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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Planning Waaay Ahead

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

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

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

Click for details on call-in information 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• How to dominate your local market as a JV Dealmaker 

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

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

• From zero to $1.5 MM using joint venture strategies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Irish crafter at work

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

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

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

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

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

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

Asian noodle bar, Drogheda

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

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

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

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

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

Click for details on call-in information 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• How to dominate your local market as a JV Dealmaker 

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

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

• From zero to $1.5 MM using joint venture strategies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Planning Waaay Ahead

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

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

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

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

Examples:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Wrapping up our three-part series on Twitter. First, we looked at the advantages of Twitter for marketers, then last month, how to tweet for maximum benefit. We’ll finish out by discussing how not to be a jerk on Twitter.

My title is a little bit pushy, in that for some people, Twitter is exactly these things—but they have few human followers (robots don’t count) and no influence; it would have been more accurate to say, How Not to Use Twitter. But I didn’t think about that when I lined out the topic titles in March.

Remember the key principle: Twitter is only worth doing if you create a tweet stream that people want to read. Otherwise, there’s no point. Every person who follows you makes a decision whether to follow you. If they’re using a tool like TweetDeck or HootSuite, they also decide whether to place you in a most-favored column of people they pay close attention to you. In my case, I am following 5823 people as of May 12, when I’m writing this. But really, I’m paying attention to about 100 in my “must follow” column. So here are some pointers on what not to tweet:

1. An endless barrage of self-promotion. If more than 50 percent of your tweets are promoting your products and services, you’ll lose followers fast. I strive for a ratio of one self-promotional tweet to 10 other tweets.

2. Continuous Amazon (or other) affiliate links. I don’t understand these people at all. Their entire stream is nothing but affiliate links, and the products usually have nothing to do with each other. I see a lot of these pages because my Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green book is a popular product to feature, and I do click through to the profile every time someone mentions my book or me. The most recent person to list my book this way has made 22,288 tweets (probably all automated), has 421 followers, and is following 486 people. Of those 421, I’ll guess that 400 are from people who automatically follow back. In short, no one is reading, the account is not operated by a human, and affiliate commissions are probably near zero. Why bother?

3. Daily minutiae. If you tweet about what you had for breakfast, or that you’ve just brushed your teeth, you’d better do it in a way that’s funny or interesting. and keep it to maybe one post in 50. This is one of several reasons I don’t do Foresquare, which tweets your location with alarming frequency. (Not inviting burglars to my house is another reason.) Don’t bore people into shutting you out.

4. Lists and lists of people to follow. Again, boring! I do one Follow Friday (hashtag #ff) and one #ecomonday a week, and I publicly thank people who list me as someone to follow. It’s a very small part of my stream.

5. Spam. Duh! It doesn’t work in social media any better than it works with e-mail. Sending the same URL to a lot of people you don’t know, or direct-messaging a URL labeled as a picture of me when it’s not is just plain stupid. In TweetDeck, I can block and report a spammer in exactly two clicks, and I will do so unless I think the sender was hacked. Sometimes I’ll publicly shame them first. (And because I don’t automatically follow back, I am not plagued with direct-message spam. I get one or two a month, usually when someone was hacked.)

Two final bits of advice: Get five or ten juicy, high-quality tweets up on your profile page, along with a picture and something useful in the bio box, before you start looking for followers. And stay away from all the robot game-the-system approaches to building a followers list. You want real people who influence others to be following you because they love your content, not a bunch of robots following back in.

If you’d like me to consider following you, I might or might not if you have an interesting screen name. But I will definitely visit your profile (maybe not right away—be patient) if you engage with me. So send me an @shelhorowitz message that tells me something you found useful or helpful about this series (hint: if the @shelhorowitz is not the very beginning of the tweet, more people will see it). If I like what I see on your profile, I will follow back. 

June 19, 7 pm ET/4 p.m. PT
Click for details on call-in information 

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

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

• How to set up Joint Ventures to make fast cash—sometimes in just a few hours using your phone book
• Secret method for mailing 10,000 sales letters per month…at no cost…not even postage
• An amazing strategy for telling 200 million people about your business for FREE
• How to dominate your local market as a JV Dealmaker
• How to use publicity to get potential joint venture partners to call you
• Sneaky way to get $5000 a month in free radio promotions
• From O to $1.5 MM using joint venture strategies

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

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

If your lead gets me a speech at my standard $5000 rate, you’d earn $1250 in commission. Drop me a note: shel ATprincipledprofit.com, subject line Hawaii Speech Possibility.

