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I’m running into more and more people whose Twitter profile shows only, “This person has protected their tweets.”

After almost five years on Twitter, I still don’t understand why people would want to do this, and why Twitter actively encourages new users to protect their Tweets. It’s not any kind of security feature. All it does is make your tweets invisible unless someone’s following you. And why would anyone follow you if they can’t see what you’re posting and decide if you’re worth their time?

When you “protect”—a more accurate word would be “isolate—your tweets, they cannot get passed around. And people who are checking you out will not tend to follow. A far better way to inoculate yourself against Twitter spam is to follow people who post intelligent and interesting tweets. Yeah, you’ll get the occasional nasty tweet with a virus link, when some idiot hacks into one of your friends. But you’d get those even if your tweets are protected, as it does nothing to stop inbound tweets. And they’re easy enough to spot and ignore/delete. (Hint: if anyone’s saying they saw a funny picture of you, they can’t believe you’d do this, etc. and a link—or just a link with no text—don’t click, and drop them a note that they’ve been hacked.)

If you’re so impressive and famous that new followers want to follow you without knowing what you’re saying, well, OK—but you’re still shooting yourself in the foot. More followers—more REAL followers, not autobots—give you more influence, and even more status.

People with protected tweets tend to have very small numbers of followers of which a fair percentage are autobots. And this means they exclude themselves from a lot of co-marketing and self-marketing possibilities; no company is going to want to partner with someone whose tweets are invisible, no one will visit your blog on the basis of a tweet they can’t read.

Fortunately, it’s easy to turn the “protection” off again. If you’re not on Twitter so people can read your stuff, notice you, and build relationships, why ARE you on Twitter?

These are my rough notes from Podcamp Western Mass 5, held March 30, 2013 at Holyoke Community College. It uses abbreviations: SM = social media; the others are pretty obvious. If I spelled your name wrong, I apologize.

According to organizer Morriss Partee, @mmpartee, since the Boston folks did a big regional thing several hundred miles south, this is now the longest continuously running Podcamp in New England.

I took notes on every session I attended except my own session, “Making Green Sexy.” I would be happy to send the slides from my talk; simply e-mail shel at greenandprofitable.com or Tweet @ShelHorowitz with the message “Podcamp PPT” (if tweeting, be sure to include your e-mail).

BUILDING OFFLINE RELATIONSHIPS FROM ONLINE CONNECTIONS

Thomas J. Fox, former addict, financial literacy/econ devel, lots of speaking:

I started in SM as the Pajama Poet on MySpace! Became the top poet there.

Social media eliminates the gatekeeper. I get an invitation to sit in on a financial literacy conference at the White House, b/c Twitter. Ask questions of important people, start conversations, build on conversations get known by them—get immersive. But it can’t be about you you you—be genuine. You build the relationship organically.

And then you take the relationship OFFline. I had a coffee with a guy I met on Twitter and I connected him to 10 people in the community. When you meet, you already know what you have in common. It goes right to how to help each other. You’re catching up with an old friend.
Listen 100% to what someone is saying.

Not interacting on SM is like having a drawer full of business cards.

Work/exercise your networking muscle, and remember you’re a brand.

Vine: new platform, 6-second videos!

Foursquare can build your brand. If you login from PV Planning Commission, Develop Springfield, etc., networking events, it shows you’re serious. And every time I’m speaking, publish an article, I post on SM. People see I’m serious and I’m genuine. At networking events, I focus on the coordinators, and they know everyone else.

And if I’m traveling to speak, I make time to meet SM contacts in Denver or wherever. And it can be huge for business.

Promote others.

For three years, I’ve been trying to meet Harold Grinspoon. I met a janitor who works for him, and he introduced me. Just because you don’t think someone can help you… I’ll have coffee with anyone. You never know.

Audience: people who built their personal networks BEFORE they needed them were much more effective. This predates the web, but online makes it faster and easier.

I’m doIng everything I do right now b/c one person invested time in me. Otherwise, I’d be dead in a ditch somewhere. I work w/ Junior Achievement to create economic opp for young kids. It takes a village to sustain an economy. Get involved in SOMETHING: friends of the homeless, whatever.

