Tag Archive for Hear & Meet Shel

The Clean and Green Club, April 2019

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, April 2019
This Month’s Tip: Two Website Traps to Always Avoid
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Recently, I hit one web page that did something very right, and something else very wrong. I want to share these with you.

One of my big peeves when surfing the Net is the lack of clear instruction when you need to fill out a form. I especially can’t stand choosing a password with no guidance as to how the site requires that password to be structured, and then having my first two or three attempts rejected. And if I have to try three passwords, I will leave the site unless I absolutely have to register (for instance, if I am doing a website analysis for a client). So the first trap is failure to provide frustration-reducing instructions.

So I loved it when I hit a signup form on https://www.smartbizquiztribe.com/ and got this wonderful clear wording:

Security is important to us.
Password requirements: 8-20 characters long,
at least 1 uppercase, 1 lowercase character and 1 digit.

What I DIDN’T like: This was a link from a page of giveaways from various marketers. The page that got me to click was a page offering a free assessment tool. But when I clicked to the landing page, it was a 30-day free trial. I don’t see that as the same thing at all—and I lost enough trust that I refused to provide my information, walked away from the tool they were offering, and crossed them off the list of companies I might do business with.

  1. Page failed to deliver what was promised
  2. I don’t like giving my payment info when I’m not buying anything
  3. I felt misled. I would never have clicked over if I’d known I had to subscribe to a paid service and then remember to cancel. My trust was gone and my time was wasted, and they lost any chance to make me a customer.

So even though I loved the way they did their password instructions, I was unhappy with the way this site took my time for granted and betrayed its promise. I lost trust and didn’t sign up. Betraying trust by delivering something different (and less than) you promised is Trap #2. Learn from their mistake!

Here’s the actual offer text that got me to click:

Free
Gift for Everyone

It’s a well-known truth that assessments and quizzes are SUPER-POWERFUL tools for growing your list and moving prospects to a YES! Smart Biz Quiz provides an automated assessment system that is revolutionizing the way coaches, trainers, speakers and consultants market their expertise online. From personalizing your communication, to increasing conversion from your one-on-one conversations, Smart Biz Quiz provides a new and innovative way to personalize your e-communication to double and even triple your conversion.
Value Each: $397 Quantity Available: UNLIMITED
Not a word about this being a one-month trial membership or about it not being a tool that the reader could use over and over.

New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel
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.

Discover why Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, and many others recommend Shel’s 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (and download a free sampler). Autographed and inscribed copies available.

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!

http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

Another Recommended Book: Loonshots
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Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries, by Safi Bahcall
What makes some “crazy” ideas take off and change the world, while others die a quiet, slow death? Bahcall, a physicist, biotechnologist, and former advisor on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, spent years studying this phenomenon across disciplines, industries, and cultures—from ancient China, to the Islamic world of the Middle Ages, to the US military in WWII, to contemporary industries as diverse as pharmaceuticals, aviation, computing, and even entertainment. This fascinating and ambitious book is the result.
What he found (a small sampling; I took five pages of notes and even recommended it to Seth Godin, who had already read it):

  • Successful “crazy” ventures nurture two very distinct, conflicting roles—and each requires a different structure and different governance. The “artists” are the dreamers and inventors who make the flying intellectual and intuitive leaps that turn 1+1 into much more than 2. But the “soldiers,” who bring the new discovery into the mainstream, are just as necessary.
  • Famous loonshots are often product-focused. But strategic loonshots, like American Airlines’ early computerized reservation system or Walmart’s initial concentration on the small-town heartland, can be just as important.
  • Artists and soldiers are in dynamic tension, rubbing up against each other with each side strengthening in some places while weakening in others—in a “phase shift” similar to the subtle changes in temperature and pressure that shift H2O molecules between solid (ice) and liquid (water) states, or between liquid and gas (steam). Change happens best when they’re both valued equally, separated, yet ideas can transfer back and forth (yes, the soldiers have plenty of ideas for the artists, because they test the concepts in the real world, where artists might not go). So, soldiers may respond better to a rigid chain of command, while artists need independence–but that independence is tempered by feedback from the soldiers.
  • Forget looking at individual molecules in a phase shift; any molecule can shift frequently to either state. But in the aggregate, as the temperature cools, more molecules will “choose” the solid phase; as it warms, more will liquify. It doesn’t happen at once, which is why some parts of a pond or a puddle might be ice at temperatures above 32 degrees F (0 degrees C), while other parts (perhaps in direct sunlight) will be liquid even at 30 degrees F.
  • It’s crucial to analyze WHY a system is generating successful loonshots—or why it’s failing.
  • Differentiate between false and genuine fails (Friendster’s failure was not about social network unworkability, but about poor infrastructure; cholesterol-lowering statin drugs succeeded when the labs shifted their methodology).
  • Organizations ossify from loonshot-incubators into franchise-maintainers (filming the next James Bond movie or releasing the next incremental software performance enhancement) because of multiple factors. But, potentially, we can prolong the loonshot phase. We humans can influence which actors are in which phase, by controlling factors such as the size of a working group (around 150 seems ideal) or whether political in-group maneuvering or pure innovation is rewarded.

Loonshots is well-written, well-researched, and quite provocative. With a release date of March 2019, you might be the first on your block to gain from Bahcall’s work (I read a prepublication copy). Oh, and read the endnotes, also fascinating.

Accurate Writing & More
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About Shel
How can you profit by putting the VALUE in your VALUES? Shel Horowitz shows how to MONETIZE your organization’s commitment to fixing problems like hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change. Shel consults individually and in groups, gives presentations, and writes books and articles including Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (endorsed by Jack Canfield, Seth Godin and others).

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The Clean and Green Club, October 2018

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, October 2018
Friends Who Want to Help 

What a Magnificent Group of Smart Teachers—No Cost
Want to create positive change in your own life and in the world? Listen to the 9th Annual Global Oneness Day Online Summit on Wednesday, October 24th (with replays running the 24th through 26th). Zero cost but you need to register.
Theme: “Living Your Life for the Benefit of All.” A super-timely message people need to thrive in these challenging times.

You’ll hear from: Dr. Jean Houston, Bruce Lipton, Marianne Williamson, Gregg Braden, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Neale Donald Walsch, Marci Shimoff, Thomas Hubl, Steve McIntosh, Gangaji, Joan Borysenko, Matthew Fox, and many others. I’ve spoken there in the past.See the Speaker Schedule and Learn More About Global Oneness Day

By living in Oneness, we can harness our deepest shared connections to co-create new education, media, governance, and economic systems.

See the Speaker Schedule and Learn More About Global Oneness Day

By living in Oneness, we can harness our deepest shared connections to co-create new education, media, governance, and economic systems.

Three Freebie Calls with the Amazing Barbara Marx Hubbard
Also, one of my favorite teachers, Barbara Marx Hubbard, is doing three freebie calls:
This Month’s Tip: How to “Vaccinate” Yourself Against Mental Subversion by Fake News
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Last month, I shared a video of a dolphin rescuing a dog, asked whether you thought it was real or fake, and then told you my answer, with seven reasons why. If you missed it, please click on this paragraph to read it.

Why the Dolphin Video Matters: A Metaphor for Something Much Deeper

Why am I going on about this? Why does it matter? Isn’t it just some people having fun making a feel-good film?

Answer: I do marketing and strategic profitability consulting for green and social change organizations, as well as for authors and publishers–and I’m also a lifelong activist. This combination of activism and marketing gives me another set of lenses to filter things, as well as a magnificent toolkit to make the world better. My activism also brings a strong sense of ethics into the marketing side.

Both as a marketer and an activist, I pay careful attention to how we motivate people to take action–to the psychology of messaging. (You may want to visit the psychology category on my blog, where a version of this article first appeared, to get posts going back many years. I worry deeply about our tendency as a society to crowd out facts with emotions. (I also worry about another tendency, to crowd out emotions with facts, but that’s a different post.)

And this is an example of crowding out facts with emotion. While this particular instance is innocuous as far as I can tell, we see examples of overreach on both the Left and Right, and they work to push us apart from each other, talk at each other instead of seeking common ground, and push real solutions farther and farther out of reach.

My inbox is full of scare-tactic emails from progressive, environmental, or Democratic Party organizations. Because I’m in the biz and understand what they’re doing, I leave most of them unopened. I just searched my unread emails for subject lines that contain the word “Breaking” and came with hundreds, including this one from a group called Win Without War:

Subject: Breaking: Trump ordered tanks in D.C.

From this subject line, you’d expect some horror story about peaceful protestors facing American military might. It could happen. It has happened in the past–for example, the 1970 Kent State massacre that left four Vietnam War protesters dead and nine more injured by Ohio National Guard soldiers’ bullets. (The shootings at Jackson State College in Mississippi 11 days later were committed by police, not soldiers.) And protestors in countries with totalitarian governments have often faced tanks; if you want to see courage, watch the video of a man stopping tanks with only a flag, in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989–WOW!)

It’s a clear attempt to generate hysteria, to have people perceiving tanks in the streets with their guns pointed at dissenters.