Greener Products: The Making and Marketing of Sustainable Brands, by Al Iannuzzi (CRC Press (division of Taylor & Francis), 2012)

Much of the sustainability narrative has been written by people at the edges of society: small companies willing to create deep innovation in sustainability, and hoping the mainstream will absorb the lessons.

This book comes from “the belly of the beast”—the heart of the mainstream corporate world. The author is a high muckety-muck with sustainability duties at Johnson & Johnson; his case studies include many of the largest consumer-focused companies in the world (Walmart, Unilever, Procter & Gamble, among others).

And while the case studies of the green-in-our-founding-DNA companies like Seventh Generation and Method make it clear that you can be greener when designing a company and product line for sustainability from the ground up, the studies of the megacorporations show that when your largest customers or suppliers demand change, change happens on a much larger scale. Iannuzzi is happy to give full credit to mainstream corporate sustainability innovators such as:

• Walmart for enormously speeding up the process of going green at supplier companies like Johnson & Johnson
• Unilever for driving massive reductions in the tea industry’s water use
• Proctor & Gamble, for a substantial reduction in greenhouse gases by educating consumers about washing clothes in cold water and developing detergents designed to perform well without heating
• Clorox, for smashing the perception that enviro-friendly cleaning products were less effective.

These are major shifts, and because of the size of these companies, spur change throughout the business world.

Note the title, “Greener Products”—not “Green Products.” I’ve been saying for years that going green is a process; Iannuzzi agrees and says there’s no such thing as a product without environmental impact—but the more we can reduce the negative consequences and replace them with positive ones, the better.

And that process constantly raises the bar. He notes that worldwide, there were four times as many environmental regulations in 2010 as there had been in 2004—an enormous challenge for manufacturers and retailers. And the small innovative companies also push consumer expectations higher up the ladder. Seventh Generation has figured out how to package dishwashing liquid in bottles made from recycled milk jugs; Method includes the Precautionary Principle (if we don’t know it’s safe, we don’t use it) in its five-step product formulation requirements.

Iannuzzi claims this is the first book that looks at both the operations and marketing sides of going green. He is certainly quite comprehensive on the operations side. Some parts of the book are really written for engineers, and you may want to skim over those very dense sections if you’re not a techie.

The case study section, looking very specifically at how companies have incorporated lifecycle thinking and profitability into product development, manufacturing, distribution, *and end use,* is worth going over carefully, and taking lots of notes. 

But the marketing section is relatively weak, focusing on just a few of the many possibilities, and once again tilting heavily toward corporate giants. You’d want to supplement it with Jacqueline Ottman’s New Rules of Green Marketing and/or my own Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.

And because Iannuzzi views the world from the lens of a corporate insider, he sometimes misses the obvious. Here’s an example that jumped out at me: Discussing the German chemical and electronics giant BASF’s self-certification of some agro-chemicals as environmentally benign, he accepts the company’s declarations at face value—while I was full of questions. The company certified a certain fungicide as enabling “greater crop yield, lower environmental impacts, and lower production costs.” I want to know—compared to what? Compared to an older chemical formulation? Or compared to an organic farming process that needs no chemicals in the first place?

Self-certification is useful as an internal measurement of achievement (and Iannuzzi cites dozens of companies that have improved their products as a result), but for consumers, unbiased third-party certifications contain much more value. Yet BASF actually markets its certification process and logo to companies wanting to gain validity in the green market. I find that at least a little bit troubling.

Finally, you should know that the book lists at $89.95. While clearly a prodigious amount of time and research went into the book, that’s a lot higher than competitive titles. Perhaps the intended audience is buying books with company money at the large firms where they work as sustainability coordinators.

Twitter

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Blog

Green and Ethical Marketing Facebook

Google+ 

His most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet.

Shel also helps authors/publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

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

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

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

A key principle: Twitter is about building relationships over time.

That means if all you do is shout sales messages, you’re wasting most of Twitter’s potential. Yes, if you have a popular brand or retail store, your customers do want information about bargains. But they also want to feel like a human being is talking — and listening.

Personally, I strive for a ratio that is no more than 10 percent blatant self-promotion. The other 90% is a mix of passing on links to interesting information (often by retweeting someone else, with acknowledgment), responding to requests for — or asking for — advice, commenting on news or trends, engaging directly with people (responding or passing on a tweet, saying thank-you to people who have retweeted me, mentioned me as someone to follow, or mentioned my latest book (Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green), or just bringing a smile with a quote or a cool picture.

However, if other people say nice things about me or my offerings, I will retweet and/or thank them, and I don’t count that toward the 10 percent.