SOCIAL MEDIA FOR ACTIVISM (open panel)

Cool apps:

ittt: If then then that: tweets take actions depending on your tweet

software to give nonprofits access to your tweet stream (David Pakman knows what it’s called, shared it last year)

Triberr, spread messages throughout tribe

BufferApp.com (allows prescheduling and bit.ly shortening and some analytics): time a ppt preso as tweets, coordinate with tweetchat and hashtag

Aldon Hynes: sharing my coloring books in kindergarten, 1965, was social media. The oldest post I can still find online is from 1982. Wrote some of Howard Dean’s Deanspace, in Drupal.

Trends: Geocaching, gamification

Leslie Rule: I train how to do three-minute videos, data wrapped around a narrative, very teachable.

Aldon. I have a FB interest group and a Twitter list to monitor state reps in CT.

Tip O’Neil was right that all politics is local, but also, all politics is personal. I can reach my Senators directly, they will read my message because of the work I’ve done in social media.

Me: you have to merge online and offline. Congress all seem to tweet. But when the developer saw Save the Mountain at the farmers market, it got to them.

Leslie. You in MA are too polite. In CA, if you don’t like your rep’s actions, you go picket their house. And with coalitions, build allies, it’s not just yourself. It’s other people with 10,000 members. You won’t get allies saying schools need a hard reboot, but you CAN find allies to oppose Common Core.

Consensus: all of these causes and constituencies overlap; we have to get out of our silos and collaborate.

PERSONAL BRANDING

Lesley Lambert, Realtor. I remember when there was a book, and you’d fall in love with a house and it would have been sold two weeks ago. Now I spend no money on offline advertising. I’ve niched myself as the high-tech realtor with old-fashioned service.

80% of buyers start online, I suspect it’s even higher. I use social media/Internet to market my clients as well as myself. I have a hand in most SM but especially Twitter. I’m also very community-based and spend a lot of time talking about where we live.

Alfonso Santanello, Creative Strategy Agency (and Strictly BusiNews, business TV show)

I’ve been getting more personal, sharing about me and not just about my business. People wan to do biz with people they like. So I show people who I am. Who I am in person is exactly who I am online, and that’s very important when you brand yourself.

Kelly Gellanis, Red-Headed Diva, social media education for educators. “Professional socializer.” I help them reflect an online persona that reflects who they are offline.

Myke Connolly, stinkycakes.com, “the diaper cake boss” Twitter: diapercakeboss and mrstinkycakes People are paying attention. You have to watch what you say, keep in mind others’ feelings (and personal safety). I’ll post about a trip AFTER we come back. I posted something that someone else interpreted as degrading. That was not my intent. The goal of SM is to get people to fall in love with you. Then they support your projects.

Lesley: My name is the one brand that will be with me forever, sop if you put my name in any social network, you find me. If I’d named myself MissParkSqaure and Park Square was no longer, all that branding is wasted. But there are advantages of company name, etc.

Alfonso: Even if I don’t intend to participate, I grab my name on every social platform. I don’t want someone else impersonating me. Whatever you do, stick to it across all platforms.

Kelly. I use redheadeddivak on all sites, b/c redheadeddiva was taken on Twitter when I started (adult toys).

Myke: I listened to what my audience called me.

But if your name is taken, and a lot of celebs can’t get their own name, you can be creative. Or fi celeb enough, you can get it back. Go ahead and call yourself Stinky Cakes; you will be writing me a check.

All: you also want to get a business page if your biz has a different name. SEO benefits (Lesley).

Alfonso: with FB’s new Graph Search, biz shows up before personal, and they’re ranked by activity and engagement.

Kelly: But even on a biz page, sprinkle some personal stuff in.

HappyGrasshopper.com: email marketing service that does the writing for you (realtors. Others?), and guarantees replies. It’s a 3-sentence e-mail that has nothing to do with real estate, just little viral-video text messages. I approve the messages, and they get more response than anything else. It reminds me that consumers aren’t always looking for dry toast; they want fruit or at least some butter.

Myke: And those messages, we can forward them around, and oh yeah, Lesley does real estate. It’s more memorable than something dry about real estate that you get 50 different people sending you.