Only in the body of the email do we find out what’s really going on:

Shel —

Last night, the Washington Post broke the story that Donald Trump has ordered a giant military parade with tanks, guns, and troops taking over the streets of our nation’s capital. [1] This is the kind of parade that dictators around the world use to intimidate their enemies and, more importantly, their own citizens.

This is what authoritarian dictatorships look like.

But Trump can’t change the fact that we still live in a democracy — which means Washington, D.C.’s local government gets to have a say before Donald Trump’s tanks roll down its streets.

Note the use of mail merge software to appear personal. Does that really fool anybody anymore? But OK, even when you know it’s a mail merge, it still generates at least a small warm fuzzy.

More importantly, note that the actual content is totally different from the expectation in the headline. We can argue the foolishness of Trump wanting a military parade (I think it’s foolish, and an expensive attempt to stroke his ego, and even he has since canceled the parade)–but in no way is this the same as attacking demonstrators in the streets of Washington, DC.

The right wing is at least as bad. I don’t subscribe to their e-blasts, but I found this juicy example (with an introduction and then a rebuttal by the site hosting it) in about ten seconds of searching.

And then there are DT’s own Tweets, news conferences, and speeches, both during the campaign and since he took the oath to uphold the constitution as President of the United States (an oath he has been in violation of every single day of his term). They are full of lies, misrepresentations, name-calling, bullying, and fear-mongering. They are hate speech. I will not give them legitimacy by quoting them here; they’re easy enough to find.

As a country, we are better than this.

How You Can “Vaccinate” Yourself Against Sensationalist Fear-mongering

Before sharing any news story or meme, run through a series of questions to help you identify if it’s real. And if it passes that test, pop on rumor-checking site Snopes and check its status. For that matter, go through a similar questions for advertising claims.

The questions will vary by the situation. Here are a few to get you started:

Does the post link to documentation? Are most of the linked sites reputable? If they advance a specific agenda, does the post disclose this? (Note that THIS post links to several reputable sites, including NPR, New York Times, history.com, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google, CNN, Snopes, and my own goingbeyondsustainability.com and greenandprofitable.com. Yes, I am aware of the issues in using Wikipedia or Youtube as the only source. I am also aware that Google gives them a tremendous amount of “link juice” because on the whole, they are considered authoritative. For both those citations, I had plenty of documentation from major news sites.) Strong documentation linking to known and respected sources is a sign to take the post seriously.

Does the post name-drop without specifics? See how the Win Without War letter mentions the Washington Post but leaves out the link? Remember that ancient email hoax citing longtime NPR reporter Nina Totenberg? Name-dropping to buy unsusbstantiated respect is not a good sign.Are the language and tone calm and rational, or screaming and sensationalist or even salacious?

Is the post attributed? Can you easily contact the creator?

And last but far from least, the most important question: Who benefits from the post’s point of view? What are their relationships to the post’s creator? (Hello, Russian trollbots!). Don’t just follow the money. Follow the power dynamics, too.

I could go on but you get the idea.

New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

This showed up just at press time and I haven’t had a chance to listen and write down the highlights–but I remember that this interview with Mira Rubin was excellent. I’ll run it again next month with the proper description: https://player.fm/series/sustainability-now-exploring-technologies-and-paradigms-to-shape-a-world-that-works/ep-009-guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world-with-shel-horowitz
 
Also quoted in this article on climate change in Playboy, of all places:
 
I’ve been taping several other podcasts lately, and will post the links in future newsletters as I get them. In the meantime, you can browse the list of the more-than-30 podcasts I’ve done; they range from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.  

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.

Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?

Repurpose that expensive content, without using any staff time. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use immediately: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

Another Recommended Book: Our Search for Belonging
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Our Search for Belonging: How Our Need to Connect is Tearing Us Apart, by Howard J. Ross with Jonrobert Tartaglione

Ross sees the need to be part of community as essential; we are hard-wired to demand it, to form community in numerous ways. He sees two kinds of communities, though: inclusive and exclusionary. Exclusionary communities bond internally but create barriers outside their in-group: they see themselves as “us” against “them”—while inclusive communities build bridges (pp. 16-17).

While those divisions have always existed, Ross sees them escalating dangerously: “People are no longer merely disagreeing; instead they are disavowing each other’s right to an opinion” (p. xi). It’s much harder to forge coalitions across these divisions now, or even friendships. And we surround ourselves with bubbles of like-minded people, who reinforce our prejudices. And that kind of social isolation.

The barrier(s) could be cultural, racial, religious, class-based, gender, sexual orientation, etc.—but they also could be ideological. If we demonize the “enemy,” if we treat them as a batch of stereotypes and not as human beings with the best interests of the world in their hearts, we create that “us versus them.” But because we create it, we can undo it.

How we define our bonding communities shifts situationally. A conservative Muslim woman or a progressive gay Christian might bond with one set of people over politics, another through religion, and a third as part of the sisterhood of women (a majority group that still experiences discrimination) or within the gay community (a minority subculture)—and some of these communities would see membership in the others as anathema.

And sometimes, others put you in the category. When the news media identifies someone as a radical Islamic terrorist but doesn’t identify the Oklahoma City bombers or the man who shot up the concert in Las Vegas as Christian terrorists, that creates a false identification of Islam with terrorism, and that demonizes Muslims but not Christians (p. 19).

One key piece of identity politics is the difference in perception between members of the dominant and non-dominant groups: members of dominant groups typically don’t often think about the experience of those in non-dominant groups. Yet, a person of color or a woman or someone who identifies as another type of minority experiences daily reminders that society puts up physical, psychological, economic, and other barriers.

That difference in perception seems especially relevant during the Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination process, which was still going on as I wrote this earlier this month. Ross says we’re all heroes of our own stories (p. 55); certainly, both Kavanagh and Ford presented themselves that way.

I blogged about some of the parallels at: https://greenandprofitable.com/kavanaugh-and-the-culture-of-belonging/ Please read it. This review doesn’t duplicate that post. Here, I talk much more specifically about the book, which has relevance to so many situations in society, the workplace, the community.

There’s a lot of good stuff in the book, including a few specific ideas for defusing conflict and forming community across those “them” barriers. I will say, though, that I expected more of that. I didn’t really feel I’d been given a toolkit—but perhaps that’s because I’ve been doing bridge-building work for decades. As long ago as 1977, when I and 1413 other safe energy activists were incarcerated in New Hampshire’s National guard armories following a protest at the Seabrook nuclear plant construction site, I was one among many of the protestors who reached out to the young, conservative Guardsmen overseeing our captivity. I was only 20. Since then, I’ve met with and even stayed with Muslims (I’m Jewish), Evangelical Christians, conservatives (I identify as progressive), and others on the other sides of those us-them mental fences.

Ross presents 10 specific ideas to become more inclusive, pp. 53-58. While I wish he had included more, what he does include shows great wisdom. Examples:

  • Look for places you can partner with the other side: where does the right-wing goal of personal liberty [I’m not sure that’s as universal a concern as he says it is, but that’s a different discussion] intersect with the left-wing goal of justice [again, I see many on the right wanting justice; they just define it differently] (p. 53)?
  • Don’t confuse voting for a candidate with supporting all that candidate’s positions or actions (p. 55). If you’re talking to a Trump voter, you may feel that person is enabling racism, bullying, lying, etc. But you may discover that person is not acting out of racism, but perhaps economic issues or ending abortion. Similarly, if you’re talking to a Hillary Clinton voter, you may go deep enough to find that this voter didn’t support Clinton’s hawkishness or her tone-deaf and entitled campaign, but wanted to keep an openly racist and mean-spirited “loose cannon” away from the most powerful job in the world. It’s worth remembering that both candidates were caught up in multiple corruption scandals, and the media was not sensitive to the vast differences in degree of corruption. So a lot of people voted as they did to vote against what they saw as someone even worse, rather than voting for a future they really wanted.

Ross notes that having situational privilege, being part of the dominant culture and mindset in a particular interaction, doesn’t mean you don’t face challenges. But the nature of the challenge is different; you don’t have to prove that what you wear or where you travel or how you speak meets society’s standards; if you’re found wanting, it won’t reflect badly on your entire subgroup (p. 91). You may not even notice that members of different subgroups often don’t share that good fortune. And you’re very unlikely to feel negative physical effects from being marginalized, if you never experience being marginalized (p. 113).

But note the word “situational.” A gay white male will experience situational privilege when the focus is on race or gender, but will be the marginalized minority in other ways. And those who hold the power typically face far lesser consequences when they stereotype and marginalize (p. 152). Members of the dominant religion or ethnic group in one country may see other religions as not only not sacred, but even heretical (p. 130)—while in a different country, the positions might be reversed. At its extreme, the consequences of marginalization include death; I happen to be reading a poetry collection dedicated to a martyred white gay man, Matthew Shepherd (October Mourning, by Leslea Newman).

All of this affects how we communicate, and how we communicate also affects bias behavior. Language creates thinking and believing patterns (pp. 124, 126, 184). Inuit languages include dozens of words for snow, while corporate English has dozens to describe different strata in management. In Hebrew or Spanish or German, every noun has a gender. In English, that’s not true. How do we think differently as a result? How does social media, which can organize both positive and hateful movements, and which can amplify (go viral) and distort (fake news) messaging very quickly (pp. 164-165), shift the dynamics?