I guess it must be working, as I get 20 to 50 new followers in a typical week, all of them earned organically, without any game-the-system crap.

Last month’s Twitter, Part 1 newsletter brought this comment from Sherry Lowry in Austin, TX (@sherrylowry on Twitter):

“I really love Twitter (or actually the Twitter-related tools) and was expecting when reading your March news to either

– see clips from your Twitter stream

– a chance to click right into or follow you

Ask and ye shall receive, at least this time. To follow me on Twitter, visit @ShelHorowitz or https://www.twitter.com/shelhorowitz

And here are five of my Tweets (all posted April 1). You’ll notice they illustrate several of the types above.

RT @TalkAboutIssues
Fact: President Ronald Reagan, an icon to most conservatives, supported increases in the debt limit 12 times over his two terms.#Obama2012 [Retweet]

Blog: How Southwest Airlines is Greening Their Planes https://greenandprofitable.com/how-southwest-airlines-is-greening-their-planes/ [passing on interesting links–in this case, an automatic post to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn from my blog]

Fabulous! Beethoven’s 9 10,000 in the chorus, Japan https://www.youtube.com/embed/paH0V6JLxSI[passing on an interesting link that I found elsewhere]

@maddow I’m hoping for 39 x 3 more years of your speaking truth to power. Very happy birthday. [engaging directly, in this case with TV commentator Rachel Maddow]

RT @SW_Coalition: Denise Hamler of @GreenAmerica will be hosting@ShelHorowitz for a talk on green business at (cont) https://tl.gd/goltff [Retweet of someone else’s tweet that promotes me]

I’m a pretty active Tweeter, so you can see lots more at https://twitter.com/shelhorowitz

June 19, 7 pm ET/4 p.m. PT

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

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

• How to set up Joint Ventures to make fast cash — sometimes in just a few hours using your phone book
• Secret method for mailing 10,000 sales letters per month…at no cost…not even postage
• An amazing strategy for telling 200 million people about your business for FREE
• How to dominate your local market as a JV Dealmaker
• How to use publicity to get potential joint venture partners to call you
• Sneaky way to get $5000 a month in free radio promotions
• From O to $1.5 MM using joint venture strategies

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

Not one, but three major telesummits on environmental themes in April (Earth Day is that month, after all). Read on for details.

MONDAY, 4/16 I’m on the first day’s program for the Green Business Entrepreneurs Success Summit: How You Can Unite Purpose and Profit for a Sustainable Planet, organized by Lorna Li as an “alternative green MBA.” https://shelhorowitz.com/go/GreenBusinessEntrepreneurs/ My topic: Making Green Sexy: Guerrilla Marketing Tactics for Small Green Businesses, and I’m on at 5 pm ET/2 pm PT. Other presenters include Alisa Gravitz, Executive Director of Green America; Steven Hoffman, co-founder of LOHAS Journal and LOHAS Forum; Jacqui Ottman, author of The New Rules of Green Marketing, Elena Christopoulos, Interim President of the Green Chamber of Commerce (among others). No charge for this series!

4/21, Amherst, MA Exhibiting at the third annual Amherst Sustainability Fair, on the common, 10-4. https://www.amherstma.gov/index.aspx?NID=683  1200 exhibitors, live music…and fun.

4/26, Interview with Wendy Meyeroff — to listen, 347-884-8365; to ask questions before the show wendy@piggybankpromotions.com

4/29 Goodall and I are also among the presenters for the Better World Forum, another remarkable telesummit on the last two weekends in April — along with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Deepak Chopra and others. Again, I feel very honored to be included. You can bring down the already-low cost ($49 another $10, to just $39 — if you use my link: https://shelhorowitz.com/go/BetterWorldForum/. I’ll be airing Sunday, April 29, 1-2 pm ET/10-11 am PT

5/1, Houston, TX Speaking at the Gulf Coast Green conference in Houston, May 1: “Making Green Sexy.” https://gulfcoastgreen.org/pages/default.asp

Also remember, if you set me up an engagement, you could earn a generous commission.

