I’ve decided to stay with last month’s theme of email conversations for a couple of more issues. Long-time readers will know that I’m very big on building relationships–before you need them–with people who can help you.
Here’s an example of how I turned my negative reaction to an article in a very prominent Internet marketing newsletter (circulation 40,000 or so) into a bylined article in that newsletter. Read the rest of this entry »
Another Recommended Book: Working Ethically…On a Shoestring: Creating a Sustainable Business Without Breaking the Bank by Lorenza Clifford, Tim Hindle, Nick Kettles, Carry Somers, and Lesley Somers (London: A.C. Black, 2007)
Although this book is thin and easy to read, it’s actually quite substantial–just concise. And necessary.
In a world where 56 percent of US MBA students admit cheating (p. 9), and where companies that claim social/environmental responsibility but don’t measure up can face a strong backlash, a little handbook of practical stories that show how ethics works and doesn’t increase the price of doing business may be just the ticket.
It’s also good for those of us who are American to see outside perspectives. In this case, the authors are from the UK.
Among the points I appreciate:
If the book has a flaw, it’s that the focus is weighted so heavily on environmental issues. Greening a company is certainly a major concern in ethics work, but the book could address more clearly some of the non eco-related aspects of business ethics.
Disclosure: one of the authors, Nick Kettles, is a fan of mine and provided some gratis (and very useful) consulting. Also, I am cited in the book.
Well, this is certainly different! A Big Media (CBS) radio station that appears to break from the mold.
This station, 94.7 FM, is a long-established classic rock number serving the Washington, DC market. About a year ago, it rebranded–still a classic rock station, but with a very clear focus on environmental issues–and a promise to play music beyond the hits.
What does it mean to have an environmental focus? The station’s press release announcing the February 2,2007 changeover notes,
The Washington D.C. station will operate using renewable energy to power its 50,000 watt signal. This move will contribute to lowering the threat of global warming through the purchase of energy resources generated by wind. Additionally, station vehicles will be replaced with hybrid models, and 94.7 The Globe will further its “green” focus by taking a number of steps on and off-air to consistently promote ways for listeners to live an eco-friendly lifestyle.
In keeping with this new focus, the station website offers quite a bit of Green content, including eco-tips compiled by station staff and also submitted by listeners.
The station’s mission statement doesn’t specifically address environmental issues, but it quite cogently promotes the station as an alternative to the sound-alike hitmakers around the country. It notes the importance of musical diversity, promises that DJs have a voice in the programming (a rarity at many corporate radio chains these days), and insists it will be receptive to listener ideas.
And I know, some may call this “greenwashing”–but I prefer to think that it ight be a laboratory for exporting new ideas into the very, very tired and bland commercial radio band.
There is, after all, quite a bit of precedent for large corporate entities developing product lines that offer more individuality and social consciousness, and integrating some of the best practices corporate-wide. Saturn, to name one example, is a unit of General Motors. And Saturn’s low-pressure buying experience has migrated not just to other units within GM, but across the entire industry.
And like most stations these days, you can listen to it on streaming audio.
Shel Horowitz’s Monthly Frugal Marketing Tip: December 2007
Shel Horowitz’s Monthly Book Marketing Tip: November 2007
[Note to Frugal Marketing readers: I believe the points in my last Book Marketing column are very relevant to marketing in general, even though some of what I cited is industry-specific. If you subscribe to both newsletters, you may have read this article ten days ago, though I’ve modified it slightly and added a third point.]
I was just beginning to think about what I’d write in today’s issue when an email arrived with a rambling, incoherent book proposal for a genre I don’t publish in. It is clearly being sent to every publisher this author could find, although at least this person had the sense to send individually addressed e-mails one at a time.
It’s not a coincidence that this showed up just as I was contemplating my monthly message. So, rather than hitting the delete key, I actually answered–and I’ll share my answer with you.
There are three marketing points I want to make with this letter:
1: In any business communication–a book proposal, a joint venture proposal, a salesletter, even a press release–understand who is reading it and focus on what your audience has to gain from your idea
2. Do your research, so that *you* understand the other party’s interests and markets.
3. If someone who doesn’t understand the above approaches you inappropriately, think about how you can respond in a way that draws that person’s attention to how you can solve that person’s problem or satisfies his or her desires in a way that benefits you as well–just as I turned the conversation to why this author needs my book. Ultimately, marketing is always about a conversation.
And now, on to my response.
Dear (author’s name):
Thank you for your proposal. It isn’t going to work for us, and I wanted to explain why. This is going to sound harsh–but you will be wondering why your proposal isn’t even being answered–and I’m going to tell you, because I believe you have a right to know, and that once you understand, you’ll be in a better position to do it differently, and perhaps eventually find the publisher you seek. I am guessing my response will be the only answer you get other than a form note saying thank you, not interested.