The good news: we can overcome the conditioning. Peru and Ecuador managed to settle a 175-year-old border conflict in just 77 days in the 1970s, by using a “process-oriented mentality” to really listen to each other (p. 173). The two presidents won the Nobel Peace Prize for doing so, because they were able to treat the other’s point of view as just that, a point of view (p. 179).

Interestingly, this kind of inclusive thinking works better, even when it’s not easy. “Belonging has to include the uncomfortable” (p. 180). He lists eight factors in effective diversity training (pp. 196-197), notes that “breakdowns can be the source of breakthroughs” (p. 213), and stresses the importance of staying civil when you and the other person disagree (p. 214). At its best, as in Nelson Mandela’s leadership in post-Apartheid South Africa, idealism and practicality come together to create something amazing (p. 215).

Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
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About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.
He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

The Green and Clean Club, September 2018

If you’re here to make a comment on this month’s article, please scroll all the way down to leave your comment, then scroll up again to read my answer and the reasons. Thanks!

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, September 2018
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This Month’s Tip: Let’s Play Detective with this Internet Dog Video (and get some marketing and psychology lessons)
Screenshot from the video of a dolphin rescuing a dog
Do you have seven minutes to watch a sweet film about a dolphin rescuing a dog who is swept off a boat in shark territory? (If you don’t, you can skip some great dolphin footage and start 2 minutes, 20 seconds in, as the dog goes over the stern, and cut off at 4:45, after the animals have made their sweet farewells. Surely, you have 2 minutes and 25 seconds you can spare. And feel free to turn off the sound. It’s just music, and repetitious music at that.) Makes you feel warm and fuzzy all over, right? Personally, I love videos about interspecies friendship, and I’ve seen a bunch of them over many years.

Now: do you think this is an actual event, a recreated actual event, or fiction? Why? Please share your thoughts in the comments below before reading further.

 

Here’s my take on it:

I’m pretty sure it’s fiction. And I’m concerned that there’s no text with this film, and no credits at the end–in other words, no accountability. I have no objection to filming heartwarming works of fiction. I love that sort of thing, from Frank Capra’s “You Can’t Take it With You” to “Fried Green Tomatoes” to “Life Is Beautiful” and “Jude”. But all of these are clearly marketed as story, not fact.

In my opinion, this film is specifically designed to make most viewers believe this was a real event.

And I have trouble with that. I feel its “story-ness” should be disclosed, and we should also know who produced the film. I’ll tell you why in a moment, but first, here’s how I reached my conclusion.

Why You Can’t Necessarily Trust Your Eyes

Because I’m trained in journalism and have worked for decades in marketing, I ask hard questions about what is and isn’t real, what people’s motivations or agendas are, and how to filter information based on what’s really going on versus what the speaker or writer or photographer or filmmaker is trying to get you to think is going on.

If you watch any crime movies from the 1930s through 1950s, there’s a pretty good chance that the detective will turn to the suspect and shout, “photos don’t lie!” But here’s the thing: THAT is a lie. Photos can lie in what they choose to include or not. A famous example: the close-ups of a statue of Saddam Hussein being felled by a jubilant (and apparently huge) Baghdad crowd were discredited by wide-angle shots showing only a couple of hundred people, many of them US soldiers rather than locals. The close-ups were propaganda, not truth, even though the photos themselves were real and unretouched. And even in the 1950s–for that matter, even in the 1850s–there was a whole industry around photo alteration. This was true in film as well; ever hear the expression “left on the cutting room floor”? The technologies of photo editing and film editing go back to the earliest days of photography and filmmaking.

In today’s digital world, tools like Photoshop and video editors have transformed those doable but difficult tasks into something incredibly easy, and only an expert will be able to tell. So in this era, we can never trust that a picture or a movie is accurate unless we were there when it was shot. Thus, unfortunately, we need to bring a certain amount of critical analysis when we view any video, any photograph.

And through this lens (pun intended, I confess), when I watch this video, I immediately discard any idea that we’re watching real-time true-story footage.

Why?

7 Reasons Why I Think It’s a Fake

  1. It’s waaaay too slick. This is professionally shot and carefully edited, by a skilled camera operator using high-resolution equipment, tripods, and lighting to produce footage as good technically as anything coming out of Hollywood. In real life, this would have been shot on a cell phone, held in a hand that shook at least a little. It’s on a moving boat, after all.
  2. Much of the footage is underwater or behind the boat the dog was riding, yet no other boats are visible.
  3. When the dog slips off the deck into the water, no people are around. If anyone were filming an actual event, we’d see some kind of rescue attempt, and we certainly would not see the boat blithely continuing away, stranding the pet. At least the crew of the videography boat would get involved.
  4. It’s just too convenient that cameras happened to focus on all the key places. And yes, that’s a plural. There was one camera focused on the boat deck and later on the swimming dog, and at least one other one focused underwater at the dolphin and shark.
  5. If the shark were really close enough to attack the dog, it would have gone after the dolphin too. Giant sharks don’t care much about “collateral damage.”
  6. It strains credulity that the boat would be waiting, unmoving, in still water, just when the dolphin deposits the dog on the tailgate, considering there are plenty of waves in the dolphin-carries-dog footage.
  7. I’m suspicious of the site it’s on, something called TopBuzz, which I’ve never heard of. I didn’t notice at first when I clicked the link from a Facebook message that it had a monstrously complex tracking URL, too. Uh-oh! I’ve stripped those tracking codes out of the URL as it’s posted here. To its credit, it doesn’t try to get me to watch all sorts of salacious videos, and a search for complaints brought up only questions about its relationships with content creators, not viewers. And I checked for viruses after having the page open for several hours while writing this, and it came up clean.

I’m also skeptical that this is a later recreation of a true event, although I’d grant that maybe a 10 percent chance. Why? Because much of the footage “documented” events with no witnesses. Unless one of the human crew is fluent in either dog or dolphin language, neither party could have told the story. And the dog might not even know about the shark threat. Certainly, the humans in the boat that drove away would have no idea. Since we don’t know who produced this or how to get in touch with them, we have no way of knowing.

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Hear & Meet Shel
Quoted at some length in Playboy, of all places, on individual actions we can all take to avert climate catastrophe. https://www.playboy.com/read/what-cli-fi-gets-right-about-our-environmental-doomsday-1

I’ve been taping several other podcasts lately, and will post the links in future newsletters as I get them. In the meantime, you can browse the list of the more-than-30 podcasts I’ve done; they range from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World
Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.

Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?

Repurpose that expensive content, without using any staff time. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use immediately: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

Three Recommended Movies about Empowerment
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I’m nowhere near finished reading the book I’d planned to review this month. Yes, I actually read all the books I review here in full.

So instead, I’ll encourage you to hunt up three movies I’ve seen about people who gained power—and used that power to empower others. I saw these over a period of months, and not with the idea that I’d be reviewing them here. So these are mini-reviews.

“RBG,” the movie about “Notorious” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, covers her amazing backstory using law to promote women’s rights. I hadn’t known much of this history and am in awe of what she achieved long before she was on the Court. I also really like it that she could be friends with superconservative Justice Antonin Scalia; they were opera buddies. I believe that we make peace in part by reaching out to those who think differently than we do.

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” the Mister Rogers movie, Watching the show occasionally with my daughter in the late 1980s, it was obvious that he was totally committed to children’s empowerment and acceptance of diversity. But I didn’t know what an activist he was, or about his own background, or about how the show format was shaped by a mix of serendipity and very deliberate choices. I loved discovering his passion to make a difference AND his choice to have as much fun as possible in the process. Fred Rogers was a remarkable man, and many of his messages resonate especially loudly in the past year and a half, to get our country back on track in an era where civility and respect seem to be very little valued.

“The Judge” may be hard to track down but it’s worth the effort. Wonderful documentary (in Arabic, with subtitles) about the first woman family law judge in the Arab world, a Palestinian. Not an easy role for any woman, even in Palestine, where attitudes about women’s education are more enlightened than in some other countries. She had very powerful opponents and even lost her ability to try cases for a while. It was interesting to me that the “courtroom” she presides over is really an office suite, where she meets with individuals and small groups and works out equitable arrangements for alimony, spousal rights of women, etc., all in conformance with Islamic law.

Two of these three are big releases and are getting traction at the box office. These movies proof films with a positive social agenda and without sex or violence can be commercially successful—and I celebrate that. I have no particular objection to sex in movies, but it should be integral to the story and shouldn’t be the reason to go see a film. And I do object to violence, of which there’s far too much on the big screen. If we want people to act positively in the world, our entertainment needs to model that! So it’s great that I can’t think of any violent scene in these three movies at the moment. If there was any, it was mild and in-context enough that it didn’t stick in my memory.

Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
Connect with Shel

 

 

 

 

About Shel & This Newsletter
As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.

He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).

“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

The Clean and Green Club, May 2018

 

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, May 2018
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This Month’s Tip: Practical Visionaries, Part 3: Why You Should Think of Mother Nature as Your Chief Engineer (an excerpt from my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World)

I want to share with you some of the amazing people—I call them “practical visionaries—profiled in my award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. These folks are doing incredibly exciting work in bringing about a regenerative, thriving world. By the time this series is over, I can safely guarantee that you’ll be glad you’ve “met” a few of them. After each excerpt, you’ll find a brief comment from me, adding more context since you haven’t read the whole book yet.

