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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).

“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).”

Chris has a weekly newsletter and I recommend you sign up for it: humanbusinessworks.com/newsletter

Learning The Art of Digital Touch

By Chris Brogan

Puudutage, Shel, is “touch” in Estonian.

In my case, I’m talking about touch as the interaction between yourself and someone else. If I were talking about Disney’s Moment of Truth (“any time a guest comes in contact with any aspect of our service and receives an impression, good or bad”), it would be similar enough to what I mean when I say touch.

An example of a moment where there’s touch in your business might be in your billing process. I was recently invoiced by a small business owner. He put the due date of the invoice to be immediate. When I logged in seven hours after receiving the invoice, it was the next calendar day. This led my invoice to have a big fat red “LATE” stamped across it in digital ink.

What do you think I felt? I felt guilt, embarrassment, and I also felt a little moment of negativity. “Wow, I’m a pretty good and repeat customer, but if you’re going to ‘shame me’ with this mark of ‘late,’ then maybe I should go elsewhere.”

Think about that. This all came from a built-in part of invoicing software and the choice to make an invoice come up as an instantly-payable bill. That one touch might cost someone thousands of dollars in business (in this case, it won’t, but that’s not my point).

DIGITAL TOUCH OPPORTUNITIES ARE EVERYWHERE

I write this newsletter to you in 14 point font. Did you ever wonder why? It’s because the lion’s share of my readers are older than 35 and that means their eyes are naturally growing a bit more tired as time goes by. Those of you who are under 35 are also more likely to spend more time in front of a screen than the average person. Thus, it’s a choice of mine to make this “touch” in a font size that’s comfortable to read.

Another simple touch in this newsletter? I use the bare minimum of HTML formatting. This is about as plain text as you can get without actually forcing your email client to offer bare plain text. Why? Because I want the newsletter to feel as personal as I intend it to be. Do you see how that might impact how you and I interact?

Where are all those other elements of touch? Hint: go to your website right now and look at it like a customer might. Can you find what you want? Is it really easy? Are you helping me solve a problem and fulfill a need/want, or are you trying to sell? I bet you could list six or seven parts of your website experience that could be improved by thinking about your touch.

THIS IS NOT “USER EXPERIENCE.”

Words matter. What we’re trying to do here is facilitate a positive feeling on your behalf from afar. Everything is up for grabs in this quest to improve your touch. Avatars, for instance.

Look at my Twitter avatar. You see a human face. You can infer some things from that face. Now look at my friend Guy Kawasaki’s avatar. His face is hidden by the butterfly that is on the cover of his book, Enchantment. You can see his smiling eyes, but then he’s using his avatar to make the connection to his book. (Again, Guy is a friend. I’m not saying he’s doing it wrong.)

Neither is right or wrong. Both are better than a logo (though Guy’s is almost a logo). But both are a choice and a choice that impresses a touch. It’s a simple detail, and yet, it leaves you with an impression.

Feelings. We are here for feelings, not user experience. Touch is about feelings. And touch and feelings and this soft gooey stuff is part of human business, and part of how you can improve your efforts on the digital channel.

SELLING IS ABOUT TOUCH, TOO

My friend Anthony Iannarino talks about sales being a lot about providing a great deal of value before you extract any. That’s a touch-based choice, too. Anthony (and I) like to create lots and lots of useful free information and give it to you without any hooks. We both love to give away 90% and more of what we do for free, because we believe that these touches will lead towards many great outcomes, some of these sales.

When I sell Blog Topics: The Master Class, one tactic that I use is to be funny about the fact I’m selling it, or at least HOW I sell it. I also do it by subtly adding it into newsletters like I just did there. That’s a choice of a touch. It’s a very soft sell. If you’re interested in learning more, you need only click the link. If not? You just move on. Soft… soft selly sell sell.

Touch is something to practice, to think about, to obsess over. It’s part of service craftsmanship, which is part of the Human Business Way.

What’s that? Oh, something you’ll learn a lot more about in the coming weeks/months/years.

Have you had good or bad experiences with digital touch? What stands out? Where do you wish you could improve your own abilities with it? Do you even see the benefit, or have I lost you in the “wow, this is way too soft” zone?