1. If you want to be taken seriously in the publishing world, you need to do your research. You would see that my firm doesn’t publish books like this, and in fact doesn’t publish books by other authors. Just as you wouldn’t propose a business venture to a car manufacturer to make breakfast cereal, so you wouldn’t query a business book publisher with one author about a book that is not about business.
2. No publisher wants to know that you’re sending this around to lots and lots of publishers. You want to make the publisher feel special, talk about the books they’ve done that are in the same market, show them you know something about their company–and with the Internet, it’s so easy to do this now.
3. A book proposal should focus on why it is to the advantage of *the publisher* to take on this project. That means you look at how similar books have performed, you demonstrate the size of the audience, and you show the publisher how you intend to reach this audience through your speaking and writing, your personal networks, the publications with which you have relationships, etc.
4. Your proposal shows a lack of understanding about the industry. Most publishers do not translate in-house; they sell the rights to a publisher that produces books in that language (and not all books get translated–there has to be a publisher interested in the destination country). And publishers don’t find you a “famous book store.” Most publishers reach bookstores through distributors and wholesalers, and those orders occur for the most part when you, the author, generate interest in the book through media interviews and other methods (I go into this in detail in my own book Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers).
I would suggest that you visit https://www.grassrootsmarketingforauthors.com and purchase a copy of my book Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers. Orders from that website (either printed book or electronic edition) include several bonuses, including a five-chapter e-book called “How to Write and Publish a Marketable Book” (which I think would be extremely helpful to you). It also includes two actual marketing plans that you can use either to use as a model for your book proposal (though you would have to add an analysis of competing titles and your own credentials) or to map out a workable strategy for becoming your own publisher.
Wishing you the best of luck,
Shel Horowitz, Publisher
AWM Books
Reasonably priced, environmentally responsible, data-secure service for getting rid of techno-junk. I’d try Freecycle.org first, since my junk may be someone else’s treasure–but this looks like a good fallback.
The FAQ page notes,
We refurbish what we can and recycle the rest. Inkjet cartridges get remanufactured and, when possible, cell phones and some computers get refurbished. Material that has no further operating life is broken down to its smallest components (metals, plastics, etc.) and used in the manufacturing of new products. Unlike some recycling companies, all of the material that GreenDisk collects is reused or recycled. No hazardous materials or obsolete components go overseas to be processed or disposed of.
It also discusses the risks of improperly-disposed, insecure data, and the steps it takes to eliminate that risk.
And this is a socially responsible company that chases away business if there’s a more eco-friendly solution available:
You should not use GreenDisk if there is a local drop-off that legitimately recycles your equipment. We believe this service should be offered in your local area to conserve energy and be more cost effective. Unfortunately, businesses in most local areas have not stepped forward. So, we started this service at the request of those who had no local vehicle to recycle their equipment.
I find the information on GreenDisk’s About page very cool: the firm was founded on Earth Day, 1993, originally to help software companies dispose of unsold software. With its commitment to sustainability, GreenDisk went around forming partnerships with existing recyclers–and with nonprofit agencies that employ workers with disabilities–around the country, rather than building new capacity.
Materials that Greendisk recycles are turned into Green office products: Diskettes and CD-RWs, CD packaging, technotrash collection stations (how’s that for a closed loop!). I had to wonder, though–who’s actually still buying diskettes?
In fact, I wondered enough that I picked up the phone. It was answered on the first ring by none other than David Beschen, President and Founder; he says all six employees answer the phone. I asked who buys floppies these days. It turns out the military and other government agencies still buy them–and NASA even still buys 5-1/4 inchers.
For up to 30 pounds of non-computer “technotrash,” e.g., CDs, cords, mice, cell phones, and printer cartridges, just $6.95. Disposal of entire computers, including wiping the data beyond recovery and recycling what components can be recycled, starts at $19.95. The largest job the company handled filled 26 railroad freight cars; the smallest was a single DVD. Rechargeable batteries are acceptable; alkaline, unfortunately, are not–but the company is working on it. “It isn’t that they can’t be recycled, but that it’s extremely expensive,” Beschen told me. “But we’re working on that.”
Since I had him on the phone, I conducted a brief interview:
SH: How do you get people not to just throw electronic parts away.
DB: There’s a huge segment that does want to recycle, and we make it more convenient. They just don’t know what to do with the stuff. We’re not missionary with people who don’t want to recycle, but the general conversations are starting to bring more people to realize [that proper disposal is important]. If you go back in our culture, we didn’t throw stuff away. Planned obsolescence is a relatively recent, and that mentality is changing. We have cars now that don’t need a tune-up for 100,000 miles, instead of rusting hulks in a junkyard.
SH: How are you different?
