Best Clean & Green Links of April

5 May, 2010  No Comment

The best Clean & Green links for April:
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Two Strategies to Increase Advertising ROI: Frugal/Green Marketing Tip, May 2010

4 May, 2010  No Comment

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 »

Clean & Green Spotlight, April 2010: Mr. Ellie Pooh

2 May, 2010  No Comment

I love it when a single offering addresses multiple social and environmental issues, providing benefits on several levels. And increasingly, I’m finding quite a number of them. One that has intrigued me since I first learned of it about a year ago is Mr. Ellie Pooh.

How’s this for capturing a whole bunch of birds with one photograph (my nonviolent spin on the old “killing two birds” proverb 🙂 ):

  • Reduce deforestation Read the rest of this entry »

    • Member Survey

    15 Apr, 2010  No Comment

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    April Expert Call: Mark Joyner on Social Change

    15 Apr, 2010  No Comment

    Mark Joyner is well-known as an Internet marketing pioneer and multiple best-selling author of such books as The Great Formula (which includes an essay by me), Simpleology, and Integration Marketing. What’s less known is his strong commitment to making the world better. In this exclusive interview, Shel got him to open up and discuss that hidden but very important side of his marketing career.

    Read the rest of this entry »

    April 2010 Frugal/Green Marketing Tip

    5 Apr, 2010  No Comment

    Leverage Your Public Speaking

    Long-time readers of this column will know that I think speaking is one of the most powerful tools in the frugal and ethical marketing toolkit. One of the reasons is that it’s so easy to make other good things happen when you have a speaking gig set up.

    Among the many possibilities, here are some that I’ve used to increase the impact of my speeches. Note that many of these need some advance preparation. Don’t expect to do all of this for every speech, but think about which ones make sense for a particular gig…

    Click here to continue reading this tip

    Hear and Meet
    • The live call with John Ritskowitz (Marketing Medic) and Jay Conrad Levinson (Guerrilla Marketing), originally scheduled for March, was rescheduled for medical reasons to Tuesday, April 6, 3pm ET/noon PT. John is actually coming up from his home an hour away (we’ve never met), and bringing some high end audio AND video equipment, so this may be a very high-fidelity call. It should be pretty exciting and I hope you’ll join us as we discuss Green Guerrilla Marketing. And there will be some extra excitement in the air, as it’s the last few hours of Passover, and I’ll be eagerly looking forward to Bread Day, which starts at sundown :-) To join the call sign up free at https://www.johnritz.com/blog/guerrilla-marketing-in-your-living-room/ We’ll be giving away autographed copies of the book and other goodies on the event, so don’t delay…
    • April 15, 9 pm ET/6 pm PT: Tweleseminar, “Communicate the Value in Your Values.” Justin Sachs, justin (at) justinsachscompanies.com
    • April 24, I’ll be exhibiting at the Sustainability Expo in downtown Amherst, MA: CiccarelloS (at) amherstma.gov
    • April 25, I’ll be speaking on collaborating with a co-author at the American Society of Journalists and Authors conference in New York. https://asja.org/wc/2010/ (using my new co-authored book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, as a case study)April 29, 3 pm ET/noon PT, I’ll be presenting on Grassroots Book Marketing Strategies for Stephanie Chandler’s virtual Nonfiction Book Writers Conference: Contact janica (at) authoritypublishing.com
    • May 8, I’ll be speaking once again on book marketing at CAPA University in Hartford, CT: https://www.aboutcapa.com/capa_university_writers_conferen.htm
    • May 11, 8 pm ET/5 pm PT, I will once again be speaking on “Create Value from Your Values” for Hilton Johnson’s teleseminar series (and this means you will once again get a series of mailings from me about Hilton’s health coaching program and about the other calls he’s hosting in May).
    • May 14, 12 pm ET, I’ll be interviewed on Solo Talk with Donna Amos.  https://www.blogtalkradio.com/solotalk
    • June 9, I’ll be interviewed again for the Guerrilla Marketing Association’s weekly calls–this time by Alexandru Israil from Romania. Contact: alexandru.israil (at) gmail.com
    • June 15, I’ll be Linda MacKenzie’s guest on the Creative Health and Spirit Show, on HealthyLife.Net radio. Linda has interviewed me a few times in the past, and is actually the CEO of this Internet radio network.
    • It looks pretty likely that I’ll be speaking on Green Marketing at SolarFest, sometime the weekend of July 16-18, in Tinmouth, Vermont. This is a wonderful event; I attended several years ago, and you can read about it here: https://www.frugalfun.com/solarfest.html
    • September 19, I speak at Live Green! in Norwalk, CT. Contact: sweicker (at) sbweventsgroup.com
    • October 2, I’m speaking at the second annual Self-Publishing Book Expo in New York City, https://selfpubbookexpo.com/
    • October 12 at 7pm ET/4 pm PT: My third annual presentation to the MUSE Online Writers Conference. This time, Selling a Self-Published Book to a Traditional Publisher
    Friends Who Want to Help
    • There’s no better way to get traditional press (a/k/a mainstream media) covering you than to answer inquiries from reporters looking for sources. I’ve used this strategy to be cited multiple times in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, even Woman’s Day (among many, many others). I subscribe to every service I know about that connects journalists and sources. My old friend Steve Harrison from Radio TV Interview Report has just launched a new one, with no charge for leads. https://bit.ly/bD6WzG (affiliate link). Given how much it costs to advertise in RTIR, this is a real bargain, at zero cost.
    • There’s an extraordinary new book that has just been published, one that will show you exactly how the billionaires/superstars and geniuses of our world get the results that they get. An international bestseller within days of its release, “The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in Life“ (Simon & Schuster) is the game-changing book by top leadership expert Robin Sharma, who’se books (Including The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari) have transformed the lives of millions of people worldwide. For the first time, Robin shares the proprietary success formula that he’s shared with his billionaire coaching clients and companies like NIKE, FedEx, IBM, Microsoft and GE. In “The Leader Who Had No Title”, you will discover exactly how to awaken your inner leader, play at wow in all you do, unleash massive amounts of excellence and productivity, get to world-class in your work, build an unbeatable mindset and really win in these turbulent times. This book will blow the doors off your past ways of thinking, performing and being. “If you want to operate at the level of WOW, be an exceptional leader and live full out-buy this book.” – Darren Hardy, publisher, SUCCESS magazine “The Leader Who Had No Title is a game-changing book…get ready for an AMAZING new life!” – Marci Shimoff, New York Times bestselling author of “Happy for No Reason” Buy this book April 6th (it’s less than $20!) and you’ll get over 100 incredible bonus gifts from bestselling authors (worth over $1,057) and a chance to win one of 24 iPods. To puchase, visit www.theleaderwhohadnotitle.com on April 6th.
    • Carolyn Howard-Johnson, award-winning novelist and author of the How to Do It Frugally series of how-to books for writers, is doing an October writing retreat in Rome!  Even this far out, she’s down to just a couple of spaces. Want more info? Write to her at hojonews (at) aol.com

