Tag Archive for attitude

The Clean and Green Club, October 2021

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: October 2021

What Chris Did—And What I Thought of It

Last month, I shared a conversation with Chris Brogan about his salesletter rewrite project, including the changes I suggested to him and his response. I also shared the revised salesletter done by the copywriter he hired to “shiny it up.” And I told you I’d come to you this month with my reaction to the rewrite.

Unfortunately, I hated it. And here’s why:

The previous version of the letter clearly identified an audience: People who want to earn more customers, create fast, effective media, find better productivity tools, receive guidance, be more known, be the authority, get more attention. They may or may not already consider themselves a part of Chris’s tribe, but they respect him enough to visit his website. And some portion of them could consider going deeper with him and might enjoy the option of a continuity program.

But what happens in the rewrite? The headline is just “Owner Media.” Some people may know that’s the name of one of Chris’s businesses. Others might just be confused. What does that even mean? Not only is there no call to action or audience clarification in the headline, it loses any promise of something to help the prospect—even the fairly week “Small Business Owner Tools and Support” of the original.

And the subhead that follows those two words is “WAIT, WHAT? THERE’S A MEMBER COMMUNITY AT OWNER MEDIA?” (emphasis in original)

Let’s keep in mind that for most people, a continuity program in the form of a membership site is not a goal. It’s a tool: a way of getting fresh thinking, new insights, and access to other tools that someone they trust has already vetted. Yet this copy assumes that:

  1. The reader will already want Chris’s membership community and just has to be informed that it exists
  2. The community is a desire, not a means; the reader knows the benefits without being told
  3. “We” language about Chris and his partner Rob will work better than “you” language about the prospect’s wants and needs

I disagree with all three assumptions. Let’s look at the third one: I think language like “we’re not telly-tell lecture-y people who create a curriculum and never want to hear sass from the audience. No, that’s not how we do our best, and we know it’s not how our Insiders do their best” is all about them, not about the benefits, and counterproductive.

Then the letter starts addressing the objection of not enough time. But it hasn’t really addressed why the person reading even needs this. Then there’s a long digression about pricing before getting to the actual pricing. Instead of building confidence in Chris and Rob’s considerable skills—they’re two of the smartest people I know—it makes Chris and Rob sound flaky, disorganized, and narcissistic.

I could go on, but I’ll stop here. I already laid out the strategy I would have used in my first response to Chris’s newsletter.

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Northampton, MA, Friday, November 12, 6-8 p.m., Anchor House of Artists, lower Pleasant Street across from the bowling alley. A rare chance to meet me in a non-marketing, non-activist setting. My late stepfather, Michihiro “Yoshi” Yoshida, was an incredible painter. Known as The Mythic Modernist, he combined natural landscapes, real and fictional/famous and ordinary people, and mythic images from around the world in vividly colorful canvases, some quite large. He was killed three years ago at age 88 by a distracted driver as he was on his way to his daily 3-mile jog. His work is stunning and original.

You can get a taste at http://ArtByYoshi.com –but really, you want to see the actual paintings, which are a much deeper experience. Yoshi and another deceased artist friend have a joint exhibit November 10-27 in the main gallery, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday from 3:00 p.m to 6:00 p.m.,with a reception as part of Northampton Arts Night Out, Friday, November 12, 6-8 p.m. The Real and the Imagined: The Legacy of Two Passionate Painters, Michihiro “Yoshi” Yoshida and Harriet Graicerstein. There will be a live violin/piano klezmer duet at the reception featuring Rafael Natan (my younger child, who has two degrees from New England Conservatory) and Nick Beary. Light refreshments will be served, several other interesting exhibits will be open in other parts of the gallery (which consistently features some of the most exciting art in the area), and there’s even on-site parking. Yoshi’s paintings for the show were selected by my wife and me. The gallery website is https://www.anchorhouseartists.org/

We also expect to do a virtual event, but I don’t have the details at press time. We’ll do it in the second half of November, so I can announce it in the next newsletter.

View highlights from (and listen to) more than 30 podcasts ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

The Folk Singers and the Bureau

The Folk Singers and the Bureau by Aaron J. Leonard

Most of us are familiar with the general outlines of US anticommunist hysteria from the 1930s into the 1960s, and particularly Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). We know that entertainers were blacklisted, workers lost their jobs, quite a few people were imprisoned, and at least two (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) were executed.

But Congress was only one slice of a much deeper attack on freedom of belief. The FBI was another big prong. I, for one, didn’t know that the FBI actually drew up lists of people who would be rounded up and detained on command—and those lists included some of our best-loved entertainers, among them Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, and Bess Lomax Hawes (co-author of the MTA song, a/k/a “Charlie and the MTA”). Interestingly, Leonard argues that longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, though a virulent anticommunist, disliked McCarthy and opposed his methods.

In a year that started with an armed coup attempt inside the US Capitol against the elected US government, it is worth remembering three key points:

  1. All but one of the mass domestic terrorist incidents I can think of were conducted by right-wingers: the January 6th insurrection, of course–but also Oklahoma City, 9/11, Pulse Nightclub, El Paso, Las Vegas, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church… (The exception is the 1954 Puerto Rican Nationalist attack on the Capitol.) Yet the government has historically focused its energies on the little sliver of far-left agitators.
  2. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have clean hands in suppressing dissent or in harnessing state terror just to show power. Though they continued into the Eisenhower administration, the FBI abuses against suspected Communist Party members and sympathizers mostly took place under Democrats FDR and Truman. FDR’s other shames include authorizing the Japanese internment and turning away Jewish refugees, while Truman’s including deploying two atomic bombs against a Japan that was already about to surrender—with the apparent purpose of telling the USSR not to mess with us. And of course, LBJ and Nixon were both in charge during the suppression of leftists in the 1960s. This makes it even more urgent to organize and make sure Biden keeps his progressive campaign promises (as I write this in September, he’s failing badly on several, including immigration justice, climate change, and voting rights).
  3. It is absolutely important to curtain domestic terror. However, there are plenty of ways to do it that don’t involve “othering” and repressing a portion of the population. We are all entitled to our beliefs, no matter how far outside the mainstream. But none of us are entitled to wage violence in the service of our beliefs, and the government needs to keep those elements in check.

Personally, I’d love to see the government embrace alternative strategies to war and violence both in containing terrorism and in furthering democracy around the world. A good first step would be establishing a Cabinet-level Department of Peace, as proposed by former Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio.

The book is impeccably researched, with a seven-page bibliography and discography, 50 pages of end notes(!), and a 15-page index. However, the writing is less than stellar, and the editor or proofreader should have been fired. Still, I will put up with bad writing to get important information (or a good story). I didn’t plan to review this as I read it, and only realized as I finished the main text and began going through the notes that there was relevant wisdom to my newsletter readers. Thus, no page citations this month.

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About Shel

Speaker, author, and consultant Shel Horowitz of GoingBeyondSustainabiity.com helps businesses find the sweet spot at the intersections of profitability with environmental and social good — creating and marketing profitable products and services that make a direct difference on problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. His 10th book is Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.

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