I’ve listened to several calls from ShiftNetwork’s latest telesummit, Spring of Sustainability, and they are amazing. I’m so proud to be one of the presenters, along with such planet-changers as Jane Goodall (legendary for her work in Africa with chimpanzees), Bill McKibben (climate activist and founder of 350.org), Vandana Shiva (Indian activist who took on Coca-Cola), Van Jones (former White House Green Jobs czar and funder of Color of Change), John Robbins (visionary who puts the Baskin-Robbins fortune to good use), Hazel Henderson (author of Ethical markets and many other key works), Frances Moore Lappé (Diet for a Small Planet and other books, decades of food and democracy activism) John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hitman), Thom Hartmann (progressive radio host and author), Aqeela Sherrills (campaigner against gang violence and government violence), Julia Butterfly Hill (she lived in a tree for months to save it from being cut down), Vicki Robin (Your Money or Your Life), Hunter Lovins (energy pioneer and co-author of Natural Capitalism), Joel Makower (founder of GreenBiz.com), John Trudell (American Indian and earth activist)…WOW! Many of the interviews will be aired between now and June 22; for those you’ve missed (including mine), you can unlimited access to the replays for a very reasonable price of about $2 per session ($147 altogether). https://shelhorowitz.com/go/SpringOfSustanability/

A cram-packed two day opportunity to further your publishing plans withaccess to experts and ample time for networking at a bargain price.https://www.ipne.org

Become an Award Winning Company: 7 Steps to Unlock The Million Dollar Secret Every Entrepreneur Needs to Know, by Matt Shoup (Shoup Consulting, 2012)

It sounds like a thin premise for a marketing book: go out and win some awards. After all, I cover the subject in just a few pages in some of my own books on marketing. In one of my books, winning awards shares a chapter on credibility building with getting endorsements and reviews.

But breaking a process down step by step is often a worthy endeavor, and in this case Shoup provides good food for thought.

The bulk of the book is devoted to the good things that can happen to an award-winning company that understands how to leverage and market those awards (including a bunch of interviews with CEOs of award-winning companies about the specific ways their achievement helped their business). A smallish section at the end goes through the how-to of actually winning awards. I might have reversed both placement and proportion, but maybe that’s because I do have a very clear understanding of the benefits already (and have won quite a few awards over the years).

Shoup himself sums up the case for winning awards nicely and succinctly on page 171: “As an award-winning company, you are going to be able to go out and attain massive success, exposure, credibility, free PR, and more business.” And a lot of the book shows how he and the CEOs he profiles have done just that.

More than the specifics, where this book really shines is in three consistent approaches to the success mindset:

1.To win awards, you must achieve excellence: base your company in high integrity, wow your customers, and establish a culture that drives the best people to join your staff and succeed with you.

2.This excellence allows you to thrive in economic downturns (he has a great rant on this) and to set and achieve goals a lot more easily.

3.Success doesn’t just happen to you; you go out and make it happen, and that means when you do win awards, it’s up to you to extract the maximum possible benefit from them in your marketing.

That last is important. Used properly, awards let you de-commoditize your business, get away from the tire-kickers and bargain hunters, and establish the value of working with an excellent company and being wiling to pay for it.

One thing that puzzles me: Shoup apparently gave no thought to becoming an award-winning *author.* The cover and interior design are amateurish, and the book would have benefited from one more edit (with someone who understands when a phrase like “award winning” should or should not take a hyphen). It would have been easy enough to spend a few hundred bucks more on a better production and then enter some good awards for the book, especially if he wants to build up the coaching and speaking parts of his own business (his primary line of work is running a house painting company).

Thank you for all your comments on the new format. Overwhelmingly, most respondents like the new HTML version. We will try to work on the display issues some people are experiencing.

We did have a winner of the e-book.


 

If you’ve been reading my newsletter for several years, you know I’ve been marketing through social media all the way back to 1995. These days, a lot of my social media goes into Twitter.

People either love Twitter or hate it. My wife can’t stand it; I think it’s great.

Why?

• You can have a big impact while investing almost no time
• It’s easy to gain very targeted followers — and influential “followees” (people you follow)
• Very short learning curve
• Interface stays reasonably constant, and the changes are improvements that make sense (unlike Facebook, where you have to keep relearning how to do it, or frequently discover that the expensive tools and processes you invested in before the latest redesign are now them obsolete)
• Third-party tools like TweetDeck (now owned by Twitter), MarketMeSuite, and HootSuite add enormous functionality: scanning the most important contacts quickly, searching topics, scheduling ahead, adding users to groups quickly
• Trends, posts, and connections can easily go viral through the power of retweets and other devices — and as they do, you can easily expand your circles of influence
• You can build real relationships with people by responding personally to their tweets
• While there are lots of ways around the 140-character limit, it does force you to sharpen your brain and be concise
• Oh yeah, and it’s fun!