Being known before needed: Myke: I love Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends And Influence People.

Kelly: I treat my name like Target does. What I do as RHD may shift, but I will always have that as my name.

Alfonso: I got business because I did the TV show, and I didn’t talk about marketing, I talk about business and the local WMass scene, and without ever talking about the agency, it brings business. I used that platform to get known before people knew what I did.

Lesley: Blogging has been huge, and that’s why I write a lot about non-real estate. I blend community and R.E. and my life. I do a lot of video blogging. I’m an open book. If it happened to me, I probably blogged about it, and that includes the ups and the downs. And hopefully you’ll feel a little empathy coming through, and they’ll know me when they’re ready.

Myke: One of my mentors says “there’s a butt for every seat.” Your audience will follow you. I spent a year getting the same qs over and over when I was training kids at Westover Job Corps. So I did a book, and I go back to the same people and say hey, I put it all in a book. And the big brands are losing because you can’t know the people behind the brands.

Lesley: the best response I ever got was asking “do you care if your realtor wears a suit?” (and the answers were overwhelmingly no).

Myke: Different fish need different bait. Not all posts will work for everyone. Most will not. So figure one answer represents 250 people. Listen to your audience, see what they engage about and start to add to that convo. Then they will engage when you don’t expect.

Alfonso: 99% of your videos won’t be viral, and most that do are mistakes or embarrassing moments. You have to have patience.

Myke: you move viral much faster if an influential person picks it up. You can buy a lot of followers, but they’re not engaged.

PSYCHOLOGY OF SM: Jennifer Williams, @verilliance

Every platform has a psychological profile. It’s all about interaction.

FB: Who am I

Tw: who am I/what’s in the world RIGHT NOW

Pinterest: who do I want to be

Instagram: How an I express myself and my world?

G+: What do I think?

LI: How am I important? What do I have to offer? What’s on my resume?

Audience (Jeff): LI will show up first on Google, and most are high-income. I did a search for a certain HR credential, and it brought up thousands of people. Those are people I can network easily with.

Psych profile influenced by timing of entry, intent, parameters, demographics

FB entered when MySpace was “kind of a hot mess.” MySp was unfriendly to age 25+. I didn’t like the anonymity, and usability was atrocious. FB had no intention of uprooting MySp but it was a very clean, simple interface. You had to use your real name, lot of white space, and people were ready by the time that hit. They realized they wanted to connect wit the people they know. It ix the closest representation to who we are. They only want to associate with you if you attract on a deep personal level. It’s deeply intimate. 67% of all Internet users, but skewed toward under 30s.

Twitter: after FB, tried to capture snippets. Who am I with, what am I doing/reading/watching right now. Half-life of a tweet is 8-15 minutes, vs. 80 minutes in FB  post. Archive is difficult to search, everything is pushed down very quickly. As a business, don’t say what you’re doing, but give others something to relate to right now: news, opinion, quotes.

Pinterest: aspirational. ~66% women—do women want to gather more? They are still the primary homemakers. It’s very concrete, what color things are, what your furniture or food looks like. Some college education, more rural. Is there not enough opportunity in real world so they’re doing it online? Yes, images, but they have to be aspirational. Quotes do really well in an image. “I want to be that good.”

Instagram: self-actualization. Everybody loves pictures. Smartphones were becoming ubiquitous, but the pictures looked terrible. Instagram provided simple filters to make them look nice. Lower income, urban, younger (under 30). If using in business, use in conjunction with other tools, or be REALLY visually interesting. It integrates very well with FB.

G+ looked a lot like FB, people looked at it  as FB competition, but Google was looking at something different. The people who flocked in were tech people, early adapters, thought leaders. Huge population of scientists I don’t see anywhere else. Also great space for artists. You get much bigger images, text area, and videos, and real-time commenting. A doodler was able to build a whole product line from his hobby. There’s still a dialog happening about the images, what inspired them to create it, how technically did you get that photo? Audience (Karo Kilfeather, @aspiringkaro): you get the best of Twitter—discovery—and FB—big canvas.