People ask me all the time why I don’t have SHARING or WEBSITE buttons in this newsletter. Answer: I have one goal. If you like this a lot and find it useful, I want you to push the forward button and send it to a friend or two (or five) [Note from Shel: I feel differently; you are welcome to share my stuff on social networks]. My goal is hand-selected growth of this community, and I’ve chosen YOU to help me grow it. It’s too easy to hit share, like, +1. It requires you to really want to hit it. And if not? I’m glad YOU are here. 🙂

—Chris…

Thursday, October 18, noon ET/9 a.m. PT,

Thursday, October 18, 8:30 p.m. ET/5:30 p.m. PT: I interview Marilyn Jenett in a call just for you, because you read this newsletter. *I have seen a number of good things in my life since I started working with Marilyn.* Please see Friends/Colleagues Who Want to Help section for more about Marilyn and her work.

October 25-26, Association for Business Communication 77th Annual International Convention, Honolulu, Hawaii. I’m deeply honored to share the opening plenary panel with with someone from the United Nations PRME initiative, widely published CSR author Nick Tolhurst, and sustainability professor Jim Harris of Hawaii.

I’ve also been asked to do a full session the next day. My wife, Dina Friedman, and I will be attending the conference on Thursday and Friday. To register online.

And—just added—that Sunday I’ll be doing a green marketing workshop and book marketing brainstorm on Kauai (https://globalsense.com/hokuhouse/shel-horowitz-seminar-green-marketing/). $20 in advance or (space-permitting) $25 at the door. If you’re on-island, or know anyone who is, please contact Judah Freed, judahfreed@gmail.com

I’ve been doing a lot of interviews the past few years about green business profitability, green marketing, and going deeply green. Here are a couple I really like: https://www.business.com/blog/expert-advice-on-being-green-and-profitable/ (print)

https://www.theempoweredworld.com/page/shel-horowitz-green-and-profitable (audio—maybe the best interview I’ve ever done, although the sound quality is poor—turn it up!)

https://theselfemployed.com/podcasts/podcast-green-marketing/ (audio)

Planning Waaay Ahead

4th annual Amherst Sustainability Festival will be held on Saturday, April 27, 2013.

Book Expo America, June 4-6, 2013, NYC.

We’re going “out of the box” because we’re not starting on the hour. But that’s only the beginning

Can you really manifest unexpected income, unexpected business, and unexpected solutions to your most pressing problems-in just two weeks or less?

This is Marilyn’s promise. Thousands of people have applied her simple, fast and practical techniques to gently create a new dominant thought in the subconscious mind, create a “pipeline” to their universal source of supply, and manifest striking results. (I recognize the names of several of her success stories.)

Marilyn overcame her own “lack” consciousness to create her former business of 20 years that attracted the world’s largest corporate clients-and major media publicity-solely through applying the prosperity laws that she now teaches in her Feel Free to Prosper program.

Marilyn will take the mystery out of these esoteric laws and share:

• Why trying to create success will never get you there.
• Why your business, job, clients, or investments are not your source of income.
• The words that you are habitually using that prevent your success.
• The single most immediate thing you can do—right now—to increase your income.

I’ve just begun to apply Marilyn’s lessons, and I can point to four different shifts in my income mentality/status during that time—closing a very large project that had been dangling for months, an idea for a whole new market for my column, and letting go of one project and one mental boat-anchor that had been weighing me down.

Working with her is certainly a factor in opening myself up to more abundance. It’s no coincidence if you do the right things to move your goals forward, and working with Marilyn has certainly inspired me to do so.

Marilyn’s entrepreneurial memoir, written online, has attracted over 38,000 views, literary agents and publishing offers and her books will soon be published.

Another Wonderful Program from The Shift Network: Global Oneness Day on Wednesday, October 24th (and on recordings forever). A full day of free programs with renowned leaders such as: Jack Canfield, Ken Wilber, Paul Ray, Michael Beckwith, Neale Donald Walsch, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Ervin Laszlo, Lynne Twist, Don Miguel Ruiz, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, and many more. Yoko Ono and Desmond Tutu have also created special videos just for this program.

See this year’s site for a full list of speakers:  https://shiftnetwork.infusionsoft.com/go/godGP/sah/ Close to 20,000 people registered for last year’s event and this year will be far larger (over 50,000 registrations expected).

Shift Network’s goal is to make Global Oneness Day the EarthDay of Oneness! Currently only 2% of people in the world understand and live in alignment with the principle of Oneness. Just as EarthDay propelled the concept of Sustainability into the global consciousness we intend to share the concept of Oneness with tens of millions of people as this event continues to grow.

Registrants for Global Oneness Day will be able to participate gratis in as many of the live discussions as they like, as well as receive no-cost lifetime access to the full library of online recordings afterwards.