I find Twitter a terrific research tool: I get a lot of my information on new trends in the green, business, and  political worlds by following links. I also find it a great way to get into conversations with people I haven’t met before, some of whom are very well-connected. Often, I’ll start a conversation on Twitter and then move it to 1-to-1 e-mail.

Twitter is also a great way to get noticed by speakers: if you tweet highlights of their talks or Twitter chat presentations — and either include a designated hashtag for the event (e.g., #sustainchat) and/or mention them by their Twitter handle (e.g., @ShelHorowitz), you’ll get on their radar. I can tell you that when someone puts @ShelHorowitz in a tweet, I go visit their profile unless it’s obvious spam, and usually follow back. And when someone at a networking event tells me he or she follows me on Twitter, I pay closer attention.

And yes, I’ve sold books, started conversations about my consulting, copywriting or speaking, and attended networking events that I learned about on Twitter.

This is the first of a three-part series. Next month, what you can tweet, and in May, what Twitter is NOT.

I’m revising my 2007 book Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers, and looking for a few more good recent success stories — the more “out-of-the-box,” the better.

I am thinking about chunking up the book into several smaller e-volumes, to take advantage of the Kindle/Nook market — and if this works well, I might repeat the strategy with my consumer book on frugal fun.

Anyway, please submit stories of 500 words or less, using this link to generate a subject line I’ll spot:
mailto:shel@principledprofit.com?subject=BookMarketingSuccessForGMAP

Submission constitutes permission to reprint in the book and in any publicity and warrants that you have the right to submit the material. If I use your material, you’ll get a copy of the mini-e-book that includes it.

Not one, but three major telesummits on environmental themes in April (Earth Day is that month, after all). Read on for details.

3/19 Triangle Variety Radio has me as a guest Monday, March 19, 8 pm ET/5 pm PT, discussing “Making Green Sexy: Marketing Strategies that Any Business Can Use to Profit in the Rapidly Growing Green Market. https://trianglevarietyradio.com/ and click “Log In To Our Radio Show” or Skype to 949-272-9578; (I’m told only Skype will work — which I find very odd)

3/24, Greenfield, MA Speaking on how artists and businesses can benefit from working together at Creative Economy Summit III: Fostering our Local Economy: Art and Business in Partnership March 23 and 24, 2011, Downtown Greenfield, MA, https://www.creativeeconomysummit.com/ — my session is from 2-3:15 pm Saturday, March 24

4/2 I’m still pinching myself that I am one of the speakers at the amazing Spring of Sustainability telesummit, along with environment rockstars like Jane Goodall (legendary for her work in Africa with chimapnzees), Bill McKibben (climate activist and founder of 350.org), Vandana Shiva (Indian activist who took on Coca-Cola), Van Jones (former White House Green Jobs czar and funder of Color of Change), John Robbins (visionary who puts the Baskin-Robbins fortune to good use), Hazel Henderson (author of Ethical markets and many other key works), Frances Moore Lappé (Diet for a Small Planet and other books, decades of food and democracy activism) John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hitman), Thom Hartmann (progressive radio host and author), Aqeela Sherrills (campaigner against gang violence and government violence), Julia Butterfly Hill (she lived in a tree for months to save it from being cut down), Vicki Robin (Your Money or Your Life), Hunter Lovins (energy pioneer and co-author of Natural Capitalism), Joel Makower (founder of GreenBiz.com), John Trudell (American Indian and earth activist)…WOW! Sessions start March 26 and go through June 22. My slot is April 2, 3-3:30 pm ET/noon-12:30 pm PT. https://shelhorowitz.com/go/SpringOfSustanability/ No cost, and all the calls get recorded. If you don’t sign up for this series, I have to question your judgment. Even if you only manage to listen to a few of these world-changing visionaries, why would you want to miss out?

4/16 I’m on the first day’s program for the Green Business Entrepreneurs Success Summit: How You Can Unite Purpose and Profit for a Sustainable Planet, organized by Lorna Li as an “alternative green MBA.” https://www.greenbusinessentrepreneurs.com/ My topic: Making Green Sexy: Guerrilla Marketing Tactics for Small Green Businesses, and I’m on at 5 pm ET/2 pm PT. Other presenters include Alisa Gravitz, Executive Director of Green America; Steven Hoffman, co-founder of LOHAS Journal and LOHAS Forum; Jacqui Ottman, author of The New Rules of Green Marketing, Elena Christopoulos, Interim President of the Green Chamber of Commerce (among others). No charge for this series either!

