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| Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip, May 2015 |
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Special Invitation: Have Your Viral Marketing Tip Featured In This Newsletter
This is only one part of a series on making a message viral. I’d like to include your stories in the series—with full attribution to you, of course. Your viral message success can be for a product, a company, a service, an organization, or an idea.
Please write to me at shel AT GreenAndProfitable.com with the subject line, Viral Marketing Success Story, and *brief answers* to the following questions:
1. What were you attempting to market?
2. What steps did you take to make it viral?
3. What results did you experience?
4. How you’d like to be identified if I use your story (name, company, URL)
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| This Month’s Tip: Make It Viral, Part 1 |
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| Competing for attention in today’s overstimulated, infinitely segmented world is a huge challenge.
In the old days, if you wanted to become known in a market, you could target a handful of local TV and radio stations and print media. And within a few months, nearly everyone in that market would know who you were and what you offered. Even if you were paying for advertising, you could afford to be known. |
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But these days, every community offers literally thousands of channels. And those channels are no longer bound by geography. Someone in Singapore can easily watch KQED TV originating in San Francisco. A reader in Queens, New York might enjoy Al Jazeera TV in Qatar. Here in Massachusetts, I sometimes listen to an oldies radio station in Monaco I found on iTunes. So the number of possible ways to get news, information, and entertainment is now infinite—and that means any one channel only reaches a tiny fraction of the market nowadays.
That’s the bad news for marketers. But this triangle also has two good sides. Side 1: if you can motivate people in your own network to spread the message, it’s much easier to reach new audiences, and to do so cheaply (often at no cost).
And side 2: It’s so much easier now to find communities of common interest. If someone has an “oddball” interest, he or she no longer has to move to some giant city to find people with the same leaning; a few clicks of the mouse puts that person in touch with hundreds or thousands of others who share that pursuit, all over the world. And that means you can partner with some of the leading lights in that space, no matter where you—and they—are located.
My own experience taking things viral has been somewhat limited; I’ve had more failures than successes and certainly don’t claim to have the magic formula. But I have had successes. Here are my two favorites:
• The launch of my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, reached an estimated 5,000,000 people—based on an average of just five people each viewing 1,000,000 of the 1,070,000 pages Google found three weeks after the launch in an exact-match search for the book title (figuring that 70,000 were probably junk pages that nobody saw). Thus, the real number of people touched by this campaign might be quite a bit higher. Achieved through partnership outreach with incentives to launch partners, social media, and mainstream media coverage, this success was featured in a Marketing Sherpa case study: https://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31895#
• Save the Mountain, the hyperlocal citizen movement I started in my own town (population 5250) and county (population 158,080) that gained thousands of petition signatures, distributed hundreds of lawn signs and bumper stickers, and could routinely bring out 400+ to public hearings. Although the “experts” said there was nothing we could do to stop the massive development project proposed for a mountain abutting a beloved state park, we were able to halt the project—in just 13 months. (I expected to win, but thought it would take five years.) For this one, we had more than 70 mainstream media appearances, but our real secret was direct public outreach: door knocking, tabling, direct mail, use of early-technology Internet communities (as they existed in 1999-2000), phone trees, letters to the editor, networking with existing environmental groups, outreach to town boards and officials, etc.
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I just pretaped an interview with Green Divas radio, which by now (or within a few days) should be available at https://thegreendivas.com/archived-shows/. |
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And I’d like to call your attention to two recent interviews. I think my full-length segment on The Bucket List Life might just be the best of the hundreds of interviews I’ve done: https://thebucketlistlife.com/p59 . |
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There’s also this very short interview on The Price of Business: https://youtu.be/6vBCNYGi5Mg |
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| If you’re attending Book Expo America and want to get together, drop me a private note, subject Meet you at BEA? Please tell me a bit about you, your book, and your goals, right in that first email. (You can do it all in one short paragraph, trust me). |
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Connect with Shel on Social Media |
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About Shel & This Newsletter
As a green business profitability/marketing consultant and copywriter…award-winning author of eight 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 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.
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 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).
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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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| Another Recommended Book—Explosion Green |
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Explosion Green: One Man’s Journey to Green the World’s Largest Industry, by David Gottfried
Still think one person can’t make a difference? This powerful memoir from the founder of the US and World Green Building Councils will surely change your mind.
Back to the mid-1980s, Gottfried has been influencing the entire construction industry to green its practices. Without him, we would not have the amazing network of Green Building Councils around the world, which have certified hundreds of thousands of committed architects, builders, and product manufacturers as green. We also wouldn’t have the set of LEED standards now used to certify green buildings in 140 countries. The standards his organization developed are now required by numerous local government agencies, and the planet is noticeably greener because of this organization.
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| In a siloed universe of specialists, each with their own professional organization, Gottfried and his colleagues created the first green building organization that was open to every sector, discipline, and size. It welcomed Fortune 100 companies, and also solo practitioners with small consultancies. It was open to profit-making businesses and nonprofit membership organizations. This strategy allowed agents of change to dialog with executives at companies often attacked by environmentalists, and get them to see the wisdom of a green approach.
GBCs have directly enabled hundreds of thousands of buildings to be built or renovated in more environmentally friendly ways:
As of October 2013, there were 56,000 LEED Commercial and Neighborhood Development projects (totaling just over eleven billion square feet) and another 119,615 residential units using LEED. USGBC [just one of the GBCs worldwide] also had about 190,000 LEED Accredited and Green Associate professionals.
There are now Green Building Councils in approximately one hundred countries with about two dozen green building rating systems. Some 63 percent of global new construction starts are planning green projects for 2105. [p. 230]
And that, in turn, has helped to bring down the prices, so that green advocates can now make a very successful case for going green on economic grounds. Gottfried notes that the price of doing a green commercial building dropped 38 percent from 1995-2003 (p. 131)—and that workers in green buildings tended to be 6 to 16 percent more productive (p. 132). Oh yes, and when these buildings change hands, they fetch about 11 percent higher prices than comparable nongreen buildings (pp. 245-246).
Much of the early LEED construction took place in California, and Gottfried posits that this may be why California was able to hold energy use more-or-less constant for the last 40 years, even as the US as a whole chewed up 50 percent more energy. This is especially remarkable, considering how many power-slurping massive computer installations have been installed to power California companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Hewlett-Packard.
In Chapter 20, Gottfried lays out USGBC’s 9-step success formula:
1. Dream big
2. Create an inclusive, noncompetitive model
3. Exercise leadership
4. Recruit volunteers
5. Demonstrate business savvy
6. Achieve LEED
7. Have a strong sense of purpose
8. Collect data and using it to create change
9. Pay attention to the lessons (from both the successes and the challenges)
Near the end of the book, Gottfried build on Amory Lovins’ concept of negawatts and negabarrels (the energy we save through deep conservation) to discuss “negafootprint,” extending to carbon, energy, water—which he sees as crucial in the coming years, as I do—and waste (p. 270).
And on page 276, he calls for businesses to take advantage of the massive “global business opportunity” in green building—advice that the entire construction industry would do well to heed. |
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