Think about this: Whatever engineering challenge we face, nature has probably already solved it.

Imagine the fortunes awaiting companies that can roll out a construction material as strong and lightweight as spider silk…a desalination process as cheap and effective as the one that mangrove roots use…a water collection method as powerful as the one used by the Namib desert beetle. John Kremer talked about “biological marketing”—so why not biological engineering, also known as biomimicry? It’s just as miraculous—and just like biological marketing, the results can be outsized. Nature has figured out Zero Waste, and figured out how to do pretty much anything that humans feel a need to do: housing, transportation, flood resistance…

These technologies have been around for thousands, maybe millions, of years, and they outperform what we humans have come up with.

Meet Janine Benyus, TED speaker and author of several books on biomimicry. When she walks you through Lavasa, India, where native vegetation has not grown for 400 years, and tells you that the area gets 27 feet of rainfall during the three-month monsoon season and basically nothing the rest of the year, you know that maintaining a thriving city here will be challenging.

Yet, immediately abutting this city, she finds proof that nature knows quite well how to handle this environment: a hilly wilderness area that, despite the alternating torrents and droughts, experiences zero erosion. As she walks us through this wilderness, she shows us adaptations like an anthill built with curves and swales, so that it doesn’t get washed away in the flood. She walks us through a sacred grove there, cool and delightful even in the dry season, and lets us understand that our cities could be just as pleasurable to live in.

She shows us a 1500-year-old live oak tree in Louisiana that has designed itself to withstand hurricanes, and points out that only four of New Orleans’s hundreds of live oaks were killed in Hurricane Katrina.

And whether it’s in India, Louisiana, China, or New York City, she captures metrics like carbon sequestration, energy and water use from those neighboring wilderness areas—things no one has bothered to measure in the past—and then cheerfully announces, “Because this is happening in the wild land next door, no one can say it’s impossible. A city that does this, that’s generous in its ecosystem services, is going to be great to live in.” She describes ecosystems in terms like “generous” and “competent,” and reminds us that the human species, at 200,000 years old, is still a baby, and we can learn much from our “elders” in the plant, animal, insect, fungal, and bacterial realms.

Her approach combines human-built infrastructure and nature-built ecostructure together to provide “ecological services” that contribute to meeting per-acre and per-block metrics, carried in part by the buildings and in part by the landscapes.

Species adapt and evolve over time, growing more able to influence their environment while being influenced by it in turn—and most of these adaptations are positive both for the organism and the ecosystem. Maladaptations create room for better-adapted species to move in. Species that fail to provide these ecological services are maladapting, and will be replaced by those that do contribute, she says. She remains optimistic that humans will learn to positively adapt, and be welcomed by other species.

A lot of her work is based on the idea that because each place is unique, the technologies we use should be matched to each place, as they are in nature. In nature, organisms ensure the survival of the species by protecting the survival of their habitat; they can’t directly take care of offspring many generations in the future, but they can protect the place where those future generations will live.

How can biomimicry change our patterns of design and construction? Thousands of ways. Here are just a few projects Benyus and other biomimicry researchers are working on:

  • Concrete that sequesters CO2 rather than emits more of it (Bank of America did a building this way, and the exhaust air was three times as clean as the intake air)
  • Altered wind patterns through urban rooftops, modeled after the reverse-hydraulics of an Indian forest
  • Artificial leaves that—just as real leaves do—convert sunlight to energy far more efficiently, and using far less expensive inputs, than today’s solar panels
  • A robot hand with more agility and dexterity, because it was inspired by cockroaches’ spring-like feet
  • Desalination systems that not only create drinking water from the sea at a fraction of the energy requirement, but can green the desert at the same time.
  • GeckSkin, an ultra-powerful adhesive developed at the University of Massachusetts after studying the way gecko lizards climb walls
  • The Biomimetic Office Building, whose designers encourage starting not with reality, but with the ideal, and then seeing how close they can come to it. They “found inspiration from spookfish, stone plants and brittlestars for daylighting; bird skulls, cuttlebone, sea urchins and giant amazon water lilies for structure; termites, penguin feathers and polar bear fur for environmental control; and mimosa leaves, beetle wings and hornbeam leaves for solar shading.” [End of excerpt]
If you want to know more about this amazing work, the full citations for most of the examples are in Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. Put into practice on a wide scale, biomimicry could revolutionize not just the business world, but the way we build structures, grow food, collect energy, move from place to place, and more. Imagine a world in harmony with itself!
New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

Last fall, I recorded a brand new keynote, “Terrific Trends for Enlightened Capitalists,” for the Enlightened Capitalist Virtual Summit, and it came out great. The online event was rescheduled to May 16-18–yep, that means it starts TOMORROW. Sorry, I didn’t have the dates yet as of last month. Listen to all 20 sessions; they promise to be excellent. I’m especially looking forward to hearing Jeff Golfman, Donna Lendzyk, and Ravinol. I’m one of just two of those speakers giving a keynote; my session kicks off the final day. This is one series you’re really going to want to dip into: https://shelhorowitz.com/go/EnlightenedCapitalist/
 
Carole Murphy of Heart Stock Radio interviews me live June 15, 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT (the previous interview didn’t record due to technical failure). Carole has a very interesting green business of her own, making purses of wild-collected Indonesian rattan, which grows among the rainforest trees and makes them too valuable to log. KBMF 102.5 FM, Butte, Montana, on Facebook, iTunes, and elsewhere.
I’ve been taping several other podcasts lately, and will post the links in future newsletters as I get them.
Friends Who Want to Help

Looking for a Job? Visit Our Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.com

Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?

Repurpose that expensive content, without using any staff time. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use immediately: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
 
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
Another Recommended Book: Love Let Go
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Love Let Go: Radical Generosity for the Real World by Laura Sumner Truax and Amalya Campbell (Eerdmans, 2017)
You might remember that although I did recommend it, I was quite annoyed by my review choice last month, Doing Good Better (DGB).

DGB took a very clinical, engineer-like approach to deciding which charities to support and what activities to do—even what career to choose—for maximum impact but neglected many of the human factors. While I was still reading it, I went to an author talk by Amalya (“Ami”) Campbell and I thought her book Love Let Go would be the perfect antidote to my frustration.

Love Let Go, unlike DGB, is a very free-spirited approach to giving (DGB’s author would think it’s too free-spirited). It chronicles a church that had invested just USD $1000 into a mixed-income community affordable housing project in its Chicago neighborhood, back in the 1970s. All of a sudden, when that housing project was sold off, the church found itself with a $1.6 million windfall.

After long deliberation, the church leaders decided to tithe. They’d give 10 percent to their congregants, with only five words of direction: “Do good in the world.” This is introduced on page 8. Most of the rest of the book follows one of three strands:

  • What the parishioners did with their individual checks (with a side story of how the media treated this story and what happened as a result)
  • How the church—which had been struggling to get enough money for its own infrastructure— wrestled with what they’d do with the remaining $1.4 million (revealed, after teasing us all the way through, on pp. 183-184)
  • Sharing the research and various philosophies on generosity that they sifted through during their long and very deliberative process

The impact from this one church and its congregants was quite impressive, but it’s only the beginning. Enabling a generosity mindset could be huge; in his Foreword, Richard Stearns of World Vision says that if every Christian gave an extra 60 cents per day (which works out to $219 per year), we could eliminate poverty in a single generation (p. xi). And yes, this is an overtly Christian book, probably the first I’ve ever reviewed. I don’t happen to be Christian, but I see no reason why this process couldn’t be replicated in non-Christian houses of worship and in non-religious organizations.

Generosity, say the authors, is our neglected superpower (pp. 3-4); using it involves the simple five-step process outlined on page 4. And we help ourselves when we get generous, opening ourselves up to all sorts of little miracles—and generosity begets more generosity (p. 95). People who give are as happy as those who double their income (p. 7). Even the bottom-income congregants, people whom no one would have criticized for using the $500 for themselves (including homeless Stephen Martin, pp. 106-107 and debt-ridden Kristen Metz, pp. 108-110, among others), found deep meaning in their giving. Of course, even a homeless man in the US is far wealthier than many people around the world; in 2015, a net worth of just $3210 was enough to put someone in the top 50 percent worldwide (p. 188).

All of this is based in something I’ve been teaching for years: an attitude of abundance. When you know the world will provide, it gives you the freedom to experiment. And while not every congregant’s $500 experiment was successful, most of them were—and several inspired even larger acts of generosity. The ones that failed were sometimes recast, for instance bringing in an established social service agency better suited to the mission (pp. 150-152). Another failure (according to the way most of us measure things) involved donating to the medical expenses of someone in need, who died nonetheless—but even this experience, which removed the money from circulation, offered many blessings.

Generosity has a twin, according to the authors: gratitude (pp. 153-166). Like generosity, gratitude improves with practice. When theologian Mary Daly says “you learn courage by couraging,” this church creates a corollary: we learn thankfulness by thanking (p. 161). And sometimes the most charitable thing you can do is to receive charity with grace, creating the freedom for others to feel the abundance of giving (p. 105, for instance). For the authors, this abundance mentality is embodied in the opening chapters of Genesis (pp. 43-44) and in the story of Jesus feeding the multitude with five loaves and two fish (pp. 143-144), as long as we don’t let fear get in the way—something even the usually abundant-thinking Abraham was not immune from (pp. 51-52).

