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| Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip,
March 2014
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Lessons from a Lost Launch
Within 48 hours after I sent out the newsletter extra edition announcing the Business and Marketing for a Better World Telesummit that was supposed to start this past Tuesday, I had to move the event back a month. The new dates are April 22-May 3.
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| We thought at the time I sent out the mailing that we were ready to go–but then we ran into a cascading series of technical problems starting with some registration buttons that weren’t loading the form (others were working fine) and culminating in a server that started crashing when we tried to update the site. That last one was such a doozy that I got myself a new webhost last Sunday and moved the site over–a multi-day process that cemented my decision to move the dates. It meant that we couldn’t tinker with the site during the migration and then couldn’t test our changes before the calls would have started going live.
So I thought I’d build this month’s article around the lessons I learned from this whole process.
1. Make sure your deadlines are realistic. Mine weren’t. The five weeks between sending out the first invitations for speakers to participate and the date the calls were supposed to start turned out not to be a realistic timeframe. My web designer and I both put in very long days for the two weeks before the launch date, and I at least had to put my client work on hold for a week. I was even editing pages on my laptop while hanging out at a family function in New York–something I’m generally very careful not to do.
2. Understand the scope of the project, and how it might differ from what you’ve done in the past. If I’d known just how much work it was going to take, I would never have done this project. I’ve put up lots of websites over the years, but this one required functionality I’d never needed before. Essentially, my designer created a WordPress site in the very complex and powerful Jupiter theme that duplicated many of the features of Instant Teleseminar, and I kept finding missing pieces that needed to be in place. Some of this was because I apparently hadn’t clearly explained the full scope, and some because the designer had never worked on a teleseminar product before and didn’t know certain pieces that I thought were obvious from the job description. And there turned out to be a fair amount of trial-and-error with plugins that only gave us part of the functionality and had to be replaced.
I took responsibility for the scope creep. And the designer took responsibility for recommending the wrong plug-ins. And we both put even more time to make it all work.
3. If integrating pieces from different providers, allow extra time to make sure they play nicely together. (See above.)
4. Know when to use off-the-shelf and when to go custom. In retrospect, it would have been much faster and cheaper to simply buy a license for Instant Teleseminar. However, now that I have all the infrastructure, I hope to do more telesummits in the future and amortize the investment. And meanwhile, I have to say the new site, https://business-for-a-better-world.com , is simply gorgeous. If you haven’t checked it out yet, please go have a look. The home page reminds me of those cool-looking infographics and the speaker presenter pages are a marvel in the way they compactly present enormous amounts of information in a clean, readable layout.
5. Plan for growth; make things scalable wherever possible. In Phase 2, this site will eventually become my web hub, and my other sites will be part of it, though the individual domains will still work. (It’s been explained to me that this has search optimization advantages over my current model of lots of separate sites). And Phase 3 may be another series of teleseminars, or some other product. Knowing this ahead helped us avoid stupid decisions that would have to be undone later.
6. Have one person coordinating the project, and channel all communication through that person. The designer hired and managed two coders, and managed the SEO expert who had actually hired the designer. He could talk programming-speak with them, and they received only one set of messages, so nobody was second-guessing anyone else.
7. Keep lines of communication clear, open, and in-use. The designer hadn’t told me that a certain change I made would wreck his layout. After that, I asked before making changes in parts of the site we hadn’t discussed. And several times, he said either that I should let him handle it, or that I should wait until some other step was completed first. Without that information, an awful lot of extra work would have been created for no benefit. Also, as I explained what I wanted, we had extended discussions on how to achieve the task. These discussions resulted in a stronger, more resilient, more elegant, and more functional site.
Overall, I’m deeply pleased with the new site. The delay will not cause any significant mischief, and I feel much better knowing that when the telesummit actually starts, all the pieces will have been tested and are working smoothly. |
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| Third Annual Spring of Sustainability Series, April 22-June 24: I don’t have the list yet of the 100(!) speakers who will be participating–but if it’s anything like the last two years, it’ll be awesome. I’ll send more details when I have them. |
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Connect with Shel on Social Media |
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About Shel & This Newsletter
As a marketing consultant and copywriter… award-winning author of eight books… international speaker, blogger, syndicated columnist — Shel Horowitz shows how green and ethical businesses can actually be *more* profitable than your less-green competitors. His most recent book is category bestseller Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet. Shel also helps authors/ publishers, small businesses, and organizations to market effectively, and turns unpublished writers into well-published authors.
He was inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame in 2011.
Shel Horowitz’s consulting firm, Green And Profitable, is the first business ever to earn Green America’s rigorous Gold Certification as a leading green company
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).
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| “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).” |
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Living In Oneness Summit, May 7-18: Neale Donald Walsch, don Miguel Ruiz, Barbara Marx Hubbard and her sister Patricia Ellsberg, Bruce Lipton, Gay and Katie Hendricks, James O’Dea, Bill Uri, Hazel Henderson, Patricia Cota-Robles, Steve McIntosh who wrote “Integral Consciousness And The Future of Evolution,” Steve Bhaerman aka Swami Beyondananda, Barbara Fields, Lance Secretan called the ‘Guru of Oneness in Business,’ Deborah Rozman who founded HeartMath, Anakha Coman, Arthur Joseph who coached Stephen Covey, Arnold Schwarzenegger & Angelina Jolie and many others will be presenting. Details in the April issue.
