The Clean and Green Club, September 2024

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Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Tip: September 2024

Should You Offer Replays of Your Learning and Networking Calls?
Woman in headscarf working on computer

Photo Credit: August de Richelieu via Pexels

You’ve probably noticed that some marketers make their recordings available indefinitely, some for a limited time with the option to buy permanent access, and some, if you’re not there live, you missed it.

I vote yes, not just for replays but also for saveable transcripts. Think of it this way: The more available you make your material, the more people know about you, get exposed to your viewpoints, and perhaps become followers.

Even if your call is to promote a time-sensitive offer, the recording can be doing marketing on your behalf long after the offer expires. If people love what you say and click through to the offer page, greet them with a message like: “Thank you for your interest in [name of program]. That offer has closed, but you can put your name on a waiting list for the next round, [give the date if you have it]. And if you’re not already on our mailing list, add your name here [hot link to your signup form] so you will be the first to know about opportunities like this and you won’t miss out next time.” You can still get these people into your tribe, where they might buy a different offer down the road.

It’s much easier to attract someone as a customer if they are already part of your knowledge tribe. That’s the real meaning of the slogan “content is king.”

Another benefit of course, is that you can still share your information and your pitch before your offer expires. Many people have competing priorities and sign up for meetings knowing that they can’t make the slot but hoping for a recording. They’ll probably listen promptly, especially if you note in your follow-up email with the recording link that it’s time sensitive.

And I recommend replay links that provide on-demand playback, rather than fixed times. If you are in my time zone, the Eastern United States, and you do a late morning or early afternoon meeting, you’re not going to get attendees from Australia, 14 hours ahead of you in their big Eastern cities, or China, 12 hours ahead. And you may not get many from Europe in the evening or late afternoon. But we live in a global economy and it makes sense to accommodate people in any time zone.

Of course, you want to make exceptions if you are planning to sell a replay package from a summit, if you’re an activist organizing an action, etc. But give people a three-to-five-day window to listen to the recordings first, and save them so for instance you can give away one session (with the presenter’s permission, of course) to entice a purchase of the whole set. After all, you put in a lot of time and energy to think about the content you presented, make the presentation, and create the offer. Why not let as many people as possible reap the benefits and get interested in what you are selling?

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.
I will be presenting a virtual program to the Thomas Yoseloff Business Center of the New York Public Library. This event will be open to the public without charge, over Zoom. It is scheduled for September 16, noon US Eastern. Click here to register.

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.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

Climate restoration

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

By: Robin Wall Kimmerer

(Milkweed Editions, 2015)

I started reading this book with no thought of reviewing it, but I found it quite relevant. I thoroughly recommend this wonderful combination of science, spirituality, indigenous wisdom, and poetic language.


Kimmerer, a member of the Potawatomi Nation of the Anishinaabe, is a botanist, storyteller, poet, mom, and gardener. Deeply proud of her heritage, she looks at issues like catastrophic climate change and cultural survival under an oppressive and powerful society through the lens of her nation’s oral history. And this is key: she is not just sharing folklore but taking a deep dive into indigenous ways of thinking.


In Potawatomi culture, plants and animals, even rocks, are people (p. 23), and calling them “it” would be extremely rude (p. 53). They all have gifts to share and needs to be met. Pecans and sweetgrass are two among many plants whose gifts she explores. We human people can take their gifts and give them some of ours, recognizing as we do that gifts are relational, not transactional; that their value multiplies when the gifts are shared; and that gifts come with responsibilities (pp. 26-28), including giving thanks (see especially the long and wonderful section on the traditional Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, pp. 107-117). I will personally be thinking about how I can thank the land as I’m harvesting in my garden this year.

If we never take more than we need, never hoard or close off the bounty from others who also need it, the culture will be in balance and sustain itself for tens of thousands of years—as it did before the arrival of the
Windigo: takers who take far more than they need, try to keep all the wealth for themselves, and give little or nothing back (often, but not always, of European origin). For 500 years, Windigo colonialists have attempted to stamp out the indigenous culture, sometimes through wars; sometimes through forcing Native children into boarding schools that punished the use of original language, clothing, and customs; sometimes through the scourge of alcoholism—and sometimes by dumping so much pollution into natural places of beauty and abundance that the land is rendered useless.


She describes in horrific detail one such toxic site. Onondaga Lake near Syracuse, New York State (pp. 312-322). The
Solvay Process Company (formed in 1881 and eventually merged into Allied Chemical) dumped directly into the lake for decades. As far back as 1907, New York State threatened legal action. Ice harvesting was banned in 1901. And that was long before mercury and chlorine processing moved in alongside the salt industry that polluted the lake since the 1830s.

But even this desolate landscape can return from the dead—when multiple species learn to cooperate (p. 332). Cooperation is a key tenet of successful societies living in balance (next month’s review of David Bollier’s latest book on the commons will say more about that).

Language is another key aspect. What we name is what takes importance. Thinking shapes language and language, in turn, shapes thinking. In English-language botany classes, Kimmerer never learned a word for the force that pushes mushrooms up through the soil in one night. Potawatomi, an almost-extinct language with only nine surviving native speakers as of when she began studying it, taught her the word:
puhpowee (pp. 48-49). In Potawatomi, 70 percent of words are verbs, while in English, 70 percent are nouns. In other words, English is based in things while Potawatomi is based in activity or states of being/becoming. The key distinction is not gender or human versus nonhuman, but whether a thing is alive—so they use different verbs for hearing a person or hearing an airplane engine. (p. 53).


Kimmerer loves English, but she also loves Potawatomi. “With the beautiful clusters of consonants of
zh and mb and shwe and kwe and mshk, our language sounds like wind in the pines and water over rocks, sounds our ears may have been more delicately attuned to in the past, but no longer. To learn again, you really have to listen” (p. 53). After her initial frustration with a language that has a word meaning “to be a bay,” she found her epiphany:

An electric current sizzled down my arm and through my finger, and practically scorched the page… In that moment I could smell the water of the bay, watch it rock against the shore and hear it sift onto the sand. A bay is a noun only if water is
dead…defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live…the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and a flock of baby mergansers… (p. 55, italics in the original)

And that paragraph demonstrates the poetry I was talking about earlier. She has written an achingly beautiful book with many important messages woven in. I intend to go back to it every few years, at least to read my handwritten notes. Treat yourself!

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.

If you’re not already a subscriber, please visit http://goingbeyondsustainability.com and scroll to the very bottom left corner. You’ll find lots of interesting information on your way to the subscription form, too.

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