Jennifer: The ability to select who sees which messages. Like Twitter, you don’t have to follow them back. You can put them in the “I don’t know these people” circle or just ignore.

I don’t focus on upping the numbers on any of the channels I’m on, and I have wide variance in numbers. Much more important is how you’re sharing.

Personally, I don’t want to be connected all the time. I disconnect. But when I connect, I want to know right where to go and jump in, post the right things in the right platforms.

SM should be your outpost; your base should be your own website.

Blog posts on Twitter: you have to pique their interest.

Val Nelson: But I want the complete thought. I don’t want to go clicking over to the blog.

Jennifer: that’s what I like about G+, you have room to see a whole blog post.

Audience: I miss the full conversations on Twitter. Now, everything’s a link.

Paul Bogush: Twitter has shifted from stationary computing to phones, and it changes what people tweet about. Fewer in-depth convos. And people want to be seen as smart, so they tweet links to good content.

Jennifer: but young people, Latinos, blacks are using Tw for convos. White upper class have more access to other tools.

verilliance.com/hispi: co-op for high-end group marketing/conversion consulting.

I posted the following on a LinkedIn discussion list called “Step Into the Spotlight, ” regarding the appropriateness of the new LinkedIn endorsement tool, and whether to endorse back. The consensus, which I agree with, is not to endorse people you don’t know. I thought you’d enjoy the discussion, so I’m sharing my post with you. The above link goes to the entire discussion.

I invite you to comment below about your own policies about whom you choose to connect with on social media.

The whole crazy thing about the new LinkedIn endorsement tool makes no sense to me. I don’t even click on them anymore because I know I’m going to be greeted with a screen asking me to endorse back, for something where I have no clue if they’re qualified. If it’s someone I know well, I will click over, and endorse if I feel I can. And I agree, it completely devalues the endorsement.

I feel badly that the tool does not have an easy way to send a message back (like “thank you”). It is too many steps and I don’t have the time. I’d love to see a button to click that would thank people for their endorsement and let it go at that. But sometimes I have 10 or more coming in, and I have a business to run.

And yes, I have been asked a few times to do a real endorsement and said no because I don’t know their work–and because I have made my reputation on the basis of business ethics and green principles as success principles and won’t violate that. The answer is always greeted with respect, and often with an apology.

However…on whom to connect with…my policy, as a somewhat public figure, is to say yes to all connection requests on both LI and FB unless I have a reason not to. It’s easy enough to sever the connection if the person is inappropriate, but I’ve only had to do that about five times in six years–and I refused one connection request from one person I know personally and who is nothing but trouble.

I find there are a small handful of people who have friended me and then actually built a relationship, and I think that’s great. Actually, Tsufit [the founder of this particular discussion group] is in that category; I didn’t know or even know of her before she invited me here. We had a very nice phone visit last week, in fact.

Now with Twitter, I’m fussier. I do feel guilty that I don’t have time to visit every one of my 6000+ followers’ profiles and decide whether to follow back. I won’t use the automated tools, though; I want to be in control of my Twitter stream. It keeps a lot of spam out and enables Twitter to still be useful. So what I do is once every week or two I look at the new-follower notices and open up anyone I actually know, and anyone whose screen handle catches my attention, and follow back those I like. A lot of them have unfollowed by then but Twitter is not a numbers game for me. The others–if they retweet or engage me, I’ll check them out.

Several big, big brands were able to think and act like nimble small businesses and seize the moment when the Superbowl went dark yesterday:

Oreo, with a picture of an Oreo on a dark background and a teaser that said:

@Oreo

Power out? No problem. pic.twitter.com/dnQ7pOgC

Heard of Carrotmobs yet? Consumers have used our buying power to avoid companies with the wrong values for decades. Now there’s a positive flip: actively making the effort to buy from companies that support your values. I only heard the term “Carrotmob”—so called because consumers use the carrot of positive business rather than the stick of withdrawing business to achieve social good.

I think I only heard the term a month or two ago; since then, I’ve run across it several times. This concept seems to be entering the language faster than anything I can remember since “Ms.” was invented as a gender-neutral alternative to Miss and Mrs., back in the1970s.