And here, abundance is coupled with awe (pp. 132-134). That’s something most of us rarely experience, but the process of giving away money to individuals who in turn gave it to others, as well as the much longer process of deliberating over the remaining money, created numerous moments of awe.

The book ends with a chapter-by-chapter reading guide that opens discussion of larger issues and how this kind of giving program can make a difference. The very last page (p. 195) notes that individuals, not foundations or corporations, make an astounding 81 percent of charitable contributions. Then it asks three questions, and I particularly love this one: “What causes you to be optimistic about the ability of one individual to make a difference in the world? How can you increase your exposure to these sources of optimism?

Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done more than 30 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
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Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
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About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.
He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

The Green and Clean Club, April 2018

 

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, April 2018
ONE deep-discount ticket to the Guerrilla Marketing Summit in Orlando, May 3-5. I bought two tickets in December at the Early Bird rate of $199. Right now, it costs $797 for a pair, and that’s going to keep going up until the last-minute rate of $1497 for a single ticket. But the person I thought would use the other ticket has decided not to go. If you’d like to buy it from me for $99 (slightly below my cost), please write to me. Include a couple of sentences about what you do and why you’d like to go. And if you’re a nonsmoker, let me know if you’re interested in keeping costs down by sharing a room.
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This Month’s Tip: The Perils of Victory

What happens next if you win your biggest battle?

Whether you’re in business, running a nonprofit, or spearheading a community campaign, you need to know the answer to that question.

I speak from personal experience. In 1999, I started Save the Mountain, a citizen campaign that I expected to win—and I thought it would take about five years. But it was so successful that we won near-total victory in just 13 months (just over one year—a fifth of the time I thought it would take). We had near-total agreement in our town of 5000 that a mountain abutting a famous mountaintop state park was no place for the massive real estate development that a local builder announced—but what we needed to change was the very strong idea that people in town were powerless to stop the project. Once that changed, after just four months, our victory was in motion. After that, it was just a mater of lining up all the pieces in the right way.This was a very exciting campaign. We had dozens of people actively working to save this mountain, bringing expertise in science, water resources, lobbying, fundraising, and other areas. I brought my own expertise in marketing and community organizing and helped to secure about 90 stories in local print, radio, and TV, social media as it existed in the pre-Facebook era of 2000, and even a story in the Boston Globe, the paper of record in the large city 100 miles away.

We were consistently able to bring out more than 400 people to public hearings, pass several pieces of legislation to regulate mountaintop development in town—and most important, change the consensus from “this project is terrible but there’s nothing we can do” to “which of the numerous arrows in our quiver will put the final nail in the coffin of this unwanted project?”

But the biggest mistake we made was not having a Plan B for what would happen to Save the Mountain once we achieved our big victory. We were organizationally unprepared to win. And thus, all the momentum that we could have harnessed in a future campaign dissipated rapidly.

This organization could have morphed into a permanent force for environmental improvement in our local area. Yes, most of our thousands of supporters joined specifically to accomplish the immediate goal—but many of them would have been happy to keep improving our area’s beautiful environment. Once we won, though, we had nothing for them to do, no other project to harness that incredible energy. The organization crumbled.

So we saved the mountain—but we let the organization wither and die, when it could have gone on to many other victories.

It’s worth pointing out that other organizations have evolved far from their original purpose. Tesla has moved from focusing on transportation to putting big tentacles into solar power production and storage, and even space travel. MoveOn.org, the massive petition site, started as an organizing effort to get Republicans to stop wasting tax dollars trying to impeach President Bill Clinton. Save the Mountain could have at least taken a role in trail maintenance and park cleanup, once we added the threatened acreage to the adjoining state park. At best, it could have taken a leadership role in redefining appropriate land use in our county. But we had no organizational way to take those steps.

In my consulting, my organizing, and in running my own business, I will not make that mistake again. I urge you to think about how—in your own business, in the community projects or nonprofit causes you’re involved with, even in your family—to think about how your next victory will create the energy and direction you need to achieve the victory after that. Do that thinking now, before you need it.

New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel
Carole Murphy of Heart Stock Radio interviews me live Friday, April 20, 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT. Carole has a very interesting green business of her own, making purses of wild-collected Indonesian rattan, which grows among the rainforest trees and makes them too valuable to log. KBMF 102.5 FM, Butte, Montana, on Facebook, iTunes, and elsewhere.

Have you ever been to a Pecha Kucha? It’s 20 seconds each for 20 slides. I’m one of several speakers presenting one on
April 24, for the Family Business Center of the Pioneer Valley, in Holyoke, Massachusetts—and I’m working as hard on this as I did for my TEDx talk back in 2014. If you’re interested I attending, I can bring one more guest who owns a business in or near Western Massachusetts. Respond to this newsletter and tell me you want to come on April 24.Guerrilla Marketing Summit May 3-5 in Orlando. I’m doing a 50-minute solo talk on social entrepreneurship as the next big thing for guerrilla business success, and also moderating a panel of several Guerrilla Marketing co-authors, each with their own subject expertise.Mature Preneurs Talk with Diana Todd-Hardy.

  • Why I got into marketing (through activism)
  • How activism led me into writing books
  • When I figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up (not so long ago)
  • How you can design to solve multiple problems at once (for instance, poverty, environment, and safety)—and to build in circular (no-waste) resource use
  • The difference between old-style social responsibility and thinking really big
  • The biggest challenge I have found in this new work
  • The most exciting parts for me personally of the new social change work
  • The difference between marketing and advertising
  • How to write sexy, attention-getting press releases (and other marketing materials) that DON’T fit the 5W formula
  • Where to look to surmount almost any engineering challenge—the surprising key
  • 2 key questions to green your business and profitably address social issues
  • How the Empire State Building changed its thinking about energy to save $4.4 million per year

Profitability Revolution with Ruth King

  • How even a very small business can get involved in healing the biggest problems of our time
  • The key questions to ask in developing a profitable approach to social change within business
  • An unrehearsed brainstorm about how a consultant can make an impact in developing countries and find people to pay for it
  • The key to solving war
  • Positive versus negative motivation
  • How the most famous skyscraper in the world got a 33 percent return when it went deep green

Watch for This One! I’ve got a taping date but not an air date for:
Mark Struczewski Podcast, focused on productivity

Friends Who Want to Help

Looking for a Job? Visit Our Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.com

Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?

Repurpose that expensive content, without using any staff time. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use immediately: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
 
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
Another Recommended Book: Doing Good Better
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Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference by William MacAskill (Gotham/Penguin Random House, 2015)

I don’t usually recommend books that annoy me as much as this one did, but I do recommend it. MacAskill raises crucial questions for anyone in the nonprofit or social responsibility spaces: how are our time and money best spent to make the world better? I agree that we have to be willing to dive deep enough to discover that sometimes, things that seem terrific at the macro level crumble in our hands when we look closely.

Yes, we want our resources to make the maximum impact—to hold our social impact projects and charity partners responsible for their actions AND their outcomes. And seeking fact-based answers about which of our actions do the most objective good is well-worth the effort. He’s an advocate of a scheme called QALY, which imposes a quantitative framework on decisions by looking at the outcomes. In theory, QALY should tell us whether it’s better to increase lifespan or increase quality of life, whether we best serve a greater number in less depth or a lesser number in greater depth, and how to measure costs and benefits of any initiative. And MacAskill remembers to factor in a lot of subtleties, such as how much improvement would occur without your help.

As an example, if a student is deciding whether to go into medical school, MacAskill suggests looking at how much impact this particular person would have as a doctor, versus someone else who would fill the medical school slot; there are always more people wanting to study medicine than available slots, so a doctor will be created regardless. That involves a whole host of questions: would the doctor be working in a developed country where services provided would not have great impact on the larger social picture but the potential for charity donation is enormous, or a developing country facing a massive health crisis, where that doctor could save many lives? Would another doctor have a social conscience? But despite MacAskill’s best efforts, a lot of it would be guess work.

Sometimes the answers may be extremely counter-intuitive; he cites cases where the most effective thing certain individuals can do is to go into a high-paying profession and live simply enough to donate large portions of that pay to well-vetted causes.

But I have a problem with his Bean-Counters Uber Alles approach. He tends to ignore a lot of the human factors, and I think that’s the kind of attitude that got us into trouble with our planet in the first place. It was actually a big relief to read that he became a vegetarian out of concern for animal rights, because it showed a caring persona that’s largely absent from the text. Yet he scorns the little actions we can all take to live more in our values, which I strongly feel make a big cumulative difference. In fact, I’ve written an ebook, 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, offering 111 simple and no-cost/low-cost steps we can take as individuals. If everyone did even 50, I think it would make a tremendous difference.