    -> New on the Sites, April 2010

    -> Media Coverage of Shel

    -> Which of Shel’s Books is Right for You?

    -> Administrative Information

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    Published monthly since May, 1997 by Shel Horowitz
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    Leverage Your Public Speaking: Shel Horowitz’s Frugal Marketing Tip, April 2010

    5 Apr, 2010  No Comment

    Long-time readers of this column will know that I think speaking is one of the most powerful tools in the frugal and ethical marketing toolkit. One of the reasons is that it’s so easy to make other good things happen when you have a speaking gig set up.

    Among the many possibilities, here are some that I’ve used to increase the impact of my speeches. Note that many of these need some advance preparation. Don’t expect to do all of this for every speech, but think about which ones make sense for a particular gig: Read the rest of this entry »

    This Month’s Recommended Book: The Responsibility Revolution

    29 Mar, 2010  No Comment

    This Month’s Recommended Book: The Responsibility Revolution: How the Next Generation of Businesses Will Win, by Jeffrey Hollender and Bill Breen

    Do you think you can learn some lessons from a company that has totally integrated social responsibility into every aspect of its operations, from day one—and even more than 20 years after its founding, continues to grow as much as 51 percent annually? And that particular year was the recession year of 2008, a time when you’d expect a company that sells organic personal care goods and does not attempt to compete on price to be suffering.

    That company is Seventh Generation, the sustainability-oriented company that Jeffrey Hollender started in 1988. True to their values, however, Hollender and Breen (a co-founder of Fast Company who serves as Seventh Generation’s Editorial Director) wait until the last chapter to tell a piece of Seventh Generation’s story—specifically how the company brought in a strategic consultant who worked with them on not just identifying their values, but inculcating the core mission so thoroughly into the company DNA that every employee understands and participates in the wider mission to change the world of business, and use business to change the world. That decision is directly related to the company’s phenomenal growth n recent years: 45 percent in 2007, 51 percent in 2008, and an undisclosed but still positive number in the economy-wide traumatic year of 2009.