4/21, Amherst, MA Exhibiting at the third annual Amherst Sustainability Fair, on the common, 10-4. https://www.amherstma.gov/index.aspx?NID=683

4/26, Interview with Wendy Meyeroff — to listen, 347-884-8365; to ask questions before the show wendy@piggybankpromotions.com

4/29 Goodall and I are also among the presenters for the Better World Forum, another remarkable telesummit on the last two weekends in April — along with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Deepak Chopra and others. Again, I feel very honored to be included. You can bring down the already-low cost ($39 through April 12, or $49 afterward) another $10, to just $29/$39 — if you use my link: https://shelhorowitz.com/go/BetterWorldForum/. I’ll be airing Sunday, April 29, 1-2 pm ET/10-11 am PT

5/1, Houston, TX Speaking at the Gulf Coast Green conference in Houston, May 1: “Making Green Sexy.” https://gulfcoastgreen.org/pages/default.asp

Also remember, if you set me up an engagement, you could earn a generous commission.

ShiftNetwork’s latest telesummit, Spring of Sustainability, is going to be amazing, and I’m so proud to be one of the presenters. See description in the Hear & Meet Shel section. https://shelhorowitz.com/go/SpringOfSustanability/

Vrinda Normand is another one who puts on great telesummits, and hers are focused on marketing for conscious companies. Her latest, Irresistible List Building Summit, runs from March 13 (yeah, you’ve missed a few) through April 6 and includes people like Lisa Sasevich, Denise Wakeman, Kendall Summerhawk, Nancy Juetten, Christian Mickelsen, and Adam Urbanski. The headline: “How to Attract 1,000s of Your Ideal Clients Online So You Can Make the Big Impact You Were Born For” — nice use of Ultimate Benefits copywriting strategy there.  :-). Another event with no cost. https://shelhorowitz.com/go/VrindaListBuilding/

GreenAmerica’s GreenFest comes to NYC for the first time, April 21-22. I spoke at this event in Washington, DC a year and a half ago, and loved it. I intend to be there Sunday, but I’m not on the program.

Two Book Launches with Lots of Bonuses

360 Degrees of Influence: Get Everyone to Follow Your Lead on Your Way to the Top
by NYT Bestselling author Harrison Monarth

In 360 Degrees of Influence, Monarth provides everything you need to gain the trust and respect of those around you — no matter where they’re positioned in the organizational hierarchy — and expand your influence well beyond your immediate environment. Become the most psychologically astute person in the room — so you can be the most influential leader in the room. Learn how to:

• Assess your current influencing power
• Overcome resistance to your ideas and proposals
• Know what people are thinking and feeling — even better than they do
• Avoid the most common decision-making pitfalls
• Create an influence strategy tailored to your organization’s hierarchy

March 22 is the launch for If I’m So Smart, Why Can’t I Get Rid of This Clutter? Tools to Get it Done! by Sallie Felton

Are you conquering your clutter — or is your clutter conquering you? Author and life coach Sallie Felton, walks you through the practical and organizational strategies that make it easy to stay organized; but this book goes deeper and uncovers the hidden reasons why it can be so hard to get clutter free and stay that way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shel also helps authors/publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

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

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

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

One of the rules in pitching journalists through services that send queries from journalists seeking stories–such as HARO (helpareporter.com), ReporterConnection.com, and the others I discussed in the July, 2011 issue–is to stay closely in tune with what the journalist is looking for.

In the first, the reporter wanted businesses actually using this strategy, and instead, I offered her expert commentary. In hindsight, I would list some case studies I could discuss. Instead, I focused only on my credentials.

The second one was particularly a long shot, which I knew going in: Newsmax is a Rupert Murdock property with an extremely right-wing slant, and I doubted the reporter would be interested in a counter-view. However, it was certainly worth 10 minutes of my time to try, especially since I really want to reach more conservative elements of the business world with the message of my book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, that good environmental practices are also very good for business.

FIRST QUERY:

19) Summary: Buy Something, Do Good

Name: Alison Miller Southwest Airlines Spirit Magazine

I’m looking for companies that are following the TOMS Shoes mold by donating money, products, or services to organizations in need each time a consumer buys their product. Any product category is fair game, not just apparel.

Requirements:
Readers must be able to buy products via a website and have them shipped to U.S. addresses.

MY RESPONSE:

Subject: HARO: Buy Something, Do Good (expert perspective)

Hi, Alison,
If you need an expert perspective to comment on why this is good for business, I’m happy to volunteer. I discuss cause-related marketing in every marketing book I’ve written back to 1985 (before the phrase existed, as far as I know), and go into some detail in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, as well as an earlier book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (both books have won awards, BTW)
Note: Please keep “HARO” or “New Pitch” in the subject line so that my email program will mark it as Priority.