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Get paid to speak; David Newman of Do It! Marketing is a seasoned professional speaker who spent almost a full year “on the other side of the desk” booking speakers for 160+ events. He’s sharing all his secrets, strategies, tactics, and tools in a powerful new 7-week program, The Speaker Marketing Workshop. https://shelhorowitz.com/go/NewmanSpeaking/ |
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April 26, NYC , 2 pm. Speaking on Making Green Sexy AND Business For a Better World at the NYC Green America/Global Exchange Green Festival. This will be my first time combining these to areas into one speech, and I’ll be signing books afterward. The Green Festivals are wonderful events. I spoke at one in 2010 and have attended a couple since then.
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May 10, Hartford, CT: I will once again be presenting at CAPA University, a one-day book publishing program in Hartford. More info: gaffney AT kanineknits.com
–> Remember: you can earn 25 percent of my speaking fee if you get me booked someplace. Who do you know that needs a speaker on green business profitability/green marketing? View my demo video, workshop descriptions, and other goodies at https://making-green-sexy.com/speaker.html.
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| Another Recommended Book—Sacred Economics |
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Sacred Economics: Money Gift & Society in the Age of Transition, by Charles Eisenstein (Evolver Editions, 2011)
This is an absolutely fascinating book. I took seven pages of tiny-handwriting notes.
It’s also one that made me cry out “Is he crazy?” at least as often as “Yes!” And it’s also long and dense. I’ve been reading it for two months and I’m not quite done yet.
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Eisenstein wants to completely reinvent the money system. He wants to factor in social and environmental capital so it becomes more economical to preserve natural resources and social customs than to exploit or destroy them.
All well and good. But his solutions are deeply radical. Some make sense to me, and some don’t–and I’m not going to tell you which is which; you should make up your own mind.
He envisions not only eliminating interest paid and rent collected, but instituting degradable currency that loses value as it ages, thus providing incentive to keep money circulating and disincentive to hoard it. He believes we’ve been greatly harmed by moving away from traditional gift economies that created obligations on the gift recipient. He sees the commoditization of exchanges that used to be freely given as a tragedy, and one that leads us not only to inequality but to surrounding ourselves with cheap junk instead of high-quality artisanal goods.
Interestingly, he bases these ideas in an attitude of abundance. How could there be scarcity in a world where so much is wasted or hoarded? He wants more efficient distribution and an end to waste–including, for instance, the waste of housing space created by super-rich who snap up multiple mansions and leave them empty for all but a few days each year, when dozens of people could be housed with those same materials, that same land. In his view, that waste and that hoarding is an inevitable consequence of monetizing formerly-free transactions. Child care and medicine are two among many examples he cites of things we have to pay for now but didn’t a few hundred years ago.
Eisenstein wants all of us to be able to afford to do good work in the world, and/or create beauty (art, in all its forms, including sacred ritual).
This is hard when work has gotten so out-of-balance and all-consuming. He claims that hunter-gatherers typically only worked a few hours a week, and lived very healthy lives. However, he doesn’t discuss their much shorter lifespans and the many survival tasks they engaged in beyond collecting food. It was rare in some of those societies to live even past 50, and I don’t believe their lives were so full of leisure after building, taking down, transporting, and reassembling their houses, making all their own clothing, etc.
But this insight is certainly true: nomadic hunter-gatherer societies did not strive to accumulate possessions; they were as much a burden as a status enhancer, since they had to be constantly brought from place to place or else abandoned every time the tribe moved on.
He notes that in nature, growth is followed by maturity–and maturity enables stasis. Once a hardwood climax forest is established, the growth phases of bare earth to small plants to shrubs to conifer forests to hardwoods can give way to a stable ecosystem. Yes, individual organisms will continue to die–but the forest as a whole is self-sustaining. This can be a model for our economy: we can move from growth (and its rapaciousness) to steady-state. We may even see a bubble first: the population and economy crest at an unsustainable place, then level off to something that can maintain itself.
And he reminds us that money has little or no intrinsic value. The actual worth in silver of a silver coin is typically far less than the value we assign to that coin. Money is something we use to transfer goods and services between parties when direct barter is too cumbersome. If you sell pigs and I don’t want a pig, money allows me to provide marketing services to you without having to take a pig I don’t want and try to find someone who would trade it for something I do want. It’s essentially an accounting system.
He has quite a deep critique of many aspects of our society: from the idea of a job (and job creation) as a positive to his deep arguments against microlending. As I said, fascinating–whether you agree or disagree.
One point he makes that I totally agree with is that we have to stop allowing business (or government, I’d add) to externalize costs–right now. When companies privatize profit but socialize the cost of cleaning up pollution or depleting natural resources or transporting cheap goods halfway across the world, the earth is deeply at risk. This is a point I’ve made numerous times in my own writing, especially in an as-yet-unpublished essay I wrote last year called “From Save the Mountain to Saving the World.”
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Anne Michelsen said,
Wrote on March 20, 2014 @ 12:37 am
Thanks, Shel. What a wonderful peek into an ambitious project, warts, flaws, triumphs and all. Kudos to you for changing the date and doing it right – that had to have been a tough decision. Looking forward to the telesummit!
(By the way, your new site really is beautiful.)
Shel said,
Wrote on March 21, 2014 @ 2:13 am
Thanks, Ann. The new site has been getting very positive feedback.And the telesummit will be well-worth the wait.