The Clean and Green Club

In This Issue…

• Will YOU be the One to Get a Brand New $1299 Multifunction Printer from Dell?
• This Month’s Tip: Market With Video, Part 1
• Friends Who Want to Help
• Hear & Meet Shel
• Another Recommended Book: The New Relationship Marketing

Will YOU be the One to Get a Brand New $1299 Multifunction Printer from Dell?

A few weeks ago, I received a gift of a very spiffy Dell 3335dn multifunction printer, which not only prints two-sided at high resolution from any computer on our network, but also scans, copies, e-mails, and stores documents in its memory. I have to tell you, even though I’ve gotten along just fine without in-house copying and faxing capabilities, I’m finding that I really enjoy having them.

Because the company is courting the green market for this printer (which not only can print both sides of the paper but also has some cool energy management features), Dell’s promotion team came to me and asked if I’d like to give one of these printers away. Of course, I agreed. But I put a condition on it. Rather than just give one away randomly, I’ll give it to the person who submits the best sustainability tip via my Twitter account during the giveaway days.

So you’ll be rewarded for your thinking processes, and probably not facing an enormous number of entries. In other words, if you give this your best shot, you’ll have a much better chance of winning than in most contests.

And five runners-up get a copy of my very useful e-book, Painless Green: 111 Tips to Help the Environment, Lower Your Carbon Footprint, Cut Your Budget, and Improve Your Quality of Life-With No Negative Impact on Your Lifestyle.

Disclosure: as is obvious from above, I got one of these printers as a gift and have been using it steadily ever since.

By entering, you agree to both my rules and Dell’s rules for the contest. You’ll find both sets of rules posted at https://painlessgreenbook.com/win-a-1299-printer-december-16-19-2011

Good luck!

This Month’s Tip: Market With Video, Part 1

In this two-part series, I’ll first introduce the context of video marketing in today’s world–which is quite different from even a few years ago. Next month, I’ll follow up with specific things to keep in mind when shooting a video, and some ideas for what kind of content to create.

There are probably at least 1001 ways to promote a product or a service with video–a medium that penetrates the brain like no other (as we’ve known since the popularization of television began more than 60 years ago). Video used to require considerable technical skill and a whole pile of expensive equipment. But these days, anyone can shoot and produce a video. All you need is a pocket video camera or (for interviews) even just a Skype account with the call recorder add-on; distribution is as simple as uploading to a video sharing site like Youtube, Vimeo, Viddler, Ustream, or their many competitors.

(Note: For some purposes, I still advise professional production; the quality will be way better. Your speaker demo reel, for instance, should absolutely be done by a pro, and so should anything that you expect to go head-to-head with footage shot by big studios. But you can do a lot with homegrown videos.)

Video is enormously popular. This list of more than 300 video sharing sites <https://www.reelseo.com/list-video-sharing-websites/> includes Alexa rank (how much they get visited) and Google Page Rank (a vague indication of how much search engines like them). Astoundingly, 46 sites have an Alexa rank better than 1000. That means out of the roughly 300 million websites in the entire world, 46 of the 1000 most-visited websites exist to share video. And many of these sites allow user submissions of videos.

Alexa’s own Top Sites page gives Youtube the number 3 position in both the world and the United States, trailing only Google (which owns Youtube) and Facebook (data checked 12/12/11).

On Youtube, and presumably other sites, you can set up a branded URL for your own channel, building name recognition. You can also easily embed a video hosted on any of these sites into your own web pages and even e-mails.

And don’t forget that these sites are typically non-exclusive. You can post the same video on multiple sites, which may be especially useful if there’s a niche video site covering your area of expertise.

Friends Who Want to Help

Guerrilla Marketing Intensive–$1000 discount just for you

My co-author, Jay Conrad Levinson, “the Father of Guerilla Marketing,” has a few seats left in his next Guerrilla Marketing Intensive, at his Florida home, January 23rd-25th. 21 hours of training over three days. Normally $4997 (payable in up to four installments)–but Jay’s manager (his daughter Amy) has offered a $1000 discount to my subscribers. Limited to just ten people, so this is pretty in-depth. https://gmarketing.infusionsoft.com/go/Int/shelhoro/ If you want my opinion about whether Jay knows his stuff, read my rave review elsewhere in this issue of Guerrilla Marketing Remix.