(My lengthy signature for journalist query responses, including book credentials, contact information via e-mail, phone, and Twitter, some of the media that have interviewed me, and talking points, went here)
———————————
SECOND QUERY:

8) Summary: Sources needed for EPA-related feature

Name: Jeff Louderback Newsmax Magazine

Category: Energy and Green Tech

Query:
The EPA has made a series of aggressive moves that makes it
tougher for business.

Among these moves are:
– Its declaration that carbon dioxide is a gas emission covered
by the clean air act.
– Its crackdown on coal-fired power plants.
– Its opposition to fracking for oil and natural gas production.

For Newsmax, I am writing a feature about OTHER new ways the EPA is lining up a major power grab to stack the deck against business even further. What else don’t we know about aside from the aforementioned concerns?

Requirements:
I am searching for sources anywhere in the United States, but I am on a tight deadline and need to speak with them no later than noon ET on Friday, Jan. 21.

MY RESPONSE:

Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2012 06:43:32 -0500

Subject: HARO: Sources needed for EPA-related feature  – counterpoint

Hi, Jeff,
If you want to throw in a little controversy, I’d be glad to make the case for why tough EPA regs can be GREAT for business. I’m the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, write a monthly syndicated column, Green And Profitable, and run a marketing consulting company specializing in green business.

[My signature, as above]
——————————— 

Notice the appeal I made to the second reporter to inject some controversy into the story. Reporters often love controversy. Also notice how I “volunteer” my expertise to the first journalist. I always try to come across as helpful, rather than self-aggrandizing. This is part of why I got quoted or cited in 143 print stories last year, 131 in 2010.

Another thing you can offer is a “sidebar”—a little sub-article that accompanies the main story, and may expose a different angle. But be prepared for the journalist to ask YOU to write the sidebar (for no pay). This has actually happened to me, and yes, I’ve written those articles when asked.

This article is already pretty long—but if you’d like more on this topic, I’ll send a 1174-word excerpt from my seventh book, Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers that includes two successful thin-match queries I sent (one of which resulted in a sidebar assignment, the other, in coverage) plus a story from publicity ninja Jill Lublin (co-author of Guerrilla Publicity) of how she stepped out of her niche to get coverage on NBC and elsewhere.

Drop me a note at shel AT principledprofit.com and use this exact subject line:

Please send thin-match journo query excerpt

— and then I’ll know exactly what to send you.

If you have at least two years green marketing experience and five years in either marketing or sustainability, you can help: If you’d like to participate, please email or call Traci Davis (tdavis@onet.rti.org or 877-233-7348 ext 109) and provide the following:

Name:
Daytime Phone number:
Mailing Address/State:
Email address:
Total years of experience:

Traci Davis at the O*NET Operations Center at Research Triangle Institute will respond when you volunteer, and will provide further details

Great New Telesummit from Ryan Elliason
If conscious business is important to you (and since you’re reading my newsletter, I certainly hope it is), you’ll want to take advantage of the latest wonderful no-charge training series of four calls from Ryan Elliason.

Ryan interviewed me for another one of his telesummits last year, and he’s a smart, well-informed guy and a sharp interviewer—so he’ll extract a lot of good stuff from his guests.

Do better in business while you do better for the world.

Topics and dates:
#1 – Cultivating the Entrepreneurial Mindset of Success How To Change The World Without Making Yourself Insane – February 22

#2 – The Client Attraction and Enrollment Formula How To Change The World Without Going Broke – February 23

#3 – Double Your Free Time How To Change The World Without Burning Out – February 27

#4 – Eight Steps To Expand Your Positive Impact, Income and Free Time The Formula for Business Success – February 28

Sign up:
https://shelhorowitz.com/go/visionaryentrepreneur/

Yakamore: Interesting New Social Network
From the creators of Sokue, a social network designed specifically for marketers. Features include longer posts, cross-posting between the two networks, affiliate commissions, and other good stuff. Let’s Yak! https://shelhorowitz.com/go/yakamore/

To Print, Or Not to Print–That Is the Question
And the answer may be easier to figure out at https://www.pixelandprintlogic.com/ , where my friend Gil Friend (a noted West Coast enviro-biz buy) has put together a spiffy graphic to help you figure it out.

