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The Clean and Green Club, September 2020

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: September 2020

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Are You a Franklin or a Mozart?

One of Chris Brogan’s newsletters offered this nugget:

We have to throw out multitasking. It’s basically an excuse we use to be bad at multiple things. Be better at one. Or a few.

If we “stay busy,” we think that’s progress. But progress is progress. Seeing one needle (one number) move is the real target.

Sell one thing really well. (Man, I really need to embrace this.)

I think of Chris as someone who does many things well, and who doesn’t fit easily into a box. So I wrote him this reply:

What you are suggesting works great for some people. But I am one of the ones who has enough ADD that it wouldn’t work well for me. I always say I became a writer because I’m interested in almost everything. And writing is at the core of what I do as a marketer.

But that ADD has driven me to keep expanding the scope of what I do, while narrowing the focus toward businesses that want to make the world better in some way.

In the earliest days of my business, most of my work was typing term papers. You may be too young to remember when that was a thing. By the time I got my first computer, in 1984, I had been in business almost 3 years.

Over time, my focus shifted first into editing and resume writing, then PR materials for small businesses and authors, then book publishing consulting, and now a mix of all of the above (except typing, which I let go of in 1990) – plus strategic marketing consulting, all with a much narrower focus on who I would like to serve. And the other strand has always been activism. The evolution of my business over the past 20 years has a LOT to do with a conscious decision to braid those two together, following a successful campaign I started to stop a hideous housing development on the side of a local mountain. That campaign brought a lot of my marketing and negotiating skills into my activist work, and I started thinking about how I could bring the values of my activism into the business world.

[I didn’t go into detail about the work I’m doing helping business find the sweet spot where profitable products and services make an actual difference on things like hunger, poverty, war, catastrophic climate change, and pandemics, because Chris and I have corresponded many times, and I think he already knows this about me. He even endorsed my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World. If we’d had less contact, I would have inserted that right here.]

From the 30-thousand-foot level, this shifting path actually makes sense and feels somewhat linear. But looking at piece by piece, it would come across as chaos.

There is a wonderful book called The Renaissance Soul by my late friend Margaret Lobenstine that posits two paradigms for a successful career path. The first is Mozart, who knew what he wanted to do at age 4 and kept doing it, getting better and better at it, until he died.

But the second is Benjamin Franklin, a person with half a dozen career paths and a gazillion interests. Was he a postmaster? An inventor? A diplomat? A revolutionary? He was all this and more.

Many of our greatest successes as a society have come out of the work of people like Franklin, Hedy Lamar (famous as an actress, she was also an inventor whose work made cell phones possible), DaVinci, Eleanor Roosevelt, Buckminster Fuller, Helen Keller, Franklin’s contemporary Thomas Jefferson… People who see the world and their own contributions through a holistic lens.

So that’s multitasking on the macro level. On the micro level, I find I’m not as good at doing several things at once in the same moment as I used to be, and have tried to focus more deeply. But I can only keep that intensity for so long, so I take a lot of breaks. If I’m doing client work, I am not multitasking, but I might only work for 20 or 30 minutes before clearing my brain for at least a few minutes. If I’m on a learning call, I typically am [multitasking]. I listen to a lot of learning calls, and in many cases prefer the replay recordings, because if I hear something that sounds important, I can rewind a minute or two and give it my undivided attention for a moment. And if I’m hiking, I often find that part of my brain is chewing on a problem, and sometimes I have the solution at the end of my walk.

PS: I think of you as someone whose natural strengths lead much more toward the Franklin than the Mozart.

PPS: Along with multitasking is multipurposing. This letter will become the main article in one of my newsletters.

Warmly,
Shel

He wrote back a one-sentence reply wondering how successful the approach would be—and acknowledging that he’s much more in the Franklin camp.

I answered,

I really think it depends on how we are wired. Some of us work very well in the do one-thing-at-a-time mode. Margaret’s whole point is that it is a mistake to assume that because it works for some people, it should work for everyone. Not that people can’t change their style but I think on the whole it is much easier to adapt your work can the style that works for you, rather than trying to adapt your style to someone else’s idea of how you should work.

This one didn’t get a reply. Perhaps you have a thought on this? If so, write back (and please tell me if I have permission to quote you).

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Would you like to be quoted or featured in media like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, ABC TV News, Redbook, and Reader’s Digest? I do at least 30 interviews in a typical year, 50 or more if I’ve got a new book out.

My favorite way to get coverage is to respond to reporters who have posted that they’re actively looking for sources for a story they’re working on. It’s so much easier to get press by giving a journalist the exact information they need to write a story than to “spray and pray” by sending press releases or cold-calling. I see many people doing this all wrong–so

Several services match journalists with story sources—and most of them don’t charge anything. There’s one called HARO, also known as Help A Reporter, that I’m particularly fond of. I put time aside three times every weekday to look over the queries and respond to the ones that could benefit me. But here’s the thing: I’ve forwarded reporters’ source queries to friends many times. And when I see their responses, I often cringe. I got tired of cringing, so I wrote a 40-page quick-read ebook on how to answer those queries the right way. It includes six actual queries (by me and four other people) that resulted in coverage in Reader’s Digest, the Toronto Globe and Mail, and elsewhere—with analysis of why they worked and how some of them could have been even better.