To get this special rate, just click this link: mailto:olympiagal@aol.com?subject=Discount?cc=shel@frugalfun.com to tell Amy you want the $1000 off for Shel’s subscribers (Also tell her whether you prefer an online payment link or prefer to call in your payment info).

Remember the hit song, “Don’t Worry…Be happy?” But how do you GET happy without worrying? Ana Weber’s book/course, “The Happiness Thermometer,” can give you more than a few clues to increase your happiness quotient without having to worry about it. https://3bl.me/rb3y6n

Coop-themed Poetry Contest for Middle Schoolers

Know a middle-schooler who likes to write? Cheese and milk co-op Cabot is doing a poetry contest for students in grades 5-8, on the cooperative spirit. Winner not only gets a cash prize, but his or her poem on a Cabot butter box. For details: https://potatohill.com/files/2011-PoetryContest.pdf

Hear & Meet Shel

• 1/4/12: Visit https://bigamericangiveaway.com/–I’m that day’s Massachusetts sponsor, and I’ll have some cool stuff for you: a gratis copy of my e-book Painless Green, and a $25 gift certificate good toward any consultation or copywriting. Same Deal applies to the London page of https:// bigbritishgiveaway.com on January 17.

• In negotiation to speak at conferences in Bangladesh and Switzerland. Nothing definite yet.

• 4/2/12: I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be doing a program for The Shift Network. For a year now, I’ve been listening to many of their calls, interviewing the creme de la creme of experts in sustainability and global consciousness. I’ll be part of the Green Business track of the ambitious Spring of Sustainability program, which also features such luminaries as Paul Hawken, Bill McKibben, Hunter Lovins, David Korten, Frances Moore Lappe and Duane Elgin. You will want to sign up for this entire series. I plan to listen to as many of the calls as possible. Watch for the registration link (no cost, I believe) in a future issue.

Another Recommended Book: The New Relationship Marketing by Mari Smith

About 80 percent of Mari Smith’s new book is about social media–but I’d say the other 20 percent might be worth the closest look.

That’s because Smith is not only a believer in meeting face-to-face, but a brilliant tactician who uses her prodigious online skills to totally win over the people she meets offline (at conferences, for example)–and tells you exactly how to do the same.

Using a powerful yet very accessible set of online research tools to steer her face-to-face encounters, Smith creates quite a bit of “wow factor” by integrating online comments about her presentation directly into the speech, in real time–and to not just show up very prepared to network with other speakers and attenders, but to have impressed them so much ahead of (as well as during) the event that they actually seek you out.

Smith outlines how she does this, step by step, in Chapter 7 of her new book, The New Relationship Marketing: How to Build a Large, Loyal, Profitable Network Using the Social Web (John Wiley and Sons, 2011). She titles the chapter, Go Offline to Optimize Your Online Marketing–but I’d actually flip that around. Really, it’s about going *online* to maximize your *offline* marketing.

While that chapter alone would be worth buying the book, it’s typical of the other good stuff, all based on the idea of using “radical strategic visibility” to build real relationships in business. She encourages businesses to think beyond B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer) to “P2P”–people-to-people. For instance, she talks about how to get your A-list–the people you want to impress–to see you as a valued colleague…what parts of your social media presence you should and should not delegate, and why…how to recovery gracefully and with minimal damage from a social-media faux pas…how businesses with purely local clientele (such as restaurants) can market effectively on social media…identifying and cultivating “superfans” who will advance your brand perhaps better than you can do on your own.

And it all comes from an attitude of service, perhaps best summed up by this quote from pages 193-194: “Always be thinking about how you can tap into the intelligent network of people that will allow you to bring greater value to each and every individual and your community at large. Provide a better product and better service, and consistently build your social equity to establish your brand as the natural “go-to” for your field. You can become a top industry leader by utilizing the inclusion of your marketplace. If you’re really treating people as equals–whether it’s 10 or 10 million–then you are relating to each one with the greatest of respect by including and involving them.”

The book is also crammed with resources, both in the main text and in the appendix, and features a wonderfully comprehensive index (something I desperately wish more business books paid attention to).

About Shel and this Newsletter