Here’s a particularly cool one with the odd twist that it was initiated by the company—and since I write about out-of-the-box people-centered marketing of green products and services, worth flagging here. I imagine this marketing strategy could get old fast if too many people do it, but the idea of having your customers pre-fund your sustainability venture is a good one. Think abou Kickstarter campaigns; this isn’t so different, after all.

A coffee company has decided that organic/fair trade coffee is not enough; the coffee should be transported on cargo ships powered by renewable energy. Specifically, using wind power.

Thanksgiving Coffee, a California-based artisan roaster, will arrange for wind-powered shipping if people buy $150,000 worth of coffee on Carrotmob. The goal is to prove demand for wind-transported coffee and research ways to make wind-powered shipping a reality in our own time.

It’s worth remembering that all cargo shipping from the dawn of history into the 19th century was either wind-powered or human-powered (by rowers). So there’s no need to prove that cargo shipping can be wind-powered. However, a transatlantic voyage by wind took many weeks, sometimes went way off course, was more susceptible to storms, etc. Steam and then diesel made shipping fast and reliable enough to create the modern global economy. So the real challenge is not to prove that they can use wind-powered ships, but that they can compete effectively using a modern wind-powered shipping fleet.

This of course could have a huge impact on the entire cargo shipping industry, if it can be done effectively and inexpensively enough to transport many different types of items. And certainly, it will inspire the shipping industry to add more sustainable practices even if using conventional diesel-powered cargo ships.

Meanwhile, if you’re a coffee drinker, you can help Thanksgiving Coffee test the waters for sustainable shipping. Go read the article on Ecopreneurist, or skip directly to the Thanksgiving Coffee Carrotmob page and buy a pound or two.

A Chinese writer posted a withering attack on Chinese corruption and environmental destruction, but disguised it as an attack on the US.

The ploy worked. Not only did it get past the censors, but it’s gone viral in China, gaining 44,000 retweets and 5400 comments.

We are a clever species. There’s always a way to communicate, no matter how hard the shoe of oppression squeezes down. I did some work on a WWII memoir written by a German civilian mom, and her focus was on the jokes ordinary Germans told to demonstrate their opposition to Hitler without getting killed or even in trouble (most of the time).

Wish some of MY articles would get 44,000 retweets! <wink>

Thanks to Daniel Lieberman, @damfino11, for passing the link.

Just found this great article on traditional, marketer-driven outbound (“push”) marketing versus consumer-driven inbound (“pull”) marketing—and it had a really good insight I want to share with you:

Whereas outbound marketing often provided consumers with fantasies (think of Budweiser commercials or luxury car ads,) inbound marketing provides consumers with facts. People aren’t researching and gathering information on what fantasy a company is trying to sell them on, they are researching the efficacy of their products, and (with ever-growing regularity) the social and environmental policies of specific brands.

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that I’m a huge believer in pull marketing, in putting the consumer in the driver’s seat to actively seek out solutions and find you. All the way back in 1985, when I published my first marketing book, I talked about effective Yellow Pages presence. Yellow Pages was the web browser of its time, a way to seek out and compare all the providers of a service and make a decision based on who could serve you best. By the time I did my most recent (sixth) marketing book, the award-winning and category-best-selling Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, I devoted significant space to inbound/pull strategies, from social media to Internet discussion groups. This kind of marketing is not at all intrusive; in fact, it’s welcomed.

But the insight that the reason it works so well is that it’s based in fact rather than fantasy is something I’ve never articulated. And I find it particularly interesting because the common marketing wisdom is that emotions do the selling, and intellect serves only to justify the purchase to others. I’ve never believed that; I have said for years that the best selling uses both emotion and rationality, complementing each other. To put it another way, selling is much easier when the buyer has both the need and the desire. Either one by itself is rarely enough to close a purchase.

By coincidence, I’m reading a book right now that says businesses don’t need to advertise—but it makes a huge exception for directory listings (including Yellow Pages and search engine ads). I was having trouble with that differentiation, until I read this article. Now I finally understand what the authors are getting at: advertising = fantasy, while listings = fact.

I’m not sure I agree, but at least now I see where they’re coming from.

What do you think—and feel—about this? Please share below.