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

Build Your Business Quickly and Easily Through Referrals
Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a salesperson, work for a business or just have an idea for one, the #1 secret to success is word-of-mouth referrals. Matt Anderson’s Fearless Referrals will show you how to build your business the fast, fun way by systematically developing high-quality referrals. You’ll learn the right time, the right place and the right people to ask. Enjoy valuable additional bonuses when you buy the book now: https://fearlessreferrals.com/

• Are you on Google’s G+ social network? I’m doing a chat via GooglePlus Hangout, interviewed by Susan Silver, Thursday, February 23, 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT. This is new technology for me, though I’ve been a featured chat guest on other platforms from AOL to Twitter, all the way back to 1995.
• If you’re a National Writers Union member, you can catch me later that day (7:30 p.m. ET/4:30 PT) leading an open Q&A teleseminar about book marketing. Contact Barbara Beckwith, beckwithb@aol.com (if you’re a US-based author or magazine/newspaper/online/commercial writer and not an NWU member, think about joining. I’ve been a member since 1982—among other benefits, I’ve been able to have the union help me collect writing fees owed to me that I otherwise would never have seen, plus contact review before signing with publishers).

APRIL

• I’m so thrilled that The Shift Network asked me to participate in “Spring of Sustainability.” These folks have put together some of the best telesummits I’ve ever attended. The lineup leaves me awestruck—I’m sharing a platform with Jane Goddall, Paul Hawken, Vandana Shiva, Julia Butterfly Hill, Hunter Lovins, Frances Moore Lappé, and about 90 others. I’ll have the signup URL for you next month.

MAY

• Speaking at the Gulf Coast Green conference in Houston, May 1: “Making Green Sexy.” https://gulfcoastgreen.org/pages/default.asp
• It’s looking like I might actually be speaking in Bangladesh at a conference in Dakka early May. If you live there, please e-mail me.

Also remember, if you set me up an engagement, you could earn a generous commission.

Is there a more authentic marketing strategy than turning your fans into brand ambassadors? I’ve long been an advocate of this approach, but even so, Brains On Fire opened my eyes to possibilities I’d never thought about.

This book is about not just identifying your deep loyalists, but empowering them, supporting them, and then getting out of the way while the magic happens. It’s a refreshing change from most other books I’ve seen about word-of-mouth/word-of-mouse marketing, because these folks understand that the real marketing arises spontaneously out of the members of a community (often unpaid), and not by faking your way through tactics like recruiting pretty young women to talk up a particular product to which they have no actual loyalty.

The book focuses on several case studies, all clients of the Brains on Fire marketing agency, which we follow through every “lesson” (chapter). Examples range from a 300-year-old Swedish scissors manufacturer to the state agency charged with reducing teen smoking in a tobacco-producing state.

Along with the focus on fan-initiated, empowered marketing comes a strong commitment to ethics—and to taking the marketing vocabulary away from the war-oriented “campaign” language of crushing your opponent or defeating your customers into purchasing, and into the more sustainable world of community, inclusiveness, and mutual benefit. Scientific marketing becomes less important. Your strategy evolves toward unlocking and channeling the passion of your fans, their desire to make a difference, and their need to be valued. Ask yourself how your product or service makes it easier for your fans to do what they love. Your goal is not just participation; it’s active engagement.

Your fans will be a mix of personalities, some of whom already have a fan base, and quiet, shy others who would not traditionally be seen as influencers—yet may have a tremendous impact. And the way you interact—even something as mundane as the way you handle incoming fan mail–can have either a big positive or big negative impact, depending on how you make that person feel.

Among the many wise points in this book:

• When allowed to lead themselves, genuine movements tend to exceed the expectations of the marketers who assist them
• You don’t get to choose your fans; they choose you
• Smart brands become fans of their fans
• Strive to put as many employees as possible in customer contact; companies with 25-50 percent of their workforce in customer contact wildly outperform those with 5-10 percent
• Strong movements fight injustice

Yes, but does all this cool and groovy stuff actually work? Yes—big time. Two among many examples:

South Carolina’s 16.9 percent smoking reduction was the largest in the nation (in the state with the cheapest cigarettes and among the lowest budget for smoking prevention programs); Brains on Fire client Rage Against the Haze (a teen anti-smoking group) had a lot to do with this.

Fiskars, makers of the famous orange-handled scissors, puts the ROI for its Fiskateers community of brand evangelists at 500 percent. Fiskateers not only tracked with a 6-fold increase of online mentions, but sales doubled in the four target markets where the effort was rolled out—while the company R&D department receives an average of 13 new product ideas every month, gratis. This doesn’t even count the impact of 7000 volunteers who can defuse PR problems before the company even knows they exist.

Read this book as an excellent companion to Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. And be sure to read the introduction, which has enormous value.