Doesn’t something go missing when we worry so much about the numbers and so little about the human factors? Is working at a job you hate for 20 years so you can donate more money and then be financially secure enough to take an executive position with a charity really better than working at lower pay in a meaningful career right off the bat? Are there tradeoffs in the massive improvement you can make in one person’s life through some kind of direct intervention versus the benefit of eradicating some scourge that affects many more lives? And how do you predict which of the people you help might go on to find the cure for cancer? It makes a lot of sense to reduce malaria deaths at a cost per life saved of $40,000, while the US spends millions per life saved on highway safety—and this aligns with his theory that we do the most good when we focus on the more neglected areas. But then again, I am alive today because improvements in vehicle safety allowed me to walk away from a 60-mph crash. So, in some ways, the whole set of questions and assumptions is absurd.

MacAskill gets even more absurd, with obnoxious positioning like a chapter called “The Moral Case for Sweatshop Goods” (he says they provide better jobs than the indigenous industries. I say that’s not good enough).

But in other areas, he’s spot on. As big a supporter of peace as I am, it’s hard to argue with his math that eradicating smallpox has saved more lives over the past 40 years than creating world peace would have over the same time frame. And it’s certainly important to choose to give to charities at the top of the curve, who consistently achieve far more with less and significantly outperform average charities. He names several of his favorites.

And one area where I’m in total agreement is how much impact one person can have, especially when joining with others, and especially in poor countries, where a dollar goes so much farther. Most human advances—in medicine, technology, agriculture, even human behavior—were because one person had an idea and nurtured it.

Bottom line: if you come in to the book as an engaged and questioning reader, willing to mentally dialogue with him about what makes sense and what doesn’t, you’ll find tremendous value. If you either accept it all at face value or throw the whole thing out, I’d say you’re making a mistake.

Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done 29 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
Connect with Shel

 

 

Find on Facebook

 

 

 

 

 

 

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.
He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

The Green and Clean Club, March 2018

 

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
Like Twitter Pinterest GooglePlus LinkedIn Forward
Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, March 2018
ONE deep-discount ticket to the Guerrilla Marketing Summit in Orlando, May 3-5. I bought two tickets in December at the Early Bird rate of $199. Right now, it costs $497 for a pair, and that’s going to keep going up until the last-minute rate of $1497 for a single ticket. But the person I thought would use the other ticket has decided not to go. If you’d like to buy it from me for $99 (slightly below my cost), please write to me. Include a couple of sentences about what you do and why you’d like to go. And if you’re a nonsmoker, let me know if you’re interested in keeping costs down by sharing a room.
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This Month’s Tip: Practical Visionaries, Part 2: Amory LovinsReinventing Human Enterprise for Sustainability

(a shortened excerpt from my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

 
I want to share with you some of the amazing people—I call them “practical visionaries—profiled in my award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. These folks are doing incredibly exciting work in bringing about a regenerative, thriving world. By the time this series is over, I can safely guarantee that you’ll be glad you’ve “met” a few of them. After each excerpt, you’ll find a brief comment from me, adding more context since you haven’t read the whole book yet. 
 
Amory Lovins…lives in the Colorado Rockies, where it often goes well below zero Fahrenheit (-18°C) on winter nights. Yet, his house has no furnace (or air conditioner, for that matter)— and it stays so warm inside that he actually grows bananas. He uses about $5 per month in electricity for his home needs (not counting his home office). Lovins built his luxurious 4000-square-foot home/office in 1983, to demonstrate that a truly energy-efficient house is no more expensive to build than the traditional energy hog—and far cheaper and healthier to run… 
 
Noting that energy-efficiency improvements since 1975 are already meeting 40 percent of US power needs, Lovins claims that a well-designed office building can save 80–90 percent of a traditional office building’s energy consumption.
 
With conventional building logic, you insulate only enough to pay back the savings in heating costs. But Lovins notes that if you insulate so well that you don’t need a furnace or air conditioner, the payback is far greater… “Big savings can cost less than small savings, because you also save their capital cost…” Look for technologies that provide multiple benefits, rather than merely solving one problem. For instance, a single arch in Lovins’s home serves 12 different structural, energy, and aesthetic functions. This mirrors nature, where many components have multiple functions. A mouth processes food, water, and air, communicates, and kisses. A hand can pull, push, hold, lift, manipulate, write, type, draw, paint, sculpt, fasten, unfasten, dress, undress, check the weather, provide sensory feedback, point, speak sign language…
 
Lovins consulted on a 1656-square-foot tract house with neither heat nor air conditioning in Davis, California, where temperatures can reach 113 degrees Fahrenheit. Replicated on a mass scale, construction cost would be $1800 cheaper than a comparable conventional house, and maintenance costs would drop $1600 per year. While it’s easier to achieve these dramatic savings in new construction, even on a retrofit, the savings can self-fund these improvements. 
 
Lovins’ Rocky Mountain Institute was also one of several companies involved in the massive “deep energy retrofit” of the Empire State Building, discussed in Chapter 9 [saving $4.4 million per year]… 
 
Just by switching a factory from long, narrow, pipes with turns to short, wide, straight ones, Lovins was able to cut energy costs for that process by 92 percent—and slash maintenance costs and operating noise, too.
 
Lovins has also looked long and hard at transportation. He and his associates have developed amazing car designs, under the service mark Hypercar…SM 
 
Lovins’s team designed an SUV that not only can hold a whole family (or two people and their kayaks), but weighs 52 percent less than a Lexus SUV, can go 55 miles per hour on the energy the Lexus uses just for air conditioning, achieves the equivalent of 99 miles per gallon (except that it runs on hydrogen fuel cells—330 miles on 7.5 pounds of hydrogen), offers greater safety than a heavy steel SUV (even if it hits one), is undamaged by a 6-mph collision, emits only water, and is so well made that its designers expect to offer a 200,000 mile warranty. 
 
When parked, the Hypercar vehicle “could be designed to become a power plant on wheels”; plug it into the electrical grid and watch your meter spin backwards, eliminating any need for nuclear or coal plants… 
 
Lovins has developed a few key principles over the years: 
  • Design whole systems for multiple benefits, rather than components for single benefits
  • Redesign production to close all the loops in a system and eliminate both waste and toxicity
  • Reward service providers and customers who do more and better, with less, for longer
  • Reinvest the resulting profits in scarce natural and human capital regenerativity model can have a huge impact not only in developed countries, but in areas of deep poverty, too.
Lovins described an effort by the Zero Emissions Research Initiative to grow houses out of bamboo, in a developing country with an acute housing shortage. The houses cost only about $1700 each, can be located where they’re most needed, and can finance themselves by selling excess bamboo to carbon brokers for energy or other uses. And of course, if the bamboo is cut back (rather than cut down) to build the houses, the plant can regenerate and maintain an ongoing income stream.
 
Curitiba, Brazil…reinvented mass transit, with a bus system that moves people as efficiently as a subway, but at a fraction of the cost. The fully integrated approach to changing from a dying to a thriving city is told in Lovins’ book, Natural Capitalism—and can be read online at https://www.natcap.org/images/other/NCchapter14.pdf
 
Using nature as a model and mentor, Lovins encourages companies to rethink their waste streams, too. In many cases, the waste of one system can become a nutrient for another process… 
 
One of the great things about the Lovins approach is that it relies on the private sector to do well by doing good. Companies that adapt to the systemic approach will be highly profitable key players in the new economy. “Early adopters will enjoy a huge competitive advantage,” Lovins says. 
 
Lovins has been looking at these issues for more than 40 years. The full profile expands on many of the points here, and is one of many reasons you should go get your own copy of Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World.
New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

Carole Murphy of Heart Stock Radio interviews me live Friday, April 20, 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT. Carole has a very interesting green business of her own, making purses of wild-collected Indonesian rattan, which grows among the rainforest trees and makes them too valuable to log. KBMF 102.5 FM, Butte, Montana, on Facebook, iTunes, and elsewhere.

Have you ever been to a Pecha Kucha? It’s 20 seconds each for 20 slides. I’m one of several speakers presenting one on April 24, for the Family Business Center of the Pioneer Valley, in Holyoke, Massachusetts—and I’m working as hard on this as I did for my TEDx talk back in 2014. If you’re interested I attending, I can bring two guests who own businesses in or near Western Massachusetts. Respond to this newsletter and tell me you want to come on April 24.
Guerrilla Marketing Summit May 3-5 in Orlando. I’m doing a 50-minute solo talk on social entrepreneurship as the next big thing for guerrilla business success, and also moderating a panel of several Guerrilla Marketing co-authors, each with their own subject expertise.Mature Preneurs Talk with Diana Todd-Hardy.

  • Why I got into marketing (through activism)
  • How activism led me into writing books
  • When I figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up (not so long ago)
  • How you can design to solve multiple problems at once (for instance, poverty, environment, and safety)—and to build in circular (no-waste) resource use
  • The difference between old-style social responsibility and thinking really big
  • The biggest challenge I have found in this new work
  • The most exciting parts for me personally of the new social change work
  • The difference between marketing and advertising
  • How to write sexy, attention-getting press releases (and other marketing materials) that DON’T fit the 5W formula
  • Where to look to surmount almost any engineering challenge—the surprising key
  • 2 key questions to green your business and profitably address social issues
  • How the Empire State Building changed its thinking about energy to save $4.4 million per year
Watch for These! I’ve got taping dates but not air dates for:
Profitability Revolution with Ruth King
Mark Struczewski Podcast, focused on productivity
Friends Who Want to Help

Looking for a Job? Visit Our Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.com

Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?

