consumers with marketing that has THEM calling YOU.” He writes the Green And Profitable/Green and Practical columns and is the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (John Wiley & Sons, 2010).

[1] https://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/propertyyou.html

What do you do when there’s no clear eco-friendly choice—when you have to balance competing claims of environmental benefit against competing harms?

In January, I spoke at the Sustainable Foods Summit in San Francisco. My challenge to the other attenders was to achieve a food system that combines the artisan quality and chemical/petroleum independence of pre-20th century food production with the massive volume and ability to feed hungry people of the 20th century Green Revolution, while achieving the distribution necessary to end hunger.

Conflicting Priorities

That sounds great, in theory. But how do we get there? And what trade-offs do we have to make along the way?

Some of the other speakers had their own ideas about the rocky road ahead, not just in food sustainability but a host of related issues. Among the many concerns they raised:

·      Is it better to switch to no-till farming, which dramatically alleviates soil erosion but is very difficult to do without herbicides—or to build up soil quality naturally through organic or biodynamic methods, and hope that the soil doesn’t blow away in the meantime?

·      What is the real benefit of using biodegradable plastics (such as compostable cutlery or packaging) if the sources of corn or potatoes for these plastics are genetically modified plants? And when food is scarce in many parts of the world, do we really want to divert cropland from food to plastic (or energy) production?

·      Which is more sustainable: a lightweight plastic bag made from virgin materials (i.e., petroleum), or a plastic clamshell using 40 times as much material, but made from recycled water bottles?

Is there a “right answer” to these kinds of questions? The answer is situational. For the wheat growers of Washington State where a foot of topsoil has disappeared in the last 40 years, the no-till method sounds pretty compelling. In a different landscape, ravaged by chemical pollution, the organic argument would probably win out.

When the Benefits Line Up

Of course, there are many situations where a clearer path exists. If all the stars align in a single direction, the choice is easy. For instance, the conference heard from dairy cooperative Organic Valley’s Theresa Marquez about the benefits of their approach: Organic farming creates richer and darker soil that is far better able to hold water and nutrients…organic cows fed a diet high in flaxseed oil produce more of the essential nutrient Omega-3 while decreasing the output of methane (a greenhouse gas linked even more heavily to global warming than carbon dioxide)—and they typically live up to three times longer than conventional-agriculture cows, which allows farms to be economically sustainable as well.

Marquez also noted that many of her member farms are planting some acreage in oilseed crops such as sunflowers, which can power a farm’s trucks and tractors, feed its livestock and generate revenues.

The Challenges We Already Meet

Other speakers provided hope for meeting those difficult challenges mentioned earlier, by showing how their organizations are already surmounting equally difficult challenges. For example, Maisie Greenawalt of Bon Appetit Management Company (a food service provider to college, corporate, and organization cafeterias) inspired attenders with stories of converting institutional food service from slop to gourmet treats with fresh ingredients, and being profitable even while allowing college students unlimited trips to the (expensive, locally sourced, naturally raised non-antibiotic-treated beef) burger bar.

Not all sustainable food initiatives are local, of course. Fair trade—which, by definition, means products are crossing international borders—was also a much-discussed. From its beginnings in coffee, fair trade has olive oil, herbs, tea, cocoa, sugar, bananas, and many others. Fair trade ensures that the farmer makes a decent livelihood and has good working conditions, and the fair trade movement is spreading into such areas as bridge loans for farmers who only get paid once a year.

And more and more companies are producing goods that are not only fairly traded but also organic, providing sustainability not only to the farmers but to consumers as well.

Big…Or Little?

While once the province of tiny little artisan firms, these products and processes are breaking out of their niches. More and more of the major players in the food industry are making shelf space or production line space for organic, natural, and fairly traded goods, and many of the smaller companies have been bought up by industry giants. While this came up frequently at the conference, questions about the roles of multinationals versus tiny independents will have to wait for another time.

Shel Horowitz, shel at greenandprofitable.com, shows you how to “reach green, socially conscious consumers with marketing that has THEM calling YOU.” He writes the Green And Profitable/Green and Practical columns and is the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (John Wiley & Sons, 2010).

Please note: Starting next month, we’ll be shifting our publishing schedule to on or about the 15th–so don’t panic when we don’t show up between the 5th and 8th as usual. It’ll be between the 15th and 18th from now on.

In This Issue…

• Column Update: Like to Make $200 Per Sale?
• Are You Throwing Away Your Opportunities? Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, January 2011
• Hear & Meet
• Friends Who Want to Help

Column Update: Like to Make $200 Per Sale?