Sustainability Funder Looking for Companies to Fund

I’m passing on this notice from the William James Foundation (WJF)—and I don’t know any more than this:

The 10th Annual WJF Sustainable Business Plan Competition. For new or growing companies seeking high-level feedback on their ideas. Our competition averages 20 pages of feedback per plan to companies, and has more than $100,000 worth of services and cash prizes to divide among the top teams. We can work with both companies that still being planned and companies that have been around for a few years that are planning for investment and/or growth. Applicants must submit a two-page summary to competition@williamjamesfoundation.org by November 5th.

The WJF Green Grab Seed Stage Investment Events. For companies looking for seed-stage funding. A live event in the Washington, DC region where investors can make seed stage investments on spot. First event in November 12th: https://wjf.wufoo.com/forms/greengrab_entrepreneurs/. Learn more at: www.williamjamesfoundation.org/greengrabs

The 3 Power Values: How Commitment, Integrity, and Transparency Clear the Roadblocks to Performance,

So it’s a shock that Gebler begins with a different J&J case study: a quality engineer’s boss threatens his job if he doesn’t allow a defective shipment of aspirin to go through. Gebler cites several other quality issues at J&J, though none so blatant as this—and notes that publicity around these issues was a likely culprit in market share for cough and cold remedies plunging from 17 percent all the way down to 2.83 (p.4)

What happened? Gebler believes it was a change in corporate culture during the 2000s: away from the Customer First credo that successfully guided the company through the Tylenol incident and helped it to regain profitability very quickly, and toward the high-pressure, cost-conscious attitude so typical of  many corporations today, where doing the right thing—throwing out the bad batch of aspirin, in this case—is considered too expensive. Of course, the market share numbers show the foolishness of that approach. In a world where nothing stays secret very long, cost-cutting at the expense of quality is a path to disaster—and sometimes, a bunch of very expensive litigation or government-ordered penalties.

I’ve reviewed many books on business ethics in this column, but I don’t remember one that focuses so heavily on the impact of a corporate culture. It’s always mentioned, but in this book, it’s the core principle. Gebler focuses his argument on improving corporate ethics as well as productivity by focusing on the three values in the subtitle.

In his view, engaged employees who feel listened to and empowered—and who see at least some of their ideas and concerns implemented into the culture—are much more likely to be more productive, and much less likely to fall down the slippery slopes of corner-cutting or cheating.

The reverse is also true: when employees feel disempowered, unlistened to, and pressured to meet performance goals without regard to quality or ethics, companies become micromanaged fiefdoms mired in quicksand BECAUSE employees fall into dangerous patterns of individual and/or group “self-deception, rationalization of inappropriate behavior, and disengagement.” Individual creativity and motivation dry up if managers don’t nurture them by hearing and ACTING ON their employees contributions—and by creating a culture where profit and success are not seen as direct goals, but as results of a positive outlook that empowers and rewards employees to do the right thing.

But when employees CAN live their values and feel good about the work they do and the company they do it for, amazing things can happen. Often, that involves getting employees whose job descriptions put them at cross purposes out of their silos and building relationships in person—or at least taking the time to understand the other’s job, the pressures they face, and the tension between a salesperson’s promises to a customer and a quality manager or parts supplier’s need to ensure quality and legality.

A lot of this happens when employees feel the culture is fair. Arbitrary rewards and punishments create a fragmented and resentful culture straight out of Dilbert. But when employees feel the same rules apply to everyone, and when bosses are involved and not isolated, the company is seen as a great place to work, and people work hard to give their best: “Every employee must be able to answer the same question: Can I align my principles with the organization’s standards of behavior?” (p. 152)

The transparency issue is a bit different from commitment and integrity, in that it’s much more externally focused: in a world of massive social media connections and instant communication, there are no secrets. Sooner or later, the word gets out, and if you’re lying or cheating, you will face consequences.

These arguments will not come as a surprise if you’ve read either of my two books on ethics and green principles as success strategies, or if you’ve been following this book review column for a while—but phrasing it in terms of the impact of corporate culture is a bit of a departure.

Gebler’s case studies include a mix of companies that were very much in the public eye, like Johnson & Johnson and Boeing, both of which had to turn around big, public problems, and Timberland, whose built-in culture of ethics led to an immediate and public reexamination of its leather sourcing after Greenpeace questioned it—as well as some of his corporate clients facing ethics and motivation issues, with names disguised. The book is unnecessarily repetitive, but makes a lot of good points.