Nina Amir and I have known each other online for a few years now; we finally got to meet at the BEA Bloggers conference last week in New York. But I had the post scheduled long before then, as part of Nina’s blog tour. It’s alo an example of the kind of great material you’ll find in the upcoming series of e-books I intend to pubish as part of a series called Grassroots Marketing for Authors and Publishers.

Yes, I already have a single-volume book by that name. But as I’ve been updating and revising for the new edition, I decided it was a bit overwhelming to be just one book; there’s so much good new cool stuff on book marketing nowadays.

Nina’s expertise is blog-to-book—and interestingly both keynote talks at the BEA Bloggers day were from bloggers who had published books. And with that, I give her the floor.

—Shel

How to Write and Promote Your Book One Post at a Time
By Nina Amir

If you want to create an author’s platform, a fan base, a tribe, a community, even a movement around your book, or around the idea upon which your book is based, the most effective or inexpensive tool you can use to achieve this goal is a blog. And if you want promote that book or idea from the moment you write the first word of your manuscript, you can do this quickly and efficiently by blogging your book. Simply write, publish and promote your book one post at a time on the Internet.

With a blogged book you write your book from scratch in post-sized bits and publish them in cyberspace. In the process, you promote your work and develop a fan base for your book (and for yourself).

To blog a book and create both a successful book, one that sells later to readers and to publishers (if you desire), and successful blog, one with a large or growing blog readership, follow these eight steps.

1. Choose your book topic carefully.  Make sure the topic you plan to write interests you and interests a lot of other people but also is one about which you feel passionate.
2. Evaluate your book’s success potential. See your book through the eyes of an acquisitions editor. To do this, go through each section of a book proposal and accumulate the necessary information as an evaluation process.
3. Angle your topic: Consider if you need to angle your book differently to make it unique in both the book store and the blogosphere.
4. Create a content plan. A table of contents works for nonfiction. For fiction or memoir, map out your story arc or create a timeline. Include material that will not appear on your blog.
5. Write your book in post-sized bits. Blog posts are short–250-500. Break your nonfiction chapters into many subheadings or sections. For fiction or memoir, divide your story arc and time line into vignettes or scenes.
6. Blog 2-7 times per week. Write a short bit of your book (a post) in a word processing program to create a manuscript. Then copy and paste this into your blogging program, and publish it.
7. Share your posts on social networks.  Include a link to your most recent blog post in your status updates on your social networks.
8. Edit your manuscript. Take the time to revise the first draft you created, and hire a professional editor to give it a final polish.

If your blog and book stem from your sense of passion and purpose, you have the opportunity to build something larger than a blog community. You can create a movement—inspire people not only to gather around your blog and buy your book but to go out into the world and take action. In this way, your fans promote for you by sharing your blog posts and by taking on your cause.

About the Author

 Nina Amir, Inspiration-to-Creation Coach, inspires people to combine their purpose and passion so they Achieve More Inspired Results. She motivates both writers and non-writers to create publishable and published products, careers as authors and to achieve their goals and fulfill their purpose. She blogged her book, How to Blog a Book, Write, Publish and Promote Your Work One Post at a Time (Writer’s Digest Books), in five months. Find out more about her at www.ninaamir.com or www.copywrightcommunications.com.

A blogger on Sustainable Business, Marc Stoiber, wonders why a major sustainability milestone achieved by Translink, the Vancouver, British Colombia transit system, went almost unnoticed by local and national media.

The funny thing is…transit systems control their own media, one that reaches the two most important audiences they have. If I were the company’s marketing director, I’d put inside placards on the front and back of both sides of every bus and subway (four signs in each car) to reach the actual riders—and exterior signage to reach the next-most-important constituency: Vancouver-area residents not yet using public transit.

The interior placards would not just brag about the accomplishment—they’d say thank you to the riders for their part. And those exterior signs would recruit new riders to join the tribe, e.g., “become part of the greenest commute in North America.” And I’d supplement this with a nice social media campaign, which itself could be a subject for exciting press releases, etc.

Then, the local media and perhaps the national media would almost certainly pick up the story—but even if they didn’t, the message would be out there, and if done right, ridership would grow.