It also includes three bonus reports: How to Write Press Releases that Actually Get Media Coverage—and Your Prospects’ Attention (includes 10 full or partial actual “story-behind-the-story” press release examples); Ten Other Services That Get You in Front of Journalists and Show Producers; and How to Get Superstars to Endorse Your Book—discussing some of the ways I’ve gotten endorsements or guest essays from Chicken Soup for the Soul co-creator Jack Canfield, futurist Seth Godin, Cynthia Kersey (author of Unstoppable and Unstoppable Women), Frances Moore Lappe, author of Diet for a Small Planet, and the founder of the Guerrilla Marketing concept, Jay Conrad Levinson (who later co-authored two books with me).

This very useful addition to YOUR marketing toolkit is just $7.95, delivered instantly as a PDF. Get your copy at https://shelhorowitz.com/product/generate-thousands-of-dollars-in-publicity-without-spending-a-cent/

 

 

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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.

Wide-ranging written interview on Fem Founder (I was very pleased that they would interview a man) about being a tiny startup, morphing my business multiple times, marketing challenges, the current work on strategic integration of profitability and social change–and even some insight into my lifestyle and my volunteer social justice/immigration justice/environmental activism outside of work. https://www.femfounder.co/femfounderstories/shel-horowitz-interview . If you prefer to read it on Medium, it’s also at https://medium.com/fem-founder/do-the-homework-to-make-sure-you-can-find-a-market-if-you-follow-your-heart-with-shel-horowitz-f27efb35ac82 . Note that at this time, I am not pursuing the activist clearing house idea that the interview refers to. I have something more exciting that I’ll reveal to you down the road.

The 22-minute Climate Change with Scott Amyx interview I taped several weeks ago is now live: https://scottamyx.com/2020/08/31/interview-with-shel-horowitz-green-transformative-expert/ We discussed some very different ideas about marketing, the importance of environmental and social commitment to profitability, and more.

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.

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———————–
Not a friend, but I came across this interview with a naming expert and had to share it with you. As a Canadian living in Australia, she has a very different perspective. https://www.sourcebottle.com/blog/WHATS-IN-A-NAME

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What Does Injustice Have to Do With Me?

What Does Injustice Have to Do With Me? Engaging Privileged White Students with Social Justice, by David Nurenberg (Roman & Littlefield, 2020)

Like so many other fields, from customer service to architecture, education has a marketing component. Educators are in the business of marketing the importance of knowing certain information, or embracing certain values or thinking processes. As Nurenberg points out throughout the book and most clearly in his final chapter, educators also have to market their own worth as change agents in a system that values conservative conformity (pp. 163-173)—and do this to multiple audiences with different agendas: students, parents, administrators, and colleagues. And he recognizes that every classroom has a different dynamic, that each teacher knows that dynamic intimately and will need to adapt any exercise to the specific conditions.

While many of the books I review here are much more overt in their marketing focus, books about social change (another subset of marketing, often) are also within my purview. This is a book by an educator, for educators. It uses the language of educators, which is not always familiar to me.It looks at how a teacher can incorporate anti-racist lessons and materials even into science and math classes (pp. 66-75). And it dips heavily into both marketing and social change.

Again and again, Nurenberg demonstrates the advantages privileged kids gain by having their privilege challenged (especially pp. 108-118): they become more critical thinkers, they face adversity and build skills of resilience, they’re more college-ready (and more desirable to good colleges), and of course, they become much more aware of different perspectives in the wider world, and perhaps more willing to take action to redress inequity. Nurenberg offers a number of specific in-class and research activities that can break down resistance to confronting racial justice—and particularly to confronting one’s own (conscious or unconscious) complicity in a system that’s ultimately based in institutionalized racism. He also offers strategies to promote genuine allyship and avoid coming in as the know-it-all, patronizing, smug benefactor. He has fewer ways to actually have students of different races work together productively, though he does offer some.

All of this is somewhat fraught. Nurenberg is highly sensitive to the effects of this kind of curriculum not only on suburban white kids of privilege but also on urban kids, kids of color, or kids of lower economic status, who are often already marginalized in majority-white schools serving the affluent. It’s very easy for white teachers and students to commit microaggressions such as tokenizing or insisting that the voice of the student of color or a particular religion or ethnicity or disability or gender category represents all people of that cohort, or demanding that those students share experiences they might rather keep to themselves. But Nurenberg offers lots of strategies to do this in a meaningful and inclusive way that feels safe for students of any background.

There’s no index, but there is extensive footnoting and a terrific bibliography.

Full disclosure: the author and I are acquainted. We both participated in a Jewish social justice delegation to a prison holding 3000 teens in Homestead, Florida last year. That prison was closed a couple of months later due to public pressure.

Connect with Shel

Turn Your Sustainability/CSR Report Into Powerful Marketing!  http://goingbeyondsustainability.com/turn-that-nobody-reads-it-csr-report-into-a-marketing-win/

About Shel

 

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

 

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