The Clean and Green Club

Last month, we looked at the incredible effectiveness of visibility marketing in advancing social causes. Can it also advance a for-profit business, and do so without buying enormous amounts of expensive advertising? Can small businesses take advantage of this kind of messaging?

I’d give the answer a qualified yes. Branding/visibility campaigns can work for small businesses, especially those with a social and/or environmental message. And now that a branding campaign can drive traffic to a website that reveals the whole story, it’s easier to pull one off than it would have been 20 years ago.

A large-scale but very counterculture example is Read the rest of this entry »

Go Green, Live Rich: 50 Simple Ways to Save the Earth (and Get Rich Trying) by David Bach with Hillary Rosner

Okay so there are a gazillion books, e-books, and pamphlets with tips on going Green, including my own 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—so why buy this one?

A few things make this one stand out. First of all, it’s written by a retirement-planning guru: David Bach, author of such books as Start Late, Finish Rich and The Automatic Millionaire (with help from Hillary Rosner, who worked on Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth). It’s very refreshing to have a celebrity personal finance author take on the topic of personal environmental responsibility.

Second, the book is crammed with hundreds of websites and resources (including Read the rest of this entry »

I used to be really scornful of “visibility advertising”: campaigns that had only a branding purpose, didn’t try to sell anything and in many cases didn’t even try to pass on a message. For most of my career, I thought this kind of marketing was only the province of corporate giants with unlimited budgets: companies like Coke, Nike, and McDonalds.

But ten years ago, I had an experience that caused me to change my mind. We were in the middle of a deep, multichannel campaign to block a particularly nasty housing development going all the way to the ridgeline of our local mountain (right next to a state park on the next mountain over, whose gorgeous view would be ruined). In addition to the press releases, the media campaign, the lobbying, the massive turnout at public hearings, and all the other tactics we were using, we did lawn signs and bumper stickers.They just said “Save the Mountain” (the name of our group) and gave our website. Of course, this was not only branding the organization, but also the idea that the mountain could actually be saved; our action mission was right there in the organization’s name.

One day, some of our canvassers were working a local farmers market when who should stroll by but the developer and his wife. And she turned to our people and said, Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Brown, founder of RideBuzz.org: a web-based organization to promote and facilitate ridesharing/carpooling, thus reducing carbon footprint and use of fossil fuels, easing traffic congestion, and saving its users money. Jeff talks about how and why he started this organization in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, how it’s benefiting its users, and how others might replicate this idea elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »

Links about the Gulf Spill:
BP’s behavior, if these sources quoted in NY Times are accurate, is probably criminal (via @gfriend, quoting @climateprogress): https://climateprogress.org/2010/05/03/bp-oil-spill-federal-permit-cut-costs/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+climateprogress%2FlCrX+%28Climate+Progress%29

If this is the plan that’s working, I’d hate to see the one that failed: (via @BusinessGreen) https://bit.ly/b2uW3g

RFK, Jr.: Gulf oil spill caused by anti-ethics culture of Bush’s “regulators” in collusion w/ BP, Halliburton: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/sex-lies-and-oil-spills_b_564163.html

BP’s Louisiana oil disaster will have repercussions across numerous industries (Triple Pundit)–and WHY are we still talking about expanding offshore drilling? I think we should be looking at the safety of all the existing rigs, first: https://www.triplepundit.com/2010/05/economic-impact-deepwater-horizon-oil-spill-loui…siana/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TriplePundit+%28Triple+Pundit%29

The always-brilliant George Lakoff on how Obama could have used the BP disaster to create a unified multi-issue leadership/moral position #fbhttps://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/obamas-missing-moral-narr_b_593528.html

Other Links:
My favorite energy futurist Amory Lovins’s TED talk on how to get the US OFF oil entirely, add 1 million jobs & lots of ROI #fb #li https://us.cnn.com/video/?/video/living/2010/01/04/ted.amory.lovins.ted #Green (I love his “Faroffistan”)

Go Green Cars: Videos: Hemp sports car by Lotus lighter, cheaper, stronger than steel. Research by Henry Ford, 1941! – https://tinyurl.com/2b946ez (via @GreenCelebrity)

Prevention Mag: Why you’re greener than you think/24 easy green steps https://bit.ly/bhmS2C

World Bank $12 million program to replace African kerosense lamps (polluting, nonrenewable, carbon spewing) w/ solar (via @whatgreeninvest) https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64H46220100518?feedType=RSS&feedName=GCA-GreenBusiness&utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FUSgreenbusines…sNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Green+Business%29&utm_content=Twitter

Even a very conservative study finds that investments in climate change mediation and other Green measures are well-worth doing: https://greeneconomypost.com/conservative-study-climate-action-improves-economy-9723.htm

Alicia Polak, CEO of Khaya Cookies in South Africa. Former Wall Streeter who gave it up to provide jobs making organic cookies in the townships. Focus on economic development and job creation for women in marginalized communities, how a global company looks at sustainability/how to be Green when you’re in an import business, keeping costs down with partnerships, and organic health benefits.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I spoke at the Go Green Expo in New York City a couple of months back, one of the companies exhibiting there was a wind-powered printing company from New Haven, offering attractive pricing, eco-oriented design templates, and of course, FSC-certified and/or recycled paper. I have actually seen their wind turbine when I take the bus from New York back home to Massachusetts; it’s visible along the coast, just as my bus turns up I-91.
Read the rest of this entry »

Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson (Hyperion, 2009)
Reviewed by Shel Horowitz

The influential author of The Long Tail has once again broken new ground. He argues persuasively that the price of anything that can be digitized, and the price of even many things that are based in physical space inexorably gravitates toward zero–and then, even though it might be counterintuitive, demonstrates a seemingly infinite number of ways to monetize your free offerings.
Read the rest of this entry »

The best Clean & Green links for April:
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In advertising, you pay for every inch of space, every word, or every second of time. So how, in this very limited canvas, can you get your money’s worth? Here are two easy strategies you’ll really want to implement whenever you’re paying for an ad, and you probably want to include even on marketing pieces other than ads (such as press releases and brochures)—because they could increase your return by orders of magnitude, without significantly increasing your costs. Read the rest of this entry »