DB: One of the key rules of environmentalism is don’t make it [if you can use something already in existence]. We use resources already in existence, including postal trucks that would otherwise come back empty. We’ve asked nonprofits that employ people with disabilities [to do the work]; they have 70 percent unemployment: those are two huge resources. Now we’ve integrated FedEx, and less-than-load tactics with all the trucking companies, so we can move stuff without making a special trip. And we can get work done without taking it offshore. To make the diskettes, we bought down-time from people who make the software. And companies will pay a premium for recycled materials.
SH: Is this type of cooperation unusual?
DB: I’m the former head of corporate communications for Microsoft. The software producers were doing all kinds of joint ventures, sharing information that marketing people would have killed each other for disclosing. I said, “do your marketing people know?” It wasn’t a conspiracy, for once. I come from the marketing world. When you create a soluton for people, you’re marketing. Companies that think only of themselves don’t tend to perform well over time.
You might remember fair-trade organic coffee roaster Dean Cycon of Dean’s Beans from my profile of his company in the February, 2006 Positive Power Spotlight.
Dean’s just come out with a fascinating book: Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee.
Most Americans and Europeans in the coffee industry have never met a coffee farmer, and certainly haven’t traveled to the remote indigenous communities where coffee is grown. Dean has traveled the world, meeting growers, processors, shamans, government ministers, bouncing his way down rutted goat trails, learning a few phrases of the local language (or what he thinks is the local language), getting stomach-sick on a regular basis–and having a great deal of fun. He often finds that not only is he the first coffee buyer to visit these isolated places, but often the first white man.
In the U.S., he spends a lot of time hectoring coffee executives at Starbucks and elsewhere to commit more to fair trade and to fund development projects–which he’s able to accomplish for a tiny fraction of the money a large bureaucracy would need, by using methods initiated and designed by local communities using local resources to meet local needs, in the spirit of E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful.
He leaves a trail not only of Dean’s Beans t-shirts and “Make Coffee Not War” bumper stickers, but a legacy of vast improvement in the lives of the villages he visits. Clean-water wells, education centers, community-owned coffee processing plants, simple hand-operated depulpers that allow coffee farmers to capture much more of the value of their crop…some of these are projects he funds directly, and others come out of the cooperatives’ share of coffee profits, made possible by the fair-trade price he pays, sometimes three times as much as the “going rate.”
Dean sums up his philosophy in the closing words of the book:
I have never been fully comfortable with what I, when I know in my heart that things can be better, more respectful, more loving, and frankly, more exciting. It pains me deeply to see cultures crumble and blow away under global pressures (or simply for lack of water), or kids’ lives go unfulfilled for want of a pencil or notebook. Javatrekking allows me the vehicle to explore my own relationship to these things and to take responsibility where I can. These may be small contributions in the greater scheme of things, but as an old Indonesian farmer advised me…”Add your light to the sum of lights.”
Dean has clearly taken that advice seriously. His many initiatives include forming the Coffeelands Landmine Victims Trust, which works in Central America and Vietnam, co-founding Cooperative Coffees, an association of 23 local coffee roasters around the U.S. and Canada who offer fair trade organic coffee, and simply funding scholarships for individual children of coffee growers in Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea.
Dean Cycon is living proof that it is more than possible to use business as a force for positive social change, while at the same time see the world and have a terrific time.
Published sustainably on recycled paper by Chelsea Green (publisher of my own book Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World), Javatrekker is full of well-told stories and includes some great color photos. It’s available from Dean’s Beans or from the publisher.
Dean Cycon, who happens to be a signer of the Business Ethics Pledge, has pledged to donate 100% of the profits to coffee farmers.
Concluding our series on pay-per-click advertising–Shel Horowitz’s Frugal Marketing Tip, November 2007.
With any paid strategy, where dollars are flowing–in some cases quite rapidly–out of your pocket for your marketing, you want to be sure you’re tracking and tweaking and tracking again.
Sometimes, changing a single word in the headline or reversing two lines in the body of the ad can shift response enormously. So you measure your results, make changes, test the results again. You do this for any ad medium, but the beauty of pay-per-click is that you can get the data very quickly, make the tweak within minutes, and test again. So you can refine your tactics on the fly, rather than waiting months if your campaign is based on (as an example) print advertising in monthly magazines.
You need to test the ad headline, the ad body copy, the landing page headline, design, body copy, offer, etc. Testing is so critical that if you’re not willing to put in the time for testing, I don’t think you should be doing PPC to begin with. This is the big reason why I haven’t really used it so far; I just don’t have the time to look at how well it’s working.
The traditional way is to test one element at a time–but that takes too long and is far too much work. I’d recommend using “multivariate testing” software that automates the whole process and allows you to test a number of variables at once.
Since I have no experience, I can’t recommend a specific solution–but here’s a link that will connect you with lots of possibilities. Ask questions like:
If money is a factor, this link goes to freeware and shareware possibilities
Awards and recognition help books get sold!