Did you see in last month’s newsletter that I’m self-syndicating a monthly column called Green And Profitable? It’s off an running, and there’s quite a bit of news—including an opportunity for you to earn some significant bucks. Here’s a quick update:

1. Along with the green business column, Green And Profitable, I’m introducing a companion column for consumers: Green And Practical.
2. In addition to offering both columns to media (at $10 per column insertion, currently), and to individuals ($10 for a six-month subscription), I’ve decided to offer the columns to corporations and organizations who might want to “private-label” them: issue them as if they had published the columns, and distribute to their own subscribers, customers, or prospects. I’m charging these organizations just 25 cents per subscriber, per year, which works out to about two cents per reader per issue.
3. This new model presents an income opportunity for you: if you connect me directly with a specific person who buys the right to private-label the columns ($1200 and up), you can earn a commission. Here are the specifics:

• If you set me up directly with a client who buys column rights, I’ll pay you $200—that’s if you make the introduction.
• If you don’t set me up, but give me the contact and I can use your name, I’ll pay you $100 if your contact makes the buy.
• If you don’t give me a specific contact but are the first to suggest an organization that buys the rights, I’ll pay you $25.
• Suggest either or both of the columns to a publication that you read or subscribe to, and if they agree, I’ll give you your choice of any of my e-books (sorry, but with total sale of only $60 for six months or $120 for a year, I can’t pay cash commission; there are costs in administering and writing the column).

Think about who you know. I’ll be here :-).  shel (at) principledprofit.com

Are You Throwing Away Your Opportunities? Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, January 2011

Happy New Year! I love symmetrical dates like last Saturday’s 1/1/11. We’ll have three more dates with all 1s this year: one later this month and two in November.

Looking out over the fields of the farm I live on, I was reminded of our luscious organic garden. This year, we had a particularly bountiful harvest of hot peppers—to the point that I went down to the garden, picked five pounds of surplus, and brought the whole big bag to my neighbors’ farmstand. They sell produce from a bunch of local farms, usually labeled with the farm of origin and the town, and of course, the price.

So I was figuring mine would go out with something like “Grown right here on this farm by our neighbors, no pesticides or chemical fertilizers” and the price per pound (they can’t legally say organic, because for our home garden, we don’t go through any certification process.) With a sign like that, I would have expected my chiles to go flying out the door, and I would have had a steady market for the remaining two months of the season. But for some reason, they put my beautiful peppers in an out-of-the-way spot, with no sign at all. And there, they slowly shriveled over the next week or so. Needless to say, I didn’t bring them any more to sell.

A less personal example: I recently bought a box of crackers that had this message: “100% of the electricity used to manufacture these crackers and this container come from green power sources,” and has a nice little accompanying graphic of a windmill. Just above this is a Forest Stewardship Council certification logo denoting sustainably harvested timber sources for the box.

Unfortunately, both of these logos and statements are on the bottom panel of the box, where no one can see it unless they’ve already bought the crackers–or perhaps if the prospect accidentally knocks the package off the supermarket shelf, happens to land the bottom facing up, and somehow notices the small logos while picking up the box.

The lesson in both of these situations is that you have to be willing to talk about the advantages of dong business with you. Not in an obnoxious way, but sincerely, and in ways that show you’re proud of what you’ve created.

An additional lesson from the farmstand: make it easy for your customers to get the information they need. Failing to put a price on the display meant that anyone considering the peppers would have to go to the counter and ask—and that extra step is a disincentive.

After all, if your sets of benefits don’t convince yourself, why will they convince anyone else?

I have learned not to be shy about this. So let me remind you: If you’d like to know more about smart green marketing, pick up a copy of my award-winning and Environmental category bestselling eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson)—and register your purchase (from anywhere) on the Bonus page to collect more than $2000 worth of extra goodies.

Hear & Meet

January

Friends Who Want to Help

My co-author, Jay Conrad Levinson, “the Father of Guerilla Marketing,” has a few seats left in his next Guerrilla Marketing Intensive, at his Florida home (where I visited recently). 21 hours of training over three days, for $4997 (payable in up to four installments). Limited to just ten people, so this is pretty in-depth. https://shelhorowitz.com/go/rfHHY8Y

Another great no-cost teleseminar series, from Ken Foster, has invited many prominent social thinkers (like Stephen Covey (7 Habits of Highly Effective People) and Spencer Johnson (Who Moved My Cheese?), as well as a host of prominent Internet marketers like Lisa Sasevitch, Stefanie Hartman, Alex Mandossian, my good friend and book marketer extraordinare Penny Sanseveiri…a star-studded cast of 18 speakers. The URL isn’t live yet, so watch for a special mailing on or around February 1 giving all the details.