Repurpose that expensive content, without using any staff time. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use immediately: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
 
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
Another Recommended Book: Flash Foresight
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Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible: Seven Radical Principles That Will Transform Your Business by Daniel Burrus with John David Mann

As you might guess, my work requires big departures from traditional business thinking. Helping business identify and market profitable ways to turn hunger and poverty into abundance, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance requires overcoming a whole lot of skepticism and rigid thinking.

Read Burrus and you’ll be well on your way to making those big shifts. How much farther along might have the business world be by now if I’d plucked it off my shelf in 2014, when I started thinking big enough to imagine actually creating that kind of shift?

The seven key principles, each of which gets a chapter, are:
  1. Start with certainty
  2. Anticipate
  3. Transform
  4. Skip your biggest problem
  5. Go opposite (I might consider that a corollary to #4)
  6. Redefine and redirect
  7. Direct your future

Even without reading it, I’d come to embrace some of these, as well as the lens of abundance that he brings to all of it—through studying systems thinkers like Amory Lovins (see this month’s main article), Janine Benyus (she’ll be profiled in May) and John Todd (July). But I didn’t have the framework to see how all the pieces relate to each other. Now I’ve taken tons of notes and I see the whole picture a lot more clearly.

Perhaps Burrus’s biggest insight is that we have to look at two very different patterns of change: the inevitable (and highly predictable), and the uncertain. Calling these hard and soft trends, he looks at key drivers of change, such as technology and demographic patterns, and extends the lines from the present to the future.

It astounds him that more people don’t do this, because the hard trends at least are in plain sight. Watching the baby boom—a hard trend— begin in the 1940s, why didn’t municipal planners and educators understand that they’d better start building new schools before those vast numbers of new students started banging on the door? And watching that same bulge work its way through its lifespan, why are we not planning effectively for the coming wave of elders and the services they’ll (we’ll) need? They’ll be quite different from those serving prior generations, from boomer video games reliving the generation’s great moments to “unretirement homes” that facilitate volunteerism while providing services (pp. 29-32).

Planning for hard trends is about anticipating and capitalizing on them. We know that Boomers will move their demographic bubble up the age ladder. We know that technology makes many things smaller and more powerful. But planning for soft trends is thinking about how to change behavior—how to affect the outcome. We can anticipate that Boomers will want active lifestyle choices in retirement. We can be ready for Millennials who demand greener business practices. We can create educational models that feel relevant even to ghetto kids who don’t expect to see their 20s (pp. 223-224).

And business success is easy if you consider both types of trends when planning new products, services, and corporate capabilities. You can predict the future if you leave out the uncertain parts, he jokes—and he backs up this joke with a multi-page chart outlining some of his successful predictions from 1983 through 2008 (pp. 24-26; the book was published in 2011, so he probably wrote it in 2009). We need anticipation; agility is no longer enough. (p. 42) And you can leapfrog the stuck places by measuring tomorrow’s benchmarks (p. 46) instead of adopting today’s best practices (which will be obsolete soon enough).

Sometimes it takes a bit of mental jiu-jitsu: instead of trying to beat your competitor at its greatest strength, find a different frame, where your strengths and their weaknesses position you for success (p.188). Often, this means turning a commodity item that people typically only purchase based on price into a unique experience. And Burrus says anything can be decommoditized (pp. 192-193), citing examples like underwear (Victoria’s Secret), coffee (Starbucks), and even junk removal (800-GOTJUNK).

Much of the book walks us through examples of how various industries could anticipate the need for change, but usually don’t. He spends five pages showing how the US auto industry could take what they know for certain about the future (e.g., fossil fuels will be less and less important, shipping cost will drive more manufacturing close to the end user, and cars will need to fit the narrow streets of places like India’s cities) and reshape itself to effectively compete—and dominate (pp.32-37). This means thinking globally. Much of the world’s new and powerful thinking will come from developing nations, as adequate food, energy, and water begin to free people in those culture from focusing only on basic survival (p. 139). And much will come from thinking differently about resources—something I’ve advocated for years. For example, the Internet and the sharing economy allowed pharma giant Eli Lilly to crowdsource the wisdom of scientists, paying only for results (p. 113)—while other companies harness children’s creativity or rent computer power at night from schools that only needed it in the daytime.

And Burrus walks his talk. As an epilogue (pp. 250-263), he describes his own experience starting a software company using the Flash Foresight principles. Determining that smartphone apps met all the demographic criteria but the existing revenue models were not profitable, Burrus set up a company to not just write some apps but reinvent how creators can monetize their work—and created an app suite in real estate that could be repurposed in many other industries, using the same software engine. Using a virtual workplace model, generating revenues by selling recurring subscription charges to vendors who wanted to be in front of his customers, and garnering a tone of Tier-1 media coverage and blogger attention, Burrus’s Visionary Apps succeeded quickly and with hardly any head-banging.

Go read this book and think about how your company can leapfrog its stumbling places and not just catch the next wave but maybe even create it.

Note: Burrus has a new book out: The Anticipatory Organization. Visit that link to get a copy at no charge.

Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done 28 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Accurate Writing & More
14 Barstow Lane
Hadley, MA 01035 USA
https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/contact/
Connect with Shel

 

 

Find on Facebook

 

 

 

 

 

 

About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.
He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.

The Green and Clean Club, February 2018

 

Having trouble reading this as e-mail? Please visit www.thecleanandgreenclub.com to read it comfortably online.
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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, February 2018
ONE deep-discount ticket to the Guerrilla Marketing Summit in Orlando, May 3-5. I bought two tickets in December at the Early Bird rate of $199. Right now, it costs $497 for a pair, and that’s going to keep going up until the last-minute rate of $1497 for a single ticket. But the person I thought would use the other ticket has decided not to go. If you’d like to buy it from me for $99 (slightly below my cost), please write to me. Include a couple of sentences about what you do and why you’d like to go. And if you’re a nonsmoker, let me know if you’re interested in keeping costs down by sharing a room.
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This Month’s Tip: How a Toddler Took Action to Save the World

The 19-year-old who interviewed me for a telesummit on productivity recently asked me some questions I don’t usually get asked. Perhaps my answers about how I got started on this path and how the profit motive can be harnessed to create social good will inspire you (while demonstrating one of the principles in my second response). His questions in italic, my answers in ordinary type.

1. When did you first realize you could positively change the world?
My earliest activist memory was at about three years old. My parents were having a party, their friends were all hanging out and smoking, and I was reacting negatively to the smoke. So I crawled around under the coffee table and started breaking cigarettes in half.

Then I took a break from activism for nine years. At about age 12, I had two radicalizing experiences and I’ve been an activist ever since. First, I bought an adult ticket but was made to sit in the children’s section of a local movie theater. This is the first time I can remember experiencing discrimination against me personally. I was so annoyed that I vowed never to return to that theater. I’ve kept that vow for 48 years so far. And second, a few months later, I went to my first rally about Vietnam in October, 1969. A speaker said the war was undeclared. That destroyed all my faith in the checks and balances we heard about in social studies class. I started questioning everything.

2. What are some great hacks for boosting your productivity?

  • Hootsuite and Buffer, to better manage my social media
  • Reading while indoor-biking
  • Repurposing replies in discussion groups, columns, etc.
  • HARO and Speakermatch: tools that connect me with people who want media sources and speakers.

3. How do we align our professional goals with positive change in the world?
I’ve chosen to motivate business to create positive change through enlightened self-interest. Guilt and shame don’t work. But the profit motive does.

4. How do we determine which problems in the world we should begin changing?
We have many choices. Ask yourself what sings to you—or what so deeply disturbs you that you can’t leave it alone. I’ve chosen hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change: four that I feel are big and scary enough that many people are shut down about getting them done, but manageable enough to actually lend themselves to creative solutions in bite-sized chunks. I just have to show that we’re not helpless; we all have the power to help create solutions.

5. How do we get others to actively support our cause?
The first thing is convincing them that change is possible. I look at the movement I started that saved our local mountain. All the “experts” told us it was impossible. I set out to prove them wrong. I thought it would take five years, but we got it done in 13 months flat—involving thousands of people along the way.

6. How do we begin to realize we can change the world?
Look at what ordinary people have done throughout history. Rosa Parks was a seamstress; Lech Walesa (founder of Poland’s Solidarity movement and later Poland’s president) was an electrician in a shipyard. Save the Mountain engaged farmers, storekeepers, school children—people from every walk of life.

7. How can businesses generate a profit by positively changing the world?
By finding niches to fill. By creating and marketing products and services that address these issues in some meaningful way. And hundreds of companies are doing this. Two examples among many: 1] Solar-powered LED lights that replace toxic, flammable, expensive kerosene. 2] A gourmet brownie baker that hires and trains people considered unemployable.

8. Why do you love positively changing the world?
It’s in my blood. I’ve been in the activist world since age 12. My mom was an activist before me. If a black family was told an apartment was already rented, Mom would go and try to rent it. What’s really exciting is in the last few years, finding ways to integrate the concept of regeneration—making things better—into businesses that are already primed the think about sustainability. That’s why I set up a website at https://goingbeyondsustainability.com

9. What are you doing to soar higher?
I’ve spent the last few years figuring out how to connect business success with solving these big social problems. I’ve written the book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. I’ve done the TEDx. I’ve attended and spoken at some pretty cool conferences. Now I want to find a critical mass of clients who will hire me either to create this kind of transformation in their own company or to enable their small business clients or nonprofit partners by sponsoring my work.