Here’s a chance to be one of the first profiled at my friend Dan Janal’s latest site, Cool Book of the Day:
https://www.coolbookoftheday.com
It’s a blog, so chosen books will be permanently archived. No cost to enter, at the moment. Knowing Dan, that might well change in the future.
If you’d like to be considered, e-mail dan AT prleads dot com, subject line: Cool Book, with your answers to these questions:
What is the title of the book?
Who is the intended audience?
What is the book about (4-6 sentences)
Why are you the best person to write this book?
How is this book different from other books on this topic?
Is there anything else we should know about this book?
Responses should be between 500 and 1,000 words.
Winners will be asked to place the “Cool Book of the Day” icon and link on their websites.
Shel Horowitz’s Book Marketing Tip of the Month, Vol. 1 #4, October 2007
Guest Columnist: Don McCauley
One of the techniques I teach in my book. . .
Why not give away a free gift? Or better yet, have someone ELSE give
them away. Here is how . . .
Since you have published a book, it might take just an hour or two to
create an e-book using already written excerpts FROM your book. Then
just print up some gift coupons for a FREE E-BOOK. The example I use in
my book is a book of recipes. Approach a local bakery and have the
owner give out YOUR gift coupons as THE BAKERY’s gift to THE BAKERY’s
patrons.
This accomplishes a number of things:
*Your free ebook serves as a ‘taste’ of the book, much the same as a
trailer provides a ‘taste’ of the full movie to come.
*The bakery gives a ‘gift’ to the bakery’s patrons at NO COST to the
bakery.
* The gift coupon has the effect of providing ‘third party’ influence
from the bakery, much the same as a referral FROM the bakery
* As the customer must visit your website to redeem the coupon, you now
have them in YOUR store. This gives you the opportunity to add this
person to YOUR mailing or newsletter list. They will most likely do
this, as they are certainly an INTERESTED prospect.
* The bakery is actually advertising for YOUR BOOK …. for FREE.
The end effect is that you win (getting an interested party to your
site for practically no cash layout) the bakery wins (gives a valuable
gift to the patrons) and the customer wins (gets a free gift). As
compared to using a flyer sent to potentially uninterested parties (1/2
of 1% return is the norm) there is simply no comparison.
The gift certificates will cost pennies to print compared to
potentially hundreds of dollars to print flyers.
Try this simple technique and track the results. Wow! Of course it goes
without saying that you will have to partner with a business in your
genre . . .
Don McCauley ICM, MTC, CH
Author-Top Ten Secrets To Getting Free Publicity
For Your Business Or Organization
Free Publicity Focus Group
www.freepublicitygroup.com
Another Recommended Book: Getting a Grip, by Frances Moore Lappé
Reviewed by Shel Horowitz
Positive Power of Principled Profit, Vol. 5 #2, October 2007
Near the end of Getting a Grip, Lapp’e–whose name may be most familiar as author of the groundbreaking Diet for a Small Planet back in the 1970s–notes that 80 percent of all Americans “say they’re likely to switch brands to help support a cause when price and quality are equal.”
This book is intended as a manual for social and environmental change activists, and not as a business book. Nonetheless, it’s quite applicable to the world of business, and draws on a number of business principles and ideas, including the recently popular Law of Attraction. Lapp’e doesn’t use that term, but her emphasis is clear: what you pay attention to becomes bigger and more real. Also, what I have for several years called the Abundance Principle: that there is plenty to go around, but a big maldistribution of resources. No one needs to be hungry or lack fuel once this imbalance is addressed.
Lapp’e’s central thesis is that large corporate and government entities have robbed consumers of their citizenship, by substituting what she calls “Thin Democracy”–I’d call it “Pseudo-Democracy” for the involved and active citizen participation that comprises true democracy–and that we, the people, can take back our rightful heritage as citizens–as people who participate in the decisions that affect us–and initiate true change.
The book is full of inspiring examples of individual people with simple actions that turned injustice into justice–most strongly, the story of an African minister whose pro-democracy efforts brought a visit from the goon squad on a mission to torture and kill. His compassion, humor, and lack of fear in the face of the attack won over the attackers, who, after inflicting significant harm, stopped the attack and brought him to a hospital.
A key insight that I’ve long believed but not often seen elsewhere is that there are two concurrent social trends: a concentration in corporate and government power and wealth that is threatening to ordinary citizens as well as the environment—and at the same time, an energizing, a democratization based in the actions of ordinary people. This second trend is the Living Democracy, a powerful antidote to Thin Democracy.
To bring Lapp’e’s points back to a business context: she notes that even the biggest companies respond to pressure from their customers, and that what she calls “entry points” allow those consumers (and other stakeholders, such as neighbors) to address–and effect change in–some pretty big issues. In Sweden, for instance, McDonald’s serves organic milk, because its customers wouldn’t tolerate anything less.