    First, they tell the stories of some other great companies that are making a difference, including some very well-known brands: IBM, Nike, British department store giant Marks & Spencer, Patagonia, and others—each story framed around central lessons within each chapter, and typically two or three companies highlighted in a chapter.

    Some of these companies, in particular Nike and Marks & Spencer, came to the sustainability sandbox after deep and stinging criticism by advocates of environmental and social responsibility, but took the message to heart and embraced the mission to reinvent their companies as sustainable.

  • Nike’s supply chain practices weren’t particularly worse than anyone else’s when activists honed in on the company in the 1990s—but it’s mission statement to be a company worthy of respect made it a target. After first defending its practices, the company looked deeper, acknowledged that it could do better, and proceeded to do so. And over time, the company has found that this deep look can not only be highly profitable but also provide leverage points to move the whole industry forward. From reducing printing of marketing materials that get thrown out to turning manufacturing wastes and consumer-discarded sneakers into inputs to designing sustainability into the popular Air Jordan line, Nike ha sconvinced the authors that the shift is genuine.
  • When criticized for some of its practices, Marks & Spencer invited the critics into the process as allies, and began making real improvements. The firm created a list of first 16, then 100 social and environmental responsibility indices that they could measure and improve, and displays both the progress and the shortfalls publicly, in an electronic ticker at corporate headquarters (the company has since expanded to measure 180 scales instead of 100).

    For others, like Organic Valley and Patagonia, sustainability was hard-wired into the corporate DNA from the beginning, and that provided a platform to ask hard questions, expose and then reform their own questionable practices, and come through this high-risk process even stronger.

  • Faced with a supply shortage, Organic Valley turned down its largest customer, Wal-Mart, in favor of continuing to service the small health food stores that had fueled its growth.
  • Patagonia did some research about the impact of chemical agriculture and processing on cotton, and the potentially catastrophic health effects this heavily treated cotton could have on its consumers. The company made the difficult and expensive decision to switch all of its cotton to organic, at a time when suppliers of organic cotton were rare. It also went very transparent about its own shortcomings in previously using the chemical cotton, and went to its customers with the story of what they discovered and what they were doing about it. The company was able to leverage its commitment to build a worldwide market for organic cotton.
  • Etsy, an online handicrafts marketplace, sees a need to enrich itself by enriching the craftspeople from developing countries who sell through the company; cheating its suppliers would be cheating itself.

    The Responsibility Revolution is crammed with great take-aways, many of them focused on authenticity, transparency, interrelatedness, and yes, profitability. Both numbers and stories make an effective case for embracing environmental and social sustainability as a path to financial sustainability.

    When sustainability is really part of the corporate DNA, it opens up vast new markets. In Seventh Generation’s case, the sustainability decision is very strategic: In Hollender’s words, it “helps us define, over the next three to five years, what sustainability will look like in the home care and personal care business.” Thus, the company is able to take the lead and market its innovations before others catch on.

    And yet the company wants to get others on board, even at the cost of that marketing advantage. After discovering how commercial palm oil plantations destroy rainforests, contaminate workers with pesticides, and spew carbon into the atmosphere, Seventh Generation didn’t just switch to sustainable palm oil (a major ingredient in many of its cleansers)—but also began pressuring the industry to switch (even backing legislation that would force this). The company was thrilled when SC Johnson, makers of Raid, Windex and Glade, among other products, came on board. Seventh Generation knows that it can continue to innovate, to raise the bar, to claim credit for sparking this wider movement, even while it can no longer claim to be the only company using sustainably grown palm oil.

    With more of a focus on operations than on marketing, this wonderful book is an excellent complement to my own Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. I’d advise reading both.

    • Go-Givers Sell More: Recommended Book, March 2010

    28 Mar, 2010  No Comment

    By Shel Horowitz

    I’ve long been an advocate of the give-first attitude in business: do nice things for others, and nice things will happen to you.

    In Go-Givers Sell More (Penguin Portfolio, 2010), authors Bob Burg and John David Mann focus entirely on this attitude. Unlike their earlier The Go-Giver, this is not a parable but a business how-to book—and frankly, I prefer it that way.

    Among the many wonderful insights:

    Read the rest of this entry »

    Best Clean and Green Links of March

    28 Mar, 2010  No Comment

    Here are the Links of the Month:

    Read the rest of this entry »

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