Unrelieved stress is a significant risk factor for heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, autoimmune disease, fibromyalgia, chronic pain syndromes, irritable bowel syndrome, insomnia, and asthma, among many other illnesses too numerous to name. THE WORRY SOLUTION, by Dr. Martin Rossman will teach you how to use your mind and brain to eliminate unnecessary suffering and the negative health impacts caused by worry. Buy the book today @ https://worrysolution.com/book/ and get a ton of amazing gifts!

NY Times bestselling author Marci Shimoff interviewed more than 150 Love Luminaries and uncovered 14 Love Keys to living in a state of unconditional love. She shows you how in Love for No Reason: 7 Steps to Creating a Life of Unconditional Love. She offers a breakthrough approach to experiencing a lasting state of unconditional love-the kind of love that doesn’t depend on another person, situation, or romantic partner. This is the key to lasting joy and fulfillment in life. Get it Today and get a TON of free gifts: https://www.TheLoveBook.com

The box says “100% of the electricity used to manufacture these crackers and this container come from green power sources,” and has a nice little accompanying graphic of a windmill. Just above this is a Forest Stewardship Council certification logo denoting sustainably harvested timber sources for the box.

This is a company that’s doing the right thing, right?

Wrong. Both of these logos and statements are on the bottom panel of the box, where no one can see it unless they’ve already bought the crackers—or perhaps if the prospect accidentally knocks the package off the supermarket shelf, happens to land the bottom facing up, and somehow notices the small logos while picking up the box.

In other words, the marketing benefit of their commitment is just slightly above zero.

This particular package has plenty of white space on the front panel, prime real estate that does have a heksher (Kosher certification logo) but otherwise, does very little marketing at all.

This cracker company (which I will not name publicly) is far from alone.

Another example, which I highlight as a case study in my talks, is the household paper products company, Marcal. When I ask my audiences what year they think Marcal switched to recycled paper, most of the answers tend to fall between 1985 and 2005. Occasionally someone will guess a year in the 1970s, especially if I call the company a pioneer in using recycled stock.

Not once has anyone guessed the correct answer—1950—or even the correct decade. Because, for too long, like the cracker company, Marcal kept its best marketing point hidden. Even though the company has been 100% recycled for more than 60 years, it was only in the past decade that it started incorporating this vital message into its packaging—and only since 2009 that environmental branding has become the central focus of its message to consumers.

You just have to wonder how much more toilet paper, napkins, tissues and paper towels the company would have sold if it had started bragging earlier. I know that when I first became aware of environmental concerns in the early 1970s, I would have been thrilled to find a cost-competitive brand that was also very green.

Like Marcal, the Swiss cereal company Familia has been using sustainable practices—in this case, buying grains from sustainable farms–for decades. But it was only early in 2010 that I noticed this was finally explained on its packaging.

These are three examples among hundreds.

Why do companies take the time and trouble to do good in the world, and then act like they’re embarrassed about it? Perhaps it’s a matter of corporate humility, not wanting to brag. In some cases, maybe it’s worry about being accused of greenwashing—an accusation that could definitely hurt.

In Marcal’s case, it may have started as a legitimate fear that people wouldn’t buy household paper made of other people’s castoffs, even if it was just their sterilized junkmail. In the conformist, status-conscious 1950s, it may not have been seen as a marketing strength, but as a liability.

But certainly by 1980 if not well before, what we now call Cultural Creatives were a well-established and rapidly growing marketing demographic. As far back as the 2000 publication of their book, The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World, Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson estimated that more than a quarter of all adults in the developed countries they studied fell into this category. A quarter of the population!

Greenwashing accusations are easily defused with one simple rule: tell the truth. As for corporate humility, it’s not doing those companies any favors. I see both a bottom-line advantage and a save-the-world benefit to trumpeting an honest green message. On the financial side, you’re able to market much more effectively to that vast market segment.

But even more to the point, you help make the world a better place. Every company that shares its green initiatives publicly shows consumers that there are sustainable alternatives, pressures competitors to also go green, and continues to generate momentum toward a better world.

Shel Horowitz, shel at greenandprofitable.com, shows you how to “reach green, socially conscious consumers with marketing that has THEM calling YOU.” He writes the Green And Profitable/Green and Practical columns and is the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green (John Wiley & Sons, 2010).