10. How do we stay motivated during the most challenging times along the journey?
Understand that it can be a long journey. The first protest against slavery in what is now the US was from a small group of Quakers in 1688. It took until the 1750s to convince fellow Quakers to oppose slavery, and more than 100 years after that before the US abolished slavery. The pace of change has picked up. It was less than a decade from the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott to the passage of major federal civil rights legislation. The movement for same-sex marriage rights started only in the late 1980s as a fringe movement, but by 2004 it was legal in Massachusetts, and by 2015, it was legal in all 50 states. So we have to remember how much progress we’ve made, celebrate our victories, and strategize on how to expand them and create the society we really want.

11. Please let me know what offer you would like for me to share with my attendees. This can’t be a paid product but it can be a landing page with an autoresponder leading to a paid product.
Social change business readiness assessment: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/your-self-assessment-how-ready-are-you-to-achieve-deep-social-change-in-your-business

Sampler from Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/ (click on the sampler link)

New on the Blog
Hear & Meet Shel

Ask Me Anything (#AMA) is a new (at least to me) model for conversations with experts, basically a live chat. I’m doing one on social entrepreneurship. I’ll be answering live Tuesday, February 27, 10 a.m. ET, 7 a.m. PT, 3 p.m. UK, 4 p.m. CET—but you can get a jump on things. Go any time and post your questions. I am visiting every few days and answering the latest batches, though you won’t see my answers until the air date. 

Stephanie Chandler of the Nonfiction Authors Association interviews me on Copywriting for Authors: How to Write an Author Bio, Book Jacket Copy, and Press Releases That Get Results Wednesday, March 7, 1 p.m. ET/10 a.m. PT. (follow the link and scroll down to “How to Participate,” then click “Join Here” to get a no-cost member profile and the dial-in instructions. If you’re a paid (Authority) member of NAA, you can also listen any time over the following 90 days.
Carole Murphy of Heart Stock Radio interviews me live Friday, April 20, 6 p.m. ET/3 p.m. PT. Carole has a very interesting green business of her own, making purses of wild-collected Indonesian rattan, which grows among the rainforest trees and makes them too valuable to log. KBMF 102.5 FM, Butte, Montana, on Facebook, iTunes, and elsewhere.Have you ever been to a Pecha Kucha? It’s 20 seconds each for 20 slides. I’m one of several speakers presenting one on April 24, for the Family Business Center of the Pioneer Valley, in Holyoke, Massachusetts—and I’m working as hard on this as I did for my TEDx talk back in 2014. If you’re interested I attending, I can bring two guests who own businesses in or near Western Massachusetts. Respond to this newsletter and tell me you want to come on April 24.

Guerrilla Marketing Summit May 3-5 in Orlando. I’m doing a 50-minute solo talk on social entrepreneurship as the next big thing for guerrilla business success, and also moderating a panel of several Guerrilla Marketing co-authors, each with their own subject expertise.

Watch for These! I’ve got taping dates but not air dates for:
MaturePreneur with Dina Todd-Hardy
Revenue Chat with Tony D’Urso (who did a fantastic interview with me several months ago for his other show, Spotlight—scroll down to his name to see what we covered—and to listen)
Profitability Revolution with Ruth King
Mark Struczewski Podcast, focused on productivity

Is Anyone REALLY Reading Your Sustainability or CSR Report?

Repurpose that expensive content, without using any staff time. I will extract the key items and turn them into marketing points that you can use immediately: https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

Friends Who Want to Help

Looking for a Job? Visit Our Job-Finding Widget
If you’re looking for a job in marketing, visit the home page of https://frugalmarketing.com. If you’re looking for a job in some other field, try the widget on the home page of https://accuratewriting.com

Order your copy of Shel’s newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World

Learn how the business world can profit while solving hunger, poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change (hint: they’re all based in resource conflicts). Endorsed by Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, business blogger and bestselling author Seth Godin, and many others. Find out more and order from several major booksellers (or get autographed and inscribed copies directly from me). https://goingbeyondsustainability.com/guerrilla-marketing-to-heal-the-world/
 
Download a free sampler with several excerpts, the complete Table of Contents and Index, and all the endorsements.
Another Recommended Book: Don’t Sell Me,
Tell Me
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Don’t Sell Me, Tell Me by Greg Koorhan (Crossbow Studio, 2017)

Like December’s review choice, Blue Collar Proud, this is a bit of a sleeper in a small package. It’s another book that pays careful attention to ethics before getting into the more obvious topic (storytelling as marketing)—and I see that as a positive. For Koorhan, in order to succeed with story-based marketing, you have to build a company worth telling stories about. Since I’ve been writing about ethics, green principles, and social change as business success principles since at least 2002, I happily agree.

But many companies get this all wrong. The trouble usually starts, he says, not when someone makes a mistake, but when the company tries to cover up that mistake (p. 15). Honesty is a great differentiator—but some business leaders can’t be honest because they’re not aware of what’s really going on in their company: “you cannot share the truth if you’re not aware of it” (p. 18). Thus, be prepared to do deep self-examination—to admit your vulnerabilities (p. 20).

With that all understood, NOW we can look at the storytelling piece. According to Koorhan’s research, telling stories is 22 times more effective than trying to convince with only facts

Koorhan sees infallibility as just not that interesting—so the stories can’t be about showing your perfection. Better: show the struggle—how you (or your client) got from a bad place to a better one, for instance. After all, filmmakers telling the stories of “broken heroes” are the most effective storytellers ever (pp. 29-30).

When you stay true to your mission, your stories create high trust for your brand (p. 38). As I’ve said for decades, your brand is not the visuals and slogans, but the “the sum of all experiences the customer has with you” (p. 41). In other words, your reputation is at stake every time anyone in your company interacts with a customer.

Koorhan makes lots of lists in the middle of the book and then elaborates on them. Here’s a list of some of his lists, each presented with explanation, and context:

  • Seven ways to brand your strongest benefits (pp. 43-47)
  • Six types of stories (pp. 47-51)
  • Four more elements of a good story (pp. 72-74)
  • Six steps to identify your brand message (pp. 79-82)
  • Twelve archetypes to factor into your psychographics (pp. 82-92)

The last third of the book continues the tutorial on how to create successful stories, with an emphasis on the aspect of connection. Some of his tips:

  • When considering which pieces to add and which to leave out, ask yourself if including this bit serves the story (p. 102)
  • Remember that authentic and humble will always be more meaningful than jargon and spin (p. 103)
  • Make both the video and text about them, not you (p. 115); a great way to do that is to dig for how a client felt before working you, and how that same client feels afterward (p. 100)
  • When networking in person, just listen first. If it’s appropriate, tell your no-pitch, relevant story. Then, and only if asked, do you go into your very brief pitch (pp. 118-119)
  • If doing anything in installments, use TV-style teasers to build interest for the next episode (p. 124)
  • When you tell your story the right way, the right people will respond (p. 134)

One little gripe: poor design. We’ve all heard, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” That’s very true of this book. The information inside is good, but the cover would have looked dated and amateurish in 1990, and the interior layout, while better than the cover, is mediocre—easy to read, but again, not professional. I was actually quite surprised to see a self-publishing coach listed in the acknowledgments, because if this had come through my shop, I would not have let it go to press without hiring someone to improve the design. (Yes, I still help people get their books published, even after adding the business-social change work). So forgive it the design flaws and go read it for the content.

Recent Interviews & Guest Articles: 

Shel’s done 28 podcasts recently, ranging from 5 minutes to a full hour. Click here to see descriptions and replay links.
Accurate Writing & More
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Hadley, MA 01035 USA
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About Shel & This Newsletter

As a green and social change business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of ten books…international speaker and trainer, blogger, syndicated columnist – Shel Horowitz shows how green, ethical, and socially conscious businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green, less-socially-aware competitors. His award-winning 8th book Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet was a category bestseller for at least 34 months (and is now available exclusively through Shel), his newest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, has already won two awards and is endorsed by Jack Canfield and Seth Godin. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.

Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Going Beyond Sustainability, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company. He’s an International Platform Association Certified Speaker and was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.
He began publishing his monthly newsletter all the way back in 1997, making it one of the oldest marketing e-zines (it’s changed names a few times along the way).
“As always, some of the links in this newsletter earn commissions—because I believe in the products and services enough to promote them (I get asked to endorse lots of other programs I don’t share with you, because I don’t find them worthy).”
Privacy Policy: We Respect Your Privacy

We collect your information solely to let our mailing service send you the information you request. We do not share it with any outside party not involved in mailing our information to you. Of course, you may unsubscribe at any time—but we hope you’ll stick around to keep up with cool developments at the intersections of sustainability, social transformation, and keeping the planet in balance. Each issue of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Newsletter has a how-to or thought-leadership article and a review of a recommended book. We’ve been doing an e-newsletter all the way back to 1997, and some of our readers have been with us the whole time.