Stoiber goes on to discuss the very creative marketing of another transit advocate, Jason Roberts—who put up a website for the a nonexistent light-rail transit line in Dallas, Texas called the Oak Cliff Transit Authority—and was able to organize so effectively around this public vision that the project actually got funded! You might call Roberts’ story “If You Dream It, They Will Come—IF You’re a Marketer and Organizer Who Can Create and Gather a Tribe.”

Vancouver Transit execs: I’d love to consult with you on how to build big awareness. I already have one Vancouver-based green company as a client.

Sunday, I asked for your comments on three inspirations for innovation and creativity. If you missed the original, please take a moment to go back and read it first. If you didn’t, be aware that I give away the ending to the Caine film below.

I’m writing this on Sunday, immediately after posing my question to you, and posting it on Tuesday, as promised. Hopefully a few of you have added your wisdom. And here’s what I think:

1. Chris Brogan is spot on when he says you don’t achieve greatness by following the existing paradigm. You conceive the ultimate goal—hopefully something big and bold—and then engineer a path from today’s world to that goal.

Examples:

• Steve Jobs envisioning a “computer for the rest of us,” or a whole music library that fits in a shirt pocket
• Amory Lovins achieving energy-sustainable construction by creating buildings that don’t need a furnace or air conditioner (and the savings on capital cost pay for the energy improvements)
• Zsolt Varga’s ingenious Kenguru: a tiny car that transports one person in his or her wheelchair, without needing any hydraulic lifts
• A goal of conserving water led Bill and Jane Monetti to enormous water savings without any need to redesign plumbing systems—just from reducing the need to flush

2. A number of lessons to be learned from “Caine’s Arcade”:

• Caine’s parents were wise enough not to interfere, not to assault their son with messages that what he was trying t do was impossible, useless, or even misdirected. They gave him room to follow his dream.
• For Caine, it was enough to build it even when people didn’t come—just as for me, I’m driven to write my blog, my monthly column, and my books even though my audiences are small. Because I know that a few people do passionately pay attention to my ideas, it gives me a lot of juice to keep going. Of course, if I had the fame of a Chris Brogan or Seth Godin, I’d reach a lot more people. And that would harmonize with my own goals to change the world. But just knowing that I have changed the lives of a few people and the course of a few communities helps me keep going. I’m not sure I’m as brave as Caine, though. I’m not sure I could do it anymore if I didn’t think anyone at all was listening.
• The missing ingredient in both Emerson’s “build a better mousetrap and people will beat a path to your door” and director Phil Alden Robinson and writer W. P. Kinsella’s “if you build it, they will come” is marketing. While Caine says he doesn’t care if anyone comes to play, he tells us of feeling excluded and teased when he tried to share his accomplishment at school. And his reaction when his lone customer brings a crowd to play shows that while just the achievement had been enough for Caine, sharing it with others is so much more. Nirvan, that solitary customer, did the marketing for him, and did a fabulous job. The happy ending is as much a testament to Nirvan’s social media prowess as to Caine’s creativity and ingenuity—just as the rise of Apple needed both Jobs’ vision and marketing skills and Steve Wozniak’s engineering genius. The lesson for entrepreneurs is that if you don’t have all three elements—vision, engineering, and marketing—you need to partner with someone who has the pieces you lack.

3. The actual ad featured in the going green video is a brilliant example of using big-picture thinking to convey a message. Take a walk—and find your true love. Yes, it’s absurd. But it’s also very compelling. and it talks most elegantly to the way people can change behavior and become greener—achieving both a planetary and a personal good.

Much traditional advertising of for-profit products and nonprofit causes focuses on one or the other: buy this car or smoke this cigarette and you’ll feel sexy, that sort of thing—or “only you can prevent forest fires,” give money to cancer research, etc.—helping-others messaging without a clear direct benefit.

As a green marketer, I constantly say that marketers need to hit both the self-interst and the planetary interest, especially if they want to reach beyond the deep greens. In fact, I wrote my last Green And Profitable column on this very theme. The ad is a nice example, and the opening slides give us some very good framing about the power of art to influence thought, in many contexts.